When I say “they killed” almost everyone in my family, I mean men with guns, mostly, following the orders of other men with guns.  On my mother’s side I was finally able to learn, with some detail, who these men were, when and where they fired the shots, what became of the bodies.

On Irv’s side there is only Night and Fog, a muddy shit hole of a hamlet wiped off the world map and the endless rage of the characters who survived in America.  No details but the names of three of the main characters, Chaski, Yuddle and Volbear, remain.  The accursed little town across the river from Pinsk itself … poof.

It would be fair to say I was haunted by this family history, as much by the stern instruction not to think about the murders as by the gristly, arbitrary murders themselves.  All that was left of this horror in the house where I grew up was a hopeless obsession with social justice.  My sister and I were imbued with it to a destructive extent since it is something the world itself doesn’t give a rat’s well turned thigh for.  

In fairness, I feel the same way about the history of American slavery, the ongoing slaughter done in my name by our weapons makers, the vast, life-swallowing institution of inherited poverty in the richest nation on earth.

“Stuck to care, motherfucker,” the skeleton of my father chortles from his grave on a hill in Peekskill, but he chuckles without mirth.   He knows he is largely the author of this Book of Irv, whether he wants to write it or not.  It’s the story of how a young boy without a chance grew up to put his kids on the hook.  What that hook is precisely, I will describe to you as well as I can.