“No pressure, Elie,” began the skeleton, launching into one of the archly meta passages that any prudent editor would immediately prune from this already over 600 page manuscript, “but, if you don’t start selling at least some of these pages, getting some of it in print, compiling a short published stack you can send to prospective literary agents, samples that will light up those little 20% dollar signs in their shrewd, shiny eyes, you’re pretty much done.  

“Not just as a writer, but as a person, I would say,” he said.  

Sure you would say that, no skin off your nose, now that you’re a skeleton. You know, dad, every time I hear the phrase ‘no skin off my nose’ I shudder, having skin, like you did, scalpeled from my nose twice, crudely covered by grafted skin from behind my ear.  I’m long overdue for the next slice, I’m afraid, on the other side of my nose.

“Well, none of us are without imperfections,” said the skeleton in another phrase destined for the cutting room floor.   “But you realize, I mean, I’m pretty sure you understand how insane your current plan is.  I don’t mean insane like totally mad, I mean it in the kinder, gentler sense of a laughably outlandish long-shot.  

“Of course, you can argue that from time to time you can move a reader, get a wheezy chuckle, that you’ve worked on your craft for decades, gotten pretty good at choosing words that mean exactly what you want to say.”  

And not wasting too much of the reader’s time.  

“Well, the reader of this particular selection might disagree, but anyway, the point is, no matter how well you might write– nobody but a madman expects to live and support himself by writing alone. I would argue that you’re too smart to have such an idiotic plan.”

Deft compliment/bitch slap, dad.   I’d agree with you if that was the whole plan.  It is one piece, one small piece.  You see, to tell you the truth, the writing is the smallest part of the plan.  

“Do tell,” said the skeleton.  

You’d like that, wouldn’t you?  

“Look, Elie, it’s no skin off the front of my skull,” said the skeleton. “I’m just trying to be helpful.  Most writers have another line of work they do to pay the bills, that’s all I’m saying.  Your boy Kafka worked in a bank, wrote all night, every night once he got home. Well, maybe Kafka’s not the best example, he died in a sanitarium, I think, worked himself to death and was completely unknown as a great writer in his lifetime.  

“How about Frederick Exley, that was a hell of a book, that chronicle of ‘the long malaise that was my life’… well, maybe he wasn’t the best example either, except maybe as a cautionary tale.  Look at this from your Wikipedia:

In 1961 Exley received a provisional appointment as clerk and crier of the courts inJefferson County, New York, where a lawyer friend, Gordon Phillips (the model for “the Counselor” in A Fan’s Notes), asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips’ disbarment.^[8]

“I mean, look, on the other hand,” continued the skeleton, “you could wind up producing something that would make us all proud, me here moldering in my grave in Peekskill, your mother in her plastic bag in that box in the beautiful paper shopping bag a few feet from where you’re typing.  I mean, Frederick Exley was pretty fucked up, too.  And yet, as your Wiki informs us:

A Fan’s Notes was published in September 1968, and although early sales were not good, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel, about a longtime failure who makes good by finally writing a memoir about his pained life, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award.

“End of his troubles, Elie?  Think again.  But look, here’s a great line about a work based on the life’s work of the lifelong alcoholic:  with humor as black as Exley’s liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another — and those we tell ourselves.    Not bad, eh?  There are some clever bastards out there, Elie.”

You’re really not helping, dad.  Pleasant though it also is to shoot the shit with you in a way that involves neither an exchange of bullets nor an invitation to exchange fisticuffs.  

“Damn it, Elie, that $84,000 debt for law school you took on was worth every penny!” said the skeleton, resting his case.

A day or two after my father died, my uncle handed me a several page document he had typed up, single spaced; an obituary for his brother Irv.  Thinking about it now, he must have written it before he left for Florida to sit by his brother’s deathbed.  

“Call the New York Times and have them put this obituary in the paper,” he instructed me.

It was longer than the obituaries for most popes and twice as tedious.  I read the first few paragraphs, wondering about the wealth of senseless detail, everything my uncle could remember about his life with his brother, their childhood in Peekskill.  

The readers of the New York Times would surely want to read about the pride the two young First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill members felt as they marched down Main Street in Peekskill under the banner of the shul, presumably in their Boy Scout uniforms, or some impoverished facsimile thereof.   The details poured out, not badly written, but clearly not the tight obituary prose of a former journalist setting out the who, what, when, where, why and how.  Page after page of this.  

Needless to say, I didn’t rush the obit to the New York Times to be set in type.  I set the pages on a table, I don’t remember what happened to them.  Which is sad because they would be of some use here.  

The lost New York Times obit is ironic, and fitting as a final act of post-death penance, because my father read the New York Times obituaries every day of his adult life.  His obituary never appeared in the Times or in any paper, except perhaps as a short item in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill monthly bulletin.

As adults, my uncle often cringed around his brother, and laughed that scraping, inhaled laugh of his, and they generally seemed quite familiarly uncomfortable around each other.  As my father was dying, in the days preceding his last breath, he kept asking about his brother.  “Is my brother on his way?” he wanted to know.   My uncle rushed to the hospital, arriving the day after I did.  I picked him up at Fort Lauderdale airport.  

In the hall outside my father’s hospital room he stopped the doctor to ask about the possibility for a liver transplant for his almost 81 year-old brother in the final stage of liver cancer, abdomen swollen with ascites, kidneys already shutting down.  

Years earlier my uncle had instructed his daughter, Ann, who died tragically young of an aggressive cancer she had been told she’d beaten, that he wanted every heroic measure taken to prolong his life.  Measures currently in existence and future technologies that would be developed while he was kept viable, if not completely alive, in cryogenic suspension. 

“He basically told me he wants to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, until they invented a way to graft his brain into a head on a new young body,” said Ann.  

I gently but firmly pulled my uncle away from the doctor.   In my father’s room he made little jokes, and laughed at them himself to demonstrate that they were jokes.  This may seem a very cruel way to portray a man who was losing his only brother, who was seeking some kind of closeness and closure he’d never had with his big brother, who was now suddenly dying.  It may be cruel, I don’t know, but it is also as it was.  

It was very poignant for my sister and me to watch the way these two tormented boys from Peekskill clung to each other in the hospital as the older one readied himself to breathe one last time.  I don’t know that they talked about anything profound, I doubt it.  I have no idea what they said to each other.  It’s hard to believe they did more than keep each other company and feel the love for each other they’d been mostly unable to feel for the entirety of their long lives. That is no small thing, of course.  

A few years earlier my father stayed at my uncle’s house for some reason, maybe related to my first cousin Ann’s memorial.  In the days before her death Ann had made herself invisible to her parents, hidden the location of the hospice she was in during her last days out of fear her parents would show up and make a scene, demand that she come home.  I was at Ann’s memorial, actually, so I don’t remember exactly what the occasion was for my father overnighting alone in Kensington, Maryland with my aunt and uncle.  

I do remember what my father said immediately after he got back to Florida from the visit.  It is as wonderful an example of his style as I have preserved.  I recall it today verbatim because I wrote it on the drawing I was fiddling with as we spoke on the phone.  I asked how my uncle was doing.  He paused for one or two beats.  “Well, we can talk about that when I see you next week, but for now, let’s just say, he remains unchanged.”   I always admired the sleek compression of the statement.    

At any rate, (a phrase my father often used), I do not seem to have the claustrophobically detailed obit my uncle wrote.  I don’t think it was in digital form, I didn’t find it with the rest of the Irv-related emails and other files on the computer.  I don’t think the pages are in the heavy paper folder I kept with my father’s funeral and headstone arrangements. I will look for it again, though I doubt I have it.  Thus I don’t have the little odd details of their childhood in Peekskill to flesh out here. I will set out the few I remember hearing from my uncle before and after the funeral, as we passed places in Peekskill that jogged his memories. 

“My brother sees everything through rose colored glasses, he lives in a world of wonder, everything is an adventure to him,” my father told me more than once.  “He once saw a guy filling a soda machine and he said ‘oh, Irv, I wish you had been there.  You would have loved it, the guy had this thing with wheels and all the colors of soda were piled on it, and he rolled the cans down these curly chutes, oh, man, it was so cool, you should have seen it!’   That’s a great quality, I think.”

At the same time, he remained unchanged.  ‘Let’s just say,’ my father said, ‘he remains unchanged.’   We both knew very well what he meant.  Although my father believed people could not fundamentally change, my uncle’s failure to do the impossible was nonetheless very distressing.  

My uncle was mild-mannered, cornily playful and always ready to laugh.  I was an adult before I saw his furious temper for the first time.  He was a raging tyrant.  My mother had always hated my seemingly gentle, playful uncle and I never knew why.  She had seen his angry, rigid, controlling side early on.  

As adults my sister and I, confronted for the first time with his quick, unaccountable rage, his operatic irrationality, suddenly knew why our mother felt that way about him.  Holy shit, it was a rude awakening, as they say.  We couldn’t get away from him fast enough, aborting our weekend plans to get the hell out of there early the following day.  

“Take your garbage with you!” he snarled, clamping his hand on the lid of the garbage can I was attempting to put a small bag of car garbage into before we drove off.  When I got back into the car still holding the little bag of fast food wrappers, and quoted our uncle, my sister and her husband cracked up.  We were relieved to be hurrying back toward the interstate. 

But those last few days at the hospital when our father was dying, after sitting by the bed all day, joined by a couple of final guests, attended at various times by my mother, sister and brother-in-law, my uncle would not leave his brother’s side.  

“Go ahead, Paul,” my father told him at last, “Elie will stay with me. You guys have been sitting here all day, why don’t you take a break, go get something to eat.  It’s OK, really.”  He said all this very reasonably, and they all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  

He turned to me when they were gone and said “I don’t know how to do this.”

I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine, not to worry.  I was remembering what the doctor had told me about how peaceful death by kidney failure is.  “You just kind of go to sleep,” is how he put it.  I was hoping that would be the case, silently helping him along, after the nurse helped me take down the divider on the side of his bed so I could sit closer to him.  His death was pretty much as the doctor had said, the breaths just became shallower and shallower until they stopped.  The whole process took maybe twenty minutes.

When he was done breathing, I closed his eyes with two fingers of one hand, like in the movies, and gave the oxygen tube back to the nurse, who had discreetly left us and had tiptoed back in after a respectful interval.  “He won’t be needing this,” I told her.  

I remember the moment very well, it was a Friday at sunset, toward the end of Passover.  The sun had sunk low in the Florida sky, the sky was stained beautiful pinks and oranges behind the darkening silhouettes of palm trees.  

When everybody got back up to the room they cried and I told them about his last moments, how peacefully he’d gone.  My mother was in anguish that she hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to him, wanted to know how he could leave her without letting her say goodbye.   I reassured her as best I could.  The nurse assured us all that many men send everyone away when it’s time to die, that most men can’t die in front of a bunch of loved ones.  “It’s too hard for them,” she suggested.  I imagine she’s right.

My sister and I took my mother back to the apartment where she’d live the next five years as a lonely widow.  My uncle and my brother-in-law stayed with my father’s dead body until late in the night. They stayed by his bed until the crew from the morgue finally came up and got him, and then they sat in the morgue with him until the folks from the Chevrai Kadisha, the Jewish burial society, came to take him and prepare the body for burial, and shipment back up to Peekskill for his eternal rest.

My mother or father suggested I draw a logo for brand new Tain Lee Chow, the kosher Chinese restaurant they were about to open, something they could put on their menu and on their sign.  I did a few drawings of a comical dragon, it had a lot of personality and was unique, idiosyncratic.  My mother laughed, I’m pretty sure, when she saw it.  

The face was fairly cute, it was a playful Chinese dragon trying to be fierce but posing no real threat, but like I say, it was idiosyncratic. My mother probably laughed because the thing was cute and it was also very much one of my drawings, that is to say, there was also something a little disturbing about the expression on the dragon’s face.

“Well,” said the skeleton, “you came by those things honestly, cute and disturbing” and he made a self-effacing gesture toward himself. 

You were certainly both of those things.  Anyway, you two took the drawing to your partner Benjy.  The verdict was Benjy didn’t like it and you used some generic clip-art dragon, or I don’t even remember what.  Outside of Benjy’s creative and whimsical names for dishes — “My Bashaert”, described as  “the perfect marriage of beef and chicken” was a favorite– the take out menu and sign for the successful restaurant were as generic as those of any Chinese restaurant.  

“Well, Benjy was the businessman, none of us knew anything about branding, marketing, trade design, that kind of thing.  Neither did you, ” said the skeleton.  “You want to make this about mom and me once again not taking your side, preferring our surrogate son Benjy to you, respecting his arbitrary judgment and crude tastes more than your’s, but that’s not a fair version of this story.  

“Your dragon was, how did that hack at that on-line rag describe your ‘beautifully written’ story about mom– the one he was going to pay for then decided not to publish– ‘too personal, somehow’.   It was a beautiful drawing but not right for Tain Lee Chow, a small business we’d invested a lot of money in, trying to get off the ground and succeed, that was it.  It was strictly a business decision and we deferred to the business manager.”

I’m aware of all that, obviously.  I’m bringing this up because I noticed, in the eulogy, that the part about your surrogate son Benjy reads:

With a partner he met at Tel Yehuda he opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years with his partner and a Chinese chef, named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.

“Wow,” said the skeleton, “I didn’t notice that as they were burying me.  I was a bit preoccupied, I suppose, but that’s… wow, like those guys from the new regime who went into the tomb of the deposed Pharaoh and scraped his face off the walls, off history, erasing him and his line from eternity.  Sonny Chow gets in there, but not Benjy, a very nice touch. That’s some good work, Elie.”

I hadn’t evolved enough by then to understand how much it would have meant to Benjy, standing by the grave grieving for a person he loved, to have heard his name mentioned as your partner and lifelong friend.  Here’s how I should have written it: 

With Benjy, their lifelong friend from Tel Yehuda, he and Evelyn opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He and Benjy ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years, Irv working in the kitchen with the smiling Chinese chef, a man named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.  Irv always smelled like Chinese noodles in those days, it was one of his jobs to fry them.

“Yeah, that would have been a more gracious and accurate way to put it, sure.  But, don’t forget, you were burying your difficult father, making the arrangements, suddenly the man of the family, and you worked to get the draft of the eulogy to the Druid in time for the funeral, a funeral that was only a few days after I died and 1,200 miles away.  You can’t beat yourself up, Elie, I’m sure even if you ran it by mom first, she probably wouldn’t have even caught it, at that time,” said the skeleton.  

I don’t beat myself up.  I’ve learned not to do that, and it was the best lesson I ever struggled to learn.  I’ve sometimes wished you could have taught yourself the same thing.  I just understand now, as I am different by years of experience from how I was when I erased Benjy’s face from your life, that, if I ever have it to do over again, it is better to think of how to be generous than to be a thoughtless dick.  No matter how justified I might otherwise have been to have acted less than generously.  

“Point taken,” said the skeleton, “even though, you know, we disagree about how much a person can really change their nature.  I mean, I’m dead, so, sure, I’ve changed.  But outside of that, good luck.”

When I came down the hill after we buried you I said to Benjy, as we shook hands, “you were the son he never had” and he looked at me with great sadness and said “and he was the father I never had.”  That was as far as either of us knew how to go, I guess, and it had to be enough.

“It was enough,” said the skeleton.

ii

I woke up from a bizarre dream today thinking about something Immanuel Kant said.  “A human soul is of infinite worth,” and then the logical second part came to me “even though they are sold by the millions, wholesale, in the free market.”

“The soul of that little kitten who screamed when he was murdered the other night was of infinite worth.  The million children’s souls that went up the smokestacks in Poland were of infinite worth.  The soul of every Iraqi child incinerated or exploded in the fight to free Iraq from a ‘modern day Hitler’ was of infinite worth.  The people who trade in human souls just never got Kant’s memo, I guess,” said the skeleton.  

If you see God there in the afterlife, ask him about that, would you?

“Glad to see you still have a sense of humor, motherfucker,” said the skeleton with what he intended to be a wink.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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