He finds a greedy audience in his writer grandson. “Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days,” says his grandson, a novelist named “Mike.” In that brief span, the grandfather pours out the choicest anecdotes from his childhood, the war, his marriage to a Holocaust survivor and his career as an aerospace engineer. The grandfather-we know him by no other name-shares these stories from his deathbed, under the influence of powerful pain medication. Years later, a widower living in Florida, he courted an elderly neighbor by hunting the escaped python she thought had eaten her cat. In 1957, he watched the rocket that launched Sputnik burn across the night sky from the rooftop of a New York prison, where he was serving 20 months for choking his boss with a telephone handset. (they were demonstrating a point about the country’s vulnerability to enemy attack). During World War II, Wild Bill Donovan recruited him into the OSS after he and a fellow soldier were caught planting explosives under the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. Here are a few things we learn about Michael Chabon’s grandfather in “Moonglow.” As a Philadelphia teenager in the 1930s, he had his first sexual experience with a sideshow hermaphrodite. Army testing captured V-2 Rockets at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1946.
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