Half Pass Six: Half Pass Six

Bremerhaven, Germany, 1919. A young, desperately poor German father leaves his small family to seek treatment for the poison gas that scalded his lungs on the battlefields of World War I. He never returns. Only his last, blood-stained pillowcase remains. His family is bereft.

Brooklyn, 1925. That dead father's son, Willi Rohrbein, illegal, without papers, sneaks into New York harbor on a ship from Bremerhaven where he has been stowed away by friends of his uncle. He reunites with his mother and older sister, who had already come to the U.S. legally, only to be shoved out the door after a few days. His detection could bring the whole family down once again.

Sargasso Sea and Galapagos Islands, 1925. Willi, now sixteen, finds himself usefully employed as a mess boy on one of the most celebrated voyages of the day - a scientific expedition to discover and catalog thousands of new specimens, explore the ocean depths with mile-long nets, and help seal the case for Darwin's theory of evolution. Willi knows how to peel potatoes and wash pots and pans, but he is mystified by the marine biology happening all around him. He understands very little English.

Long Island, 1958. William Rohrbein, established in his own home, supporting his own family, long-since legal in his documentation, receives a Christmas gift from his oldest daughter that bewilders him at first. It is a beautiful original edition of The Arcturus Adventure, a bestseller published in 1926 by William Beebe, the Jacques Cousteau of his day.

Willi has always admired, almost worshipped Beebe, but had little comprehension of the scientific breakthroughs happening on a weekly, sometimes daily and hourly, basis, in the Galapagos expedition that Beebe led and Willi served as mess boy.

Now Willi gets it, as he spends his evenings reading slowly chapter by chapter, reliving old sights and episodes as if they had happened only yesterday and realizing for the first time why they were significant.

Willi has succeeded in his life by being extremely hard-working. He does not talk much. He is often gruff. For the first time in her life, his daughter feels that she has managed to break through his reserve - however briefly - and appeal to his emotions.

In this unusual narrative - part biography, part natural history, part obliquely written memoir -- Barbara Rohrbein Lockhart, Willi's daughter, peels back layers of time with the artistry of a novelist and the tenacity of someone who is still trying to plumb her own origins.

The result is Half Pass Six - a haunting account of an age now past, and a fugitive immigrant boy who found his own American dream, while memory and artifice are still able to summon them back into being.