Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Photo courtesy of Adam Sachs
Bio
Adam Ehrlich Sachs was born in Boston and now lives in Pittsburgh. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s, among other places. His first book, Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems, was a finalist for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and his second, The Organs of Sense, is forthcoming from FSG.
On one of those days when writing fiction seemed like a straightforward description of lunacy—a solipsistic and uncompensated thing I do alone in my own room while mouthing words with my lips—the NEA called and made me feel, temporarily at least, that I’m spending my time in a reasonable way. The news was especially meaningful to me coming at a time when I had begun to worry that the book I was working on was too idiosyncratic to find readers. I am honored to join the recipients of this year’s fellowship and I’m deeply grateful for the psychological and financial support it provides, which will give me time to finish my current project and, I hope, get started on another.
Excerpt from "The Flemish Engraver’s Son"
A seer whose prophecies had never failed foretold that the artistic fame of the great Flemish engraver Dierckx would one day be eclipsed by that of his infant son. Dierckx immediately built a small stone tower behind his home and locked up his son in it. The boy never learned to speak. He never learned to draw, never held an artistic tool, never encountered paint, clay, or wood. Twice a day he received through a slot in the wall a meal of bread and water, and as he ate his father watched from a peephole to ensure that nothing artistic was made of it. He had no medium with which to express himself; even his excretions were promptly removed. Nor, to the father, did he seem to possess an artistic sensibility at all. He ate, drank, urinated, shat. In winter he sat huddled in his rags. In summer he pressed his forehead to the cool stone floor. He moaned, he howled, he quaked. Often he dashed his head against the wall.
But none of this reassured the engraver. Just the opposite, in fact. He’d surpassed his own masters not by engraving better what they engraved well, but by engraving what they had not even thought to engrave. Likewise, the way in which his son surpassed him artistically, he would probably not even recognize as art.
Any of this might be the art! The moaning, the howling, the quaking. The art of rag huddling, the art of pressing against stone. How he ate, how he shat: was it art? The head-dashing: art? What aspect of his son’s evident insanity would one day be regarded as genius, while his own lucid engravings were left to rot? On the son’s nineteenth birthday, the elderly engraver rushed into the stone tower, appeared before his son for the first and last time, and stabbed him to death with his largest chisel. The son’s name is not recorded. Dierckx is still considered the high-water mark of late Renaissance Flemish engraving.
The seer’s failed prophecy was little noticed, but it became a source of fascination and skepticism for the seer’s son, an apprentice to his father. Whenever his father averred the perfect certainty of his prophecies, or regaled another dinner party with his impeccable predictions about the King’s Duck, the Bookbinder’s Goiter, or the French Merchant’s Fortune, the son would inquire, with an air of naïve curiosity, “What about the Flemish Engraver’s Son?”