Dream Dredger

Pregnant with her first child, Diny Branson is haunted by her mother’s death years ago in the Hudson River. Was it suicide or accident? Slowly, Diny weaves the many threads of Lise’s tragic life—from a fairyland youth to a happy marriage, then through the travails of losing a child.   Diny learns how the forces of history, like the coming Holocaust, inflict losses, such as loss of language, that create other more subtle losses—and how the forces of nature, like the majestic Hudson, can be both threat and comfort.

“In a beautifully crafted novel, Silman unravels the life of Lise Branson . . . [and] does a remarkable job of depicting the qualities of the river—its majesty, practicality, and danger as integral parts of Lise's life.” —Booklist   “A lyrical, sad and beautifully rendered story about the power of family love and the intrusions of time, place and history . . . Liselotte Hurwitz, beautiful and gifted . . . [was] the privileged daughter of a famous medical doctor in Vienna, her parents escaped the Nazis early and settled in a pretty Westchester town . . . Later, Lise . . . has a seemingly happy family of her own. But . . . when her son Arthur . . . dies, Lise unravels. . . . [and] it’s up to her daughter, Diny, to reconstruct and redeem her mother’s half-submerged emotional life. . . . one of the most attractive things about this attractive novel is its loving description of the [Hudson], its lore and its effect as a mirror and consoler of the lives of the novel’s sturdy, vivid, and affecting characters.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review   “Can madness . . . result from the deepest desire . . . for order and continuity, for the security and protection of those whom one most loves? In a novel of ever-growing emotional intensity, Silman demonstrates the effect of the violence . . . of our century upon a family that early fled Nazi pogroms . . . The river serves as leitmotif of the major character’s fears and longings . . . and resonates in the reader’s own psyche; for Lise . . . tells us much about ourselves . . . [becoming] ‘universal’ at the moment she begins to question her own sanity. The novel has drama and suspense, magnitude and integrity . . .” —James McConkey, author of Court of Memory

Roberta Silman’s first story was in The New Yorker; other stories followed there, in The Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s, Hadassah, VQR, The American Scholar and in many places here and abroad. Her books are Blood Relations, stories; three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos; and two children’s books, Somebody Else’s Child and The Astronomers.   Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.   A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.   Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.