Reading GroupGuide
Discussion Questions
Snow in August starts like a modern-day fairy tale, with the phrase “Once upon a cold and luminous morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.” In what other ways does the author use fairy tale elements, and why do you think he does so?
Heroes and villains, both real and imaginary, are a significant part of Michael’s life. What does he learn about heroism in the course of the book? Does his hero worship help or hinder him? Do you think that heroes are necessary in our lives? Do you think children today have fewer heroes available to them than Michael does in 1946?
One of Michael’s greatest worries in Snow in August is whether or not to tell the police about Frankie McCarthy beating up Mister G. Michael’s mother says that informers are the “scum of God’s sweet earth,” but Rabbi Hirsch tells him, “You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime.” Do you agree with Kate Devlin or Rabbi Hirsch? Whom do you think the author agrees with?
Over the course of Snow in August, Michael learns Yiddish and Rabbi Hirsch learns English. Both of them are fascinated by the power of words, and ultimately Michael draws on their power to create the Golem. What does this suggest about the power of language? Do words still have power today?
The shadow of World War II and the Holocaust looms over Snow in August. Both Kate Devlin and Rabbi Hirsch have lost a spouse to the war. Are there ways in which Kate and Leah Yaretzky are similar? What about the Rabbi and Tommy Devlin?
The progress of Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers is a recurring motif in the novel. Why do Michael and the Rabbi follow his story so fervently? What do they learn from it?
Michael is often moved or inspired by the music of his time, from popular music to Dvořák. How do the titles of these pieces reflect the themes in Snow in August? Is the radio just a conduit for the music, or do you think it has a wider significance?
Snow in August is a novel full of miraculous happenings. Were you surprised that Michael was able to re-create the Golem? Why do you think the author used miracles instead of more realistic events?
On Writing Snow in August
There are many valid ways to write novels, but I’m one of those countless writers who must begin with the rough material of my own life. Like all human beings, I was shaped by the accidents of living in a special time and a particular place. The time was as important as the place. I was born in the middle of the Depression, came to consciousness during the Second World War, and lived my adolescence during the great optimistic years that followed the war. The place was Brooklyn, the largest borough of New York City; a place suffused with a peculiar angular light, reflecting off the harbor; a place with hundreds of churches, many libraries, a lovely park set in its heart, and a strand of beach at Coney Island. Some rich people lived there, along with many families that came to be called middle class, but in its style, its toughness, its valor, Brooklyn was proudly working class.
Each neighborhood was a separate urban hamlet, with its own heroes, villains, and myths. My neighborhood, not far from Prospect Park, was a mixture of Irish and Italian immigrants and their children, and a smaller number of Jews. The architecture was as jumbled as the classes: proud brownstones owned by people who worked in the distant towers of Manhattan; cheaper one-family homes where clerks and ironworkers and newspaper pressmen raised their families; and tenements that housed the poor, built with darkening red bricks and fire escapes zigzagging on their faces like iron calligraphy.
We lived in a tenement. Our railroad flat had five rooms, but only one bedroom had a door. We were on the top floor, able to survey the street on one end and see the skyline of New York from the other. We were not much different from all the others who lived in the tenements: family was the essential core of our lives, and we lived most of that family life in the kitchen. In the kitchen we ate and talked and listened. We did our homework at the kitchen table. We listened to the radio in the kitchen, our imaginations crowded with Captain Midnight and Tom Mix and Terry and the Pirates, and then by the grave voices of Edward R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, bringing news of distant battlefields. The kitchen door was never locked.
But there was a sense of extended family too. There were widening geographies in that neighborhood, extending from the flat to the building to the block to the adjoining blocks and finally to the parish. We knew everyone in our building, their strengths and weaknesses. On hot summer evenings, in those years before air conditioning, the grown-ups took folding chairs out to the sidewalk in front of the building and sipped iced tea and talked. They talked of everything: past, present, and future, people they knew and people they didn’t. The immigrants talked about the Old Country. Sometimes a voice would rise in song. We knew the owners of every store along the avenue. And though we did not think of them that way, we understood that there were some basic institutions: the Church, the Bar, the Police Station. They represented stability and continuity. The bars were more than simple drinking establishments; they were social clubs, places where men could drown their sorrows if a son was killed on some Pacific island, refuges from all difficulties, hiring halls for men who had lost their jobs.
The great goal for working men was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where two of my cousins worked, and where I would serve a year as an apprentice sheet metal worker. A job at the Navy Yard was a civil service job, and that could last a lifetime. Because of the Depression, the need for steady work was central to all of them, even the kids. I started working at eleven, after school, delivering a newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle. Other kids delivered groceries, shined shoes, washed windows, shoveled snow in wintertime. There was a general assumption that working for money was more important than education; I didn’t meet anyone who had gone to college until I was in the U.S. Navy. Most young men quit school at sixteen to go to work. Eventually, I did, too.
But if we were part of a parochial hamlet, there was another presence that bound us to all other parts of Brooklyn: the baseball team called the Dodgers. We read the sports pages of the Brooklyn Eagle (and the other newspapers) as if they held the secrets of all life. They were, in a religious sense, the fundamental texts. My father, an immigrant from Belfast in Northern Ireland, became an American through those sports pages. If Jorge Luis Borges had known the Dodgers and those newsprint pages of heroic deeds and invincible statistics, he might have written a story in which the texts invented us. They were part of the dailiness of our lives, as were the games on the radio described with laconic exuberance by Red Barber. We were all so young we thought that world would last forever.
By the end of the 1950s, everything was gone. The Dodgers were gone, the Brooklyn Eagle was gone, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard was dying. Red Barber had become the announcer for the hated Yankees. Television had arrived, and so had heroin. Nobody sat outside anymore on summer evenings; they watched Ed Sullivan or Jerry Lewis or Sid Caesar in the blue light of the television screens. The kitchens were abandoned; they had finally found a use for those living rooms, and ate dinner on folding trays, sucked into the voracious tube. For the first time, as junkies began their restless gnawing prowl, they locked their kitchen doors. You saw more and more moving vans in the neighborhood, heading for the distant suburbs. I remember feeling, as did so many others, that the world I knew was gone forever.