DNA testing for the purpose of establishing parentage or kinship was not available until 1990.
Acknowledgments
During the writing of this novel I relied on the kindness of friends. Linda M. Bonnell, Pharm D. and Leslie Vought, M.S., C.G.C., gave me invaluable and enthusiastic assistance with serology and Canavan’s disease. Peggy O’Brien lent me her snowbound house for two critical weeks. Deborah Michel provided her customary close readings and one-woman cheering section. Five years ago, Sally Kahler Phillips told me that I really ought to write a novel about that strange Irish case. This turned out to be a good idea, and one for which I am appropriately grateful.
I thank Dr. Vivian Fromberg for her guidance through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Dr. Eleanor Nicolai McQuillen, M.D., M.S.A., my consultant in forensic medicine, solved every problem I presented her with and several she didn’t know I had.
I am beholden to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a fellowship during the winter of 1997.
The “Sabbathday Affair” on pp. 26-29 owes its genesis to “The Pemi Affair” by Kirk Siegel, which appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. I appreciate his forbearance in allowing his true misadventure to inspire my fictional one.
I am so grateful to Pam Bernstein, Donna Downing, Arabella Stein, Judy Klein, and Jonathan Galassi for believing in this novel and its author.
In memory of two children who died during the writing of this book:
Olivia Kuenne, aged five years
No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.
—Michael Longley, “Terezín”
Copyright © 1999 by Jean Hanff Korelitz
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Designed by Abby Kagan
First eBook Edition : December 2011
First edition, 1999
Second printing, 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Korelitz, Jean Hanff, 1961—
The Sabbathday River / Jean Hanff Korelitz. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-25323-4 (alk. paper)
PS3561.06568S23 1999
813’.54—DC21
98-6636