Over the last few years Peter Orner’s come home to write about Rogers Park, the neighborhood he never lived in. The results are several melancholy and moving tales in Esther Stories, his recently published collection of short stories that capture the spirit of a north-side Jewish neighborhood that’s long gone.
So in 1999 he enrolled at the writers workshop at the University of Iowa and earned an MFA in creative fiction. Since then he’s moved from one teaching job to the next. He’s now teaching literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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In particular, Orner has created three generations of Burmans, whose trajectory from Rogers Park in the 50s to Highland Park in the 80s is revealed in several stories. The patriarch, Seymour Burman, harbors horrible secrets from his days on a naval cruiser in World War II, and he makes his living running a small insurance company. The matriarch is Bernice, who almost studied dance with “the great Lincoln Kirstein” and now teaches ballet to neighborhood kids “in the ballet studio above Al Fonroy’s Shirts and Slacks on Touhy Avenue.” The daughter, Esther, is worshiped by friends and family for her beauty (she looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor). And then there’s Philip, the son, who will eventually move his family to Highland Park.
The quintessential Rogers Park story is “The House on Lunt Avenue.” It opens on an early Monday morning in November 1954. “Seymour Burman shouts at his son Philip, the boy who will become my father. It is ten before seven and Seymour’s anger smells of Scotch. Philip is eighteen and has flunked out of the University of Illinois. He lies on his old bed with a pillow over his face. The room stinks of filthy socks.”
He wrote the first draft of “The House on Lunt Avenue” in 1996, when he was living in Boston. “I was writing in a coffee shop in Cambridge. I finished in the summer of 2000, when I was back visiting friends in Africa. I kept returning to the story. I wanted to get it right.”
Mucha worked at Maryville only five months, but the absence of books weighed on his mind even after he left. “I wasn’t a really big reader when I was these kids’ age, but once I started it opened a lot of things up. If the books are there and a couple of guys get started reading them, it could be a huge change. These kids come from the worst socioeconomic family backgrounds you can think of. Reading is one escape. Anything that can perk their interest in something other than being a player is good.”
