Yolk (1995)

Josip Novakovich's collection of stories, published by Graywolf Press in 1995, draws on his boyhood as a Protestant in Yugoslavia before he moved from Croatia to the United States at twenty. It includes "The Burning Clog", in which the narrator seeks out his late father's former assistant, now a village clog maker, and "Apple", which the acknowledgements record as a Cohen Award story from Ploughshares, in which a boy called Yozzo watches his father, a clog maker and beekeeper, die after asking for an apple from the attic. (Open Library)

Watches

Zenith (unidentified model): In "Apple", Yozzo cannot eat apples for years after his father's last supper, keeps the lights on every 6 January and dreams that his father has come back to die a second time. On the first anniversary of the death, certain that he himself will die at midnight, he puts his father's Zenith watch beside his bed and prays through the last thirty seconds, then thanks God when it passes. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: On the first anniversary I was certain that I would die at midnight, though I knew that my belief was irrational. I put Father's Zenith watch next to my bed. I prayed, opening and closing my eyes. Thirty seconds left, ten seconds left. (Josip Novakovich, Yolk, scan cataloged as Graywolf Press, 1995, p. 56, in "Apple", which runs from p. 36 to p. 57 by the scan's running heads; the father calls the narrator Yozzo on pp. 38 and 56; Internet Archive scan OCR)