I ask my sister about Beaver Dam, which she vaguely recalls.  She could not have been much older than two when we played.   She mentions the time our father tossed us into deep snow drifts on the side of the house after a record snowfall that came down when we were little.   I tell her about Azi’s memories of our father as a fun-loving older cousin who affectionately wrestled with him when Azi was little.  Hearing stories of her father’s playfulness before we were born confirms my sister’s theory.  

“We did it to him,” she says, “when we were born, that was the end of any chance of happiness for him.”  

I marshal my usual arguments, quote him the last night of his life about his life being essentially over by the time he was two.  She agrees, seems convinced, realizes that our existence could hardly have been the decisive factor in her father’s happiness or unhappiness, then adds:  “we were the last nails in his coffin.”  

That was part of his genius, making us feel like it was our fault he was angry all the time.  My sister quickly agrees when I mention Rodney Dangerfield’s “your father and I wanted a child so badly — imagine our disappointment when we had YOU”.  

“No, that’s true,” she says, “we were eternal disappointments to him.  I think you more than I was, since he was basically a misogynist and you were always more important to him than I was.”  

I am in danger of veering into personal terrain that is not mine to veer into, so I will stick to my perceptions here.  

I grew up unable to understand my parents’ readiness to get mad and their frequent harshness.  I had nothing to compare it to.  Like most kids, I figured on some level it was normal, just the way the world is.  Dad gets home from a long day at work, mom has had a long, trying day at home with the kids muttering “wait til your father gets home….” and then he walks in the door and she unloads a day of frustration on him.  

“Don’t call ’em my kids,” he scowls, “they’re your kids too,” then, because he has to somehow deal with this shit after a long day of work, he forgets everything he knows about sensitivity training, developmental psychology, group dynamics –it’s pure survival mode in the cold, deep water.  

“You empty-headed little thief,” he says to his little daughter, who once pilfered a quarter off a pile of change.  “What did I tell you about playing with that fucking snake?”  This sends a shudder through the little girl and the mother, both are phobic about serpents.  “If you play with a fucking rattlesnake you’re going to get bit.  Don’t I always tell you that?”   For my part, I remain coiled, vigilant, shaking the rattle on my tail.  

If you get the shit beat out of you every day by an angry bully, like the young Pat Conroy did, you know what is giving you the nightmares, the proneness to depression. If your father is an artist who never uses the crude instrument of a fist or a belt, who constructs an alternate universe where you are always wrong and he is always the victim of his child, somehow, it may take you many more years to realize what you are up against.  It is natural, somehow, to blame yourself.

I have idly thought from time to time that I’d have preferred beatings, which would have stopped by the time I was fifteen, the first time I saw real fear in his face when I stood abruptly during one of his dinnertime tirades and glared at him like I was about to lunge across the table.  Idly is the only way to think of such things, since nobody prefers beatings.  

I just think it would have made things clear: on the subject of his anger, dad is out of control.   He’s nuts.  One day there will be a law to make people like him stop doing this kind of shit.  There could never be a law against the subtle art of my father’s rage.  

Your parents are your first teachers about the world.  It happens, often, that your parents don’t really know shit worth teaching you about the world.  They are struggling themselves, victims who have never overcome the things they were born up against.  Add to it the mass-murder of virtually every relative in their parents’ generation and you have a potent brew.  

“You’re in a chipper mood today,” observes the skeleton.  

I am not in an unchipper mood.  I am carving a gigantic block of marble, these tiny fragments need to be removed to complete the portrait of you.  You recall what my boy Michelangelo used to say about carving a portrait out of a block of marble?  

“It is easy to carve a man out of marble, just cut away the parts that don’t look like the man,” said the skeleton, looking off into the distance.  

Look, that’s how I tolerated friends who barely concealed their rage at me over the years.  I can have this breezy chat with a father who psychologically bludgeoned me every day from the time I was in the crib.  

“You were a very angry baby,” the skeleton reminds me.  

No shit, Shylock.  Look who I had for a father.  

“Point taken,” says the skeleton.  

I think of my longtime friend, and now longtime former friend, Mark, a depressive young genius who could never be happy.  It took me many, many years, but in the end I realized his disappointment in me had little to do with me.   He could never be satisfied with anything in his life.  If the club would admit somebody like him as a member, the fucking club had to be destroyed.  In the end, and it was gratifying in a sick way, I reduced this man of a million convoluted words to sullen silence.  When I was finished with my final argument there was nothing left for him to say.  He had no defense.  I sat and watched him glower and quietly suck his teeth across the table in that Florida diner against the black sky as sheets of rain fell on the parking lot outside.  I enjoyed the sound of the slashing rain against the windows, the silence of this angry man who had for years tried to blame me.

“Well, I never saw how you could have been friends with such a relentlessly selfish prick to begin with,” said the skeleton.  

You always told me I was a poor judge of character.  I could go down the list.  The insane guy, now in a cult, who mooched off me for years.  Who once told me, as I laid down a perfectly serviceable piano part, “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a piano player.”  It was years, and a series of unmistakably escalating provocations, before I finally cut that guy loose.   You taught us we didn’t deserve any better, taught us to tolerate being treated badly.  

“You sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  

Nice.  If you weren’t already a skeleton I’d kick your ass for you.  You know why people like me sound like bitches?  Because the macho man keeps his mouth shut and uses a fist, if it comes to it.  

“I didn’t say you weren’t entitled to sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  “And as for your threat to kick my ass, you remind me of that brash young relief pitcher who claimed he could strike out Ty Cobb on three pitches.”  

I remember that.  When the sportswriter challenged him he said “no doubt I could do it on three pitches, Cobb would be over a hundred years old, for Christsake.”  

“There have been some clever bastards among us, Elie,” the skeleton said.  

Indeed.  Cleverness for its own sake, I don’t know about that these days.  I’m looking for something beyond the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling.  

“Ah, Freidrich Neitzsche, Hitler’s favorite philosopher,” said the skeleton. “‘A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling’, yes, indeed.  Sekhnet taught you that one.”  

Yes.  And let us point out, as if it needs pointing out, that Hitler understood Nietzsche’s philosophy as well as he understood the teachings of Hillel.  

“And let us also stipulate that for all of Nietzsche’s brilliance and insight he had a complete breakdown at age forty and was cared for by his sister for the rest of his life,” said the skeleton.  

But we digress.  It is necessary, if we are to present an honest portrait of you, to show your monstrous side as accurately as possible.  

“Yes, please, my monstrous side needs to be shown accurately, of course,” said the skeleton.  “After all, why leave your father to rest in peace and dignity when you can piss on the skeleton a decade after he’s gone.”  

Don’t, dad, you sound like a bitch.  

“Touché ” said the skeleton.

I visited my cousin Azi a few months back, a man I hadn’t seen in years.  My sister and I always marveled at how much he looked like our father.   The photos of him as a young man, on the walls of his home, posing with his beautiful wife and their three kids, showed an uncanny resemblance to Irv, his first cousin once removed.  (You can see the two of them, as adults, on my sister’s couch by clicking  here)

Azi, as my sister and I remembered him from our childhood, always seemed cheerful, had a good sense of humor, laughed easily and genuinely.   It is hard to imagine that, like his cousin Irv, he could possibly have a dark side.  My sister and I are both unable to imagine it.   Then again, one could have spent a day or two with my father and never have glimpsed anything but a fairly cheerful, droll, highly intelligent man.    Azi and his wife Sue were gracious and highly interactive hosts when we visited them in Israel in November.  Azi, like my father, seemed to be interested in, and knowledgeable about, every subject that came up.

“Sapiens  [A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari] is a great book,” said Azi when I mentioned a fascinating lecture I’d heard by the author, an Israeli professor who wrote the book in Hebrew, the language the American-born Azi read it in.  “You can’t just pick it up and read it like a novel though,” he pointed out.  “It’s more like taking a graduate course, you need to let it sink in.  Read a chapter, think about it, digest it a little, read the next one.”   When I listened to the audio version of the remarkable book I found he was absolutely right.

I’d had some trepidation about contacting Azi when we were planning our trip.  I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, though he sent condolences immediately when my mother died (six years ago tomorrow).  He and Sue used to visit my parents whenever they were in Florida visiting Sue’s father.  I’d had a few pleasant meals with them over the years when we were in Florida at the same time.   The trepidation arose because of my partisan position in a long cold war in our family.  My father had chosen the losing side in that long war between his first cousins, as I too learned to do in most things.  My father loved his seventeen years older first cousin Eli.   The Eli faction had, for decades, had nothing to do with the Nehama faction.  Eli and Nehama hadn’t spoken for the last thirty years of Eli’s life.  Nehama, Eli’s half -sister, was Azi’s mother.

Eli’s mother died shortly after Eli was born, of complications from childbirth.  Eli was raised by his mother’s mother and his three aunts.   Eli’s father remarried and had two more children with his wife Tamarka.  These children were Nehama, a brilliant woman who lived to 102 and had been the first female graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and David, a genius with an eidetic memory who became a lawyer but never needed to practice law as he became the family millionaire.  Nehama married a rabbi, Ben Teller, and they had Azi and his older sister.  

Eli, a rough and charming character with a ferocious temper,  carried on a more than thirty year grudge against his half-sister Nehama; they never spoke after their father, my father’s Uncle Aren, died.  My father allied himself with Eli, I became good friends with Eli in the last years of his life.  It is thanks to Eli that I know the detailed history of the family that I have learned.  

“Well, Eli had his version of history, that’s for sure,” said Azi laughing when the delicate subject of some old story came up over Friday night dinner at their home in Neve Ilan.  I agreed at once, as I have finally learned to do, about a matter of opinion or speculation I might have reflexively taken sides about in former decades.  Eli, although a very candid man, had strong opinions and was not always the most reliable narrator.  Whatever the truth of this particular story may have been, it was easy for me to agree that there were other, completely plausible, sides to it.

I realized, a moment before I spoke and in time to say something else, that Tamarka, who Eli had described as “a bitch on wheels” and “uglier than an ape”, two sentiments my father endorsed, had been Azi’s grandmother.  It was this same Tamarka, I learned from Eli, who had broken up the romance between my grandmother Chava and the red-haired Jewish postman.  It was Tamarka’s rubber tree plant that my young father and his little brother dug their fingernails into, with vegecidal intent, as they dusted the leaves when they helped Chava clean Tamarka’s house.  Chava, it seeemed, would never work off her indenture to Tamarka and Aren; her children were also required to kick in to pay off her passage from Truvovich.  

It was Nehama and Dave who, along with their father Aren and Tamarka, made all decisions regarding my father’s future.  He was to go, along with his brother, to  trade school.  

“Yeah, NYA, Sheet Metal School, ’cause we were too dumb to think about going beyond trade,” said the skeleton, quoting himself from the last conversation of his life.

I was shocked at how much bitterness my dying father still seemed to have toward Nehama, a beautiful woman who sang in a high melodious voice and served my young sister and me ice cream sodas in chilled metal tumblers whenever we visited her as children.   Nehama and Ben lived very close to us in Queens when my sister and I were kids.  They moved to Jerusalem when they retired, around the time Azi, Sue and the oldest of their three kids emigrated to found a new moshav outside of Jerusalem.    It was largely my dying father’s bitterness that made me hesitate to contact Azi until a couple of weeks before we finalized our travel plans.  

Azi at one point expressed, in the gentlest way, his perplexity as a younger man to see the hard-edged enmity I always seemed to have toward my father.  In Azi’s recollection his older cousin Irv, who he remembers with great love, was a fun-loving playmate when Azi was a boy and a kind, brilliant and humorous man when they were both adults.  “We used to wrestle all the time when I was a kid,” said Azi.   When my father came out of the army Azi was a young boy.  My father always loved young kids and interacted with them quite naturally.  

“I remember he took me aside when he got engaged to your mother,” Azi said, clearly amused by the memory.  “He told me we wouldn’t be wrestling too much any more, that he was getting a new wrestling partner.”  

This reminded me of a game my father invented that my sister and I used to play with him when we were very little.   My father would lay on the double bed in his bedroom, take off his glasses and say “Beaver Dam!”.   This was the signal for my sister and me to jump on to the bed and begin trying to roll his huge body toward the edge, and over it, as a log in our beaver dam.   We loved this game, shoving the top of our heads against his ribs and pushing as hard as we could.  One of us would dive down toward his legs to push from there, get a grip on him, try to topple him on to the floor.    This freewheeling physical fun, accompanied by our father’s humorous sounds and commentary,  was probably similar to Azi’s experience with his cousin Irv.

I have no recollection of how many times we played Beaver Dam.  I do recall that at least once the two tiny, tireless beavers managed to roll this gigantic log on to the dam, over the side of the bed on to the floor.  I think my sister will immediately remember this game too, although she couldn’t have been more than two or three when we last played it.   What I remember clearly is how every session of Beaver Dam ended.

“Goddamn it!” my father would bawl to his wife, “he kneed me in the balls!”   This confirmed what my father knew from the beginning, when as a tiny baby I’d eye him accusingly from my crib, that I would do anything to hurt him.  He’d cry out to our mother that I had deliberately kneed, or kicked, or punched him directly in the balls.    

“Did you?” asked Sekhnet when I read her the account of the game.  “Maybe you did it unconsciously,” she suggested.    It’s possible, I suppose, though I have no recollection of intent to do anything but get leverage and roll the gigantic log on to the dam.   In the grappling I don’t doubt that he may have gotten a knee or elbow in the balls.  

“Well, it’s my own fault, really.   Everyone who plays Log in Beaver Dam knows that you wear a goddamn cup, since a knee or elbow in the balls from a flailing little beaver is pretty much inevitable.   But I was a young father and naive as a baby,” said the skeleton.

It is a cliche used to describe the pathetic:  “his father was so mean to him!”  said with sideways marionette’s quake of the head and a mocking little wave of the hand.  “Her mother was a nightmare,” is sometimes said with a touch more sincerity, but, in general, hearing an adult talk about how mean a parent was brings a smirk to the cheek.  

“Well, you hit on something there, Elie.  That’s why I said the other day that I don’t hold anything against my parents,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

“Look, there’s no doubt that I was a bastard to you and your sister, and that I did terrible harm to both of you, and put obstacles in front of you in this uphill world that made things a lot harder for both of you.  I accept all that, and like I told you right before I died, I was sorry about it.  But beyond that, as an adult, you have to find a way to move on.   You can’t keep blaming your painful childhood.”  

Well, of course, you can keep blaming your painful childhood, many people do that, consciously or unconsciously.   But I take your larger point, it’s like forgiveness.  We learn that forgiveness is not primarily for the person you forgive, though it also makes that angry, guilty asshole feel better.  Forgiveness is a gift we give mainly to ourselves.  The understanding that while you cannot change a bad thing that was done to you, you can digest it to the point where you can let it go, exhale it as some other gas.   We can learn to become like the plant that breathes in toxic gas and exhales oxygen.  We must do this for ourselves and for the larger sake of peace among those we love.  

“Uh… OK.  You’re getting a little abstract and poetic here, but I get the point,” said the skeleton.  

Plus, there are also certain things that at the time were hurtful that you can later see through more mature eyes as having been inevitable.  You remember that ass-whipping you gave my sister and me in the Badlands?  

“Heh, yes, I remember that very well.  And I have to say, you and your sister brought that on yourselves.  It was one of the few times I ever lifted a hand to either of you,” he said.  

All true.  Yes, and my sister feels the same way, so do I, in fact, even at the time we didn’t really hold it against you.  It was one of those things that, looking back on it, had been inevitable.   I don’t remember if I told the story here already.  

“I don’t think so,” said the skeleton, “and, anyway, you have to start gathering these 330 pages into themes and bunches and pruning them and adding things where more detail is called for.  Write the poor little story, what do you have to lose?”  

You were still working as a teacher back in, we’ll say, 1962, and so you had those blessed ten weeks off every summer.  Somewhere I probably still have the bit I wrote about What I Did on My Summer Vacation from the beginning of second grade.   We’d gone to the AAA on Hillside Avenue and while my sister and I gathered up tons of glossy tourist brochures, you sat with someone from Triple A and they took a green marker and made lines down a series of spiral bound map books they called Trip Tix. The long pages were bound at the top, like a meter maid’s ticket book.   The Trip Tix laid out the route exactly, mile by mile, and had notations for every historical site, or site of interest to kids, along the 3,000 mile drive.  There was also a fat book for every region we’d be passing through, with selected hotels and restaurants, each with a notation about how they felt about young children and dogs.  We were going to be traveling with Patches.  

“A brilliant dog, Patches.   She’d proven her smarts on the street as a very artful and independent little pup before she decided we were going to take her in.  You remember she used to come back from Union Turnpike munching on a chicken carcass she’d find behind the bar?”  

She was a smart dog, alright.  I remember one time she was not so smart, though, or at least, not very prudent.  

“Yosemite National Park,” said the skeleton.  

Yup.  We were stopped in a line of cars on that leafy road.  

“I remember it vividly,” said the skeleton.  

I know, this is for the reader.  Several cars were stopped in front and behind us as we came upon a small group of roadside bears, up on their hind legs, begging. There were signs all over the park about not feeding the bears, and every ranger reminded us of that warning, but some of these shameless hustlers still managed to get fed.  You and mom were obeying the law, as you most often did, and the car windows stayed rolled up.  A gigantic dark reddish brown bear was standing by mom’s window, to us it looked like a grizzly bear, it seemed to be about seven feet tall, and Patches, who was on mom’s lap, lunged toward the bear.  

“Heart in mouth moment,” said the skeleton.

The bear wasn’t about to take this shit from some little pampered pooch in a car and it swung an enormous paw at mom’s window.  The paw was almost the size of the entire window, and you could see the gigantic, sharp claws and the huge light brown pads on the underside of it as it pounded against the glass.  

“It seems like a miracle the glass didn’t shatter,” observed the skeleton.  

It does, and thinking of it now, I suppose the very size of the paw may have been a decisive factor.  The weight of the hit was apparently distributed across the glass enough that the glass didn’t shatter.  Then again, Physics was the only course I truly had no idea what was going on in.  

“Lucky for you that pinko you had in high school thought you were a cool kid and passed you anyway,” said the skeleton.  

Well, as you know, I’ve always been an extremely lucky bastard.

“As were we all that day in Yosemite.  Jesus that was a scary moment,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   Anyway, it was a hot summer, literally thousands of miles in the car, sweltering in places like St. Louis, and I recall that huge bag of M & Ms we had in the car turning to mush.  We started saying “melts in the bag, not in your hand” as a riff on their ad: melts in your mouth, not in your hand.  

“Well, that was before the age of air-conditioned cars.  And it was the height of summer.  We stayed out of the heart of the Old Confederacy, where it was really, really hot, in more ways than one.  We were heading across country, after all, but we stayed out of the deep South deliberately too.  That AAA guide would have also needed to tell us which hotels allowed Negroes, and Jews, along with kids and dogs.  The Klan still ran much of the south and there were no federally enforced anti-lynching laws yet,” the skeleton shook his head.  “We were already post-racial back then, see, there was no need to protect the good Negroes who did what they were told.  If some angry asshole Negro got out of hand, too uppity, well, it was a state’s right to deal with a bad apple like that as they saw fit.”

I remember passing some share croppers’ shacks on the side of the highway somewhere down south.  Raggedy little black kids moving around outside these tar-paper hovels.  That may have been on a trip to Florida, though, I think it was in South Carolina.  

“Yeah, I remember you asking about those shacks, and I think you’re right, that was probably a couple of years later when we started going to Florida,” said the skeleton.  

Reminds me of another ass-whipping my sister and I almost got in Harold’s father’s place in Miami Beach where we stayed during that first trip to Florida.  I don’t know how you didn’t beat our asses that time.  

“I was always a man of great restraint,” said the skeleton, deadpan.  “Even when I was calling you a fucking cobra with a face twisted and contorted in hate I was being restrained.  Even as the spit flew out of my mouth and my face turned colors.”  

It goes without saying.

Back to the Badlands then.  We’d been in the car for weeks by then, and going a bit stir crazy, I was probably six and my sister would have been four.  We’d seen a lot of cool stuff, but there had also been hours upon hours in the back seat of the station wagon.  We were in a rangers’ station and the ranger was showing a slide show.  For whatever reason, the slides were projected in such a tiny size that, even lying on the floor right in front of the screen as my sister and I were, it was hard to see the details of things like the Tufted Ear Squirrel that the ranger was droning on about.  We started to laugh at the absurdity of these postage stamp-sized images at the front of this large, dark room and we couldn’t stop.  You hissed at us, very embarrassed, and it only made things worse.  We were delirious.  

“When you two started laughing like that, it could get bad very fast,” said the skeleton.  

Well, it did in the Badlands that day.  You’d been driving for thousands of miles by then, and it was hot, and your kids were out of control.  Even at the time, somehow, and in spite of how young we were, we seem to have recognized all that.

“If you don’t stop laughing I’m going to whip your asses,” you finally threatened, miles from the rangers’ station, when we still could not stop howling.  This, of course, only made us laugh harder.  And we couldn’t stop.  

You pulled the car on to the gravel shoulder of that desert road, yanked us out and pulled us to the back of the car.  You threw down the little panel in the back of the station wagon and shoved us toward it, seemingly yanking down our pants, and underpants, and drawing your belt out of the loops in one motion.  Our little hands were flat on the panel and our asses were extended in the proper orientation for a good ass-whipping.  I don’t recall the feeling of the strap across my naked ass at all.  What I remember, vividly, are the faces of the kids in the passing car as we were about to be whipped.  They were pressed against the glass and laughing deliriously as their car roared past.  I know my sister saw them too.  

“Well, as President Kennedy said ‘life’s unfair’.  They got a free show of two kids being whipped bare-assed for exactly the same thing they were doing– laughing their asses off.”  

I remember hoping we’d pass their car further down that desolate road, pulled over, and get to see them getting their little asses whipped, but we didn’t.  

“Life’s unfair, Elie, and then you die,” said the skeleton, lying back down to continue his long nap.

The skeleton of my father sat up in his grave in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery on that tree-lined country road, Oregon Road, in Cortlandt, NY (though you won’t find it reasonably placed on any map) and summoned me.   I have to admit, these conversations with a man long dead are starting to wear me out.  On the other hand, the duty to honor our father and mother does not end at the grave.  

“Exactly,” said the skeleton, “and that’s what I want to talk to you about.  It’s human nature, as you know, to look for causes for things, particularly things that trouble us.  That impulse to find a cause for vexations without explanation animates violent mobs and great thinkers alike.  It’s tempting, when you think you’ve found a cause, to believe that it explains everything.   Nothing explains everything.  That’s one thing that begins to sink in once you are dead, Elie.”  

I knew what he was driving at, of course.   It is one thing to step forward into a life of new insight, it is another to avoid stepping back into the dimness of your previous life.  

“We had this mostly senseless debate for most of our life together,” said the skeleton, “arguing about how much a person can really change, if at all, on a fundamental level.   It is a stupid argument, really.  Of course we can change things that bother us enough, of course we can’t change other things that make us most vulnerable.  It’s not all our choice, on one level, and it’s all our choice, on another. You can talk about the role of genetic predisposition, DNA, early childhood experience, circumstance, luck — humans are complicated biological machines. But I think it’s ultimately a mistake to blame someone else for the misery in our own life.”  

Interesting pivot, dad, back to where this discussion started so many years ago.  A mistake, you say, to hold others accountable for their destructive actions and the impact those actions have on us?  

“OK, I can see the problem with that.  Fine, let’s take this away from a discussion of intangible abstractions, then.  I don’t blame my parents for what happened to me in my life.   In particular, I don’t blame my mother,” the skeleton’s neck looked suddenly stiffer, if such a thing is even possible.  “I have to imagine she suffered terrible things to make her unhappy enough to whip her own baby in the face.”  

No doubt about that, though it’s two different things to imagine the terrible things she suffered and to hold her accountable for the suffering she caused.  One can only imagine the miseries of life in that doomed little hamlet Truvovich.  In fact, one is forced to imagine them, since the place and all its inhabitants are gone without a trace.  If not for the Russo-Japanese War, and your Uncle Aren drafted for a twenty year stretch by the Czar, Aren probably never would have run away across the ocean with Fischel Bobrow and a guy named Fleischman and wound up in New York City learning to vulcanize tires at the dawn of the automobile.  If Aren hadn’t arrived, Chava, my grandmother, would have remained in Truvovich and died with everyone else in her family as the shtetl was wiped off the world map forever by anonymous murderers.  

“Well, yes, thankfully she made it to America, courtesy of her brother Aren.  What we know of the lives of Jews in that part of the world, and seeing what their eventual fate was, we do not imagine a very happy life there even for a little Jewish girl who was born happy as a clam.   I don’t imagine that my mother was born with a great talent for happiness, and she certainly found very little reason for it here in America.  As to what made her so violent toward me, it’s really impossible to say.”  

Is it, though?  How do we find it impossible to say?  She suffered enough to make her violently enraged at her infant son.   The suffering must have been tremendous to make her whip a baby in the face.  

“OK, I don’t think I’m making my point.   It doesn’t really matter what made her that way, I guess that’s what I’m saying.  Would I have preferred a mother who didn’t act like that?  Of course.   Can I blame her for everything that I suffered in my own life?  I really don’t think so.”  

Interesting perspective, for a dead man.  I will have to mull this over a bit more and get back to you.  

“You do that,” said the skeleton, then he seemed to wink.  “You’ve had a lot of practice mulling things over, haven’t you?”