Stilted Memories

In this 75th episode of No Hair, All Heart, Mookie Spitz resurrects Stilts—a short story written three decades ago, born out of conversations with his father’s childhood friend George, a Holocaust survivor. At its surface, the story follows the adolescent rivalry between two boys in wartime Budapest, centered on a pair of stilts that transform from childish playthings into tragic symbols of survival, sacrifice, and loss. Yet the deeper resonance comes not just from the story itself, but from what it reveals about survivor families, literary appropriation, and the fraught act of revisiting one’s own early writing.

Mookie frames the reading with raw honesty about his own history: estrangement from his father Laszlo, his uneasy attachment to George, and the intergenerational scars carried by children of survivors. The dynamics are painful—fathers who endured unimaginable trauma yet transmitted cruelty, self-destruction, and narcissism to their families. George’s reaction to Stilts—dismissing it as “shit”—is revisited here as both insult and revelation: perhaps the wounded vanity of a man who felt his life stolen in voice and reframed by another, or perhaps just another repetition of the cruelty survivors often enacted on those closest to them.

The episode explores the strange appropriation inherent in storytelling, and what it means for a writer to take someone else’s memories and reimagine them in the first person. Cathy, George’s daughter, reminds Mookie that her father never sounded like the narrator in Stilts; the disconnect between testimony and literary invention unsettles her. This tension raises larger questions: when does a story become literature, and when does it become theft? How does subjectivity shape interpretation, and why do some writings wound those whose lives inspired them?

At the same time, Mookie reflects on the challenges of youth as a writer: his indulgence in detail, his tendency to overwrite, his oscillation between history and fiction without seamless segues. What once felt raw and urgent now, in retrospect, shows both excess and promise. From the vantage point of experience, he sees both flaws and strengths: the ambition of a young writer trying “too hard,” and the lasting power of symbols that still resonate.

And yet, beneath the pain and the criticism, there is also joy—the joy of digging up old gems, of revisiting the vault of one’s own creativity, of analyzing a story not just for what it got right or wrong, but for what it meant in the moment of writing and what it reveals now, decades later.

Stilts is ultimately about more than stilts, more than Budapest, more than George or Karl and their Holocaust horrors. The story is about survivor families and their cycles of trauma, the uneasy relationship between art and appropriation, the subjectivity of interpretation, the hubris and courage of youth in writing, and the wisdom that comes only from returning to old work with older eyes. The inspiration centers around the fragile balance of carrying inherited trauma and still daring to tell stories that elevate us above the damning weight of history.

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