No heroes: a memoir of coming home

Description

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer comes the unforgettable memoir No Heroes. "If you haven't read Chris Offutt, you've missed an accomplished and compelling writer" (Chicago Tribune). In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists. Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt's parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.;Intro; Dedication; Epigraph; Prologue; Chapter 1: Job Interview; Chapter 2: Arthur Goes to War; Chapter 3: Irene Goes to the Ghetto; Chapter 4: Nine-Mile at the Video Store; Chapter 5: Arthur Meets Irene; Chapter 6: Irene Finds Freedom; Chapter 7: Beginning the Book; Chapter 8: The Library and Mrs. Jayne; Chapter 9: Arthur Works at a Labor Camp; Chapter 10: Irene Is Saved in Plaszow; Chapter 11: No Heroes; Chapter 12: First Day of School; Chapter 13: Sam and James Learn About the Holocaust; Chapter 14: Hot Rod to Haldeman; Chapter 15: Arthur Becomes a Handyman; Chapter 16: Irene Sees Beno