“Oy boy…” said the skeleton, as soon as I mention the subject.  “Here we go…”  He took a long pause, something the dead do with ease, then continued.

“You know, Elie, you’re trying to do something very ambitious here, with this whole project, now an unwieldy three hundred page monster thrashing against being organized into a narrative.  I feel you taking a breath, bracing yourself to try to run up this steep hill of a subject.  ‘A chat about Nazis’, well, that’s pretty quaint and casual-like.  Sure, we can chat about Nazis, let’s.  But the reader will want background, which, of course, you can link to, and I will want a chance to think about what I say, since you are putting it down as my final word on the subject.”

Odd to say, perhaps, but I have to agree with him.  A chat about Nazis is a bit ambitious feeling today.  It’s a fairly stupid title for this, in any event.  “Hey, dad, let’s have that long overdue chat about the Nazis, shall we?”  What is my father supposed to say about the Nazis?  

“Well, I suppose I could point out what you often do, about their original party platform, in around 1921, with its one very reasonable plank.  One out of twenty something that was not the typical Nazi stuff we came to know so well.  The Socialist element in the early party wanted to fight the tyranny of monopoly capital, the huge conglomerates who could undersell every mom and pop store in the country and take over all the business.  Like Walmart today, or any number of big corporations whose fantastic wealth enables them to put every small business in the area out of business.  Like your buddy Bill Gates, the inventive computer entrepreneur who became a billionaire and hired an army of lawyers to fight and bankrupt every other inventive computer entrepreneur who came along.   Adolf and his friends rooted out these idealists pretty quickly, there’s usually only room for one Hitler in a small political party.  But, I suspect, this isn’t what you really want to chat about,” said the skeleton.

There’s a show on cable TV called Ray Donovan.  Ray is a stone-faced tough guy who fixes problems for rich people in L.A. and has no problem taking a dozen punches in the face to get the job done.   His father, played brilliantly by John Voight, is a likable sociopath, a career criminal hated by Ray.   When the elder Donovan gets out of prison and tries to renew ties with his family Ray eventually hires a hit man to kill him.   The father talks his way out of being killed and confronts his son about the attempt on his life.

A priest, killed by Ray in an earlier episode, had fallen in love with young Ray, made him feel special and eventually molested him.  

“You remember what you did when I told you about it, Mick?” Ray asks his father, who demanded to know how his oldest son could hate him enough to want him dead.

In that moment Mickey Donovan shifts his eyes in a way so familiar to me I did a double take watching it.  

“Oh boy…” said the skeleton.

“You told me I was a fucking liar and you beat the shit out of me,” says Ray, his father still shifting his eyes.  “You were dead to me right then, Mick.  Killing you now is only a formality, to protect my family.”  

I don’t recall Mickey Donovan having any response, beyond the shifting eyes. Now that I think of it, the first thing the elder Donovan did when he got out of prison in the first episode of the show was kill a priest, trying to make amends, though he killed the wrong priest.  

“You don’t make amends,” said the skeleton. “I was wrong, I told you what a horse’s ass I’d been, and that covers this Nazi business too.”  

The Nazi business was this:  My father told me I had no right to feel personally upset about the Nazi mass-murder of our entire, once large, family.  I was in elementary school and inadvisably had gone to see a Zionist propaganda film called “Let My People Go.”  It was at a convention for the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea, a nationwide Zionist youth movement for high school kids.   My father had by then become director of the region, in addition to his full-time job at the Board of Education.  He is remembered with love by many of the kids he worked with in those years.  I saw one recently who has only the best memories of Irv, a funny, bright, hip bastard if there ever was one.  

“Your mother begged you not to go,” said the skeleton, “but, of course, nobody could ever tell you anything.  You always knew best.”  

This isn’t about the movie, Mick, it’s about what happened a short time later.

“Mick….” said the skeleton.

Feeling the cold breeze up there now, no doubt, sorry about that.  Grandma was one of seven siblings, so was Pop.  Your mother had two brothers, Yuddle and Volbear, and a sister named Chaski.  I have no idea who of your father’s family were left behind in Europe.  It took my eight year-old brain a few days to put it together but I asked you, once I had, if the killing of all these people in our family made us kind of holocaust survivors.  Do you remember what you told me?

“Yes,” said the skeleton, not looking anywhere in particular.  

All a horse’s ass can do is fart and shit.  What you did, dad… it’s still almost impossible to understand.  

“I know,” said the skeleton quietly, “I basically beat the shit out of you and called you a fucking liar.”  

The reader deserves to know that this was a metaphorical beating.  My father did much better in the physical violence department than one might expect from an infant whipped across the face by his mother in his earliest twitching memories.

“This betrayal of mine is hard to write about,” observed the skeleton.  “You could direct the reader here for some of the details, I suppose, but your real work seems to be ahead of you, figuring out how to fit this puzzle into a nice, tidy box, walk the reader through meeting me, liking me, seeing the dark side of me.  The dark side is where all the real action is, of course.”

Maybe we can walk through this together.   Your young son asks you with great trepidation about his mother’s twelve aunts and uncles killed by Ukrainians while the Nazis supervised and you brush it off.  “Abstractions,” you say, looking shiftily away like Mickey Donovan.  

“Look, what is it you want now, fifty something years later?  Do you expect closure or something?  Nobody gets that, except in a Hollywood movie.  Did my apology to you the last night of my life give you any fucking closure?  I would have liked to think it might have, but as the years go by I think you’ve come to see that last conversation as more of a blessing for me than it was for you.  You did me a great kindness, you had every right to be as merciless to me as I’d generally been to you, but they don’t give medals, or even closure, for generous acts of human decency.  You just do them, and congratulations to you for not being as big an asshole as the person you did them for was.”

You were twenty or so, stationed in Germany right after the Nazis surrendered.  You were in the land where people had very recently marched in columns, their arms raised like erect dicks, saluting the world’s most famous mass-murdering psychopath.  In the nation whose armies had invaded Belarus, the Ukraine, where special units composed of the most dedicated fanatics supervised the systematic destruction of what remained of our family.   I understand you had no way to process any of this.  You had to just fucking suck it up.   You had a job to do, which was whatever the Air Force said that job was.

“Look, I’m certainly not proud of how I reacted when you asked me about our family and the mass-murders.   Of course you were right to be upset.  Of course I was wrong to tell you that you were being a melodramatic little pussy to be upset.  I couldn’t handle it, and I know you get that.  What is it you fucking want me to say?” asked the skeleton, becoming a bit testy at last.  

Nothing, really.  I’m making a record, that’s all.  We live by stories, we understand the world by stories, our memory is organized into stories.  This story is one of the hardest to tell and the hardest to understand that I can think of.   You are born into a family that, only thirteen years before you were born, was reduced from dozens of people to a handful.  A once large tree pruned down to a single branch, the leaves trembling, the bark shuddering.  What are you to make of this?   What are you to make of this?