The eulogist spoke:

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.    

These last two facts, the little mayor of Peekskill and the marching Hebrew Congregation Boy Scouts, are from my uncle.  First time I heard either one was at the grave.  

My Uncle Paul was my only uncle, my father’s younger brother.  My mother was an only child, so Uncle Paul was it for uncles for my sister and me.  My father only told one childhood story about him and his brother.  I have come to think this relative parsimony about tales from the past may be a generational thing.  At least this was generally true in my family, except for Eli, who was extremely generous with stories.   I have to say, in defense of their policy of general silence about the past, that it seems many of the stories would have been painful ones.

The story my father told about his little brother was the time they were alone at home and my father took the raw chopped meat that was waiting to be cooked for dinner and stuffed his helpless little brother’s mouth full of it.   Irv laughed, as at a fond memory, and told my sister and me the little story on more than one occasion.  It gave us a better idea of why our slight, delicate uncle always seemed to flinch around his much bigger older brother.  Uncle Paul would usually laugh a kind of inhaled, scraping laugh as he flinched, it sounded like a tin shovel encountering fine gravel.

The devil, one notices, is usually in the details.  The worst is sometimes betrayed by a single word.  If you’re not attentive, you can stumble right past the portal into the devilry, are left wondering what that infernal smell is.  The opposite is also true, a single word can make a great difference for the better.  It all depends on the word, of course.

The word I want to emphasize here is “poor”.  A single syllable that states the grim fact plainly and goes right by, having made its simple, terrible case.  

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.

The reason they moved to Peekskill is so that Uncle Aren could look after his sister’s little family.  The three of them were in great distress down in the slums of New York City.  Azraelkeh, (the fond diminutive for Azrael) was an infant, already being subjected to great cruelty by Chava, his mother.  His father, Eliyahu, already poor, had lost his job wrestling herring barrels into Lower East Side shops and was unemployed.  There was no choice really as far as trying to deal with the misery of Aren’s sister’s situation.

“Where he grew up poor” carries a wallop, even as it is just a glancing blow in that sentence.  It is not hard to imagine how much misery there was for a young immigrant family in the slums of New York City in 1924.  Poverty today is the same horror for the poor, a timeless sentence, only probably even more violent today than back then.  It is not hard to picture the many terrors of that desperate, lawless section of town in 1924, 1925.

My father once mentioned a cousin of his, a young, handsome man, he said, who had taken his own life down in the misery of the Lower East Side of the 1920s.   America was the land of opportunity, home of The American Dream, but not everybody got to live the dream.  “I guess he suffered from what today would be called ‘Depression’,” said my father when he told me about that despairing young cousin.  

There is no telling how Aren wound up settling in Peekskill, a once thriving small town on the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City.   When Aren arrived in New York City in 1904 he learned to vulcanize rubber.  This was at the dawn of the automobile, and his new skill was in increasing demand.  He worked in automobile-related fields for the rest of his life.  By 1925 he owned and operated a garage and service station in Peekskill.  He got wind of his little sister’s desperation and sent his rough son Eli down in the truck to pack up the little family and drive them up to Peekskill.    

Eli’s mother had died shortly after he was born.   Aren was unable to care for the baby, he had to work.  He felt he had no choice but to give the baby up for adoption.  His dead wife’s mother and sisters would not hear of it.   They took the baby Eli and raised him.  They had a farm in the Bronx.  The four women doted on little Eli.  

“When I was four, five years old, I ruled that place.  Whenever I said something, it was done.  I spoke and those women jumped.  My word was law!” he told a friend of mine in his rough voice.   She laughed, which caused Eli’s smile to become electric.  His hand on her knee, he leaned forward and whispered “which was very, very bad…”  

The little king did not take kindly to being disrespected by a teacher in High School, or by anybody else for that matter.   Weeks from graduation, with a large boil under the collar of his shirt, he told Mr. Pimsler, a Jewish teacher, a guy he generally liked, that he had to go out to his post in the hall.  The principal of DeWitt Clinton had enlisted his borderline juvenile delinquent students as the hall monitors, the Dotie Squad.  They kept order and got a feeling of pride and participation in a school that otherwise held limited interest for them.

“Pimsler told me ‘sit the hell down, Gleiberman, I’ll tell you when you can go,’ and I went to the door, told him I was sorry, but I was on the Dotie Squad and I couldn’t be late to my post.  He tried to stand in front of me, stop me, and I pushed past him and had my hand on the door knob when he grabbed me by the neck and busted that boil.  I saw red!  My fist flew out and I decked him, he went down.  I hated to do it, I had nothing against Pimsler, it was just a reaction.  Anyway, it was a few weeks before graduation, and I just walked out of the school and never went back.”

For some reason Eli didn’t get the unreservedly warm reception he was expecting when he shortly thereafter moved up to Peekskill to live with his father, his father’s second wife, Tamarka, and their children, his half-sister, the brilliant and beautiful Nehama, and half-brother, the brilliant and soon to be fabulously wealthy Dave.  He was also, according to him, unceremoniously welcomed to Peekskill by the brothers whose father owned the hardware store.  

“They stood in front of me on the sidewalk and said ‘hey, you’re that kyke Aren’s boy, aren’t you, the little Jew bastard from New York City?’ and I said to the one with the big mouth ‘that’s right’ and I decked him.  He went right down and the other two got out of the way.  ‘Nice to meet you, boys,’ I said.  They didn’t say much to me after that.  There were a lot of Klansmen in Peekskill back then.  If you took any shit from them, it would be very bad for you.”

Eli took Aren’s truck and drove the long way down to New York City to pick up his beloved Aunt Chava and her family.  In those days it was an arduous trip from New York City to Peekskill.  As children my sister and I were taken to Peekskill a couple of times, when my father visited the graves of his parents.  

It seemed to us hours away, the trip was grueling, with an aspect of time travel.  We both had the strong sense we were not traveling back to a time when ice cream was plentiful and everybody played happily until it got dark out every night.  I was shocked when we drove to my father’s funeral, on modern highways, that the trip only took about forty minutes.  

In 1925 or 1926, it was not a short trip.  There was a ferry that took passengers up the Hudson River and made a stop at Peekskill.  That trip by water was probably as fast as driving the narrow, winding roads back then, in the automobiles of the day.  There was also a train that could take you to Peekskill, probably in three or four hours.   But the little family on the Lower East Side needed to pack up everything, what little they owned, and put it on Aren’s truck for the move.  Eli reports they had very little by way of possessions.  I picture the four of them driving pressed together in the cab of the truck, my infant father on his father’s lap.

In a short time Paul would be born in Peekskill.  The boys would learn English, march as Jewish Boy Scouts through the streets of their hostile little town, play ball, graduate High School and, as soon as they could, leave Peekskill forever.   A few other things also happened in those years, and I will detail some of them in the next installment.

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.