Four years ago, St. Louis poet and author Jason Sommer realized something terrifying was happening: the stories his Holocaust-survivor father had spent decades telling were beginning to disappear.
Now, as Sommer prepares to speak at the J’s “Books & Bagels” series later this month, the urgency behind his memoir, “Shmuel’s Bridge,” feels even more personal. What began as a son documenting his father’s memories has quietly become something else entirely: an act of preservation against time itself.
Sommer’s father, Jay, survived Nazi brutality, escaped a labor camp in Budapest and later built a life in America after World War II. But more than 70 years after arriving in New York from war-torn Europe, the memories that once defined his life began slipping away…