As you read this, I’m presently working on my novel The Danube. For those of you familiar with the James Michener books of twenty or thirty years ago, I’m trying to bring those kinds of large historical travelogue / novels back into vogue. For those of you familiar with the great cities along the Danube - Ulm, Regensburg, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade, to name the largest and best-known of them, they conjure up images of Strauss waltzes (The Blue Danube), Hungarian Gypsy Music, Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, and the wedding-cake architecture of the Baroque and Rococo periods.
The story begins when a daughter calls her mother from Fresno, California to advise mom that she and her husband have separated and asks whether the grandparents could take their children for a month or two, while daughter and her husband are trying to sort things out.
When the grandkids, Aviva, 12, and Noah, 10, arrive, the grandparents experience the “new world” in which youngsters function today. It’s a place of endless computer games, apps, - an electronic babysitter, which has taken the place of Saturday afternoon movies and TV. A place where meaningful conversation has become a thing of the past, and anything more than 5-years old is meaningless old history, and where traditions have become less important than ballet lessons, Tae Kwon Do classes and other “activities.”
Has modern life really become that empty? The grandparents try to ignite the grandkids’ interest in life any way they can – leaving good books in their rooms, National Geographic magazines, attempts at dinnertime conversations, announcements of upcoming plays – all to no avail.
On the eleventh evening of their visit, the family has finished dinner and the grandkids are about to return to their never-ending computer games. The grandparents are listening to the classical music station, played softly as background for winding down from the day. The station plays Smetana’s Die Moldau, one of the grandparents’ favorites. Suddenly, 12-year-old Aviva says, “Hey, isn’t that Hatikvah, the Jewish national anthem, which we learned in Sunday school?”
This is the first time either of the kids have said anything other than monosyllabic responses. Seizing on the moment, the grandparents engage the children in talks about Europe – which the kids have read about in class, but of which they have no real idea. Grandpa asks if the kids would like to see a video of places the grandparents have visited in Europe. The grandchildren, more to palliate the grandparents than anything else, desultorily agree to watch the video. Unexpectedly, they become interested, then fascinated, by some of the things they see. When they ask to see the video again, the grandparents extend the children’s bedtime. The next morning, Aviva tells the grandmother that she dreamt and thought about one place the night before.
The grandchildren have two months before they return to school in Fresno. Pillow talk between the grandparents results in a plan: with the permission of the children’s parents, they will surprise the grandkids by taking them to Europe for a month – specifically down the Danube River, from its rising in Western Germany to its terminus at the Black Sea.
What follows is a mixture of the family’s experiences, which serves as “wallpaper” for the heart of the book, a series of novellas, stories about people and events that took place from the days of ancient Rome to today in various settlements along the Danube River, and which are related, via a multi-generation family saga, to Aviva and Noah.
At the end of the book, the children have learned about the vast tapestry of life that unites time, place, and human beings who have followed the much the same paths, with universal wants and needs, throughout history – and that history means exactly what it says – “his story” – a chronicle of humankind. They emerge from the story much the same – but very much changed in their outlook and their projected future.
Not since the James Michener books of the 1950s through 1990s (Centennial, Chesapeake, Hawaii, The Covenant, etc.) have there been long, monumental, all-encompassing historical novels with the broad, sweeping passion, love, fury, and discovery of The Danube.
During the next several weeks, I’ll update this news column with descriptions and points of interest and history of the Danube, from Donaueschingen, a German town in the Black Forest, near the confluence of the two sources of the river Danube, to its Delta, where it ultimately debauches into its terminus at the Black Sea, some 1,727 miles from where it started.
Stay tuned ... and welcome to my world.
With love, HUGO
Carmel, CA
Hugo Gerstl
The Danube overview