These nuanced understandings of my heritage snuck into my writing, and then strangely empowered me to employ events from my own life—specifically, the more than three years I spent working various jobs on a half dozen small international expedition ships. I love ships, living on ships, the sea, and traveling, and the spirit of that experience has very much informed this book. In my twenties, I saw shipping ports in every corner of the world, and witnessed how ships hold the potential to change the direction of any life at any time.
I later married into a large Jewish family in Chicago, and in doing so, became very close to my wife's two grandfathers, who are now both in their nineties. One lived on and off vessels as a frogman in the Pacific campaign of WWII, and the other had been a medic who helped liberate the camps in Europe. I've had long conversations with them and used their stories to understand different perspectives and religious backgrounds when writing about the war. At a family party, the medic, Joe Sheade, took out pictures the size of a stick of gum that showed heaps of pajama-clad bodies taken from the liberated death camps. He's kept these photos in his wallet for over seventy years. "So I don't ever forget," he said. His willingness to look directly at something so ugly to keep perspective haunted me.
Then the last piece of the puzzle for me was research, which I did a lot of. Almost everything I discovered, story I heard, or event I learned of that took place during the war became something I held up and asked, "Would this show the impossibly complex and ethically messy reality of one Dutch family's life during the war?"
Yet, even after all this, my editor challenged me to go back and revise with an eye for moral and personal dilemmas for Jacob. It was with this in mind that I wrote the scene where the boys at camp lead Jacob to the burn pits to toss rocks at the rats. One of the boys makes an offensive comment, comparing the rats to a Jewish propaganda poster, and, both desperate to fit in and relieved not to have been the focus of these boys' menace, Jacob agrees. He is immediately reminded of his beloved Jewish teacher who called out, "Yeladim," to gather him and his classmates, and he is flooded with guilt. This is this scene that troubles me the most. This scene arrived from my own children's teacher calling to them, "Yeladim," this word that breaks my heart with the love and care it sings out. It has become my favorite word, and after writing that scene, and knowing it was right for the book, it hurt, and still hurts. It makes me uneasy to include those anti-Semitic sentiments, something I feared readers would judge both Jacob for allowing and me for writing. But I felt that I needed to push all cowardice and self-censorship away when writing The Boat Runner. These events were ugly, to be sure, which is why we must look and look closely at them.
This is very much a work of fiction, but it is built upon a historical and personal scaffolding of real people and true events. Now, I hope others will read this book and see this family's impossible situation, and how the circumstances that create great upheavals have morphed through time, jumping borders, races, and oceans. I hope this book does its job and entertains, evokes empathy for others, and leaves you more alert to those around you and the unique depths of their lives. But more than anything, I hope this story connects some unknowable reader to the receding shadows of our past, especially those of the darkest times, which is where we learn how essential it is to find the power of our own voice.
Read on
Devin Murphy's Short Story Off Dead Hawk Highway
The older Girl Scouts kick out the screens of their bunkhouse at night and wander the open fields at the back part of the ranch. They often walk down the dirt road my cabin is on to get to the horse pasture. I can see them in the dark. They move like timid deer—taking quick dashes ten yards at a time and stopping to assess the night around them. They betray themselves by laughing when one bumps into the other. I keep my porch light off so I can see the stars. The girls never pay attention to my cabin tucked along the tree line or me on the deck as they line up along the fence, stepping on the first plank to lean over the top and coo to the horses. They wave carrots and apples they've hoarded from the mess hall. I like watching them—the slow saunter of the horses approaching and nuzzling the girls, their movements breaking the stillness of the night, fireflies touching the space around them like thin blue flames.
By morning, the undertow of the mountain will have pulled the girls back to their bunks, and the horses will be slick with dew and honey-colored in the pasture. The bear grass will bloom like fists of light pounding up the hillside, and by afternoon, rainstorms will darken the sky and strike the ground with lighting before blowing over and leaving a calm I have only ever felt in these mountains.
My boss, Joe, rents the horses from an outfit called Sombrero that lets them free-range in the mountains during the fall and winter. The horses are all starved and half wild by spring when they come to the Girl Scout Ranch. Joe had us wait by the horse trailers when they arrived to send back the ones we thought were too sick. If we could fit a dime between its protruding ribs we wouldn't let it off the trailer. The ones we kept had to spend two weeks being retrained by the wrangler girls.
So when a wrangler calls this morning from the stable and says an old horse has died, Joe says, "You fellas misjudged one," and we have to go out in the rain to get the dead horse before the campers see it.
Joe drives us to the pasture. The pasture runs along an incline with a large cup of earth surrounded by lodgepole pines with rainwater pooling over the roots. My coworker, Kurt, says that later in the summer the rain washes away the topsoil down to the clay, "and the clay gets slicker than snot."
Kurt and I take the tractor into the pasture. It's slow going—the wheels can hardly catch in the mud. In the trees lies a dark brown quarter horse. Its head is sloped downward enough to see a row of yellow headstone shaped teeth embedded in the gums. Its unfurled tongue lies on the ground like a dull pink ladle.
"We'd be better off just letting the mud swallow the damn thing," Kurt yells over the engine noise.