Phoning Home: Essays
Jacob M. Appel
Author Bio
Jacob M. Appel’s first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won the 2012 Hudson Prize and will be published by Black Lawrence in November 2013.
Jacob has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals including Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Subtropics, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch. He has won the New Millennium Writings contest four times, the Writer’s Digest “grand prize” twice, and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom competition in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He has also won annual contests sponsored by Boston Review, Missouri Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Briar Cliff Review, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Writers’ Voice, the Dana Awards, the Salem Center for Women Writers, and Washington Square. His work has been short listed for the O. Henry Award (2001), Best American Short Stories (2007, 2008), Best American Essays (2011, 2012), and received “special mention” for the Pushcart Prize in 2006, 2007, 2011 and 2013.
Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown University, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia University, an M.S. in bioethics from the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, an M.F.A. in playwriting from Queens College, an M.P.H. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has most recently taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was honored with the Undergraduate Council of Students Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, and at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. He also publishes in the field of bioethics and contributes to such publications as the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the Hastings Center Report, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Times, The Providence Journal and many regional newspapers.
Jacob has been admitted to the practice of law in New York State and Rhode Island, and is a licensed New York City sightseeing guide.
Description
Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author’s quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel’s recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues including genetic testing and end-of-life decision-making. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. One essay recounts visits to a demented aunt who promised him lime Jell-O, his favorite dessert, at every visit—but forgot her promise before the treat was served. Another recounts Appel’s brief encounter with Harry Truman’s former chauffer at a psychiatric hospital. Several describes his relationships with his grandfathers: one an irreverent psychiatrist, the other and straight-laced refugee. “She Loves Me Not” recounts his futile efforts to woo a celebrated folk singer.
“We’d just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother’s foul-tempered Dodge Dart,” writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever–beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his “private apocalypse.” Yet he manages to connect this episode—and his quest to retrieve the cats many years later—to larger issues of property and class that arise while he is teaching an ethics course at Brown University. Similarly, Appel connects an episode in which he mistakes a case of wine for a bomb with a decrease in civil discourse. These connections between personal trials and national travails are what distinguish the essays.
New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv wrote of the collection: “In his essays, Jacob Appel vividly evokes a younger version of himself, whom he treats with both cruelty and affection. His essays are gentle, crisp, self-mocking, and sneakily absurd. In each essay, he reaches some sort of equilibrium, a kind of intellectual epiphany that doesn’t come easily; instead, it feels raw and hard-earned.”
Book excerpt
In fifth grade, we are asked to sacrifice: our prized possessions must be inventoried and surrendered to the state.
This is, mercifully, an exercise. I am a sheltered ten-year-old boy in an upscale bedroom suburb of New York City, a community so flush that its grade-school teachers must simulate hardship for their students. We have already suffered through a sugarless week in solidarity with the overtaxed colonists of eighteenth-century New England; we have wandered the classroom blindfolded, rendered sightless by a barrage of Confederate bullets. Now we are studying the immigrant experience—or possibly the Holocaust—and each of us has been ordered to bring from home a personal treasure that our teacher-turned-jailor, Mr. G., intends to “confiscate” as the price for our freedom. This crash course in palm-greasing takes place several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the Challenger explosion, before the death of my be loved grandmother—and I confess the details are misty in my memory. (It is also an age of laxer classroom mores, when Mr. G. can still have his young charges massage his shoulders, not because he harbors ulterior designs on children, but because he enjoys having his muscles loosened.) What I do recall vividly is Mr. G. as Kafkaesque bureaucrat, shuffling between our tiny desks on his reconstructed knees, inspecting one boy’s meticulously labeled coin collection and another girl’s sepia photograph of her great-grandparents in fin de siècle Vienna. When he leans down to demand my offering, I gaze intensely into the Formica desktop. I have brought him nothing. I have not even told my parents that he’d asked.
“I don’t have any favorite things,” I mutter. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, well,” says Mr. G. “Nothing will come of nothing.” How can I know he’s quoting Lear? I want to sink my teeth into his fleshy hand.
“Surely you must have something worth sacrificing,” says Mr. G, sporting the perpetually bemused smile that defines his benevolent, leonine face. “Maybe you could bring in something for us later this week.”
“All of my prized possessions have been taken!” I snap.
“You’re too late.”
This earns me yet another afternoon with the school’s psychologist.
Looking back now, I recall the prized possessions that I no longer possessed were two miniature rubber cats, one fat, one thin, given to me by my grandmother’s eldest sister. The thin cat appeared hungry and scheming—a synthetic, feline Cassius. The fat cat looked as though he’d just swallowed an obese goldfish. They were not a matching pair, manufactured as companions, but two independent creatures forced into unsought friendship. Neither of them had real names. Merely Fat Cat and Thin Cat. Although they’d once been the most treasured objects of my brief existence—at the age of six, I had carried them everywhere, even into the bathtub—they lack any other social or economic value. Unfortunately, our school’s psychologist, a tense, hyperanalytic fussbudget, got hung up on determining whether Aunt Emma was an aunt or a grandaunt. We never came around to discussing Fat and Thin, so my unspoken anxiety continued to slosh around inside me like battery acid. Even now, I shiver when I recall my private apocalypse.
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