Shattered: A Son Picks Up the Pieces of His Father's Rage

by Arthur Boers

A sensitive and penetrating reflection on coming of age in a Dutch immigrant family scarred by violence.  
 
Arthur Boers’s earliest memory was of shattered glass. His father threw a potted plant at his mother, and she ducked as the plant crashed through a window of the family home. His mother cleaned up the shards that day; later in life, he would find himself called upon to pick up the pieces as well.  
 
In Shattered, Boers reflects on coming of age in a family scarred by violence. The son of Dutch immigrants, Boers illuminates the generational trauma of the Nazi occupation of Holland, refracted in vignettes of his boyhood in postwar Canada. His hard-working, Calvinist family is endearing, but ultimately unable or unwilling to address the insidious cycle of abuse that passed father to son. Breaking with this silence and complicity, Boers reflects candidly and empathetically on his tumultuous relationship with his father. Intertwined with this narrative is his emerging vocation to ministry, more mystical and expressive than the Reformed tradition in which he was raised.