My father was raised in a religious Jewish home, an orthodox Jewish home.  His mother, I always heard, was very religious.   She was, as far as I can tell, not from the merciful school of Hillel, where love of God and kindness toward others is taught with patience, kindness and a touch of humor.  My father’s religious upbringing was harsh.  It seems remarkable to me that he absorbed and transmitted as many of the deeper moral lessons of Judaism as he did, considering how they were taught to him.  

As a result of the heartfelt moral teachings of my father, I am compassionate toward the religious impulse.  It is right to be kind to the helpless, to be gentle, to treat animals well.  It is right to identify with the vulnerability of the dispossessed, the orphan, the homeless.  It is an excellent thing, probably the best single thing a person can do, to refrain from doing to others what you hate having done to you.  My sister and I were raised to feel solidarity with the oppressed, a certain awe about the mysteries of history and the universe, and compassion for animals and underdogs.  

As a result of my father’s distilled religious lessons, and the way they were often disjoined from the way he actually lived, I have little patience for the rituals of religion.  I’ve never shouted out “this is bullshit, you goddamned hypocrites!” during a religious service, but it’s very hard for me to sit through one, to rise, and please be seated, and please rise.   Obedience to God, as interpreted and demanded by men, is as repellent to me as obedience to any tyrant.  

“Whoa!  Whoa!” said the skeleton of my father, holding up a bony hand.  “Wait a second, there.  You’re writing a frame to set up a series of stories about my practice of religion and my feelings about it.  The reader doesn’t care about your opinion of religious services.  They want my religious life, mine, the protagonist.  

“You’re going to take the half dozen or more anecdotes you’ve written about my religious life and combine them into one chapter, combing out the repetition and giving as full an account as you can of my religious life.  You’re going to call it ‘My Father’s Religion’.  Nobody gives a shit about your editorial feelings as you begin.  Strike that whole paragraph about obedience to religious tyrants.”  

Don’t be a religious tyrant, dad.  That kind of categorical certainty is part of what is so hateful about religious strictness.   God’s supposed insistence on you doing whatever incomprehensible thing God is urging on you becomes an unquestionable religious duty.  You take your religious leader’s word for it.  Or, if you’re really inspired, God’s word.

Take your first born son to a hilltop, tie him to a pyre, bind him so you can cut his throat, set him on fire and offer him as a burnt offering to the All-Merciful.  The boy will go along, docile as a lamb, because he’s righteous, and does as God will command be carved in stone, Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother, and you’ve taught him blind obedience to the will of God, and to his father.  

For your willingness to slit your first-born son’s throat and burn his body, you’ll become Judaism’s first righteous patriarch, oddly enough.  Your unflinching faith will position you for all time as the moral source of three major world religions.  Then for thousands of years y’all can kill each other over who most humbly and truly worships the All-Merciful King of the Universe.  

“Well, that’s your jaundiced view of religion,” said the skeleton.  

Like I said, I make the distinction between the religious impulse, the spiritual longing to connect to something higher and more wise than yourself, a worldview to help you behave justly, and religious ritual and dogma, propagated by blood-thirsty religious leaders with swords in their hands.  I think you made the same distinction yourself, increasingly so over the years.  

“Yeah,” said the skeleton with a sigh, “I did make the same distinction.  And increasingly so as I went along.   Those Born-Again morons in the prayer circle around me on my deathbed, I tried not to judge them too harshly.  I was too weak to judge them, in any event, but you know what I was thinking.  Sad idiots doing the best they could, somehow. Going to mega-church and voting for Dubya Dumbass Bush, righteously hating with God on their side, trying to convert dying Jews before forsaking the lonely widows of those souls they believe they’ve saved.  

“I’m not pretending I was a religious person, I just think you have to tell the story of my religious life better.  That’s all I was trying to say.”  

I read you, Rebbe.  I’m working on it.

It was, I see from a primary source (the eulogy) May 5, 2005, when my father’s body, in the plain pine box he’d instructed me to get for him when he died, arrived for burial at the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery.  It was a sunny day, blue cloudless sky, a perfect Spring day, completely comfortable for the dark blue suit, shirt and tie I was wearing.  

An oily character from the funeral home came up to my mother and me as the hearse pulled up.  He wanted to know if we brought the money.  He was wearing a sharp black suit, which on him made him look like a ghoul.  He counted the hundred dollar bills my mother handed him, to make sure there were eighty of them.  

This handing over cash at the cemetery before the funeral struck me as one of the crassest things I’d ever seen, but the merciless pricks at Hellman Funeral Chapel had insisted on it.  No funeral without the corpse, no corpse without the cash.  We have the corpse, do you have the cash? No checks, please, you understand.

The ghoul made a bit of small talk as my mother fished for the fat envelope of cash in her purse.  He asked what I did for a living.  His face lit up with a creepy smile when I told him I was a lawyer, which I still was back then.  “I used to be a lawyer,” he said, beginning to count the $8,000, “but I like this much better.”  

I’m sure you do, I thought, hiding my revulsion behind a smile almost as sincere as his.  When he was satisfied with the money count he asked me if I was going to identify the body.  I hadn’t realized I’d be doing this, but I walked with him over to the hearse.  A working man opened the coffin and I looked inside.   It was my father, all right.

 He had died as Shabbat, the day of rest, began on Friday evening, April 29th.  Jewish tradition is to hold the funeral as soon as possible after death, ideally within a day.  Since my father died in Florida, and his entire family had congregated in that hospital on State Road Seven, and his grave was in Westchester, New York, there’d been a logistical delay before we could get everyone to the cemetery.  Meantime, his body was prepared for burial and watched over for several additional days by the Chevrai Kadisha, the burial society, which probably added a grand or two to the sum my former colleague had counted.

I don’t know who’d made the decision, perhaps my uncle, but my father, sprouting the five-day white beard I’d heard old men grow after they die, had a shard of broken pottery over his lips and one over each eye.  I assumed this was some Orthodox Jewish tradition.  The winding sheet he was wrapped in, another religious tradition.  “It’s him,” I told the ghoul and the cover was placed back on the coffin.

Standing by the open grave at the top of the hill in the small cemetery, I heard the words I’d written for the eulogist being read by an excellent reader, an actor with a great voice who also chanted beautifully.  As well as he read, I was impressed most by his pauses. He had inserted brief pauses, each one in the perfect place to set off exactly what I’d written.

My niece, I noticed, was standing by herself, crying.  I nudged Sekhnet, who went over to the girl and put her arm around her.  They both cried, as birds sang, and cars crunched past on Oregon Road, not far from where we were standing.

“You ask me if I have royal blood and I’ll give you a definitive answer,” said the skeleton.    

Do you have royal blood?  

“Possibly, but you’re definitely giving me a royal pain in the ass,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?   

“Why not personally examine my royal hemorrhoids for the magisterial answer to that one, poseur?” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?

“Possibly, but I could increase my odds by drinking all of yours,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?    

“Why, are you thirsty for a rich drink, unlanded vampire?”   

Do you have royal blood?   

“I don’t know, let’s compare it to your’s.  Come on, out with it, all of it, bloody bastard.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“Get on your knees when you ask me that, peasant, and call me ‘Sire’.” 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Not necessarily, though I do have hemophilia,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Beats me, but I do have a swollen royal blue asshole, I might be baboon royalty,” said the skeleton.

Do you have royal blood?  

“I don’t know, but it’s rushing to my head, and when it gets there, I’m going to order you and your family out of your home and have you hunted by hounds and nobles on horseback,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“I know you are, but what am I?  OK, that’s enough of that, Elie.  This was really stupid.  Not only a waste of time for everyone involved, burping out these semi-snappy MAD magazine-style rejoinders to a stupid question, but not even something I’d do when I was alive.

 “Wait, I know what you’re going to say– I have that power now absolutely–  ‘well, you’re not alive, and you’ve grown up since your death’– and that, I can tell you, 100%, is complete bullshit.  I haven’t changed a bit, except for that night when it began to dawn on me I’d be dead in a few hours and I thought it only fair to give you what I’d withheld from you for your entire life.  

“I’d been consistently unfair, taken advantage of your better nature to make everything your fault, make you shoulder the entire weight, and blame, for our long, relentless war.  It was only fair for me to say, before the little candle of my light winked out, that it hadn’t all been your fault.   I went a step further, since you were so mild about it by my death-bed, and took all the fault.”  

The leaves on the trees around the grave, once green, now orange, yellow, brown and red, trembled in the light breeze.  The wind made a quiet whistling sound, to accompany the rustling of the dry leaves.  There were no cars on the road.

“The Holy One, Blessed be He, threatened those who were hostile to Him with uncontrollable terror at the trembling of a leaf.   ‘The sound of a windblown leaf will make you run in terror, as if hunted by a hoard of your enemies, you will flee, heart pounding, though nobody pursues you,’ or some such poetic phrase, in your beloved Leviticus 26.   You know, as the days grow shorter and the temperature cools off, nights suddenly frigid, older, sick people tend to die and babies who are not fated to live long also begin to sicken and die.  

“The coming of winter is a living metaphor for death and humanoids recognized that thousands of years ago.  The holidays around the winter solstice all involve the lighting of candles, the miracle of the Hebrew zealots kosher oil burning for eight days, the Christmas lights, Diwali, a hundred primitive religions that time has forgotten, or whose practitioners have been wiped out by religions who had deadlier weapons.  

“Look, man, in fairness to yourself, you can’t just get up and come in here and expect much to happen every day.  Some days you are just going to be swinging an unstrung racquet at a nimble baboon’s unwashed ass. Today may be such a day.  No matter how you wiggle, and jiggle, and dance, the last three drops go down your pants.  Face it.  You can write all the lines you want for me, some days, this is all you’re going to get.  As for me, shit, I don’t mind in the least.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“OK, I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve never revealed to anyone.  I was a King.  This land is mine, God gave this land to me.  That is what made it so intolerable to me to be treated as an asshole, no different than the rest of you fucking peons.  

“Do you realize, when a little king is whipped in the face, the cataclysm that is rendered in the heavens and down here on the earth?  My divine right to rule, contested by an ignorant and vicious commoner, with a crude but effective whip in her hand, over and over with all her raging might, into my tiny face?  Do you understand what this does to the order of things?  How can you possibly understand that?”

Obviously I can, I have royal blood.

There is a website that periodically sends me an email asking, as a come on to try to get me to open their email, if I have royal blood.  I hit delete, but they are persistent.  When I say “they” I’m not talking about an individual, of course, it’s a robot of some kind, a snappy spambot, programmed on behalf of a company that you can pay to have trace your ancestry.  “Do you have royal blood?” the bot asks me, every week or two.  

There is nobody to say this to directly, so I may as well send it out like a spambot, into the darkness of cyberspace.  A paragraph or two may come in handy for my proposed Book of Irv.

My family does not have royal blood.  If it did, the faces of those royals were many generations ago scraped from their tomb walls, their bones scattered to hungry scavengers.  In my memory, and the handed down and painstakingly unearthed short history of my family, I know only this much:

 My mother had twelve aunts and uncles and her grandfather on her  mother’s side wrote to her and sent her Russian coins when she was a girl.  Of these people none survived events in their Ukrainian town during the dark winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943.  Any of them, or their children, who made it through the starvation and disease was marched to a ravine on the northern end of town one warm summer night and in that ravine their misery was ended.

On my father’s side, a few hundred miles away, it happened a year or so earlier.  By July 4, 1942 it was all over for everyone but Aren and his little sister Chava, both of whom were in America, far from the killing.  The hamlet they came from in the marshes just south of Pinsk disappeared without a trace, along with all its inhabitants.  When I say “disappeared without a trace” I mean that nobody who has researched it has found any trace of where the little settlement was on a map.  As for its former inhabitants, don’t ask.

So, royal blood?  Most likely I don’t need a thorough check of my ancestry, which, except for two framed photos, can go back no more than two generations in any case, to answer that one.  Royal blood? No, thank you.    

There is a large framed photo here of Azrael Gleiberman, Aren and Chava’s father, and one of his wife Leah, but those haunted-looking, life-sized portraits are all that remain of them.  Azrael is referred to as Reb Azrael on his daughter Chava’s gravestone in Peekskill, suggesting he was a learned man, or at least a very religious one.  Only Aren and Chava, among Azrael’s children, ever got a grave stone.   Royal blood?  Let me see.  It looks somewhat unlikely, romantic as the idea undoubtedly is.  

It might be nice, in a fairy tale sort of way, to believe that the rage of Chava, the frequent unreasonableness of Yetta, the fearfulness of Sam, Eliyahu’s devil-may-care attitude, were all caused by the high octane spirits of royal blood.  You know, the reason Yetta drank so much vodka sometimes, and acted so headstrong and impetuous– she was a former royal living in exile in a worker’s apartment in the Bronx.  Unbearable!   Sam, once a prince who dressed in the Russian fashion, shaken to his core by the surprise assassination of his father the King and fled from the lands he once ruled.   Chava, the youngest member of another royal family, forced by cruel circumstances into marriage in an alien land with a man whose wits and constitution had been damaged beyond repair by generations of royal inbreeding.

Why else, really, would these people have acted so crazy?  It has to be royal blood really, no?  

I think of the history of the world, how it continues to be written in blood, so little of it royal blood.  Which is a shame, really, since no less an expert than Thomas Jefferson believed that the Tree of Liberty needed to be watered periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  And who more fit to be a tyrant, and to provide sustenance to that noble tree, than a ruler pulsing with royal blood?  

The Divine Right of Kings, Manifest Destiny, Indian Removal, Separate But Equal, Racial Purity.   Do I have royal blood?   If we have ever spoken, you already know the answer to that one, comrade.

My father, a brilliant and prickly character, prone to anger and armed with a great sense of humor, died on April 29, 2005.  He was supremely defended while alive and tended to dictate the scope of any conversation he participated in.  

Since his death he has become much more interactive, far less given to the brow-beating he often resorted to.  I have enjoyed months of honest, back and forth conversation with him since January of 2016 when I began writing the first draft of The Book of Irv, the story of my father’s life and times.  

When he first popped out of his grave on the outskirts of Peekskill to contest something I’d just written, I thought little of it; it appeared to be something easily enough fixed in the rewrite.  It seemed kind of a stagey conceit, having the protagonist pop out of his grave to contest his biographer’s assertion, try to correct the record.  I thought it was a bit idiotic, frankly.  But the skeleton was soon back, intent on participating fully in the telling of his history.  

It was oddly organic, the way our conversation began.  He seemed to insist on it.  Being by nature a collaborative improviser, I went with it.   I soon found myself looking forward to our almost daily chats.  

“Don’t you wish we could have had a few of these when I was alive?” said the skeleton of my father, smiling that odd, sardonic smile they all have.  

Obviously.  And cruel as it would have been to say while you were alive, it was almost inevitable we wouldn’t have a much better relationship until after you died.  I want to underscore who you were, who you are now, as your own skeleton, and who you’re not.  

“Well, clearly, I was always the proponent of people not having the ability to change their inner wiring to any significant extent,” said the skeleton.  

Which was convenient, I realize now, because that belief kept you from taking responsibility for your sometimes brutal actions, things that were hard-wired in and not amenable to your will to control, according to your rigid belief that people can’t fundamentally change.  

“So you dragged me out here to fight?” said the skeleton.  

Nah.  I dragged you out here to show that, while you have evolved to an impressive extent since your deathbed regrets and the absolution I tried to give you as you were dying, you remain, in many ways, and as you always insisted, unchanged.   You get defensive, you attack when feeling cornered, you prickle, and startle, express your fear as bravado, and so forth.  

“So you dragged me out here to mock me?” said the skeleton of my father.  

Well, only to the extent that it’s funny to hear from such an opinionated skeleton.  Most people, when they die, are simply dead, I suspect.   In fact, you yourself would be completely dead now, but for my exertions here as I creep inexorably toward my own extinction.  

“Well, it’s nice of you to indulge me this way, then,” said the skeleton.    

It’s nice to talk with you in light of your improved insight.  The regrets you had while you were dying gave you a perspective you hadn’t consciously acquired in eighty years.  

“Better late than never,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   The insightful Jeanne Safer wrote about the new ongoing dialogue that is possible once a parent, no matter how problematic, dies.   I never thought I’d find myself in a silent room tapping out actual conversations with the skeleton of my father.  

“Well, shit happens, Elie.  It seems to me you’ve gotten a lot more out of this process than you ever did out of sitting week after week with that earnest little unsupervised idiot in the Brief Psychotherapy Program who started off trying to teach you what she’d learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy before secretly switching to a ‘relational’ approach a few weeks in,” said the skeleton.  

She wasn’t an idiot, she was just an unsupervised grad student.  Yeah, look, this process is certainly the best use of my time right now.  Unless I could get an appointment with someone like Jeanne Safer, who I believe is writing full-time and no longer seeing patients, it’s pretty pointless to look for the help of people who just want to be normal and successful.  

“Two things nobody could accuse you of being, Elie,” said the skeleton.    

Hardy-har-har.  You know, you haven’t lost that deft touch you always had, even when foam was forming on the corners of your mouth.  

“Foam never fucking formed on the corners of my mouth,” said the skeleton indignantly, unconsciously wiping at his molars.  “You’re thinking of Eli.  Now there was a guy who could turn purple at will with spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth.”

Eli is another can of worms.  

“Not anymore, he’s been dead ten years longer than me.  The worms have moved on.   He really deserves his own book, you know,” said the skeleton.  

He certainly does.  Now, to sum up:  

The skeleton is a combination of my father in life, a man who remained stubbornly unchanged, and the man who underwent a certain transformation in the last hours of his life, as he was seized by countless regrets.  

“I literally could not make an accurate tally of my regrets,” said the skeleton, dry eyed.

I know, and I take a deep lesson from that.

(Please note that Sekhnet called the previous draft of this “nauseating” and urged me to do it, if I must, with a lot less sickening language and a lot more artfulness.  I’ve removed a couple of stray “f-words” and re-titled the fucking piece)

There was a television show my father used to like.  It aired toward the end of his life, I don’t remember the name of it, but it ran in an age when television writers were allowed to be more true-to-life, on a network that didn’t bleep words like “fuck” and “asshole” and “poop”.  

He loved the snappy dialogue and verbal violence of the show.  It was set in a brutal western town during the days after the Gold Rush, during the genocide of the Native Americans, the mass slaughter of the American Bison, the building of the transcontinental railroad that greased the wheels for the new Barons of the Gilded Age.

In this town, which may have been called Deadwood, brutal characters vied with anyone who wanted a piece of what they had fought to grab.  There was an evil-looking, dead-eyed character, perhaps the mayor of the town, with a head of thick, greasy black hair and a mouth like a maldita inodoro, as the Latinos say.  He’d sit at the bar and snarl at the people around him, all, apparently, fucking shit-assed cocksuckers of one kind or another.  

My father loved this guy, not only for his brutality, but for the over-the-top way he used his quick tongue as a filthy, razor-edged bullwhip.   I don’t think I ever saw more than a moment of the show, which I think only ran one season, but my father would tell me about it, chuckling.  He clearly loved the way these characters cussed at each other.  

My mother complained that she couldn’t stand the cursing.  “He loves it, every other word is ‘fuck’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker,’ I can’t watch it,” said my mother in disgust, going into the other room to read as the characters cursed on the screen and my father smiled from ear to ear.  

I grew up in a household where curses were common, so my mother wasn’t squeamish about words, she just found the language in the show offensively excessive.  

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of cursing in the house, but it was within reason.  For example, I can say with perfect confidence that my little sister and I were never at any time referred to as ‘cocksucker’ or ‘motherfucker’ or anything inappropriate like that.   Rather, curses were sprinkled like salt on a wound, to make it sting and sink in, although not so much to cure anything, except in the sense that a dead animal’s flesh is “cured” for eating.  

If, for example, I was called a snarling rattlesnake if I said something mean to my sister, it was much better to swap in “fucking” for “snarling” and make me a “fucking rattlesnake.”  You see how that works?

It worked the same way for the vicious pricks in this fictitious town.  My father read to me from an interview with the creator of the show.  The guy said he had researched it and the over-the-top language was historically accurate.  It was a way of expressing violence, aggression and domination without resorting to guns.  It was a kind of safety valve, if you like, allowing angry men to blow off steam and express honest hatred of each other without coming to blows and killing each other, as was the code for most physical altercations on the frontier.  

A “filthy cocksucking varmint” could either retort in kind, and spit a plume of filthy tobacco juice after saying it, or reach for his gun.  If he went for the gun, people would die.  If he retorted that his interlocutor was a “slimy, ass-dicking, motherfucking polecat,” well… stand-off, you see.  They’d glare at each other, throw back their shots of cheap frontier whiskey and go on with their business.   My father liked that.  

Would I have preferred if my father had taken a swing at me, literally gone for his gun, pistol-whipped me every time he used a curse word to whip me with?  I’d have to take being called a fucking cobra, if those two things were the only choices.  

I hope this explains why a “senseless war” is often referred to in these pages as a “senseless fucking war” and being weary is sometimes “fucking weary” and like that.  It adds a flavor to the ms. that makes it more true-to-life than omitting a spice that is, admittedly, not to every taste, but which was ubiquitous in my father’s home cooking.  It’s just how the fucking guy was, liberal with the fucking f-word.  

The f-ing “n-word”, in any form, was not in his vocabulary, I must point out again.  That said, if he needed to say the word at all, as in quoting a racist legislator or Supreme Court justice, he would say “nigger” and not swap in the hideous, hypocritical fucking “n-word”.  

He may have often had a mouth like a maldita toilet bowl, but there was nothing immoral about it.