“Well, you know, Elie, one very important question you still need to answer remains  unaddressed.   You have to figure out why anyone would give a shit about a poor Jewish kid from Peekskill who, by pure luck is rescued by The Second World War (no combat), the GI Bill, hard work, attains American Dream.  In his comfortable suburban home he was The Dreaded Unit to his children and not very tender with his wife, so what?”  said the skeleton of my father.  

“I mean, why would a reader give a shit about my life?  I was pretty much nobody.   I was not the best man, but there were many, many worse men than me.  Statistically I was like millions of other guys of my generation, the so-called Greatest Generation.  I came of age when America was fighting a just war, the last just war, against manifest evil, actual Nazis and Japanese militarist fanatics.  Every American who fought in that war was entitled to a middle class life, if he didn’t throw away the chance.”  

“That post-war period, during the early Cold War years, was the largest growth of a middle class probably ever in human history.  When it was over, people became very, very bitter.   In the end, when the populace gets de-spirited and bitter enough, you get someone like Trump.”  

“Another way to think of it is as a monster story, and I have to admit I was a monster as a father to both you and your sister.   We discussed this right before I died, you understand I became aware of how fucked up I was when I used to machine gun you and your sister at the dinner table.  I couldn’t really see it for all the years I was desperately fighting for my life, but I saw it as I was dying, as you know.”  

“Still, it’s not your classic monster story anyway, you’d have to write it really masterfully to get the nuances of my monstrosity.   I  wielded a metaphorical machine gun, strafing in a subtle manner, leaving no dramatic physical wounds.  I could justify everything, very convincingly, and I inflicted my damage with the relentless cruelty of that.   I ground you two down, my ground game was awesome.  You and your sister were going to lose the war, that was the main thing.”  

“I was, if I might say it about myself, an eccentric monster.   My subtle monster story might fascinate a few freaks, the sophisticated, creative ways my sadism expressed itself, the entirely psychological palette I used to such great effect. But it’s not a story built for more than a small, specialty niche demographic. Nobody will be very impressed by what a monstrous dick I was to you and your sister.”  

“In the scheme of monstrous pricks, I’d hardly rate, though I know to you and your sister what I inflicted was just as bad as what the first rate monsters do.  In any random group of fathers, there are a few who commit truly horrible abuses against their kids.  I never crossed that line, I like to think, though I certainly know I did my damage, serious damage.”  

“Maybe a better way of thinking of my story is playing the angle of how almost universal this intense childhood pain you’re talking about is, my childhood, your childhood, my mother and father’s childhoods.  It’s a matter of degree, of course, but few children escape traumatic experiences altogether.   Childhood involves a certain amount of trauma for all but a few fortunate kids.”  

“There is something scary, scarring, enraging, humiliating, traumatizing, in almost every child’s life– think of all the ways a kid can be scarred for life.  They call these Adverse Childhood Experiences now, and there are quite a few such experiences on the list, with lifelong effects.   Poverty comes with its own set of them.  Hunger is one, being constantly hungry can really fuck with your mind, as well as your body.  Being beaten is certainly an adverse childhood experience, especially if the one beating you is your father or your mother.   Kids are raped, how do you recover from that one?   Others are viciously told just to shut the fuck up every time they open their mouths.   A parent who is intoxicated all the time, or two parents who are constantly at war.   The ways to traumatize a kid are limited only by your sick imagination”

“I never knew what trauma my poor father must have gone through to leave him ‘two eyes, a nose and a mouth’ as the poetic Eli described him to you.”  

Eli finally explained to me why your father was named Harry and his brother was also named Harry.  I was confused when introduced to Uncle Harry, who was my grandfather Harry’s brother.    

“They were half-brothers.  They had two different mothers.  My grandfather married a woman with two or three boys, one named Harry.  His son was also Harry.  So my father was the second wife’s step-son, and not a very welcome Harry in a family that already had a kid named Harry,” said the skeleton.  

According to Eli she was the classic evil step-mother.   She was reportedly fond of whacking her step-son Harry in the head with heavy objects.  She would slug him with a cooking utensil, a thick book, a wooden board.  He adapted, apparently, by keeping a straight face and looking straight ahead.  He rarely spoke, Eli said, and when he did, it was in a tentative, ironic manner that Eli described as drily comical, infinitely subtle.  

“Well, it was certainly infinitely subtle.   Eli must have been the only one who would describe my father as ‘drily comical’.   It makes sense, what Eli said about my father being hit in the head frequently when he was a kid.   He was completely unable to cope with this world, my father.  He was illiterate, unsophisticated, overwhelmed by the demands of the material world.   It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’d had concussions, traumatic brain injury, something like that.  People thought he was retarded, that’s why when I went to kindergarten as a big, blind dummy who couldn’t speak to anyone everyone just figured, ‘well, his father is a retard, what do you expect?'”

“The retard doesn’t fall far from the retard tree, as they say.  I know we don’t say ‘retard’ anymore, it’s considered a pejorative term for low IQ people.  Moron used to be a word, a descriptive term for a certain range of low IQ people.  However you want to say it nowadays, my father, to all outward appearances, was a dullard.”  

I’m going to have to stop you there, dad.   I know you don’t have to get up tomorrow, dad, but I do.  I’m tired as hell, so I will bid you a good nap and, God willing,  I’ll catch you on the other side.  

“Goodnight.  Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

My father, the night before he died, told me I had no idea what it was like to have been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill, which he claimed to have been.  This stunned me.  There are many things you could say about my father, some of them not at all complimentary, but it was impossible to say he wasn’t extremely bright.   Well-read, with an excellent memory and a quick wit, it didn’t take more than a short chat with him to realize how intelligent he was.

I asked him how he could possibly say he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.

“Hmmmmf, by far!” he huffed, more than seventy years later, still convinced he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.  There were a handful of Jewish families in Peekskill back then, most of them, I imagine, gathered in the tiny First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill, a narrow white structure as austere looking as a Lutheran church.  The Jewish kids of Peekskill were a fairly small, random group of kids.  Unless fate had strewn an astoundingly improbable group of young Jewish geniuses in Peekskill, I had no idea how he could make this claim.  He died a few hours after insisting he’d been, by far, the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill, so I never had a chance to follow up.

“Well, I can’t help you much here, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.  “As you know, I know pretty much what you know about any of this.”  

Let us look at what is known, then.  By 1929 or 1930 when you started kindergarten, you spoke no English, only Yiddish.   Though you were born in New York City, you didn’t understand the most basic English questions put to you by teacher and classmates.   Your mother famously went to school and faced the principal, who wanted to know how it was that an American boy came to school knowing no English.  She delivered the line that had probably been fed to her, a line immortalized (so to speak) by Eli.   “He’ll loin…” she assured the principal, in one of her few English sentences.  

“Well, she was right about that,” said the skeleton.

Your vision was 20/400 meaning you could not clearly see your mocking little classmates’ faces, or much of anything else.  Not much reading in kindergarten, so no worries there, but classmates’ feet, thrust in your path, would not be easily seen.  You were bigger than the other kids, maybe your mother didn’t enroll you when you were first eligible.  So, as far as you were treated by your merciless little classmates, you were the Big Dummy.  

“I was the Big Dummy,” said the skeleton.  

Hold on, there.  If you were legally blind, and hampered by not knowing English, how is any of that a reflection on your intelligence, which is obviously far above average?  

“I was the dumbest Jewish kid in that school, there is no doubt about that,” said the skeleton.  

Here’s what I’m thinking.  You emerge from kindergarten with half decent English and you’re put into the dumb class for first grade.  Most of the Jewish kids are in the other class, as Jews were famously studious, especially back then when immigrant Jews pushed their first generation American children hard.  Maybe there are a couple of Jewish kids with you in the dumb class, but they are gone by the time you are promoted, still blind, to second grade.  Now we are in 1931 or 1932.  The Depression is in full, depressing swing.  Your family, poor before the Depression hit, is now the poorest family in that hard-hit river town.  

“That much is all true,” said the skeleton.  

Herbert Hoover was still the president, presiding over the shit-show that would doom his presidency.  Hoover was no friend of the working man, or the unemployed man either, for that matter, or the children of such men.  That’s one reason he lost the Electoral College 472-59 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, class traitor.  

“We can get into FDR some other time.  He ran against a Socialist candidate and a Communist candidate, as well as Hoover.  They didn’t get any electoral votes, natch, but their movements were forces in society in 1932.  FDR saved America for capitalism with his New Deal, but that is not what we’re talking about here.”  

I recall you telling me that the eye-glasses I selected, when I was a teenager, wire frames based on John Lennon’s, were just like the glasses you wore, the humiliating badge of being on Relief.  

“They made us wear those wire rimmed glasses, the cheapest to produce, I guess, and it was a sign to everyone we passed that we were on the dole,” said the skeleton.  

But here’s the question, dad, now unanswerable with anything besides my best guess: what year did you get those Relief glasses?   To ask it differently: how old were you before you could finally see?

“Well, obviously, Elie, I can’t tell you that, but, before you pursue this theory, you recall that I always flipped my glasses up on top of my head and held the newspaper close to my face, I didn’t need glasses to see up close.  I was near-sighted, like Magoo.”  

OK, fine.  You also had Lasik surgery toward the end of your life that made your vision basically 20/20.  

“Yop,” said the skeleton. 

I’m picturing you in first grade, in that class with the other dumbest kids in Peekskill, and the teacher is pointing at the letter A on the board in front of the room.  The other kids are all chanting “A”.  The teacher is holding up words that start with A, with pictures.   Apple, alligator, asshole.  You are muttering along with them, but could not possibly see the letters she was teaching you.  

“I don’t know, I have no specific memory of this, but it sounds plausible,” said the skeleton.

At the end of Hoover’s term he passed some kind of half-hearted Relief Act, but it was directed toward the states, as far as I can tell, bailing them out of boiling water.  I doubt glasses for kids were even a remote consideration in that first bill.  FDR, shortly after his inauguration on March 4, 1933 (a month and a few days after Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany) passed an Emergency Relief Act that might have covered glasses for poor kids.   If so, your first pair of glasses might have been made around your ninth birthday, meaning you were legally blind from kindergarten to, say, fourth grade.

“Your guess is as good as a dead man’s,” said the skeleton.

If your first pair of glasses were made under the Social Security Act, that would have been 1935, when you were eleven.  

“The math is right,” said the skeleton.  

“I note here, while we’re doing the math, that I was fourteen when the federal minimum wage law was passed.  We take Social Security and the shamefully low Minimum Wage for granted.  But the same law that mandated a federal minimum wage also created the forty hour week (something else we take for granted) and banned child labor.  Meaning, if my vision had been OK, any time before my bar mitzvah I could have legally been forced to work in some factory, for as many hours as required and for whatever slave wage offered, if a job had been available.  Ain’t dat some shit?”

Dassum shit, as my father used to say.

My family, all through the sixties, as the Vietnam war and the war for Civil Rights here in America raged on TV, had our own war every night at the dinner table.  This is not my imagination speaking, it was an actual war.  In case there was any mistaking it, our father would grimly remind my sister and me regularly “you may win this battle, but you’re going to lose the war.”  

What kind of parents style their struggles with their children as a war? How does it nurture a child to predict that, in the end, no matter how many bloody battles they manage to win, they are going to lose the war?  What war?  What exactly is this fucking war, dad?   Speculating about what kind of parent convinces their child that they are in a losing war is a dodgy exercise, I think.  All I can say definitively is that, in my case, it was parents who’d been raised by brutal tyrants themselves, and had lifelong difficulty controlling their own over-boiling rage.  

My mother loved me, there is no question about that.  Yet I have a vivid, and hilarious (in retrospect, I didn’t see the grand humor at the time) memory of my mother shaking me vigorously by the shoulders at the dinner table.  She was frustrated, I was small enough to be grabbed by the shoulders and vigorously shaken.  As she shook me, in the manner of a terrier shaking a rat, she demanded angrily, each syllable accompanied by a shake  “What did an-y-bod-y e-ver do to you to make you so fuck-ing ang-ry!!?”  

I had no sensible answer at the time, though it occurs to me now I could have said “I don’t know, maybe things like what you’re doing right now.  Would you let me go, please? and stop screaming, I’m a few inches away.”   The point is, my mother, who I was much closer to in many ways than I was to my father, was as capable of incoherent rage as my father was.   They simply did not know how to control themselves when they were frustrated, which was often.  

I don’t blame them for being frustrated.  Life is often frustrating.  We have our noses rubbed in our powerlessness countless times every day.   Corporations are people, increasingly we are not and the cards are ever more unfairly stacked for the corporate “person” against the human person.  We are powerless consumers manipulated into buying things we don’t need, things we are told will make us feel better about ourselves, voting for representatives who will not hesitate to sell our interests to the highest bidder.   People who pine for long-past golden days are nostalgic for a sense that we are not all endlessly manipulable saps.  We always have been, but much more so now, in the age of instant data-driven demographic manipulation.

My parents were born at the dawn of our modern age of mass manipulation. My father, born in 1924, came on the scene around the time of the radio.  By the time he was old enough to understand what he was hearing over the radio we had our first mass media president, FDR, skillfully using the magical new wireless medium to reach every American in their living rooms.  Poor as my father’s family was, there was some radio somewhere they could huddle around to hear FDR address the nation in his Fireside Chats.  Movies were the other new form of mass media, and both of my parents saw them as often as they could.  My mother went every Saturday, saw the newsreel between features, watched the events unfolding in Europe and elsewhere.  

Fast forward to now, every kid has a device in their pocket that shows them endless, opinionated newsreels endlessly.   The torrent of targeted content is unstoppable.   Kids think they are the best informed generation in history, since they have instant access to the five second answer to any question.  We can think of this as “information” but it is most often slickly packaged commercially-driven manipulation.  Being constantly bombarded by “content” also fractures the already shaky human ability to focus and concentrate, shatters it into one and two second twitches.   The world is constantly changing, for the most part without wisdom increasing.  So be it.

Anyway, I don’t blame my parents for being frustrated, for having been the victims of frustrated, violent mothers.  The only thing I can blame them for, and this is a stretch, is not gaining any insight into their life-long battles with rage.  You’d hope a new parent could examine their life and reactions honestly enough to realize that blaming a new-born baby for being irrationally enraged, adversarial and vicious was probably not the entire answer to the question of why life with baby seemed so impossibly hard.

Back to the war at the dinner table.  The tension would be mounting all day, my mother making the famous threat of that era “wait ’til your father gets home!”  As my mother served dinner, after my father came in from his exhausted nap, the sniping would begin and my father would as often as not beg our mother “feed me after them!”  It was unbearable to him, trapped in his corner seat near the toaster, between the wall, my sister and the refrigerator, to have to fight this endless battle every single night after a long day at work, before he headed off to his second job.  

At his second job he interacted with Jewish teenagers who seemed to love him, as many of his high school students also seemed to.  He was a hip guy with a good sense of humor and no taste for bullshit.    Every so often one of these kids would become a surrogate son (no surrogate daughters that I can recall).  He developed a lifelong friendship with the last of these surrogate sons, a man named Benjie.  

But at the dinner table, he was cursed, besieged by his own bloodthirsty offspring, at war.   He was reduced to threatening his snotty, doomed children, that, although they my have been winning battle after battle against him at the table, they were destined, in the end to lose the fucking war.   He guaranteed it, bitterly, angrily.  “You will lose the war!”  What fucking war, exactly?  

“Well, of course, I can’t defend any of this,” said the skeleton of my father, “it was an existential war.  I’d been raised by an angry mother who literally whipped me in the face from the time I could stand.   You can judge her, decide she was psychotic or whatever judgement you’d like to make.  The fact is, I was forced to eat shit and ask for more from the time I was two.  From the time I could stand, I was made to shudder in fear, by my own mother. You do the math.”  

I get it.   Here’s what I was thinking.  My sister and I did the best we could to survive in this existential war.  The alliances were constantly shifting, but we could never forget that we were in an ongoing battle, in the midst of a long war we were told we were going to lose.  It came to me, the other night before I fell asleep, that since we were always duking it out and fighting for our lives, we would often take it out on mom.  Yeah, these two little bastards would join forces to mock and torture your ally, mom, on a regular basis.   We tortured the fuck out of her.  

“Don’t sound so happy about it,” said the skeleton.  

I’m not happy about it.  It’s sickening, really, to think about.   We were being bullied regularly and we found someone to take it out on.  Mom was a prime target for bullying– her mother had bullied her, you bullied her.  It was irresistible to us when we were kids, being in a war anyway and sensing her vulnerability, we bullied her.   She fought back, she ranted, she cried, she even lashed out at us a couple of times physically, usually with dire consequences that left her crying.   But we tortured her.  She may have won a few battles but we…

“Don’t even say it.   Why are you telling this to a dead man?” said the skeleton, turning his face to show me his profile.  

The apple, it is said, doesn’t fall far from the tree.  

“That’s beneath you, Elie,” said the skeleton, shaking his head slowly.  

Maybe so, but who gives a shit? You may win this particular battle, dad…

“As you grow old, Elie,  you start to realize that you can do almost nothing to influence anyone’s particular stay in their own private hell,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Every person lives in the situation they need to live in, for a variety of entangled psychological reasons.   Just like you can’t truly know anybody else’s demons, and a fear that threatens someone else to death may be nothing to you, the personalized hells people find themselves in are largely beyond rational discussion.   I’m sure you’ve realized this by now.”  

I have, obviously.  Terror is the subject we are least likely to be able to talk about.  We are all geniuses of self-justification.  Everyone believes they are doing what they must do, in the face of what they are up against.

“Not only that, Elie, the devil in each person’s hell provides just enough tenderness to make leaving impossible, that much and not a drop more.  Each hell is perfectly tailored for an exact, personalized fit.  Women who stay with men who abuse them, it’s always the same story.  ‘He showed such remorse…’, ‘he is the only one who truly understands me,’ ‘he really loves me,’ ‘he can’t live without me…'”  

“Think about this, Elie, when you felt most terrified as a child wasn’t I great about calming you down, reassuring you?”  

Yes, you did seem to have a talent for soothing us when things were really scary.  

“Right, so I showed you that concerned face, that empathy and kindness I usually withheld.  You could see my love, my capacity to be a caring person, a supportive father.  Then, as soon as the crisis passed, it was back to business as usual.  I blamed you and your sister for everything.  I raged at you both. I used my superior arguing skills to back you into corners in a crazed attempt to never be wrong, about anything.  My skin literally cracked open from time to time, from the pressures of my life, and I had to be hospitalized.   I told you that your acne was the hatred pouring out of your skin.  ‘Nice, dad…’ I can imagine you saying back then, though of course, you responded angrily to the in-your-face outrage, as most people would.   To this day, and be honest, your sister still believes that you and her being born ruined mom’s and my lives.”  

I don’t want to go very far into what anybody else feels in this account.  This conversation is between you and me.  But your point is well-taken.  If my sister and I had never seen your capacity to be a loving father, it would have been much easier for us both to tell you to go fuck off, permanently.  There would have been nothing in it for us.   The kindness you sometimes showed when we were most worried was enough to keep us hoping we were not alone in our moments of greatest vulnerability.  

“It’s like a pitcher who doesn’t have a great fastball, showing it once in a while in a strategic situation, just to set up another pitch, to keep the hitter honest, off-balance.  Look, Elie, I obviously feel bad about all this.   My mother, may she rest in peace, and I still can’t phrase this, really… let’s just say she was not a very tender person.   But she always called me ‘Sonny’.   You should have heard the heart-breaking way she said it, that American term of endearment coming out of her Yiddish mouth.   Every time she called me that I felt a tiny flush of tenderness, just enough to keep me from turning my back on her for good.”

This is how monsters do it, then.   They show you just enough tenderness to keep you on the hook.   They play on your need for mercy by letting you have just a taste once in a while.  You took good care of your mother in her final years, I’m sure.  

“Of course I did,” said the skeleton.  “Just like you and your sister took good care of mom after I died.  There was never a question of that in our family.”

 Suddenly the air gets chilly.  It’s hard for me to hear the phrase ‘our family’ without thinking of history, thirteen years before I was born, when all but four or five of my grandparents’ large generation were slaughtered.  

“Let’s not go there today, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

We were talking about personal hells, how about this one?  Thirteen years before I was born, as many of grandma and pop’s twelve siblings who were still alive were marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of Vishnevitz, babies in their arms, holding children by the hand, mom’s first cousins.  

“I get it, Elie, believe me,” said the skeleton quickly.  It looked like he was about to try to whistle.  

While two hundred miles north other agents of hostile states were plowing your mother’s entire settlement into the marsh across the Pina from Pinsk, with no trace today.  

“Yes,” said the skeleton, “I know.”  

“Recursive, recursive!  Neurotically recursive, this endless rumination on some horrific thing beyond digestion,” said the imaginary psychiatrist, popping his head up from a patch of clover near my father’s grave.

“Shut up!” said the skeleton and me in unison.  

“He does have a point, though.  This is a historical reality there is nothing you can do anything about.  It’s almost incomprehensible,” said the skeleton.

Except that it happens over and over and over in human history.  Look at the poor children in Yemen right now, to take one example.  Does anyone know why our ally is starving them to death, with our help?

“Not an unreasonable point,” said the skeleton, peering down the hill toward the nearby Hudson, invisible through the trees.

I have been working sporadically on a book about my father’s life, the Book of Irv.  I’ve spent nineteen months, so far, putting this puzzle together in a darkened room.   For the first year I worked on the manuscript pretty much daily.  That was the easy part, remembering what I could and writing it down. For the last six months I’ve been wrestling with how to put it all together to best show my father as a three dimensional person.  

My sister reminds me that we can never truly know another person’s inner life with any degree of certainty.    This portrait I’m assembling of my father’s life is an attempt to show him in action, his conflicts, what he loved, what he hated, the tides of history he contended with, the personal challenges he faced, the regrets he died with.  It is, it goes without saying, my version of his life.  

“I think you need to add one crucial piece to this description, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, sitting up in his grave.  “Much of this book is the conversation you and I should have had all along.   As you reminded your sister the other day, though we usually fought, we were in agreement about virtually every important thing: politics, humanism, kindness to animals, our duty to protect the weak– ironic as that last one may seem coming from a man who tortured his children as much as I did.  As mean as I was to you guys, I managed to instill values that both of you try to live by to this day.  As you told your sister, that is the true puzzle of my life: my highly evolved belief in justice and mercy versus my tendency toward merciless cruelty.”  

“And, yeah, yeah, I know, whipped in the face when he was a baby, insisting to his kids that childhood experience has nothing to do with adult life, lavishing loving friendship on a string of surrogate sons while lashing his own kids ruthlessly for their failure to fulfill his unobtainable need from them — to make the pain of his childhood disappear– a perplexing, hypocritical horse’s ass dying with bitter regrets, The End.  But, as you note, not such an interesting book.”

More interesting, to me, is the story of how high you climbed toward your potential, given the impossibly heavy boot of the world on your soul as you were growing up.   Imagine beginning your life at school as the Big Dummy, the biggest kid in your kindergarten class, unable to speak the language and legally blind.  Add in the Depression hitting with the stock market crash during your first weeks in that demoralizing classroom.  By the time you’re nine, Hitler is in charge in Germany.   If your mother had been the kindest woman in the world, how does a kid overcome all that?  

Your mother was, sadly, not the kindest woman in the world, but you apparently made your way among peers who had viciously mocked you, with emerging high intelligence, a keen sense of humor, an unaccountable interest in the larger world and, one must imagine, a certain elan.

 “Well, as your sister said, you can never really know what’s in another person’s heart, what their inner life is really like,” said the skeleton.  “I can’t really know about my own inner life at that point in time, except that it was pretty fucking grim.”  The skeleton regarded me with sightless eyes.  

“The fact is, from the point of view of completing this book, you need me to help tell the story, ridiculous as that may seem.   I am dead, true, but also, I’m the only person who can provide another perspective, so to speak.  Plus, as you say, the heart of this book really is the discussion I wanted to have but that I was never capable of having with you.  I told you at the end that I didn’t know how to open up and be a human with you and your sister.  The least I can do is try to do that now.”    

You understand the dilemma that puts me in, trying to be a reliable narrator and all.  

“Of course, that goes without saying,” said the skeleton, looking around with what used to be his eyes.  “About my 20/400 vision, of course nobody had any idea I was legally blind until they tried teaching me how to read.  They all just figured I was a moron, including my uncle and my cousins who would later run the family.  My father was a dim bulb, an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by the world.  Everyone just assumed I was a mental defective like him.  Eli told you my father spoke English with no trace of a European accent.  That’s true.  But he said almost nothing.  He kept his head down.  When my mother, may she rest in peace, raged at me, my father said nothing.   He didn’t want to attract attention to himself, or he’d be next.  

“When I was able to see and start to read, even though I looked at the words through those humiliating wire frame glasses that marked me as a boy whose family was on Relief, the dole, as they used to call it, I became fascinated with a world I’d never known existed.  There is a vast world of ideas out there.  Many of them, as we know, are destructive fucking ideas.  Hitler had ideas, Dick Cheney has ideas, as does, presumably, this audaciously self-promoting orange asshole you have now, but there are also ideas that turn a light on in a dark room.  The illuminating light of humanism, which comes, largely, if sometimes indirectly, from the moral insights in our ancient religion.”

A couple of black vultures did a few languid turns in the sky over the graves in the First Hebrew Congregation cemetery.  On the hill, toward the top, my father and mother’s graves.  My uncle, Irv’s younger brother Paul, is buried a few steps down the hill, his coffin suffocated under the honor of a pallet of worn out prayer books.  Paul’s funeral was on a bitterly cold day, the ground and the sky were both white.  There were a half dozen of us there, freezing, nobody but my cousin said much.  A couple of years later my cousin, Sekhnet and I drove up to plant some of my aunt’s ashes under her side of the headstone, next to my uncle.  

“First Hebrew doesn’t allow the ashes of cremated members to be buried in their cemetery.  I knew that, that’s why I didn’t want mom, your mother, to be cremated.  I know it varies among Jewish congregations, there’s nothing in Jewish law specifically about not burying ashes, though it’s customary, and still done in Israel, to bury a body in the earth as soon after death as possible.  In Israel the body is put into the grave in a winding sheet, or shroud, no coffin.  In Jerusalem more and more cemeteries are now above ground, vaults one on top of the other, and the body is slid into a slot-like crypt.  

“The day of my funeral was a magnificent Spring day in early May, 2005.  It was warm and sunny as you walked up past Eli and Helen’s grave to the freshly dug hole where I would be planted.  Birds were singing and the world was that beautiful Spring green.”  

That was the last time I saw you, at the bottom of that hill, in the plain pine box, with a shard of broken pottery over each eye  and one on your lips.  You had a five or six day growth of white stubble, almost a beard.   You were wrapped in a gauze shroud.  That greedy ghoul in the black suit, former lawyer turned beaming funeral director, had a worker open your coffin so I could identify you.  

“The last word I remember hearing you say was ‘yes’.  Then my coffin was closed again, the wooden pegs pounded back into place.   I was buried and rested under a ton of earth for twelve years.  Suddenly now, and to my relief, you wake me up to continue the conversation we should have had for all those years.”

Yes.

Tyrannical types are prone to zero tolerance of anybody who crosses them. Nixon, an ambitious man who lost a close presidential election in 1960 and a 1962 run for governor of California, was known, in the end, for his obsession with winning.  He famously maintained an Enemies List.   The list had the names of everyone who had slighted him, insulted him, threatened him, opposed him or his policies in any meaningful way.   Our current president, a man whose brand is winning at any cost, seems unable to forget anyone he feels crossed him.  He too seems to be making a list of America’s internal enemies and checking it regularly.    

While it’s a natural human reflex to dislike anyone who takes a stand against you during a time of vulnerability, it’s also a hallmark of the psychopath to divide the world into “with me or against me”.  Psychopathy we learn is a spectrum, you can be a little bit psychopathic or very, very psychopathic.   Even extreme psychopaths are not necessarily killers, some are very successful in business and politics, being highly intelligent, often charismatic, unimpeded by doubt or hesitation, seemingly fearless.  

Much as we’d like it to be, the workings of the world are neither simple nor straightforward.  That’s one reason telling my father’s story with any degree of completeness might take me another few years, or beyond the span of my natural life.   It might take a thousand or more subtle strokes to paint a lifelike portrait, but even that is not enough.  A lifelike portrait, by itself, tells us only what the person looked like.  I’m aiming for a portrait that shows exactly why he looked and acted the way he did.  High bar.

I’m thinking of Nixon’s enemies list because my father had one.  It was never committed to paper and it was not a very long list, but it was absolute.  As a kid I argued with him about this tendency to cast beloved friends out of his life forever with no chance of reprieve.    

“You have been over this very idea several times already in this ms.,” says the imagined psychiatrist, impatient for me to get on with it, or at least to expedite payment of his bills with my insurance company.

A friend insisted, shortly after I started writing this manuscript, doctor, that I was actually writing this book about myself, not about my father.   I conceded that it might be so.   It’s a book about a relationship, I told him.  The relationship was marked by a one way lack of forgiveness that became, after a long enough while, mutual.  It took decades to have any helpful insight into the implacable nature of my father and how to let myself off the hook for his unexplainable anger.  I get it now.  I fortunately had just begun to really get it when he was rushed to the hospital to get the news that he had less than a week to live. 

“Again, old news.  His liver cancer diagnosed six days before his death, in the E.R. while his cardiologist, endocrinologist and hematologist were still making appointments with him, to try to figure out what was wrong,” the shrink observes, snappishly.  “He had an appointment with the cardiologist for the day he died, didn’t he?”

“I love that you’re making the shrink the asshole foil now, Elie, instead of your poor old father,” said the skeleton of my father, with a rictus of approval and a bony thumbs up.  

I know, pops, I’m doing it for your sake.  

“The two of you really are nuts,” observed the shrink.  

“The two of us?” said the skeleton indignantly.

All right, that’s enough, you two.  Doctor, my father was always very suspicious of psychiatrists, because of fear of his own demons and because psychiatry is a profession we know attracts a disproportionate number of mentally unbalanced people.  Dad, this pretentious quack is only trying to be helpful.  So, both of you, calm down.

“You’re an asshole,” said the mental health professional definitively.  

Look, doctor, there’s no need for the fucking language.  I appreciate your professional opinion, but I’d appreciate a more specific diagnosis.  I’m sure that DSM you have there has more specific categories and insurance codes for my particular constellation of conditions.  

“Go to hell,” said the mental health professional, closing his notebook, grabbing his DSM and stomping out of the room.  

“I rest my case, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father pointing to the fleeing shrink’s back.  “What is the new point you are trying to add here today?”  

My Way or the Highway, the roots of that extreme and inhumane position.  

“Well, that is a fucked up way to operate, and as you recall I had deep regrets about having been that way, I told you about that the last night of my life.   We know a lot of people like that, too insecure and damaged to listen to advice or hear anything that contradicts anything they need to believe.  Your beloved Eli, he was a great practitioner of that philosophy,” said the skeleton.  

You loved Eli too, and you were afraid of him until the day he died.  

“Life is complicated, Elie.  You’d have been afraid of him too, if you’d met him when I did.  He was a bundle of rage who had no hesitation to punch anybody in the face.  Anybody.  When he drove a truck he had a pistol tucked next to the steering wheel.”  

He told me it was in a holster strapped to the steering column, just below the steering wheel.  

“It’s a miracle he never shot anyone, with the temper he had.  The Gleiberman temper, he’d always say, with that winning smile.  The man had a beautiful smile,” said the skeleton.  

Do you think My Way or the Highway is related to a fear of shame?  

“How’s that?”

Complete and categorical intolerance of any opposing point of view.  What do you suppose motivates that?  

“Fear and shame, yeah, probably a pretty safe bet,” said the skeleton with a yawn, and then he fell back into his soft grave, snoring.

Demons are intensely personal, created in a dark place and individually crafted to do the most damage.   What is terrifying to one person may be a matter of indifference to another.  It’s very hard to understand a terror if you’ve never felt it.   Fear of public speaking is said to be a very common terror, many people would rather be in the coffin, it is said,  than standing next to it called on to give a eulogy.   My father had many demons, but public speaking was not one of them.   He was an excellent eulogist, delivering his eulogies like a jazz soloist.  

He’d improvise from a minimalist lead sheet, five or six words in his small, meticulous handwriting, on an index card or the back of an envelope, indicating a few points to remember to bring out.  The rest he’d just let fly, speaking from his heart, faltering without any show of discomfort, hitting some good notes, getting a laugh, making the tears flow, another laugh, more tears, laugh.  Nothing came easier to him than delivering a eulogy, and he was a master of the form.  He was also not shy about appearing on TV, or addressing large groups anywhere, even the hostile crowds he spoke to about the need for desegregation of the New York City schools in the years after the Supreme Court ruling.   That said, he was the furtherest thing from a show-off.

Demons tailor themselves to our individual lives.  I can only dimly imagine the horrors my father encountered in that tenement kitchen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he was first whipped in the face by his mother.  I cannot imagine a more terrible thing, though there are things as bad.  Parents killed in front of you, or children, I think is as horrible.   Watching people marched to their deaths, blown up, burned alive, decapitated– about as bad.   Think of the worst thing you can imagine; can you think of something worse than being whipped in the face by your mother from the time you could stand?  

I can’t picture how one survives that particular assault on one’s tiny soul.  Whatever my mother’s faults and weaknesses, I never doubted her love.   Even my father, most often appearing in his dreaded, highly defensive, adversarial aspect, I knew loved me, in his twisted way.  I could see it sometimes, revealed at odd moments, between the plates of his armor.  

Demons, continuing to assemble themselves as my two or three year-old father was driven up to Peekskill with his parents and baby brother.   They arrived in the small town, his parents in a miserable, arranged marriage, as the wards of his Uncle Aren.  Aren was his mother’s much older brother, the man who had sent for her in Belarus, rescued her from the muddy hamlet where everyone would be murdered thirty years later.   They were soon the poorest family in Peekskill.  Then, as my father started kindergarten, terribly nearsighted and without glasses, speaking only Yiddish, the Depression hit.   It is virtually impossible to imagine these effects on the psyche of a kid, and all this happened before he was even able to see the world with his 20/400 vision corrected.  

Demonology is complicated terrain.   My father referred to his demons on a few occasions over the years, in the context of talking about everyone having their demons.  His demons were never discussed with anyone, as far as I know.  My sister concluded, after he died, that his morality was shame-based. This is not an unreasonable summary.   He was….

“You are writing blindly and without focus,” says the imagined psychiatrist, eyes beady, calmly critical.  “You have been over all this terrain before.  In fact, this may be one of the most recursive tales ever told.  Back and forth over the same finite set of facts.  This rumination is mere brooding.  No wonder it’s nine hundred pages long.   Why only a mention of the family slaughtered in the old country, the plowing of the entire community into the marsh?  Certainly you must be eager to rake all that up for the tenth time.”  

OK, doc, let me focus this for you.  

I have noticed this particular trait in people consumed by shame, by self-hatred.   They are ruthless and desperate.   They often become expert manipulators, it is the only way they can survive.   They argue, they cajole, they minimize their own bad acts, they bully, they attack, when confronted they rage and in an extreme situation may even threaten to kill.   Even if the murder threat is made only once, it is hard to forget.  

“You are veering into terrain you vowed not to go into in this ms,” says the shrink, making a note on a legal pad with an expensive fountain pen.  

There was one relationship in my father’s life, an involuntary one at that, that would illuminate more about the way he was than any single relationship I can think of.  It is one I must not write about directly, it is taboo.  Which presents a maddening dilemma to me, as the person trying to tell the complete story of what my father faced, how he was driven to be the way he was.   

I once heard my father’s millionaire first cousin Dave, Eli’s younger half brother, laughingly chide my father for wanting to control his money from beyond the grave.  Dave was a pleasant man with a big smile my father always referred to as Dave’s Cheshire Cat smile.   My father was concerned about not leaving money to a relative who flushed huge sums of money down the toilet regularly.   He agonized at the near impossibility of protecting his life’s savings from this relative.

“What are you doing?” says the shrink, acting as some kind of guardian of decency, real or imagined.  

Your demons will make you tolerate evils that will make other people shudder.   You will defend someone who only threatened to kill you and your children once.   You will be silent as the truth is made taboo, an alternate false set of facts is forced on everybody, fake smiles all around, rage ready to blow at any second underneath.    

“You truly can’t keep your mouth shut about this, can you?” says the shrink.

My most goading demon, doctor, is a powerfully amplified voice that says, in a dozen dialects, even if you are completely right, shut the fuck up, especially if you are completely right.  One of my main demons.  I think that bastard is the main one.   A lie will suffice to explain everything, your search for the truth is an affectation, arrogance, hubris.  There is no truth, smiles the demon, nothing that can’t be twisted and used against you as long as enough desperate determination is applied.  

The demon laughs, pointing out how brief the periods in human history have been where this has sometimes not been the case.  Invites me to write about one such time, after the riot in a Brooklyn high school in the 1970s when the study conducted after it was an earnest search for causes and solutions rather than the usual fixing of blame.  The demon keeps asking why I continue to perversely struggle against the way the world of humans has always been?  

I’ve seen the damage lies do, felt it in my tissues.   Lies justify every atrocity.  They cover every imaginable shame, obscure every criminal enterprise while creating greater shame, hatching motives for other crimes.   We simply do not speak of things that cause the deepest pain.  So it was with the worst of my father’s behavior.  So it is whenever humans act in rage.  So it is for every human burdened with shame, humiliation, painful experiences that are impossible to carry.   What is left to that person is to manipulate others, to defend themselves at all costs.  Such was the terrible burden my father carried for his eighty years, with the high costs it continually extracted from his loved ones.  

“Fairly adroit pivot, there,” said the shrink, filling in another line on his New York Times crossword puzzle. “Under the circumstances.”

Take a pain that is too great to bear, it is a doorway for demons to walk through.  In my father’s case I learned of his primal pain accidentally.   I was over forty when his beloved, seventeen years older first cousin Eli turned the light on in the dark room that was my sometimes cruel father’s inner life.   Eli witnessed the scene, more than once, when he was a teenager.  He described it to me almost seventy years later.  His beloved Aunt Chava, who loved Eli to death, raising a heavy, frayed cord from her steam iron.   She’d snatched it out of the drawer next to the head of the table where she sat.  In a rage, my tiny grandmother brought it down furiously across my two and three year-old father’s face.

“Seriously, Elie, how do you recover from something like that?” said the skeleton of my father, with a sorrow to rival Eli’s when he told me the story. 

“After a while all she had to do was rattle that drawer,” Eli told me with infinite sadness.  “And your father would….” and he did one of his beautiful pantomimes, this one of a terrified child, eyes cast to the ground,  shuddering in terror.  

“You understand now that one doesn’t ever recover from this,” said the skeleton of my father.  “And, obviously, I could never speak of it.   Certain things are too fucking painful to talk about.”    

I found myself in my room as a kid, confused and agitated by the violence I’d just been exposed to, generally over something relatively trivial.  I didn’t drink my milk, a liquid I always hated.  My mother believed that if a child didn’t drink four glasses a day their bones wouldn’t form right, they wouldn’t grow up strong and tall.   We had battles over drinking milk from time to time.  My father would chime in with his famous prediction “you may win the battle, but you’re going to lose the war.”  It was the voice of experience talking, just not the kind of experience you could build a healthy outlook on.  

In my room I wrote, I drew, I learned to play guitar and then keyboards. Honing my powers of self-expression became an obsession of my childhood that persisted into my adulthood.   It simply could not be that this was the sum of life and the last word — endless war against insane adversaries with no appeal to a non-insane higher power.  My mother wanted the best for me, so did my father.  They had other troubles, their own childhood demons, that often turned wanting what was best for me and my sister into a war.   We grew up, my sister and I, in a war zone.  The alliances were constantly shifting.   Once in a while my sister or I would hit with a line at our father’s expense too funny for our mother not to laugh at.  Her laughter was the ultimate betrayal of my poor father.  

“Sure, side with them, Evvy, they’ll be dancing on your grave,” he’d snarl, from his corner spot at the kitchen table, a spot between a counter, my sister and the refrigerator, where he was trapped.   For the record, my sister declined my invitation to dance on our father’s grave as we walked from his grave after his funeral service.  

Demons caused by unresolvable childhood pains lead people into cults.  Sometimes the cult is a cult of one.   It can be someone just like mom, or dad, or whoever our psychological weakness draws us to.   Membership in the cult confirms, on one level, what our demons tell us, that we have no right to anything better.   Anyone who proposes any alternative to the cult is seen as an existential threat, a deadly enemy to be avoided.  

I was determined, as a boy, scribbling in my room, to learn to communicate well enough to do battle with my demons.   My sister always maintained that I had it worse, because I fought back against our father’s bullying.   I don’t know which of us had it worse.  I do know that I am thankful now for the thousands of hours spent learning how to sort through my thoughts and feelings and set them out clearly on a page.

“So it says here that your recent notes on your father’s life are now almost 900 pages long,” says the imaginary shrink, eyes twinkling, lids twitching slightly.  

“Was your father also a brutal prick, doc?” I ask, studying his shifting face.

 “We are not here to discuss my father,” says the psychiatrist, composing his face.  “I have a very successful practice and a very good life.   We are here to discuss your failure to thrive.”  

“You know, doctor, my failure to thrive is not the thing that troubles me the most about my life.  I don’t have a house, or a car, or an expensive guitar, or even a livelihood at the moment, but those things cause me little pain.”  

“Then why are you ponying up the $50 copay on your shit silver insurance plan to see me every week?” says the doctor acutely.  

“It is my sense of powerlessness, doctor.  The sad fact that, in spite of insights I may have gained wrestling with some very energetic demons, I am unable to help anyone else.  Maybe we can never help anyone else, except by listening attentively and responding as directly as we can to what they’ve expressed.  My sorrow is largely about my inability to be a moral actor, except in a very, very limited way.”  

“I’m sorry, our time is up,” says the doctor.  

“What are you talking about?  I’ve been here less than five minutes.”

“That’s what you say,” says the doctor.  

This is the kind of shit I’m talking about.  That moment where it doesn’t matter who is telling the truth, who is lying, who is right, who is wrong.  That disorienting feeling of in-your-face unfairness, instantly releasing chemicals designed to help us fight or flee, when external reality fades completely in the face of an arbitrary power, exercised brutally.  This flood of cortisol and adrenaline overflows from our earliest experiences of vicious unfairness.  

“That’s why they call us demons, motherfucker,” says a demon cheerfully, “we exist outside of time, outside of objective reality, our power is undiminished by the passing of years, even decades.  We retain the power to fuck you up any time we like.  Kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”  

I can easily picture my father’s shifty-eyed expression whenever I came close to cornering him in one of his infallibly presented flights of hectoring illogic. It’s related to the implacable look this demon is giving me, but he adds a mirthfulness my father never had when attacking.  It is a mirth, in the face of my suffering, an overbrimming satisfaction in seeing me suffer, that makes any desire to flee vanish, now the chemicals are all urging me to fight.  

“It is, in fact, my face,” says a former close friend, veteran of several stays in mental wards.  True that, my brother.  It is a facial expression that provokes rage.  It is the face of someone determined to provoke violent emotion, no matter what the cost.  It smiles at your pain, mocks your anger and it comes from a bottomless well of self-hatred.  

“Yes it does, bitch,” he says with that maniacal grin, smug as a pedophile priest untouchable by any law, “that’s why they call us demons, son.   Now, if you would stop crossing your legs so we can get back to work…”  

Demonology is not a short talk, but I am done with it for the moment.  I also know that defeating demons can rarely be done alone, no matter how well we manage to set the issue out before us, before a reader, even for a jury of our peers.  Was my father a monster?  He believed so as he was dying, to some extent.  He feared that he’d lived as a monster, at least.  There is some evidence to support that fear.

A book about a monster is not as interesting to me as a book about a highly moral man who, in spite of his deeply humanistic values, inflicted terrible pain on his loved ones.   That book, if I could put it into your hands, on to the shelf of your local public library, would be a fucking demon.