Death Watch: A View from the Tenth Decade

Gerald Stern, National Book Award-winning poet, creates a powerful new prose book in his ninth decades, as he contemplates mortality. In his characteristic audacious, uncompromising, funny, and iconoclastic style, Stern looks back at his life and forward to how he will end his days.

Will he be cremated—against the tenets of Judaism—or buried, and if buried where? He visits synagogues to find answers to questions that are unanswerable. He examines his identity—a Jew born of immigrant parents and raised somewhat haphazardly in Pittsburgh, on account of the death of his sister, Sylvia, at ten, when the author was eight years old.

Her death lingers over Death Watch, as much as the author’s own inevitable demise.

Stern wrestles with his identity in Judaism, his name uprooted from its origins, as so much of his life will be willfully disrupted from the expectations of his parents and the norms of a predictable path. Stern recounts his life, itself “a grand digression,” which takes him from Pittsburgh, to the Army, to Paris on the GI Bill, and back to the US, where he immerses himself in the literary culture around him.

Death Watch – which Stern describes as an account of a final journey – reads instead as a vivid, passionate, and, at times, whimsical look at the gamble of living life to its fullest, choosing the life of a poet, philosopher, prophet, lover, radical, and perpetual trouble-maker.

He revels in his past love affairs, the many women beloved in his life. He recollects books that occupy his recent reading—the work of W.G. Sebald, Blaise Cendrars, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline—and how memory is always at the heart of literary accomplishment and what creates the staying power of great literature.

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