David Slucki is an assistant professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation.
Sing This at My Funeral is a compelling memoir, crafted with great
artistry: an eloquent meditation on fathers and sons, the forces
that shape them, and the impact of grief and trauma over the
generations. Slucki acts as both subject and witness, intimate
participant and historian, skillfully interweaving the past and the
present, the personal and the political, and the old world with the
new. This riveting quest for understanding is, above all, a
profound act of familial love and humanity.--Arnold Zable
"novelist, writer, and human rights advocate"
David Slucki's memoir of fathers and sons is simultaneously a still
raw highly personal and unfiltered expression of grief at the
untimely loss of a 'larger than life' father with whom he shared an
unusually close bond, and a more capacious reflection on
transgenerational Holocaust postmemory.--Atina Grossmann
"Australian Historical Studies"
For a book with so much sadness at its center, Sing This at My
Funeral is surprisingly wholesome. . . . even the most charmed life
is not insulated from the ripples of trauma, and Slucki's memoir
had me sobbing more than once. It deftly illustrates the difficulty
of healing history's traumas and the challenge of maintaining that
historical connection into the future. Sing This at My Funeral
illustrates how personal silences can easily become amplified by
communal history, even in the best of times.--Rokhl Kafrissen
"Tablet Magazine"
Lots to think about in this one.--Erika Dreifus "My Year in Jewish
Books (2019 edition)"
Nostalgia for Yiddish culture is an ideological gesture. Slucki's
memoir [. . .] provides a valuable antidote to the illusions of
nostalgia, and for that reason each volume is salubriously and
exemplarily political.--Marc Caplan "Los Angeles Review of
Books"
The book is set in motion by David Slucki's discovery of a trove of
Yiddish letters written by his survivor grandfather, Jakub Slucki,
whom he had never met. David Slucki found the cache in Los Angeles,
the city that, a year earlier, had been the site of his father's
unexpected death. "This is a book about ghosts," writes Slucki in
the Preface to Sing This at My Funeral: ghosts of family, the
ghosts of the past. But where a straight academic monograph might
settle on the term as a handy metaphor, Slucki's lyrical writing
imbues his ghosts with a presence that is rather more profound and
complicated. Both in this regard and in the decision to include in
the book an unusually large number of family photographs, Sing This
at My Funeral shares more in common with genre-busting graphic
memoirs like Art Spiegelman's Maus, Nora Krug's Belonging, and
Michael Kupperman's All the Answers than with traditional history
writing or memoire. Highly recommended for academic, synagogue and
school libraries.--David Schlitt "Association of Jewish Libraries
News and Reviews"
This, to me, is the main essence of the book - what we call in
Yiddish Di Goldene Keit (the Golden Chain). The passing down, from
father and mother to child, all that it is to be Jewish. Beyond
religion, beyond nationality, beyond culture. It is what every
Jewish parent is faced with, particularly in the post-Holocaust
era. The author is clear about this - he's sub-titled the book A
Memoir of Fathers and Sons. And while the project likely started as
a therapeutic exercise - his father Charles passed away suddenly
less than four years ago - I think it quickly transformed into
something more worldly.--Moshe Goldberg "The Times of Israel"
Written with raw, candid feeling, this memoir attains its emotional
climax not at the description of Sluggo's sudden death at the age
of sixty-seven or even of his funeral, but, rather unexpectedly, in
the epilogue, when the author cites his father's conciliatory
email, sent after their most serious !ght (up to that point, their
relationship sounded quite idyllic). As French novelist Marcel
Proust once said: 'An artist expresses not only himself, but
hundreds of ancestors, the dead who find their spokesman in him.'
David Slucki is one such artist, literally giving voice to his
now-voiceless ancestors and to the numerous ghosts that accompany
him on his life's journey.--Merav Fima "Australian Book Review"
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