"Jude" / Colorado Review

On the burden of Legacy.

There are precious few times that you’ll come across a work of art that speaks to you so clearly that it imprints on your memory. And I’m not just talking thematically—because it mirrors some specific in your own life—but because every individual element of its construction succeeds, and the whole far surpasses the sum of its parts.

I feel this way about Erika Krouse’s “Jude,” in the Summer 2024 issue of Colorado Review (3,800 words). It’s just an astoundingly strong and moving story.

Content warning: it is a very heavy story, about a young girl / young woman’s thorny relationship with her grandmother, and with her growing understanding of her family’s history in the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia, through World War Two and the holocaust, into the present and certainly beyond.

Legacy.

But if you’re willing, don’t let that preamble deter you from diving in. From an editorial perspective, “Jude” is a masterclass in exposition, plotting, character development…form. It just gets deeper and deeper the further you get into it.

In the opener we’re introduced to Roberta, the grandmother of our narrator, Basia, a young girl who visits Roberta’s confining Brooklyn apartment once per season with her family. Roberta had “baffled everyone,” according to Basia, “by insisting on giving me my name…so she must have felt something special for me.”

It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Roberta is unsmiling, distant. We sit with Basia in the sweltering heat at Roberta’s side table, which has photos “trapped under the heavy glass, her bitter iced tea sweating above.”

Then we’re treated to wave after wave of detail. An ocean of showing, showing, showing of circumstances that tells us everything we need to know, that builds character, setting, world and world view. Roberta’s thick-acrylic paintings of places to which she’s never been. A five-dollar ticket for a klezmer band performance at a Crown Heights senior center. Roberta’s long list of other expenditures tallied on Basia’s father’s pocket calculator and the attending frustration and derision attached to the family’s financial straights.

Basia’s father is footing Roberta’s bills because she can’t claim social security payments. “No such person” exists under her name and social security number. When pushed, she reveals that Roberta isn’t her given name and, at the peak of tension in that suffocating apartment, Roberta refuses to divulge what that name is.

“But for me she held the same kind of fascination as Halloween, or the heavy balls of mercury we used to roll around in our palms when a thermometer broke.”

From there, we dive deeper into family history; of Roberta’s husband’s troubled and troubling past, toggling back and forth from her Brooklyn apartment to Roberta’s time in a concentration camp. We’re alongside Basia at college as she struggles with what her grandmother will and won’t reveal about her history.

And ultimately we return to naming—of Basia, of Roberta’s long-hidden given name—and the whole of the story crescendos in a gut-punch close that hammers home the idea of the inescapability of ancestry, of the burden we carry on our shoulders and in our blood.

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I was surprised to hear, in Kelly Fordon’s fantastic podcast “Let’s Deconstruct a Story,” that “Jude” is largely fictional but includes some cobbled-together historical facts. It feels too hard-fought, too complete, too real to not be a personal truth, a specific family history. But this is one of the charms of fiction, and certainly Erika Krouse’s fiction. Yes, write what you know. But also please write what you don’t know but are willing to research thoroughly enough, to feel thoroughly enough, to capture completely.

“Jude” is in Erika’s fantastic short story collection Save Me, Stranger, and her book Tell Me Everything; The Story of a Private Investigation—part memoir, part literary true crime—is a wonder. I strongly recommend it. You won’t be able to put it down.

And as if that isn’t enough, Erika has ranked the top 500 Lit Pubs for short fiction and posted it on her web site; a service that you won’t know you need, writer, until you start using it, when it quickly becomes indispensable. Thank you, Erika!

Colorado Review is committed to the publication of contemporary creative writing. They are equally interested in work by both new and established writers. While open to a variety of styles and concerns, CR welcomes work that centers story and voice and/or that plays with form in meaningful ways. They accept short fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews.

They’re open for submissions through March 31^st. They reopen on August 1^st. They’ll consider stories somewhere between 15 and 25 manuscript pages. They do not accept flash fiction and only allow for the submission of one story at a time. They pay $300 per story, and their Submittable fee is $3.

From CR: “While it is difficult to define the sort of story we’re looking for, some of the questions we ask ourselves while reading manuscripts are: Is there an engaging opening? Has the author created original, idiosyncratic characters, people you’re interested in following through the story? Is the language crisp and sharp? Is there a provocative central problem or issue in the story? Is the story about something, and is whatever it is about important or troubling? Is the pace suitable? Is the story tightly constructed from start to finish?”

Are you reading enough short stories to know what lit pubs are looking for?

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