Shattered: Picking Up the Pieces of My Father's Rage

Three-year-old Arthur Boers taunts his father after watching a geranium plant hurtle past his mother and shatter the apartment window. His parents retell this story for years, always laughing. Arthur doesn’t laugh now.

In this luminous meditation on inheritance and memory, Boers excavates what it means to be the son of Dutch Calvinist immigrants who carried more than belongings across the Atlantic. His father survived Nazi occupation and brutal combat in Indonesia, t...