Free The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday Page B

at all.
    But on the back was a full-page grainy black-and-white photograph of my uncle with his arms crossed, feet spread to the width of his shoulders. He stood in front of a tall oak. It was the kind of photograph you’d find on the back of a Stephen King or a John Irving novel at that time—in the days when a writer could become as famous as an actor or an athlete and ascend to the most visible ranks of American public life, could hope to meet Norman Mailer at a party, be reviewed in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. A kind of literary fame that’s hard even to fathom, let alone remember, now.
    Uncle Poxl was everything a sententious musical at the Wang Center could never be.
    â€œCan we get one?” I said.
    â€œPoxl said he’d send us each a copy,” my father said. “He said he signed one for you already. Have some faith. It’ll come.” I didn’t argue. But whatever Poxl West did for me, in all the years after the publication of his book, he never did send me that copy. Some part of me will always be awaiting it.
    I sat between my parents, who were still in their work clothes. My father was a tax lawyer at a corporate firm downtown, and my mother worked as an administrator at Mass General. They were more markedly not my uncle Poxl than almost anyone in my life—he was a writer and an artist and a war hero. He was about to stand up in front of an audience while they sat watching. My father’s father had come from Latvia after the war and worked all the way from janitor to dean at the prestigious school where Poxl taught, before his untimely death. My mother’s parents had left Romania after World War I and opened a bakery on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. We saw my mother’s parents in New York only a couple times a year. My parents did their duty, making the best of their parents’ hard work, their modest but tangible successes. I did not want modest successes. I did not want to be a professional. At that point, I don’t know what I wanted, other than a hero. I wanted to listen to my uncle Poxl.
    When Poxl caught my father’s eye on his way to the podium, we felt we’d been some part of that life he’d led, a life so Odyssean and outsized we couldn’t help but listen. Some young hip professor from the Brandeis English Department in a pair of paint-splattered Guess jeans and a salmon sports coat rolled to his elbows talked for five overstated minutes about Poxl West’s nearly instantaneous place in the canon of Jewish chroniclers of World War II. His speech was full of humorless references to Eastern European writers I’d never heard of, writers who’d not even been translated into English yet.
    Then Uncle Poxl stood.
    Without shaking the professor’s hand, he put his mouth very close to the mike.
    â€œBefore the night is through I would like to read to you from the climax of my memoir, a memoir that is ultimately about love and love’s limits, but which contains certain inevitable passages describing as yet unspoken vengeance against the German horror,” he said.
    Speakers popped. He moved back from the microphone a few inches, found his place behind the podium.
    â€œTo begin, I’d like to show you a little of how the Lancaster bomber S-Sugar came to drop bombs on Nazi soil.”
    Rain ticked against the windows as if to dispel the validity of the pathetic fallacy. Uncle Poxl read from a chapter describing how he and his cousins felt when they first learned of their parents’ fate during the war. Heads bowed toward chests all through the audience of maybe a hundred listeners packed into that small space when Poxl described what he knew of his mother’s deportation to Terezin. Poxl himself never looked up from his text, which was enormous and imposing as the Pentateuch in his narrow red fingers. Thin red spindles rippled out across his face as he turned to a passage describing his trip from Rotterdam