As a writer of fiction, Bill Broder is accustomed to wrestling with characters in his mind. Telling his own life story proved no different.
Broder’s “Prayer for the Departed” is a memoir, but reads more like a collection of short stories peopled with vivid characters. They just happened to be his real-life family members.
“I’m a storyteller,” says the Sausalito-based author. “This book was written deliberately as a story. I believe that all writing, all intellectual pursuit, is a matter of selection and storytelling.”
Broder will read from his book on Sunday, Feb. 26 at Book Passage in Corte Madera.
Broder, 80, grew up during the Depression, the grandson of Jewish immigrants. His parents typified the generation of Jews that grabbed the American Dream, achieving success while opening the door to assimilation, especially for their children.
Yet Broder did not want to be the star of his own autobiography. “I didn’t think of the book as a personal journey. It’s a story about a family. My impulse was to create an image of this family that I saw as separate from me, a family in the 20th century.”
Broder’s father had known abject poverty, and with Horatio Alger-inspired gumption determined to make something of himself, launching a successful coffee-roasting business.
Judaism was important in the household, especially to Broder’s mother. Still, Broder early on felt the gravitational pull of American secular society. After his father died when Broder was 14, it was just a matter of time before he set sail into a beckoning world.
He joined the Navy and later attended Columbia University, where he studied creative writing. But through it all, Broder never forgot where he came from.
“Every American Jew has common ground,” he says. “If you grow up in a strongly Zionist, kosher household, you are a different person, no matter what happens.”
A strong-willed mother, obdurate brothers, loving aunts and uncles, lovers and other strangers round out the book’s dramatis personae. Broder recalls events from more than half a century ago with remarkable detail.
That’s not because he has a photographic memory; he actually took notes. The text is “based on a tremendous number of journals I kept,” he says.
After marrying and moving to Northern California, Broder worked as a writing professor, freelance writer and playwright.
He wrote “A Prayer for the Departed” as a kind of Kaddish for those who made his a happy life. “I loved those people,” he says of his colorful family members. “They weren’t Nobel prize winners, just good, kind people who tried to live.
Bill Broder 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera
“A Prayer for the Departed” by Bill Broder (233 pages, Ainslie Street Project, $12.99).