I see, reading the eulogy that the gentle soul who conducted the funeral put together, that a couple of elements of my uncle’s story were incorporated into my narrative, as well as a beautiful tribute by my largely insane aunt.  So much the better for our purposes here.

The eulogy begins:

Israel I. “Irv” Widaen was born June 1, 1924 to Harry and Eva Widem in NYC.   The Widem family lived on Henry Street in Lower Manhattan for the first few years of his life. 

The family may or may not have lived on Henry Street in Lower Manhattan, it is impossible for anyone alive today to verify that.  They certainly lived in the teeming Jewish section of the slum on the lower East Side in 1924 when the baby, Azrael Irving (always rendered “Israel Irving” in English, due to Irv’s parents’ illiteracy in English) was born.  He was named for his maternal grandfather Azrael in Truvovich, a Jewish settlement in a marsh across the river from Pinsk, then Poland, now Belarus.  

In the Jewish tradition babies are not named for people still living, so we must assume that Azrael Gleiberman had gone on to his reward by 1924, allowing his name to be passed like a flame to the first born living child of his youngest child.  It is therefore likely that Azrael was long gone by the time of the massacre of his entire family in 1942 when the muddy Jewish hamlet of Truvovich was wiped from the face of the earth.

Of their life on the Lower East Side little is known, except that it was a life of misery and extreme poverty.   The arranged marriage between Azrael’s youngest daughter, Chava, and Harry “Eliyahu” Widem (streamlined on Ellis Island from Widemlansky) was by all accounts a loveless one.  It appears not to have been a lucky one either.   A first born child, a girl, had already died, shortly before or after her birth.   Another of a hundred vague mysteries here that can no longer be solved with any certainty.

Eliyahu was a man of few words, although he spoke those words, when he used English, with no trace of a Yiddish accent.  Yiddish was his main language, but he had come over by ship as a tiny child and spoke English like an American apparently.  Or maybe not.  He said little.   What little he said, he pronounced, I was surprised to learn, without a Yiddish accent.  His son, at eighty and hours from death, described him with real sympathy for the first time, “my father was an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world.”  

Chava, my father’s mother, was tiny, red-haired, very religious and possessed of a ferocious temper that was apparently easily provoked.  Like my knowledge of my grandfather, the bulk of what I know about Chava was gleaned during long discussions with my father’s first cousin, a tender-hearted, plain-spoken American-born roughneck named Eli Gleiberman, seventeen years older than my father.

Eli, the first born son of Harry Aaron “Uncle Aren” Gleiberman, is a pivotal character in the story of my father’s life.  For one thing, he was Chava’s beloved nephew, and friends with Eliyahu, and he knew my father, and loved him, from before he was born.   For another, he was brutally honest, and also, just brutal sometimes.   My father loved and feared Eli.  Eli was very proud of my father and almost never scared the shit out of him.    

Eli’s father, Aren, is even more essential to this story.  If Aren had not, at 28, fled west with two other Jewish desperados, while his fellow draftees in the Czar’s Imperial Russian Army headed east to be massacred by the Japanese in 1904, there would be no Irv, no off-kilter grand-nephew born to write the biography of a father never born.

Aren fled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled in New York, worked hard, saved money and, more than a decade later, sent for his baby sister Chava.    If Aren had not deserted the Russian Army, arrived in America, succeeded and sent for his youngest sister right before World War One erupted, they would both have died, if not before, then certainly in Truvovich with the rest of the Jews rounded up in the Pinsk area between July 1941 and November 1942, when all but a tiny handful of the Jews of Pinsk were killed.

Here is what Eliyahu (for whom I am named) did for a living on the Lower East Side, before it was necessary for Aren and Eli to drive down to NYC to bring the hapless little family up to Peekskill.

(next time, as the eulogy continues)

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.  Began kindergarten in Peekskill speaking only Yiddish, played sports, mastered English, graduated from Peekskill High in 1941.   At least one member of Irv’s class went on to serve as Mayor of Peekskill.

Irv was a member, as was Paul, of Boy Scout Troop 33 of the First Hebrew Congregation and they marched together in Peekskill parades under a banner representing the First Hebrew Congregation.    

Ah, my uncle at work!

The Book of Irv will have to be presented in three parts, I’m thinking now.  

Part One will be a more or less straight chronology of his life, in the manner of the eulogy spoken over his mortal remains at the First Hebrew Congregation Cemetery in Cortlandt Manor, NY on May 5, 2005.   Part One will sketch the broad sweep of his life the way a detailed obituary might, citing every available fact about his known life.  Part one will map his life’s worldly trajectory, with as much detail as I can provide.

Part Two will lay out the teachings of my father, the deepest beliefs and values he held, the contradictions that he faced, the futility that stared him down, his abilities and inabilities, his personalized army of demons.  

Part Two will also briefly treat his complex personality, the heroic and the barbaric sides of it, which always existed simultaneously and without contradiction.    

Part Two will also lay out the mine field of his life, the nature of his many battles.  From the terrors of the violent abuse he endured as an infant to the infinitely gradated “non-violent” abuse he dispensed on his own babies.

Part Three is the after-party, where my father himself, present as an occasional talking head in parts one and two, is given free rein, through the sardonic jaws of his skeleton, in conversation with his hubristic biographer.

Contained in this final part are the skeleton’s deeper musings about history, the nature of human society, striving, ethnic hatred, the possibility and impossibility of human growth, evolution and positive change, the complexity of the world that confronts us, perfectly constructed abuse, tailored with care, in order to achieve the maximum sadistic effect.

“If you do nothing more than lay out that definition of abuse you stumbled on– and put into my mouth: ‘…whatever you need, you will get the opposite, shoved at you, and a stinging slap in the face if you complain about it,’– you’ll have done a service.  If you get paid $10,000 for the manuscript, you can consider your time well-spent, whether Leonard Lopate ever reads the Book of Irv or not,” said the skeleton.  

Dig it.

“Pay no attention to these bitter skeletons,” said the skeleton.  “They died loaded up with resentments and now, on top of it, the skeleton of the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill is being treated like a celebrity by his idiot son with the fancy words.  Fuck ’em, you know what I’m saying?”  

“You both suck, momzers,” opined one of his dead neighbors, impugning both our sexuality and our legitimacy.

I’ve been thinking more about your riddle, and the difference between vigilance to the point of paranoia about the potential dangers of a social situation and feeling basically safe in your own skin and confident in your judgments when things start heating up.  

“Well, I grant that you’ve done a lot of work on staying out of conflicts, though it comes at the cost of not being able to hold a job and not fighting with pieces of shit who desperately demand to have their lights punched in,” said the skeleton.

It works for me, as long as the dough holds up, my life is somewhat less angry these days.  Anyway, I was thinking of how you can be quite friendly with someone who it will emerge, only over time, is quite a bad person.   By “bad” I mean an intolerable side that emerges over time and queers the deal.  

The person still has all their good features, these just get occluded by something intolerably foul.  You used to chat amiably with your neighbor Shep, who you found to be a droll, likable man with a quick wit, easy to bullshit with.  

“Yeah, he was a very nice guy, I always liked running into Shep when I walked Sassy.  The neighborhood kids he was fitting with Danish anal extenders and gently buggering loved him too.  They were crying when the cops took him away, when their mothers told them there would be no more parties at Shep’s.”

That reminds me of a guy I was friendly with after mom died.  He reached out, offered to hear about mom, surmised she must have been a great woman to have raised such a mensch.  He promised to try to keep his big mouth shut long enough to listen to stories of this wonderful woman, if I was willing to tell them.

“He reached out with flattery during a time of need,” said the skeleton.  

Yes, that was his way.  He was a practiced flatterer.  A bit full of himself, and a little immature in some ways, but a basically good guy.  

“This former friend you don’t talk to any more and are about to assassinate in print, a good guy?  OK, I’m all ear holes,” the skeleton turned his head to show where an ear had been.

He was very helpful when I was trying to figure out how to get my student-run program off the ground.  He encouraged me to write a manifesto, laying out my beliefs, how the program would advance these beliefs, what my theory was, how I proposed to test it, how the program’s success could be gauged.  He was a big help at a key time.

“A big help encouraging you to launch a doomed pipe dream,” said the skeleton.

Anyway, I noticed, over time, that virtually every time we’d get together he made some reference to child molestation.  I was working on a program for kids ages 7-11 and he kept making comments about child sex.   The first few went by without notice or comment, but he got my attention when he spontaneously invented a theory under which a person like me, working with kids in a free-wheeling creative program, could be prosecuted for a crime he dreamed up: vicarious child pornography.

A person was guilty of this heinous imagined felony by facilitating or allowing the creation of material, by children, that could be deemed, by a randy pervert on the bench, as intended to arouse sexual desires in other children or in an adult.  This came to his mind after he watched a beautifully animated sequence of two clay figures kissing and merging to form a heart. 

“You’ve got to be careful with that,” he said, describing his imagined law against an adult allowing a third-grader to express certain abstract feelings with clay and drawing.  

I pointed out that the kids self-censored themselves, that it was one advantage to having seven year-olds and ten year-olds working in the same workshop.  I can point over to the younger kids any time the older ones begin pushing the limits and they get the point immediately.

“You’ve got to be careful,” he said again, having another small glass of single malt.  

There was an adopted son who was no longer talking to him or his angry, critical wife.  It perplexed him that this boy they had raised, a young man with his own children now, hated them so much he would not even return their calls.  It was impossible for him to believe the love they had always shown him had turned to this.  

“I think I see where this one is going,” said my father’s skeleton.

One spring afternoon, over lunch, in a crowded outdoor restaurant, he asked me why I thought it was that pedophiles were so universally despised, in an unmentionable category of their own among hated criminals.  

“Most likely because they prey on the most vulnerable and defenseless victims imaginable and ruin their lives at the moment they are most impressionable.   They put their own need for sexual gratification above the lives of the little souls they destroy.  That’s pretty bad, no?”  

This fellow was brilliant.  Sekhnet had memorably characterized the full-grown arrested adolescent as a brilliant child.  “You have to remember that he’s a child, a brilliant child, but a child.”  

“She really does have a talent for putting a person into an ingenious nutshell, doesn’t she?” said the skeleton. 

I had great difficulty following the course of this brilliant child’s conversation of the next hour or so.  I kept trying to focus on what exactly he was saying, asking for clarification several times, but it was impossible to get any sense of where he was going, beyond a generalized discomfort with how universally hated, among all malefactors, adults who loved and had sex with children seemed to be.  

“Isn’t it possible that if the adult truly loves the child, and is always gentle and loving, that the child wouldn’t be harmed at all by the relationship?” he asked at one point.  

I allowed, for the sake of argument, that this was theoretically possible, but even assuming that ten percent, even fifty percent, of pedophile relationships fell into this category, you’re talking about millions of kids fucked up for life for the sexual pleasure of artless adult child fuckers.  I left aside the obvious point that a loving adult has many better ways to show love to a child than making that kid a sexual partner.  Every other way you can think of, pretty much, outside of something like enlisting them to join you in torture and murder, is better.

When we somehow wrapped up the conversation, he could not stop thanking me.  Nobody had ever allowed him to talk about this subject, it was so taboo, nobody could hear five words about it without stopping him.  I told him I was willing to discuss anything, in theory, but that I still really didn’t know what the hell we’d just been talking about.    

“See, that’s the moment I’m talking about when I ask how we can recognize them.  You had a moment when you hadn’t yet done the math; he already knew the math, had the final figures all worked out.  It would take you a little while, a few hours, a day, maybe a week, before you realized why this conversation was so important to him, before you made the connection to the irrationally angry adopted son who hates him, etc.  He was already there, waiting with his teeth out, a sharp blade in each hand,” said the skeleton.  

You’re right.  What happened next put that beyond any doubt.  He went from overflowing gratitude to casually asking me what I thought of Edward Snowden and Bradley Chelsea Manning.  I told him whatever else could be said of either of them, they seemed to have acted out of conscience and done a valuable service to the public and for democracy.

It was as if I’d dropped a match into a lake of gasoline.  This otherwise nuanced and philosophical man went bat shit insane.  He harangued me with such ferocity about the treachery of these two self-involved traitors that his wife, a complete harridan who had joined us moments into this conflict, felt compelled to break in and tell him that he had to let me speak.

 He would not, he did not, he could not.  My premises were all completely fallacious!!  He roared.  He raged.   I managed to cut in to ask him to tell me what those fallacious premises were, but he was beyond listening.  He screamed, quoting now obscure sociologists of his college days, berating me for my ignorance of their teachings.  He cited the holdings of once-famous now obscure court rulings on treason which all proved, beyond any doubt, that I was categorically and completely wrong.  And worse than that, fucking arrogant.

“Jesus, why didn’t you tell him to shut the fuck up and get out of there?” said the skeleton.

I was dumbfounded, and also in the back of his car, speeding along the highway.  There was no place to go.  He was yelling so much it would have been futile to have tried to yell over him to get him to pull over.  I had to just wait to get where we were going and get the hell away from him.

“See, that’s why I asked how do we recognize them before we’re in the back of their speeding car, bound for wherever they are speeding off to,” said the skeleton.

I wasn’t worried in any kind of existential way, but I was shocked and hurt.  It was literally sickening to be abused this way, after being casually asked my opinion, which I had couched in the most diplomatic of terms.  It didn’t take long before the intense burning started in the center of my chest.

“Oh, boy,” said the skeleton, very familiar with this burning in the center of the chest.  He had felt it every time his tiny, enraged mother rattled the drawer where she kept her cutting whip.

“That’s precisely what I’m talking about, Elie, that’s the exact thing I was always defending against– that terrible burning in the exact center of your chest.   You know what that feeling is?  It’s fighting off the death that is clutching angrily at your heart, to be treated so cruelly by someone you did no harm to, for the crime of being blameless.”

I noticed the quiet in the cemetery.  None of the other dead folks had anything smart to say about this.

“Here’s  a riddle for you, Batman,” said the skeleton.  “How do you immediately know who you are actually dealing with in the world?   Tabula Raza steps up to you, extends his hand, says it’s nice to meet you.  Is there any way to get an instant bead on the essence of this smiling yet possibly dangerous type and be on a sturdy footing before they try to get the first shot in?”

I have to say, that’s a hell of a riddle, dad. 

“You seem to think you can meet everyone with an open face, Elie, and extend the benefit of the doubt– or at least you profess to operate that way, however ungracious your actual judgments may actually be in the moment– and that pretty much any two people in the world can get along, at least to the limited extent of helping each other in an emergency.”  

Well, I don’t picture Vasily, the drunken Ukrainian reptile, deputized by the local SS, the fellow who shot the pregnant woman’s baby and then shot her in the stomach, in that category, if that’s what you mean.  There are plenty of filthy, banal bastards, filled with rage, hating themselves, capable of anything.

“No, obviously.  Vasily the Reptile finds himself in an in extremis situation and his worst nature takes wing.  When people are given leave to legally kill their fellow humans all bets are off.  I’m talking about people in polite, everyday society, you meet your girlfriend’s father for the first time.  Or, less fraught, you meet a new classmate at a school mixer where everyone is being introduced to everyone else.”

Not that I’ve ever been to a school mixer, but the obvious question is why do I give a crap one way or another about the character of this new classmate at a school mixer, beyond saying hello and seeing what he or she has to say?  

“Obvious question to a person who is not born with a boot on his throat, maybe.  Although, in many ways, you can still see the mark where my boot rested on your tiny throat.  Maybe you got lucky, Elie, seriously, in a way I never could.  I never went into a situation without immediately sizing up who I could take and who could take me.  Those who I figured could take me, I knew immediately I’d have to work my way around.  I had a menu of techniques to neutralize the dangers in such situations.”

Wait, are you saying you were completely insane?  

“There’s nothing insane about him!” shouted another skeleton, clearly beyond bearing any more of my casual attitude of mutuality with my father. 

This can’t be happening, I recall thinking.  

“You know, Elie, I think most people are keenly aware of the vicious, competitive nature of this dangerous world.  In many ways it really is a zero sum game, what I want to have I need to get before you can grab it,” said the skeleton of my father.  

“A zero sum game, son of a bitch!” called the other skeleton.

Tell me this can’t be happening, I remember thinking, though I have no idea who I was appealing to.  

“Your higher nature, maybe?” suggested the other skeleton in a tone I resented very much.

Listen, dad, we’ll have to continue this another time.  I don’t have an answer to this odd riddle and I don’t feel like explaining to the local police why I am kicking down gravestones in this quiet country cemetery.  

“You’re not talking about my gravestone, I know that,” said the skeleton of my father.  

No, of course not, dad, why would I kick that gravestone?  But I have to tell you, that other bastard is really getting on my nerves.

“He got on everybody’s nerves,” said the skeleton of my father, as I waved goodbye and made my way up the rest of the hill to Oregon Road, the road on which people drove back from the well-protected concert where Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and, famously Paul Robeson, had performed.   Workers had organized a guard of more than ten thousand men, shoulder to shoulder, guarding the concert grounds.  There were no incidents at the concert.  

It was along this quiet two-lane road that rolls a few steps up from where my father is buried, after the show, that their cars were ambushed, windows smashed, some overturned, by Westchester Klansmen in the fall of 1949, while the State Police, and the local police, smiled, and chewed tobacco.

My father was diagnosed with final stage liver cancer in the Emergency Room of a Florida hospital, six days before he died.  This failure of several frequently visited Florida specialists to make the fatal diagnosis, leaving it to an E.R. doc to make when there was almost no time left on the clock, confirmed what he always said about Florida doctors, that they were the worst in America.  

He found himself unexpectedly on his deathbed, a tube draining ugly looking fluid from his body, with a lot of work to do in those last few days of his life.  It was a bad break, as Lou Gehrig phrased the news of his own ALS diagnosis, but, like The Iron Horse, Irv was determined to get some small, important task done before he breathed his last breath.  He had the good fortune of a visit late the last night of his life that allowed him to do much of what he had left to do.  Which was mostly express his inextinguishable regrets, to apologize, for the first time, and try to explain why he had felt doomed from the start.

After he died I began to write the eulogy, as we arranged to fly his body from Florida to his grave on that hilltop outside of Peekskill, as Sekhnet booked a flight to fly the rest of his small family up to New York to stand around the grave as he was lowered into it and buried.  The man who would be conducting the service, and reading the eulogy, advised me to write a straight chronology of my father’s life.  That advice seemed sound, and I followed it.  I will look for the eulogy and place it here somewhere.    

I think now, as I did then, of how enormous a task it is to deliver a meaningful eulogy.  A good eulogy puts a life, episodic while being lived, suddenly whole in death, into a neat frame, complete with the illusion of coherence.   Life is a complicated series of often contradictory entanglements where moments of mercy are not always the rule.  People are hard on themselves, hard on others, then, often at the very worst possible moment, they suddenly die.  

“Well, that’s a pretty good nutshell,” said the skeleton.  “You know, you try to live the best you know how, but often that best is not very good, you wind up doing great damage in spite of your most noble intentions.  I intended to teach you and your sister that if you are honest, and weigh things fairly, and show kindness to the helpless among us, the way we always took care of our dogs, well, you know, the rest will kind of take care of itself.

“What I wound up teaching you was a little different, I guess.  I taught you what my mother taught me, the unmistakable fatalistic lesson of her upbringing.  You can be honest, weigh things fairly, show kindness to the weak– that’s all well and good.   But I have demons inside me that are not impressed by what you might call a good character.  In fact, your good character only pisses my demons off, enrages them enough to stomp off with a lynch mob.  Who the fuck are you to have good character?   I got your good  character right here! 

“And you are one and a half years old, younger, and you watch this violent beast inexorably rise up in your mother, watch her turn over and over again into this monster mother and all you can do is think ‘Jesus, no… not again….’ and try to comport yourself with as much dignity as an infant can muster, steel yourself for the whipping that is about to erupt.  

“And then, sure as night follows day, boom!! Across the face, then again, and let’s do that one more time, and one more and once more, and then, goddamn it, this is not helping, again, again, again!!!!  You worthless little fuck, goddamn it, you can’t even make me feel better when I whip you as hard as I can in the fucking face!!  

“So, as I told you that last night, I don’t feel good about what I did. My mother, may she rest in peace, didn’t feel good about what she did.  I have to think she didn’t, though I’ll never know for sure.   A mother does not feel good knowing she has failed in the sacred task of helping to create a compassionate child.  

“Now, even though I’m long dead, I am treated to the almost daily ritual of watching my own son muse in writing, trying to somehow understand and alchemize the cruelties I inflicted, unwittingly, unwillingly, deliberately, directly, as he looks for deeper meaning in it than just a cycle of misery.   There is no end to these musings, Elie, and you see that now, I trust.  

“You have enlisted me to narrate my own life– there’s something very macabre there, even as it’s also fitting.   It’s like having Eichmann narrate a documentary about his important work during the war.  Though, of course, I’m no Eichmann.  

“I’m more like Barack Obama, really, if you think about it.  How many of your friends, especially those who only met me a couple of times, remember me as a cool, funny guy?  It happened just a few weeks ago, someone’s face lit up when the subject of fathers came up and she said ‘I remember your dad, he was a cool guy!  You’re so lucky.’  I got a kick out of Sekhnet’s face as you nodded, with that smile of a thousand ironies.  

“And of course, I’ll be very charming, eloquent and sincere as I accept that Nobel Peace Prize, while I keep my eye on the real prize– projecting power, propagating an absurdity like American Exceptionalism, pursuing whatever murderous policy is necessary to protect my legacy and the great wealth of the blessed nation that has made me the luckiest man on the face of the earth.  Then I’ll go buy a backhoe to rake in my serious Tubmans when I step down as impeccable dignified, tastefully comedic front man for the greatest nation the world has ever known.”

I was walking with somebody yesterday who told me he’s been reading these pieces I’m putting up here in cyberspace.  My first thought was the line I heard from an aphid-sized Louie CK the other night.  He called blogs transcripts of conversations nobody wants to have, even the computer they’re typed on is going “ewwwww…. power failure please….”   The audience and I laughed at the truth of this, picturing photos of the fabulous immortalized lunch someone had, the huge turd they later launched like a glorious ocean liner for that long, final voyage.  

“What did the fellow think of your project?” asked the skeleton.

 You know, I didn’t ask, I really have no sense of how he felt.

“You didn’t ask?” said the skeleton.  “I don’t see how that’s possible.   The guy told you he’s reading the manuscript you’re working on, have been devoting the last nine months to, and it never occurred to you to ask him what he thought about it?  What his feelings were about it?  What?”

It was in the woods, walking over real and metaphorical roots, where I even stumbled once, over some particularly intrusive root that stepped up to meet me, as he extended his arm, made sure I was OK.   I learned that his father, apparently the same age as you, although very much alive, never turned from the leftist worker’s dream that you pursued for a while and then pretty much abandoned in search of the American Dream, that seductive mirage.

“Well, there’s another nutshell for you.  But he also told you his father was always a member of a community, in a union, standing with his brothers and sisters, taking his children to a Communist summer colony the way I took you and your sister to a Zionist one.   This world is goddamned complicated and the deck is stacked against any given individual, Elie, but one thing is for sure.  If you’re going to change anything, if real change is even possible, you have to stand with all the comrades you can find.  

“It sounds like your walking companion’s father had a sounder idea for how to put his beliefs into practice than I did, from the little we both know about his life.

“Of course, the devil, as always, is in the details.   How good a man is his father?  How generous and content is he in old age?  Is he embittered today that his dream for a much better world than this one has been irrevocably stomped under by a thousand armies of profit-driven mercenaries?  Did you find out how he’s doing with all that, in our new unipolar, post-ideological world order?  There’s a $64,000 question for you.  

“No need to answer, since you clearly don’t know.  All we can say is that his son appears to be a decent and thoughtful man with a good sense of humor, affectionate and with a strong spirit of adventure.  That tells you something about his father, doesn’t it?   Then again, you appear to be decent and thoughtful, animated by a certain love of fun.  What does that tell you about all this, Elie?”

It tells me that the hill I am walking up is actually a treadmill, dad, and that I’m going to go cast my eyes somewhere else for a while, for the good of my vision.  And, also, that it’s time to go back down and stir the sauce I’m making from tomatoes, garlic and oregano that Sekhnet lovingly grew on her farm out back.