That Summer, ‘53

Excerpt

Sidney King told me it was the last of his rental bungalows. “That there’s even one available is pretty much a miracle,” he said over the phone. “You’ll see. It’s Shangri-La up here. Once you’ve rented, there’s no walking away.”

Sure enough as soon as we turned out on the parkway it felt like Shangri-La. The Sawmill Parkway had just been completed; it was my first time driving the hills and curves. The trees as we drove north were a tender spring green. I looked over at my wife; a bright flowered scarf tied around under her chin, our three year old daughter Tanya cupped in her lap and thought I was a lucky man.

“It’s good for the baby, this country air.”

Though the windows were rolled up Ella drew a deep theatrical breath.

“But you’re a city girl,” I teased.

This was our joke, since Ella was born in Moscow and I was born in a small city called Reni, near the Black Sea. She liked to say that even if I studied hard every minute, I’d never become as cultured as she was. And though I argued that I’d lived in Lucerne and Paris before New York, that I spoke five languages compared to her pitiful two, and that I did not falsely Americanize my name as she had from Elisheva to Ella, My wife’s tongue tsked her teeth. “Say what you want, Serge. Your little Reni was never Moscow.”

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is the author of four books of fiction and three books of poetry, most recently the poetry collection Woman Without Umbrella and the short story collection Make Me Do Things (Four Way Books). Her novel The Border of Truth weaves the situation of refugees and a daughter’s awakening to the history and secrets of her father’s survival and loss. Redel’s debut novel Loverboy (paperback: Harcourt) won the Graywolf S. Mariela Gable novel award and was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Granta.com, O the Oprah magazine, Salmagundi, NOON, Elle, Bomb. Redel is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. Visit www.victoriaredel.com for more information.

Hannah Tinti on “That Summer, ‘53”

I’m writing this in the final moments of summer, which always feel both relaxing and fraught. I spend every minute I can outdoors, enjoying the last of the good weather, and at the same time, I wonder at how fast the days have gone by. Luckily, I have Victoria Redel’s remarkable story, “That Summer, ’53,” to help me remember the smell of BBQ cooking, the cool joy of jumping into a cold lake, and the lazy stretch of a summer night with friends, sipping drinks and watching the sun filter pink and orange through the trees. Set in 1953, this bucolic lakeside life is the American dream for Serge Solta and his young Russian family, their own little piece of Shangri-La. But things are more complicated than they seem in Serge’s work life and his marriage. The McCarthy hearings and the Rosenberg executions are broadcasting through everyone’s TV sets, and soon Serge finds himself caught between two worlds, muffling his misgivings with Seabreeze cocktails and the rhythm of Pérez Prado’s “Mambo Number Five” while trying to keep Shangri-La from slipping through his fingers. Check out Victoria Redel’s Q&A with us to hear the family history behind this sharply-turned tale. Then it’s time to get out your vintage cocktail shaker, fix yourself a Gin-and-It, open the pages of “That Summer, ’53,” and enjoy a literary Indian summer.