Aaron Tracy

The Dahl estate issued an official apology for his anti-Semitism.

So I guess I'm trying to decide if that should make a bit of difference for me or not.

That's interesting.

I like how you just said that.

You know, you're trying to figure out how you feel about it and how you feel about as a Jewish family, how you're going to relate to that apology.

And the Wagner Festival went through a similar thing where there was some reckoning.

And I think one family member apologized.

I'm not sure where they are with that.

I haven't done research on it in a few years.

I think that to me, we can't change what Dahl said.

We can't change who Wagner was.

But I think the estate or the institutional drive to apologize is actually meaningful.

I think that apology, which is a little different from remorse, but I think apology within the context of the conversations we're having is actually quite rare.

It's not something people do a lot of.

There's a lot of lack of repentance across the board around these issues.

And I think that every apology begets more apologies.

One hopes that it creates this idea that we can acknowledge that wrong was done.

And that has both emotional, maybe even aesthetic and certainly legal meaning.

I sort of treasure every apology because they are so rare and because they remind us that it can be done.

So one of the things I'm thinking about a lot in the book is I really grapple throughout the writing of the book with should a person be written off or lost for having done a rotten thing or said a rotten thing?