Scott Nadelson | April 2022

Scott Nadelson

1

Generally speaking, and often to its credit, cinema is not a subtle medium: big screens require big gestures and clear visuals to communicate both external drama and characters’ internal strife. Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker is no different; while powerful at times, it’s also sensational and a bit maudlin, with exaggerated emotion that tips toward melodrama. Based on Edward Lewis Wallant’s novel of the same name, The Pawnbroker was the first American movie to deal with the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust, focusing on the life of a survivor, Sol Nazerman, who lives a bitter and solitary life in New York after the murder of his family in Europe. Nazerman runs a pawnshop in East Harlem, treating the locals with disdain and retreating at the end of the day to a soulless and empty housing development on Long Island. The film makes clear that Sol has closed himself off to everyone around him, including his young assistant, Jesus Ortiz, who idolizes him. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover the reason: Nazerman, once a university professor, watched both of his children die; he witnessed his wife forced into prostitution and raped by Nazi officers; he suffered untold humiliation and degradation in a concentration camp. Now he speaks to no one about his experiences, burying them as deeply as he can and living a miserly nonexistence in a world he no longer trusts.

The film feels dated now, especially during moments in which it stereotypes East Harlem’s Black and Puerto Rican residents, but it’s worth watching for just a single sequence at its end. During a robbery, Jesus takes a bullet meant for his boss. The young man lies in the street, and Nazerman—played by the great Rod Steiger, who, two years later, won an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night—finally comes out from behind the barred windows of his pawnshop and holds the young man’s head as he dies. Still melodramatic, yes, and played by a lesser actor it might have stayed that way. We’ve seen plenty of images like it in the movies: a dying character’s last words fading before the hero belts out a wail of grief. Instead, Steiger opens his mouth in the shape of a wrenching cry, but no sound emerges. He faces away from the crowd gathering around the murdered Jesus, so no one sees his expression. He tries again to call out, but again, no sound. All we hear are the sentimental strings of the Quincy Jones soundtrack, which fit perfectly well with the rest of the film but sound completely out of place in this moment. All the pain Nazerman has buried for years rises to the surface in Steiger’s horrified expression. We want him to let it out. We want so badly for him to release the hurt so he can access the compassion he has withheld since being liberated from the camp. We want him to live again.

But Steiger refuses to give us—and his character—such easy release. (In interviews, Steiger makes clear that it was his choice, not Lumet’s, to make the scream a silent one.) He shows us the cost of Nazerman’s repression, the consequences of closing himself off to emotion. Feeling returns to him when it is too late to act on it, and after failing to raise his voice in anguish or pity—or anything but anger—for so long, he can no longer make a sound. And the impact on us as we watch is profound. Movies are a noisy medium, and we’re used to hearing people on the big screen scream in alarm, shock, horror, or sorrow. When we expect a sound and it doesn’t arrive, its absence is far more startling than the loudest shriek. Instead of hearing Nazerman’s cry, we feel how trauma has silenced him, robbed him of his voice and his empathy. The enduring devastation of the Holocaust is embodied in a scream with no sound. In the emptiness of Nazerman’s open mouth, we hear millions of silenced voices, of both those murdered and those left to live the rest of their lives with the impossible burden of survival. The silent scream contains the excruciating contradiction of Nazerman’s life: that of having witnessed the worst inhumanity possible and still being confronted every day with the faces of human beings, their capacity for cruelty matched by their capacity for joy, generosity, and compassion.

2.

In her book Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat—paraphrasing both Albert Camus and Osip Mandelstam—argues that literature is a “revolt against silence” and functions as a kind of “disobedience” to systems of oppression that want to keep us quiet.¹ To make literature, she suggests, is to expose the silences that are thrust upon us, the silences that are framed as “obedience” to a set of rules or norms meant to repress dissent, and then to write in opposition to them—to raise a voice into the void opened by those silences and drown them out with words containing beauty, pain, revelation, and complex truths, all of which threaten the status quo.

One of our first aims as writers, then, is to recognize what silences we need to rebel against, where they creep into our lives, who imposes them, and when we impose them on ourselves. This may seem like an easier task for prose than for film, since we sit in silence as we write and read. But words on the page ring as loudly in our heads as those coming from speakers in a movie theater, and when silences emerge, they can be as surprising and powerful as Steiger’s soundless wail.

Though Candace Denning’s novel The Women in Her Dreams is full of dialogue, it’s a book so often punctuated with silences I always experience it as an extended, stuttering whisper in my ear. As in The Pawnbroker, a silent scream features prominently, though here it comes early in the story, setting the foundation for an exploration of freedom and repression as the sexual awakenings of the late 1960s collide with rural Midwestern life. Denning’s stunning book—published by North Point Press in 1988 and, sadly, out of print for many years—follows Sarah Broderhouse, the less inhibited of a pair of identical twins, as she attempts to break away from her oppressive family in Illinois and forge an independent and fulfilling life. While her sister Laura gets married within months of their college graduation, Sarah sleeps with a pool-hustling, motorcycle-riding poet, telling him that “when you make love to me… I know I exist.”² Later, when she finds out he’s married, rather than reject him, she treasures the news, whispering to herself, “‘I’m having an affair with a married man.’ It was something no one else that she knew was having.”³

The silence Sarah rebels against is that imposed on female desire, which represses not only sexual pleasure and experimentation but a rich inner life. And the way Denning reveals this silence is by first letting us hear all the noise that masks it. Sarah’s extended family is a talkative bunch, but they talk in the Midwestern tradition of saying a lot about nothing. In an early chapter, when Sarah is struggling to find her footing as a photographer and reeling from her sister’s swift submersion into banality, she suffers through a meal with her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who spend the time together talking about guns, about fishing, about church, about whether or not Catholics are really Christian, and about whether or not bingo is actually gambling. Her relatives inform each other of things but don’t actually communicate; they reveal nothing of themselves in their speech, touching only on surface concerns. In the middle of their conversation, Sarah excuses herself, retreats to the bathroom, and studies herself in the mirror to determine which of her family’s features she has inherited, which she has managed to avoid. Then she “opened her eyes wide and stretched her mouth into a silent scream. Her face was all mouth and teeth and tongue. Unexpectedly, she did not look horrible, but she thought she saw death. The loneliness in it was worse than anything.”⁴

Unlike Sol Nazerman’s silent scream, this one isn’t just a culmination of years of repressed emotion but also a wake-up call, a recognition, in Danticat’s terms, of obedience’s cost. If Sarah follows her sister’s path, the path of her family, all she sees in her future is death and loneliness. And immediately afterward, she hears confirmation in the form of more inane conversation through the bathroom door: “Grain shipments have been quarantined because of the cereal leaf beetle infestation,” her mother says, as if reading from a newspaper. “That’s going to hurt a lot of farmers.”⁵

The silence imposed on her desires drives Sarah to take off with her married lover, who provides a sexual outlet but is otherwise too self-absorbed to offer her much emotional satisfaction. He abandons her in a motel in Canada, and she hitchhikes to Michigan, where she works as a waitress before making her way home. What follows is the most moving exchange in the novel, when her mother confronts her about returning home at dawn. Around them in the house, “everything was in order,” and Sarah “wanted to burst in that silence.”⁶ Order and silence are paired, two forces suffocating her, so she rebels against both, finally breaking her silence, because, she thinks, “the truth was disorder.”⁷

Sarah tells her mother about her affair, about traveling by motorcycle and staying in motels, and her mother, horrified, accuses Sarah of being selfish, of not appreciating everything the family has provided her. In response, Sarah takes responsibility, telling her mother that “I’m not as good as you are.”⁸ She tries, desperately, to communicate, to express her inner life, and “seeing her mother cry [gave] her hope.”⁹ We recognize that all Sarah really wants is openness, a life that allows people to feel and express what they feel. But her mother abruptly ends the conversation by saying, “I hate to cry.”¹⁰ She shuts down feeling, reinforcing appearances over truth, silence over connection: “I look ugly when I cry,” she says.¹¹

At the novel’s end, Sarah is still stuck in her small town, living with her sister, whose marriage has fallen apart. But Sarah has begun to understand that escape can’t and shouldn’t be easy, that it is necessarily messy. She realizes, too, that she isn’t trying to escape into happiness, only into freedom. When her sister expresses worry over her, she says, “Being happy isn’t the most important thing in the world to me right now.”¹² She recognizes that “she was going to be a twin for the rest of her life,” meaning she would always be attached to home, to family, to the part of her that craved order.¹³ But she also knows that she will find a way to extract herself from the pall of her upbringing. As she and Laura move into their aunt’s house, she pulls down a set of curtains, and in the spare prose that infuses the novel with the threat of silence even as it works to undermine it with sound, Denning gives us an image to suggest Sarah’s future trajectory: “Sunlight slipped through the moving branches into a pattern on the floor. Sarah watched the light dance in the shadows. She knelt beside Laura and watched the light struggling to be free of the pattern that held it.”¹⁴

3.

Obedience and the silence it breeds are particularly insidious forces of oppression in a recent story I love: “Meet Behind Mars,” by Renee Simms, the title piece of her debut collection, published in 2018. In this case, obedience means maintaining a status quo of “politeness” and “civility” in the face of an affluent suburban school system’s institutional racism. The story’s narrator, Gloria Clark, a Black single mother who raises her son in a predominantly white community in the Pacific Northwest, documents the history of her son Jesse’s treatment by teachers, school administrators, and classmates. Over the course of a dozen pages, she chronicles a series of racist micro- and macroaggressions that no one else wants to acknowledge, ranging from adults going out of their way to call Jesse “cute” to neighborhood girls drawing genitalia with mustard on her driveway and throwing a watermelon at her house while Jesse and his Black friends are having a sleepover inside.¹⁵

What gives the story its particular power against the community’s silence is its epistolary form. Written as a letter to the school board president to explain what Gloria calls “The Night of the Yellow Mustard Penis,” Simms’s story lays out a case against the community in an official document that can’t simply be ignored. The school board might prefer to disregard the racist behavior perpetrated by teachers and students, but a formal complaint is something they have no choice but to reckon with; it ruptures their willful obliviousness, forcing them to hear what they would rather dismiss.

Gloria’s letter engages the board with the politeness of “civil discourse” while at the same time entering into the public record concrete evidence to build her case: email exchanges with Jesse’s teachers; transcripts of voicemail messages from the school principal; passive-aggressive notes of apology from the girls who threw the watermelon. With all of this documentation, it’s impossible to deny or justify Jesse’s mistreatment. He’s singled out for bullying because he puts a leaf on a boy’s shirt; he’s given detention for carrying a “weapon” when he’s found on the playground with a nail file, which turns out to belong to another boy; he’s accused of sexual harassment for wiggling a gummy worm by his crotch when girls are nearby and might see.¹⁶ By simply reflecting its members’ words back to them, Gloria shatters the silent acceptance of the community’s racism: in one email, the principal writes, “I wanted to let you know that we got a call from a parent who saw Jesse looking at graffiti on one of the foreclosed homes in the neighborhood. Please remind him that this is private property and to walk straight home from school.”¹⁷ In a private message, the principal’s authority is hard to contest, but making the email public immediately reveals its absurdity and its unnecessary cruelty, as well as how unconsciously those with power abuse it.

Examples of the school employees’ implicit bias pile up as the story goes on, each with deeper consequences. Despite Jesse’s strong academic performance, a white teacher sends an email suggesting he doesn’t work hard enough. Later, the teacher holds Jesse back in a remedial algebra class even though his grades don’t warrant it, until Gloria intervenes. The principal defends the teacher, even though she can’t explain his rationale. Eventually, the teacher is arrested for selling drugs in the school’s parking lot, but even then, no one but Gloria will name the problem; no one will speak up against the silence that keeps the racist system firmly in place. Authority figures continue to push a narrative of “obedience”: if Jesse would just play by the rules, the principal suggests, he wouldn’t get into so much trouble. It quickly becomes clear, however, that the “rules” aren’t applied equally, leaving Jesse with no way to comply.

But the story doesn’t simply catalogue the community’s racism and its refusal to face the truth. Even more importantly, it reveals, publicly, the pain Gloria has experienced from years of watching her son endure indignities out of his control. She tells the board president that “the worst part of writing this statement was recalling all of these events because, honestly, I’d just as soon forget.”¹⁸ But, she adds, she moved to this town in part because of its reputable school district, with the belief that she could “go wherever I damn pleased, and to expect good things when I showed up.”¹⁹

Gloria wishes she, too, could remain silent, because it’s painful to speak up. But what Simms—originally from Detroit, now a professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington—understands is that the most excruciating silences are the internal ones, when a person is left to suffer emotional turmoil alone. Gloria’s letter, even with its sly humor and wry tone, is above all a cry against the silent anguish she has endured on her own for so long, a shout to say you have hurt me, again and again. In imagining how the neighborhood girls might genuinely make amends—she suggests an interpretive dance in her yard, to see how they might interact with the mustard penis—Gloria exposes her wound, which has festered in isolation for years: “They could have danced without shoes,” she writes. “Only brave souls step in bare feet on the cold moss and rocks . . . It would have been interesting to see whether they stepped on the yellow balls drawn from their imaginations, whether they absorbed the color and substance into their own skin . . . A dance would have shown me who those girls are.”²⁰ In her description of the imagined dance and its impact on the girls, we hear the subtext of Gloria’s letter: a desire to glimpse her neighbors’ true nature, their humanity, just as she wants them to recognize hers.

Because of the story’s form, however, we don’t know if her cry will be answered, if her lonely wound will finally heal. While it provides a means for direct challenge to the silence of those in positions of authority, the epistolary story is also a form with silence built in. It’s a one-sided conversation, a single voice speaking out of the hush of racism’s emotional toll. Will the school board answer? Will its members acknowledge Gloria’s pain, or will they turn away? Gloria ends her letter by saying, “I patiently await your response,” and we wait with her to see if some other voice, any other voice, will join in with hers.²¹

4.

Close to the end of S. Yizhar’s short novel Khirbet Khizeh, a group of soldiers accomplish the task assigned to them: after shutting down opposition with overwhelming force, they enter a village and clear it of its residents, expelling them from their homes before sending them off to refugee camps across the border. It’s 1948, and the soldiers, after defending the new State of Israel from attacks by surrounding Arab armies, have now been charged with rooting out internal resistance, as well as making room for the masses of European refugees soon to arrive—a goal most of the soldiers in the company embrace without question but which causes the young narrator great discomfort. “Do we really have to expel them?” he asks one of his platoon-mates, who simply replies, “That’s what it says in the operational orders.”²²

The novel, published just months after the end of the 1948 war and, for a time, required reading in Israeli high schools, is an intense exploration of individual conscience and morality in the context of nationalist fervor and the group mentality it stirs. The unnamed narrator takes a definitive stand, saying, “But it’s not right,” before struggling to find more to say, “not knowing which of all the arguments and speeches fighting within me I should set before him as a decisive proof.”²³ Words come more easily to his platoon-mate—that is, he finds easy words to demonize all the villagers, all Arabs, anyone who isn’t just like him: “They start laying mines on the roads, and stealing from the settlements, and spying everywhere.”²⁴ The narrator tries to object to these fears as “fantasies,” but when he can’t come up with any other solution, his platoon-mate says, “If you don’t know—then shut up.”²⁵

The fellow soldier succeeds in silencing the narrator, at least outwardly. And the narrator wishes it could silence him inside as well: “This was the advice that I had preferred from the outset,” he tells us. “But I was overburdened with words… And since I had no one to argue with—I argued with myself.”²⁶ He tries to convince himself to accept the “operational orders” as something out of his control, but in the next moment he tries to work up the courage to “stand up and resist.”²⁷ Then he castigates himself for being weak, not for failing to stand up but for feeling sympathy: “Bleeding heart, bleeding heart, bleeding heart!”²⁸ he taunts himself. At the same time, he can’t shake the feeling that he’s been “forced into a nightmare and not being allowed to wake up from it.”²⁹

And only then does he take in the sight of the villagers,

several dozen now sitting in a circle, maybe a hundred people altogether. If you glanced sideways and overlooked the circumstances, you could have easily been misled into recalling those village market days . . . when everyone gathered together in the same kind of huddle, under every green tree, in any puddle of shade, waiting in a festive heaving moving mass . . . as that festive thing they had been looking forward to, happened.”³⁰

But instead of the brimming life he would like to hear, the sense of normalcy and anticipation, “this silence left no room for such delusion.”³¹ The soldiers have put a lid on all possibility for festivity and joy. In their place, the narrator wishes for other sounds, imagining “if one of them were to stand up and say, We’re not moving from here, villagers, take courage and be men!”³²

Worse for him than anything is their silent acceptance of a terrible fate. He wants them to resist, to show that what they are suffering is wrong, but also to show that they are in fact a dangerous bunch and that the soldiers are justified in distrusting them. The longer they stay quiet, the more the narrator finds himself “ill at ease.”³³ In an attempt to appease his conscience, he tells us, “I conjured up before my eyes all the terrible outrages that the Arabs had committed against us. I recited the names of Hebron, Safed, Be’er Tuvia, and Hulda. I seized on necessity, the necessity of the moment, which with the passage of time, when everything was settled, would also be set straight.”³⁴ But in the face of the villagers’ continued silence, he “found no comfort.”³⁵ He is undone by their refusal to speak out, left instead to confront his own misgivings, which leave him praying “that something would happen to seize me and take me away from here so I would not see” the villagers loaded onto trucks and driven from their home.³⁶

Silence is the aim of oppressors, the end goal in repressing dissent. But it can also be “a form of resistance,” according to the poet and critic Cynthia Cruz, who explores “how silence manifests in the body, in the face and the mouth, and in the work of the artist,” in her fascinating collection of essays Disquieting.³⁷ Cruz is particularly interested in the way physical manifestations of silence, such as muteness following trauma, provide the victims of oppression a means to refuse acceptance, “a decision not to engage in the world.”³⁸ She argues that what is often diagnosed as mental illness and something to be fixed as quickly as possible—such as depression or anorexia—can be better understood as a silent rejection of neoliberal culture, which “sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations.”³⁹ To be depressed is to withdraw from the world rather than normalize and assimilate into that state of relentless competition—a Bartelby-like refusal to participate.

What often replaces speech in these acts of resistance, Cruz says, is gesture, which “performs or communicates through the body and not through the verbal articulation of the inner life.”⁴⁰ She points, as an example, to scenes in which the main character in Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia rebels against the life of material wealth, productivity, and performance of happiness she has found herself living through a “different form of language—how she carries herself, the way her body slumps, slouches, the exhaustion marked on her face, the way her hair eventually becomes undone.”⁴¹ The world of capitalist striving has silenced her, keeping her from articulating her true desires. But by finding a new language of gesture within that silence, she has discovered a way to resist, refusing to let the culture consume her.

In Khirbet Khizeh, too, gesture fills in what speech leaves out. The villagers don’t give the narrator what he thinks he needs or wants, an articulation of their anger or pain; they refuse to normalize what is happening to them by fighting or chanting or even crying. But as they sit in their circle to await their exile,

One man, with a prodigious mustache, sat at the edge of the circle patiently rolling a cigarette in his dark peasant hands, transforming the lap of his robe into a tiny workshop for the purpose, gathering up the crumbs of tobacco and packing and tamping them in the trumpet of paper, trapping it this way and that, fussing with his flint and tinder until it finally produced a glow, which was nurtured with blowing and shielded with the cup of a hand, and lit it, raising for his enjoyment a pungent cloud of smoke, demonstrating the last scrap of freedom remaining in his possession, and also some hope for the future, a sort of everything-will-be-all-right that someone always kindled through wishful thinking, which he immediately believed in as though it were the first step toward salvation and even infected his neighbors with his good faith.⁴²

 

Watching this small action amidst the silence, the narrator recognizes what the old man is doing: rejecting this moment of expulsion as the end of his world. The sentence itself, astonishing in its intricate syntax and specificity of detail, shows what capacity the gesture has to create language where speech is absent. The old man’s action, and with it his refusal to accept hopelessness, is beyond the soldiers’ ability to control or repress. External silence here becomes a shield, protecting the inner life, which persists in seeing a possible future despite the devastation of the present.

 

The novel ends with the narrator watching the last of the convoys take the villagers away from their homes, and by then he, too, has recognized the power of silence, far greater than that of his army’s guns and tanks: “All around, silence was falling,” he says, “and soon it would close upon the last circle. And when silence had closed in on everything and no man disturbed the stillness, which yearned noiselessly for what was beyond silence—then God would come forth and descend to roam the valley, and see whether all was according to the cry that had reached him.”⁴³ What the villagers’ silence has opened for the narrator is the moral clarity to judge his actions, not in terms of “necessity” but in a language that is beyond his ability to speak.

5.

The one silence all stories are rebelling against is the inevitable silence of the grave. We write to leave a record that we existed, that humanity existed in us, despite the many inhuman acts that mark our history. And all stories’ endings, by returning us to silence, remind us of our own approaching end.

But what do we do in the face of humanity’s ultimate silence, the silence of extinction?

This is what Ted Chiang reckons with in his remarkable story “The Great Silence,” from his 2019 collection Exhalation. The narrator begins by describing the Fermi paradox, which posits that given how large and old the universe is, it should be filled with life, “a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcertingly quiet.”⁴⁴ The silence that surrounds us might be explained, the narrator tells us, by theories positing that “intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space.”⁴⁵ If so, “then the hush of the sky is the silence of the graveyard.”⁴⁶

In Chiang’s story, one silence is imposed by the universe itself, which places nearly impossible-to-overcome obstacles in the way of any species trying to survive in its vast, inhospitable spaces. But another is the silence we human beings create and enforce. The narrator, we learn, is a Puerto Rican parrot who posits another theory to explain the Fermi paradox: “intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.”⁴⁷ As a member of a species “that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans,” he believes “it makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.”⁴⁸

What makes the story particularly moving is the narrator reminding us that we haven’t actually been surrounded by silence, not if we’ve been paying attention. All along we’ve had “a nonhuman species capable of communicating” with us, exactly what we’ve been looking for with our complicated technology that sends messages into space and waits for an answer that has yet to come.⁴⁹ The answer, the narrator tells us, has been here the whole time. Like humans, “parrots are vocal learners,” he says; they “can learn to make new sounds after [they’ve] heard them,” and like humans, they have a “unique call” and “address each other by name. One bird imitates another’s contact call to get the other bird’s attention.”⁵⁰ He tells the story of “an African grey parrot named Alex,” who demonstrated to scientists an ability not only to repeat human sounds but to actually understand the concepts behind them.⁵¹ Just before Alex died, he said to the researcher who’d spent thirty years studying him, “You be good. I love you.”⁵²

The more devastating silence, then, is a willful one, a refusal to hear what’s right around us—a deafness to the rich music of our own planet and the species that inhabit it. We call outward and listen for messages, but our calls drown out the sound that’s closest to us. We are capable of detecting the “faint hum” of the Big Bang, “the residual radiation” of creation’s initial sound that “will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists,” but we ignore the voices of those who speak right beside us.⁵³ The narrator assures us that he doesn’t blame us for the destruction we’ve caused, believing we haven’t done it “maliciously”; rather, we “just weren’t paying attention.”⁵⁴ Still, he not only reminds us of our failure to recognize the vibrant language of parrots, which contains its “myths,” “rituals,” and “traditions,” but points to the cost of not listening: in creating the conditions that lead to the parrot’s extinction, we have silenced one of the only voices willing to speak to us, to keep us from being alone in the vast universe.⁵⁵ The story ends with the narrator sending us one last message from the parrots before they disappear, a message that underscores our coming loneliness: “You be good. I love you.”⁵⁶

The most painful silence of all is the one following that final period. Once the parrots are gone, there is no one left to witness our behavior, to respond to our voices, to offer love in exchange for our words. We really will be on our own, until we join the “hush of the night sky,” the Great Silence of the universe’s “graveyard.”

But Chiang’s story, by acknowledging the coming silence, also resists it. As the narrator reminds us, “it’s no coincidence that ‘aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.”⁵⁷ The words the parrot speaks, the words on the page of Chiang’s story, are words of intention, of hope, of continued breath in the face of its inevitable end. They enact the revolt Danticat argues for, this time against our own capacity for creating silence, for destroying what we need most. The story—like Denning’s and Simms’s and Yizhar’s—is a cry into the silent void, waiting for the rest of us to answer.

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Scott Nadelson is the author of seven books, most recently the story collection One of Us. He teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

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Notes