Four years ago, on a January afternoon while Montreal was in the middle of another subarctic deep freeze, I boarded a plane for Munich. Hours before, as the wheels of the taxi spun on the ice and careened toward departures, I realized that I only had one book, Karl Stern’s 1951 memoir The Pillar of Fire, for my flight. I’d found a first edition at a used bookstore, where it cost me the equivalent of two baguettes. It was signed by Stern with a blue fountain pen and addressed in that elegant, unmistakeably European cursive script to a colleague at Montreal’s Saint Mary’s hospital, where he had been psychiatrist-in-chief.
I hadn’t planned on reading it. I’d been reading around Stern, in footnotes and bibliographies, for close to a decade. Every so often, I’d meet an elderly person who remembered him as a Jewish doctor. Others said he was a novelist. Or, a German pianist. My neighbor, a Francophone nun in her eighties, thought he might have been a psychoanalyst for priests. No one ever seemed to be talking about the same man.
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