Opa Nobody

It had come to this: breast-feeding her screaming three-month-old while sitting on the cigarette-scarred floor of a union hall, lying to her husband so she could attend yet another activist meeting, and otherwise actively self-destructing. Then Sonya Huber turned to her long-dead grandfather, the family "nobody," for help.
Huber's search for meaning and resonance in the life of her grandfather Heina Buschman was unusual insofar as she knew him only through dismissive family stories. He let his wife die of neglect . . . he used his infant son as a decoy when transporting anti-Nazi literature in a baby carriage . . . and so the stories went. What she actually discovered was that, like his granddaughter, Heina Buschman was a beleaguered but committed activist whose story echoed her own.
Through her research, Huber not only conjured her grandfather's voice in answer to many of the questions that troubled her but also found in his story a source of personal sustenance. Based on extensive research and documentation, this story of Heina Buschman offers a rare look into the heart of the "average" socialist trying to survive the Nazis and rebuild a broken world. Alternating with his voice is Huber's own, providing a rich and moving counterpoint that makes this deeply personal exploration of family, politics, and individual responsibility a story for all of us and for all time.

Sonya Huber is an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of Cover Me (Nebraska, 2010) as well as the textbook The Backwards Research Guide for Writers, and many essays and articles.

"Opa Nobody is a masterful layering of lives, a beautifully readable and often poetic tracing of the heart lines between grandfather and granddaughter, old leftie and new, Nazi-era German rabble-rouser and present-dd American activist... The research in Opa Nobody is prodigious, the history fascinating, the quest for justice inspiring, but the lives here are what will keep you reading,page after page, long into the clamorous night." Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream and Big Bend "Sonya Huber is a writer of remarkable talent and courage. With great passion and skill, she resurrects her grandfather in this story of a family in the years leading up to and away from Hitler's Third Reich. Painstakingly researched and richly imagined, Opa Nobody is a brave book of politics, history, and love--a book filled with an irrepressible embrace of humanity." Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and From Our House "Sonya Huber begins her innovative memoir with a question: 'Why try to change the world? ' Thus begins an intimate dialogue with her long-dead, activist grandfather--part fact, part imagination--that delves into the nature of political resistance and the toll this stance takes on those intrepid souls who dare to live on the edge of change." Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body and co-author of Tell It Slant