The Brothers

Perhaps the bleakest entry among the collection, “The Brothers” tells the story of two brothers who respond very differently to their father’s death. The elder, inheriting the whole of their father’s land, embraces enterprise and earthly toil, while the younger asks only for a small plot of land on which to meditate and live a life of contemplative solitude. As the years pass, and each brother settles more firmly into his own chosen mode of being, each of them refuses to be the first to visit the other. Only a humble servant stands a chance at bringing them back together, if only he can learn to bridge the gap between their divergent, binary paths. 

Origin:

Perhaps even more than the other stories, “The Brothers” is directly inspired by Laemmle’s childhood memories of old Jewish parables, albeit with a decisively dissimilar ending. With its abrupt and somewhat jarring conclusion, it is a story that functions less as an answer than an unresolved question, reflecting Yeats’ terrible assertion that “the centre cannot hold.”

(2,900 words; coming Nov 2020)