August 12, 2008
Blast rocks Jonathan Safran Foer’s world (1985)
To novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, it was the Explosion. The knife-edge moment that divided his life.He was eight years old, the middle of three boys, growing up in a Jewish household in Washington, D.C. He was not your usual boy. He was flamboyant and sensitive. At 3, he asked his mother for a vest that sparkled; her sister-in-law made one for him.
On this day, his mother drove him to Murch Elementary school, the site of a summer school program. The class was going to learn how to make sparklers. They were supposed to learn astronomy, but the instructur took ill. The class was divided into groups of four, and the graduate student who acted as teacher set out the bowls in which the chemicals would be mixed. On the chalkboard was the recipe, "basically, a recipe for gunpowder, with a little extra," the instructor told them. One wonders what he was thinking, having children mix gunpowder.
The prospect of making things go boom (or sizzle or sparkle) bored Jonathan. He remembered leaving the classroom, dawdling in the bathroom, sipping water from the fountain.
You can imagine the scene: the three other kids around the table, perhaps chattering and passing around the bowl, taking turns mixing the formula, the empty child-sized chair, the boy who had just finished second grade the month before, continuing to dawdle, reading the list of chemicals on the board.
There was a blast. Acrid smoke filled the room. The fire alarm went off. There were screams and the sound of chairs falling over, the shuffling of children's feet, the teacher calling out.
In the hall, Jonathan's best friend was leaning against the wall, his glasses coated with debris, his skin burned. Four children in all were injured, two of them critically. Jonathan had second-degree burns on his hands and face, and for weeks his hands were bandaged.
The explosion traumatized Foer. For the next three years, he didn't want to leave his house; didn't want to play; didn't want to go to school. He would wet his pants. Being out in the sun for too long could make his skin feel like it was burning. He feared going to the hospital to visit his best friend, who was seriously burned. His principal noted that Jonathan was "withdrawn and pensive" since the accident.
He recovered, and his mother could see again the promising, bright child. When he was cast as a hunter in a school play, his mother recalled, "I can still see him taking giant Elmer Fudd steps across a stage. In fifth grade, he was incredibly popular, and he had the makings of being a big-time ladies' man."
But something happened inside. In an account he wrote for the Washington Post, Foer writes:
One of my responses to the explosion was to lose the ability to express, and perhaps even to feel, anger. I never fought with my parents or siblings, and still don't, and don't fight with strangers, friends or my wife. Since I was 9 years old, I have not raised my voice to anyone. But thinking about the instructor, now, brings something ugly to my skin.Years later, Foer would use these experiences in his second novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
" in which 9-year-old Oskar Schell, his father dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, wanders New York City, trying to reassembled his life blown apart in light and thunder.Bill Peschel Notes: Material for this essay was taken from two articles: "The Rescue Artist" by Deborah Solomon and "My Explosion: How summer camp changed everything" by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Born: Robert Southey, poet, Bristol, Gloucestershire, 1813; Helena Blavatsky, theosophist, spiritualist, Yekaterinoslav, Ukraine, Russian Empire, 1831; Edith Hamilton, author, Dresden, Germany, 1867; Zerna Sharp, educator, author, Hillisburg, Ind., 1889; Robert Francis, poet, Upland, Penn., 1901; Wallace Markfield, novelist, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1926; William Goldman, screenwriter, author, Chicago, 1931; Gail Parent, novelist, New York City, 1940; J.D. McClatchy, poet, Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1945; IBM personal computer, 1981.
Died: William Blake, poet, engraver, mystic London, 1827; Helen Hunt Jackson, novelist, San Francisco, 1885; James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, essayist, Cambridge, Mass., 1891; Thomas Mann, novelist, essayist, Zürich, Switzerland, 1955; Ian Fleming, spy author, Canterbury, Kent, 1964; Esther Forbes, novelist, children's author, Worcester, Mass. 1967; B(ernard) Kliban, cartoonist, San Francisco, 1990.
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
