After reading Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Mr. Scerra’s Literature and Composition classes designed tests with two sets of answers.  The first answers were those of a perfect student.  The second were written by Holden’s great-grandson Bolton Caulfield.  Despite the generation gap, Bolton has the same attitude, speech patterns, and approach to education that his great-grandfather had; he would take the test on the same way Holden might.  The following is a passage from Bolton’s test:

In 2-3 paragraphs, use the following passage to determine whether or not this story is a successful bildungsroman. Make sure to have a clear thesis and use specific evidence to make your point. 35 points.

• “We kept getting closer and closer to the carousel and you could start to hear that nutty music it always plays… It played that same song about fifty years ago when I was a little kid. That’s one nice thing about carousels, they always play the same songs… Then what she did–it damn near killed me–she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head… I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there”(233).

Bildungsromans are stories of character growth, specifically about kids learning to become adults. When researching this term, I found that too many stories were listed as “classic bildungsromans,” when really they’re novels written by old rich authors that get famous off of phony stories that make their audiences happy. If you saw that list you wouldn’t think it’s very fair. And it’s not. This passage, along with any other story touted as a bildungsroman, does not show any true growth in character.

In Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden doesn’t improve. He starts off okay and everything. Like, you actually expect him to be an alright guy but he’s hopeless. He takes too many taxis, smokes too many cigarettes, and old Holden himself doesn’t even get what’s wrong with him. It’s messed up. The worst part is, he acts like he deserves to feel better.  When you act like that and that kind of person is who you choose to be, you deserve exactly what you get. Until Holden makes himself better, he won’t feel any better. That’s what he’s too stupid to realize. That’s why this story is a failed bildungsroman. Holden’s too dumb to get better.

Bildungsromans are never successful though, even though the phony ones try really hard to be. It’s impossible to write an honest book that is also a bildungsroman. You either write a true story with what actually happened or you write a fake story about fake change in fake characters. Like in last year’s English class, we had to read this book To Kill a Mockingbird. And it was actually pretty good in the beginning, to tell you the truth, except in the second half when it got all phony. Anyway the main character was this kid Scout and she was alright but by the end she acted like she was so different, just for having lived a little and listened to her dad some. There was a girl in our class named Elle and she thought that was so great but I told her that’s not how change happens. Scout didn’t even do anything, just pretended she did to feel better about herself. It’s not fair when people fake that kind of stuff. Elle didn’t get it though. She thought To Kill a Mockingbird was a perfect bildungsroman. But I’m telling you, those don’t exist. Everyone has a true self. You can’t just change who you are. Holden is stupid and stubborn and he thinks he deserves to get anything else other than what he has. He’s wrong. He is who he is and he can never change that. Any story that seems like bildungsroman is phony because no realistic character ever deviates from their true, underlying self and that self is incapable of change.

photo by Peter Forster / unsplash.com

This short story by Melanie Kramarchuk ’22 was written in response to a challenge from Mr. Scerra to write something inspired by author Ted Chiang’s style in which form matches content. 

FALLING

The tunnels threaded through the earth, spanning the entirety of the planet’s inner layers. Their size and quantity were such that, were the earth to be cut in half, it would be seen that there was little material between the tunnels, separating one from another. This was inevitable, for so much of the earth had been dug up to the surface for the sake of creating these tunnels that very little had remained below the crust. And so the earth no longer hid dirt and gravel and rock beneath its face, but rather an endless maze of tunnels leading into the depths of the planet. The material that had once filled these tunnels now formed mountains on the earth’s surface so that one could not help but think that the earth was being turned inside out. Continue reading →

This story by James Blume ’19 was part of a portfolio of work that earned a 2018 NCTE Achievement Award for Superior Writing. The photograph is also by James.

Photo by James Blume ’19

The Rock Face

Some of the girls were down by the river, timing themselves as they sat in sports bras and short shorts in the run off, screeching in giggles as they tested who could lay the longest in the near freezing water.  The stream itself was shallow, the water only wrapped around their waists, leaving dark stains up their legs. Blocks of hollowed out snow, melting from within, cradled the opening. It dripped downward in a slow transparent current into the girls. One of the fishermen we passed on the way up said this past winter was one of the harshest he’d ever seen here, enough snow to make many of the normal passes impassible. The same snow thawed in the summer sun.

Above them, I lay shirtless beside Will and David, lazing on the boulder next to piles of stripped off clothing, peeled off watches and tossed off backpacks. I rested my head on the brain of pack using the zipped up rain layers as a pillow, the rim of my hat shading my face. Continue reading →

Photo by Fischer Twins
Unsplash.com

Samantha Parelli’s story “Hotel Lobbies” earned a 2018 Governor’s Award in Arts Education to be presented at an award ceremony and performance at the Patriots Theatre at the War Memorial in Trenton on May 22, 2018. Samantha is being recognized for winning the Jersey Shorts Flash Fiction Contest sponsored by the Writer’s Theatre of New Jersey, a statewide prose-writing contest for students in grades 9-12. This year’s prompt was to write a piece of flash fiction in 1,500 words or less. Samantha’s piece was selected by professional writers based on the following criteria: voice, originality, authenticity, sophistication, craft, intention and successful execution. Enjoy this wonderful story.

Hotel Lobbies

I’ve become quite acquainted with hotel lobbies. For the droves of travelers, bearing department store suitcases of plastic veneer, this would have been a self-satiating realization. The possession of a suitcase was what I initially believed to be the cause of my animosity toward such lobbies, but I now understand that this theory was fundamentally incorrect. A suitcase, even the turquoise one that was the object of my childhood infatuation, would have only sat as a dead weight at my feet. My mother would have dragged me across one floor or the other, and invisible claws would have left prominent scratches along its gleaming sides. And I would have cried. Just like everything I had every wanted, tangible achievement was bound to ruin it. In hindsight, the suitcase was one of many things that did not matter, yet it is inevitably featured in the dimly-lit tape of hotel lobbies that seems to always be on repeat. I see this sequence of events over and over again, and trademark decorations of the 70s flash behind my eyelids in a display of wasted extravagance. I search for it, search for the “why,” the “how,” and ultimately the “why” once more. I search for a meaning that constantly eludes me, but there are so many hotel lobbies that they all feel like surreal extensions of my imagination. Continue reading →

“Hero to Three” by Ava Sharahy ’20 earned a 2017 Scholastic National Silver Medal in Flash Fiction. In 2018 Ava earned a National Gold Medal in Poetry for her poem, “M,” awarded at a Carnegie Hall ceremony on June 2018. Of nearly 350,000 Scholastic entries per year, less than 1% earn National Medals. Enjoy this work by Ava.

Hero to Three

In a forgotten corner of Kazakhstan lived a slice of Ukraine’s outcasts. They all escaped death by gunfire or hanging or imprisonment, only through cramming on a boat to what seemed to be safety. The children never questioned why they were living in secrecy, or why the friends and family that couldn’t make it to the boat never visited. A piece of home was created only through the memories of a past life, when being hunted down like animals was unheard of.

Only a six-year old boy named Shmul questioned this, asking his mother once why they couldn’t go back to Odessa to uncles and aunts and Papa. Sighing, she would just knead the bread for dinner, letting his words fly through her ears. She wondered, though guiltily, why couldn’t Shmul be more like the neighborhood boys: chasing after birds on the street instead of reading whatever the he could get his hands on, standing pale and sickly next to everyone else. It was only when Shmul was about to leave, defeated, she answered with looking at him:

“We’re safe here, Shmul. Unless you want to be hung up on a string like Uncle Abe and Aunt Annuskha back home.” Continue reading →

The following short fiction by Ezra Lebovitz ’18 won 3rd Place in the 2016 Johns Hopkins Creative Minds Fiction Contest and was published in the magazine IMAGINE. In addition, Ezra’s work earned “Judge’s Choice” distinction in the 2017 NJ Youth Poet Laureate Contest, Honorable Mention in Rider University’s 37th Annual High School Writing Contest, and a 2016 NJCTE Bronze Medal for Poetry.

Tashlich

“Tashlich (תשליך) is a ritual that many Jews observe during Rosh HaShanah. “Tashlich” means “casting off” in Hebrew and involves symbolically casting off the sins of the previous year by tossing pieces of bread or another food into a body of flowing water. Just as the water carries away the bits of bread, so too are sins symbolically carried away. In this way the participant hopes to start the New Year with a clean slate.”[1]

We go down to the water on a Tuesday, when the sky is a taut-skin smile and the grass is cracked.

“The Boston River is an unwieldy thing,” my older sister reminds me while we walk. “Hanan, don’t grab at the currents. I know you want to, but they’re powerful.”
I don’t want to go through the delicacies of telling her that she gave me this speech back when I was thirteen and that I’ve taught myself how to do tashlich since then, so I just nod quietly and that seems to satiate her.

“Do you have the bread?” she asks and I hold the bag up for her inspection. She nods– it’s met her standards and I can see her shoulders unclench.

She smiles.

“You did a good job,” she says, awkwardly mussing my dark hair. I shrug her off, too busy watching the way the headlights and sunsets dapple the street as we make our way down Fairmount Street. There’s something decidedly urban about city rivers, I think, but I like them anyway. I like peering off gated bridges and even more than that, I like knowing that I have the power to stop myself from falling. There are bridges in Eastern Europe, but they aren’t built like this, built like deconstructed ash.

I wonder what kind of bridges my sister prefers.

I’m still thinking about the interlock of chain fences when a car brushes past us, indelicate.

My sister bites her lip. “So, Dad tells me you’re thinking about Northeastern?”

It’s Tufts, not Northeastern, but I don’t see the point in telling her. I shrug an affirmation instead.

“It’s a good school,” she says. She looks at me, eyes tentative, and holds out her hand for a high-five, adding, “Turns out the Franklin kids really are smart, huh?”
She wants me to, so I high five her. Her hands are cold, and I wonder if she’s getting enough iron. She’s been off finding herself in Kosovo (which isn’t even a real country anyway) for two years, and they don’t have enough iron there. Probably, at least.

Just as the sun slips just below the horizon, we reach the bridge, lined with industrial chain-link fences and highway signs. Something sinks in my stomach, like the Boston river is reaching up and winding itself around my veins. It’s like drowning from the inside out.

The thing about tashlich is I have to acknowledge your sins– this slice of bread for every lie I told, this piece for every unkindness.

I don’t want to think about that.

I’m pretty sure my sister doesn’t either, because when she turns back to me from the precipice of the sidewalk, she seems almost vulnerable. Almost.

“Hanan,” she starts, like there’s something she’s trying to say.

I want to say something.

I want to ask her how she could just up and run away, how she could fly out to the wreck of a barely nation. I want to ask her where she’s been when I had sins to forgive, what it felt like to walk out of our house and not know if she was coming back, where she went for tashlich, why she left me.

But I don’t.

I don’t say anything. I just swallow, hard, and the words tumble back from the tip of my tongue to the pit of my throat and they’re acidic, like vomiting in reverse.

She reaches her hand out to me, palm splayed open and pale to the sky, veins stretched so tightly they might snap.

“Can I have some?” she asks. “To throw away?”

I press a piece of bread into it, and I think I almost touch her skin.

[1] “What Is Tashlich?” About.com Religion & Spirituality. Web. 8 Oct. 2015.