It can’t be helped.  Whether I wind up sexily summarizing the selected highlights of your life story and managing to sell it or not, this is a crucial moment for the reader’s understanding.

“Lay on, then, Mac fucking Duff,” said the skeleton.  

I persisted in asking about this troubling subject– I became desperate to know what happened to Grandma and Pop’s twelve brothers and sisters.   I don’t think I asked them, I’m pretty sure I never did.  Probably it didn’t seem right to me.  Even as a boy, maybe I sensed I shouldn’t bring it up, the answer possibly being too terrible to make them talk about.   My father was a tough, straight shooting guy, seemed like the right person to ask.  

“Was I the right person to ask?” asked the skeleton.  

I’ll let you be the judge.  You’d told me that “one day the letters from Europe just stopped coming.”  Mom told me, decades later, a few weeks before she died, that she corresponded, in Yiddish (which she spoke with her parents at home and learned to read and write at the Sholom Aleichem School, the secular Socialist Yiddish culture school) with her grandfather in Vishnevitz for years.  

“Yetta’s father, yeah, he used to send her Russian coins with his letters, ” said the skeleton.

Well, those letters, apparently, stopped in 1942, when she was fourteen.  The reason, it turns out, is that at that time Nazis occupied Vishnevitz and made the local Ukrainian reptiles the keepers of the Jewish ghetto they forced the Jews of Vishnevitz to build.  I learned all this recently, from transcribed eye-witness accounts, and it chilled me to the bone to learn the hideous details.  But at nine years old all I had were nightmares and troubling questions.    

“Which you understand troubled me deeply too,” said the skeleton.  “You know, it’s very easy, in hindsight, to condemn me for the way I responded.  You’re building this lawyerly case against me, bringing in this one damning witness, a moment of weakness when I gave a very poor response in an impossible situation.  I understand you’re eager to make your point about how subtle my abuse was —  there was plenty that was not subtle about it, like regularly calling you a fucking poisonous snake, a cobra or rattlesnake, take your pick.  Pointing out, when you argued, that your face was ‘twisted and contorted with hate’– an admittedly odd, recurring line that now gives you and your sister a chuckle.  I answered your anger with anger when you were a teenager by announcing that your acne was the poison of your hatred pouring out through your pores.  That was a pretty good one.”

Particularly coming from a man whose skin periodically cracked apart and left him bleeding on the way to the hospital.

“Yop.  Look, I’m the way I always was, the way we all are what we always were.  You’re conversing with me like those insights I had while I was dying changed me permanently.  If I had been properly diagnosed, cured of the cancer, sent home to die quietly years later in my own bed, we would never have had that conversation that last night of my life.  But for that circumstance of my misdiagnosis and sudden death you would have only the image of me as I always was, an implacable lifelong adversary.  I would have given no ground and you would not be attempting to write this book, I guarantee it.”

Probably true.  My sister would definitely endorse that view of you.  Look, I understand why you couldn’t give me a better answer about Grandma and Pop’s families that day.  But the answer I am about to report is not just the expression of a father’s discomfort with a super difficult subject.  It is the coarse cord of an old fashioned steam iron, gripped tightly in an enraged fist, and lashed across a child’s face.   You were dismissive, and instantly turned my troubling question into a discussion of my lack of courage, my weakling’s character, my pathetic lack of manhood at nine years old.

By way of illumination, for anyone poised for high drama, I had a girlfriend once who described her father as an abusive man.  She clearly had been hurt very deeply by him.  I have no doubt the man was a cruel bastard.   I was in my twenties, and though I already knew everything, I didn’t actually know anything, was still taking many of my cues from how my father acted.   I asked her, in the manner of the fact-based man from Mars speaking to the sensitive, emotional woman from Venus, to tell me about his abuse, which she said had turned physically violent.  I asked her to tell me about the physical violence, and there was a skeptical tone to my question.

It turned out that one time, after he’d snarled at her, she stormed out of the room and, as she went by him, he swatted her in the ass.

I think I actually laughed, to show how little I knew about anything.   That one glancing swat in the ass, physical abuse?  Really?  Oh, ha ha ha.  My donkey ears went back, and as tears rolled down her cheeks, I tried to pull myself together for her sake.  I understand decades later how abuse really works and how she felt.  

The damage of abuse is caused by its relentlessness, over years, the way it wears the soul down, programs and reinforces the hurt. The essence of abuse is that it is not a random event, it’s constant.  Any time you need something, the opposite is offered and you are cursed for being needy.  To that poor damaged girl the one swat stood in for all the rage and rejection her father had been unfailingly expressing for her entire childhood.  The physical blow was the final proof of his utter disdain for his needy youngest daughter.

“Well, that is the nature of abuse.  Whatever you need, you get the opposite and also a stinging slap in the face if you complain about it,” said the skeleton.  

We were standing in the dining room, I think.  You were six foot one, I was probably four feet tall.  I asked you what happened to Grandma and Pop’s brothers and sisters.  You told me they had all been killed.  That was upsetting news, and I probably reacted badly.  You tried to reassure me.  You said “look, those people were just abstractions.  Nobody knew them.  You can’t get upset about that, they were a few of millions of people killed by the Nazis during those years.”  

I realized in that awful moment, when the worst was confirmed, that our once large family tree had been pruned down to a single shivering branch by an army of murderers.  I asked you if that made our family holocaust survivors; it seemed to me it did.   You remember what you said next?

The skeleton looked straight ahead with sightless eyes.

“Goddamn it, you find a way to make everything about you!  You are such a fucking melodramatic kid, you want to feel like the victim all the time, you’re desperate to feel like a victim.  You want to feel like you’re personally connected to this historical atrocity.  You’re not.  You’re not a goddamned victim, those abstractions who were murdered were the victims.  You never knew them, nobody here ever saw them.   Goddamn it…” and you ranted in that vein for a while.  I had nothing to say, left, went off to lick my wounds somewhere, brood about what an asshole my father was.  

“That was wrong of me,” said the skeleton.  

No shit, Shylock.  It’s still hard to trace your thought process, if there even was one.  ‘Nobody knew those people’– Grandma and Pop had no relationships with their siblings, even Grandma’s youngest brother, who she adored, Yussele, Little Joey?   Why would anyone but a grandiose little drama queen be upset about Little Joey and his family being marched to a ravine, resignedly stripping to their underwear and filing into a row to be shot in the back of the head?  

“Enough!” said the skeleton, “we get the point.  I was a fucking monster.  What do you want me to fucking say?  I already told you I was wrong!”    

Fifty years after the fact, granted, and more than eleven years after your death.  Better late than never, I suppose.  Not to mention that it is me who is actually admitting you are wrong.

“Heh, clever devil you are.  Look, we are all ultimately responsible for our own lives, Elie.  That is the troubling, sickening truth, the sobering fact that hits you hard in the face from time to time in your life.   We know how we should act, but that knowledge doesn’t always win the day.  We act the way we are set up to act at any given moment.  We paper over our terrors with a thin veneer of bullshit, but we know it’s bullshit.   We are dealt whatever shit hand of cards we get, then we spend our lives bluffing.  Then we die.”  

The skeleton looked off from his spot on the hill at First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill’s boneyard.  “Unless we are lucky enough to have a brooding child who keeps digging up our bones and making us account for how we played the hand we were dealt.”

“The story is you doing what you always do– exactly what you feel like doing at any given moment.  Every few years you energetically dive into an ambitious project with blind faith, excitement based entirely on wishful thinking, that the thing you want to do will be seen for the valuable thing it is, even though you haven’t thought through the daunting details most people would carefully consider before starting out.  You dive into a pool from a cliff and as you fall you check to see if there’s water there,” said the skeleton, hammer in one hand, tongs in the other.  

OK, pops, lay it on me.

“You see, you wrote last time about the folly of thinking you can ever meaningfully ‘make a record’, yet, what is this Book of Irv but your attempt to make a record?  You hope to write the story in a way that will move readers to identify with your side of the story, see your father as the implacable monster, move Terry Gross to coo sympathetically, have Lopate express admiration for your straight-forward, heroic honesty, ask insightful questions about your point of view.  And please note, I wouldn’t dream of embarrassing you by mentioning the MacArthur grant you’re secretly waiting for so you can revolutionize the discussion of collaborative education and creative problem-solving in this country with your groundbreaking, or wind-breaking, student-run creativity workshop.”  

Noted.  

“You see, Elie, what you are trying to do, once again, and I have to give you a certain credit for trying — is impossible.  If you’d started thirty years ago, been paying dues all these years, getting credits and credentials, making contacts, cultivating a network of successful connections in your field you could call on for real-world favors and advice, if you’d applied yourself in high school, instead of virtually dropping out and graduating 823rd in your class, if you’d had the grades to go to a prestigious university, met the children of rich and influential people….”

All right, dad.  With all due respect, that’s enough of your fucking bullshit.  We learn this carping, discouraging, damning voice is called the “Internalized Victimizer” and it’s no smarter than the hopeful voices and it’s certainly much more destructive.  I can give you a counter argument for every point you raised, along with my hackles, but I ain’t doin’ it, B.   Going to continue this hard work.

Do you think I’m the only person in my gigantic generation to grapple with an extremely difficult and destructive parent?   Do you think my life has progressed without gaining a few insights others might find interesting, even illuminating and useful?

“Good, well-said, genius.  Back to my original question, then: what’s the story?”

It’s about brutality, betrayal and forgiveness.  Your mother betrayed you, as her generation was being wiped out, you betrayed my sister and me, I eventually found a way to get over my anger enough to have one real conversation with you, in spite of your ruthless desperation not to have that conversation.  A conversation you were very grateful for as you were dying.  

“Mmmm, fascinating story.  I see a best-seller in your future,” the skeleton made a show of clapping his claws.  They sounded like castanets.

“You know, you once told a young writer to limit what she was writing about to one thing at a time.  It muddies the story, you told her, to bring in too many things at once, tempting as it also is to try tell the whole story at once, the larger story with all the side stories and bringing in the interesting digressions from each side story, and all the back stories of each digression too.  

“You told her about that great piece by Kurt Vonnegut I clipped out of the Times for you when you were in high school.   Vonnegut gave a series of tips, the first being: always give your essay a title.  This, he pointed out, will focus you on the subject at hand.  It was excellent advice.  Advice you pretty much follow on this gratuitous blahg here.  

“Yet what are you doing now?  Calling this tome The Book of Irv, containing, one presumes, the uncontainable, ineffably expanding, logic-defying universe that is a human life.  You want to truly understand an individual human being through a book?  Find an accomplished genius who has an excellent editor at a top publishing house.  Give him a large advance, and a budget for a team of researchers and fact-checkers.  And, guess what?  That genius and his marketing team will still have to reduce the story to one essential paragraph.  That’s what you’ll see in the New York Times capsule views of new and notable books.  

“You are back to square one, without that one essential paragraph it all boils down to.  It doesn’t matter what you produce, how much genuine insight or pathos you put on an individual page, you have to put it in a tidy package you can sell.

“Otherwise you have a mighty tree falling in the woods with only timid woodlands creatures around to admire the crash,” the skeleton looked off toward the Hudson River with sightless eyes.

An adversarial baby declares war on his parents from the crib, only to learn decades later that sometimes the best way to play the game is not to play.

“Fire that copywriter,” said the skeleton.

“Fuck the skeleton,” said the copywriter.

A brutalized boy survives a childhood of grinding poverty during the Depression, gets a Masters degree from an Ivy League school, follows an idealistic path while blaming his adversarial children for destroying his life.

“You make a joke, but you were a very, very fucking angry infant.  From day one.  You were in a fucking rage,” said the skeleton, jaw set.  

I know, I remember it well.  I recall coming home from the hospital, being placed next to the bed and glaring at you accusingly thinking ‘who the fuck is this asshole?’  You know, I couldn’t wait to learn to talk so I could start really giving you shit.  As soon as I saw you, I remember thinking, I’m going to torture that piece of shit.  

“Well, it’s nice to hear you finally admit it.”  

No problemo, dad.

Angry baby learns his entire family was killed by the Nazis, asks his father about it.  Father tells boy that he’s a whiny drama queen who wants to imagine he’s a victim.  Boy attacks father, who responds violently, boy is taken to emergency room for treatment.  Father forbids son to ever discuss the matter.  Son discusses the matter. Discuss.  

“Keep making jokes, Elie, that’s getting you closer to your goal of realizing there’s nothing here,” said the skeleton.

Nothing here, dad, nothing at all.

A night of troubled dreams reminded me I have not come close to painting the monster side of Irv.  It is impossible to understand the deep regrets he struggled with on his deathbed, the essential tragedy of his life, the damage he inflicted on loved ones, without a good taste of the rage that drove him.  Capturing what made him so formidable and destructive is the supreme challenge for the would-be portraitist.

Last night’s bad sleep reminded me that I’m wrestling with something at once in my face and cleverly hidden.  In one of the dreams I was working for a mocking, witlessly brutal jackass, and in the end, I had to tell him so.   I simply had no choice.  As I was telling the jackass off a colleague warned me that they record everything.  I kept that in mind, all my remarks were PG rated at worst.  But they were devastating, even more so for being so targeted, ruthlessly accurate and superficially polite.  The jackass did the only thing he could do, braying “you’re fired.”  I shrugged, smiled, took my time walking off, very relaxed.  

The situation was disturbingly familiar.  In real life I had lost many jobs this way, virtually all of them.   In the end I simply could not restrain myself from returning disrespect with disrespect.  This unfortunate reflex,  a kind of PTSD,  came directly from the wars with my father, that one-sided obligation for self-examination and restraint.  My father blamed me for the wars and reserved the unquestioned right to act like a petulant two year-old; I was chided for not acting like a grown man at eight, nine, ten.    

We like to believe we are making a record, you know, anyone with an ounce of impartiality hearing the conversation would weigh everything and have to take our side.  In that dreamed pissing contest with a jackass boss, I had put no word on the record that couldn’t have been played back to a group of first-graders.  The kids might have agreed with my right to say everything I’d said, but any adult would immediately cringe at my tone.  You can’t speak to your boss that way and expect not to be fired.  It’s like crossing the street with the light and getting creamed in the crosswalk by a car speeding through the red light at the intersection.  You are completely in the right, but you’re still dead.

There is no record, no reckoning even, in most cases.  You will almost never get the hearing justice demands.   Justice?  Mercy?  Ask anybody whose ever been shot in the face about those things.  Being totally honest is no defense either.  “You are brutal, and witless, and a jackass,” is the last thing you will say to an employer who is all those things.  Especially if he or she is all those things.

It is the subtlety and deniability of my father’s brutality that makes it so hard to describe.  There was nothing subtle about it when you were the recipient of it, you could feel it crushing your lungs like a boa constrictor.  But because it was confined to silence, withholding and the occasional unspeakably violent verbal outburst, you are left holding air when you try to sculpt it into something tangible.  

As I mentioned, my sister didn’t even realize the extent of the damage until many years after she left home.   We were always made to feel like the monsters.  Like whiners too, if we protested. What are you protesting?  Your father didn’t say anything, you whining fuck.  Insidiously ingenious, the Dreaded Unit’s game.

There is a reflex that develops when you are abused a certain way.  A boy who is punched by a parent every day waits for the day he is big enough to punch back.  Eventually he goes through a period of fist fights, “nobody is going to punch me in the face and not get punched in his fucking face!”  

When Pat Conroy was beaten up by his war hero father, Frank, and injured so badly he had to be rushed to the emergency room, there was no ambiguity about what had happened.  No matter what Frank Conroy had to say about his boy’s attitude, or whatever his twisted rationale was, the boy was being treated in the emergency room because of his father’s reaction.  Once Pat Conroy wrote about it in The Great Santini, the war was on.    

Frank Conroy’s family never forgave Pat for betraying his father by revealing that his father had beaten him to a bloody pulp as a kid.

Betrayal tears trust, affection and every other good thing to shreds.  It’s fair to say that Irv was betrayed over and over during his childhood.  His mother Chava called him “Sonny”, but also made it quite clear that she had every right to whip him in the face whenever she felt like it.   His father, Harry, looked on —  two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  I imagine, whatever else he was feeling, that he must have been relieved that he wasn’t being whipped in the face for a change.

You’re in a terrible place when you’re up against the famous Gleiberman Temper, a magenta-faced blind rage.  I watched Eli, Chava’s beloved nephew, many times, turn from genial, funny raconteur to savage, snarling panther.  His face turned feral, and rose through the shades from red to purple, white foam on his lips as he roared.  He didn’t like to be contradicted.   I, like my mother, had little tolerance for pretending to agree with complete bullshit.  

With Eli, at least, because there was great love and warmth along with the rage, his anger would recede as quickly as it had risen up. Eli and I both felt cheated if we didn’t have a good fight or two during my visits.  He and my mother once fought in the car from Pompano Beach to the New Jersey Turnpike.  My father chuckled when he reported it.  With Eli, at least, it was sport as much as anything.

But what to make of the rage?  There is no bottom to it, no reasoning with it.   It is the same thing that animates a lynch mob.  When I visualize evil it is someone whipping up rage in someone else.  Rage rages, that’s all it can do.  It’s like fire, consuming everything in its path.

It is also a product of fear.  It’s part of the primitive lizard brain’s survival mechanism, vigilant, easily aroused, ready to kill or make a desperate dash.  We homo sapiens have refined the expression of this reflex over the millennia, but it sill rules.  

I don’t know how I would embed this great talk on the lifelong health effects of adverse childhood experiences in a book, but here on the internet it’s a click away.  

In this short lecture you have the simple, inexorable mechanism by which this damage is done laid out clearly by a brilliant pediatrician named Nadine Burke Harris:

How does it work? Well, imagine you’re walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal to your adrenal gland that says, “Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!” And so your heart starts to pound, your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. (Laughter)

But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging.

Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing.  High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

source

We can think of this damage as a kind of doom, unless we can look at it without flinching and begin to take the steps needed to heal.  Only then is there the slightest chance of avoiding a terrible fate.  Irv, to his eternal regret, never gave himself the slightest chance to avoid that terrible fate.

There would be no Book of Irv, no Irv, without his Uncle Aren’s bold escape from the Imperial Russian Army, a desperate run that brought him to the United States in December 1904.  Within a decade Aren sent passage for his youngest sister Chava.  Chava later gave birth to Irv, who grew up to marry Evelyn, the only child of the sole survivors of two large families wiped out in the Ukraine, they begat me and my sister.  

Everyone Aren left behind in Truvovich, a muddy hamlet across the river from Pinsk, was dead when the Nazis left the area free of Jews in November 1942.   Quite simply: no Aren, no Chava, no Irv, no me. 

In the middle of the Russo-Japanese War, a contest over Manchuria and Korea that the Czar’s army was losing badly, Aren Gleiberman, a draftee in the Russian Imperial Army, made the fateful decision to desert.  If he hadn’t hopped that westbound train, with fellow desperados Fischl Bobrow and another Jewish draftee named Fleishman, and lit out across the Atlantic Ocean from Hamburg, instead of following orders and rumbling east on the Trans-Siberian railroad, my father would never have been born.  

My existence, like my father’s, owes itself entirely to Aren’s bold decision, at the age of 28, to abandon the land of his birth and the doomed, marshy little hamlet of Truvovich, where he was born and raised.

When I say Truvovich was doomed, I’m not being poetic.  Every Jew in the Pinsk area where he grew up, outside of perhaps a dozen known to have escaped and survived, was systematically executed on the orders of the SS, carrying out the fondest wishes of their Fuhrer.  Men and boys were killed in two major rounds of shooting; women and young children were driven into the swamps and marshes to die however they saw fit.  

Truvovich was part of an open air slaughterhouse from July 4, 1941 to November 1, 1942.  After the liquidation of the doomed hamlet of Truvovich during those fateful months, no trace of it can be found on any map I’ve ever seen.  I have looked long and hard for a trace of Truvovich, as has my cousin Azi and an expatriate friend in Poland.  That trace so far remains very well-hidden.

Not that things were ever too promising for the Jews of that area, in what is today southern Belarus.  1904, the year Aren made his run, was a year after the soon-to-be infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russian.  The book caused a sensation, and that sensation launched a new flood of pogroms.   Enflamed by fabricated proof of the international Jewish conspiracy to control the world, lynch mobs swarmed into Jewish settlements and did their damnedest.  It is safe to assume that Truvovich was not spared a pogrom from time to time.

When Aren came of age the Czar’s government drafted him for a five year hitch to go fight the Japanese over Russian colonial interests in Asia.  Aren took the initiative to get the hell out of there, I’m grateful to say.

Aren begat Eli, Nehama and Dave, three American-born first cousins of my father who figure prominently in his story.  I know as much about Aren, born Harry Aaron Gleiberman in 1876, from his children and his grandson Azi, Nehama’s son, as I do from my own experience.  I was still a boy when my father’s uncle died at almost 91.

My father introduced my sister and me to his Uncle Aren toward the end of Aren’s long life.  Aren was eighty the year I was born, and so for me his toughness was mostly a matter of reputation, though he was a short, stocky guy who looked like he’d been pretty sturdy in his day.  I could see a spark of the formidable younger Aren from time to time.  

He was a rough voiced man with a barrel chest his sons Eli and Dave would inherit.  Eli got the rough voice too.  Aren was known as a man not to be trifled with.  He was strong, determined and he had a fierce temper.  “The Gleiberman temper,” his son Eli, one of its foremost exemplars, always called it, with a little smile that showed teeth equally ready to bite.

My sister and I were young kids and Uncle Aren was an old man when we met, so we knew a quiet old man with a heavy Yiddish accent.  Uncle Aren always kissed my sister and me, brushing our faces with his close-cropped, bristly mustache.  He also gave us money every time we saw him.   A dollar bill each, sometimes a five or a ten.   “Wow, he gave you a fin,” our hipster father would say when we showed him a five, “here, let me hang on to those for you.”  He always pocketed whatever money Aren gave us, promising to keep it for us.

Uncle Aren didn’t speak to us much that I can recall, though I remember his heavy Yiddish accent.  He used to speak mostly in Yiddish to his nephew Irv and he read the Forward, the Yiddish paper my grandfather Sam also read.   Aren, at that time a widower of many years, lived in a rented ground floor apartment in Queens, not far from his daughter Nehama’s place, within walking distance, I think, of her husband Ben’s synagogue.  I recall seeing Aren several times at Ben’s synagogue.   These details leave me the impression that he was a religious man and regular shul goer.  I don’t know if that’s so.

I have gone back and forth during my life about the existence of a benevolent God.  I tend to see God these days as he appears in Leviticus 26, a jealous deity with no hesitation to make good on the most blood-curdling threats.  I have a hard time untangling the all-forgiving, loving God from the merciless events that go on in His world, often in His name.  

There are some who would say it must have been the hand of God that guided Aren westward and across the ocean to New York City on Christmas Day, 1904.  More likely, I believe, it was the hand of Aren himself, clenched into a hard fist and knowing it had to be better in America than the senseless, murderous life he was seeing all around him.

I’m reading the engaging Straight Life, Art Pepper’s recorded stories transcribed and artfully arranged by his wife Laurie.  She interspersed illuminating bits of interviews with people who knew Art and, very helpfully, placed a cast of characters at the front of the book for easy reference when an interview popped up.  Here is the first pass at the cast for Book of Irv, tip of the cap to Laurie Pepper:

Irv: (1924-2005) the skeleton who helps tell his own unwieldy life story.

Evelyn (1928-2010) Irv’s wife of 53 years, a Bronx girl, from the Concourse

Uncle Aren (Harry Aaron Gleiberman) (1876-1967) Irv’s uncle, escaped Czar’s army in 1904, brought youngest sister Chava to U.S in 1914.  All remaining family in Truvovich, including three other siblings, killed some time between July 1941 and November 1, 1942.

Chava (1895-1953)  Irv’s mother: red-haired, small, religious, implacably angry.

Eliyahu (Harry) (1893-1948)  Irv’s father, “an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world”; a simple, straight man; two eyes, a nose and a mouth.

Paul (1926-2013) Irv’s younger brother, socially progressive career civil servant and dead-ringer for Stephen Colbert

Eli (1908-1996)  Aren’s oldest son, Irv’s first cousin.  A tender, charming, brutal roughneck who loved to fight and gleefully fought Evelyn for decades.  The keeper of the darkest, most illuminating stories of Irv’s childhood.

Nehama (1911-2014) Aren’s daughter, Irv’s first cousin.  A brilliant woman, the first female graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary.  She, Dave and Aren “ran the family” and decided Irv and Paul were fit only for trade school.

Dave (1912-2002) Aren’s youngest, Irv’s first cousin.  Top student with an eidetic memory, he practiced law for a few years until he figured out a better way to become a millionaire.  A Communist earlier in his life, he owned a bank in later years.

Yetta (1900-1979): Evelyn’s mother, the dynamic woman Irv always called “Mom”, talented, opinionated, fond of vodka– only survivor of seven siblings killed by August 1943

Sam (1899-1978):  Evelyn’s father, Pop, a strong, quiet man who loved nothing better than “shooting pictures”, Westerns —  only survivor of seven siblings killed by August 1943

Eliot (Eliyahu) (1956-   ) narrator of his father’s perplexing life story.

“My sister” (1958-   ) a very private person whose privacy I seek to preserve, beyond her insights in helping understand and tell Irv’s story 

Benjie (born c. 1952) colleague, close friend and business partner of Irv and Evelyn in Tain Lee Chow.  A modern Orthodox Jew, Benjie was funny, shrewd at business, hard-working, he was the son my father never had.  “He was the father I never had,” said Benjie at Irv’s funeral.

Arlene and Russ: dear friends of Irv and Evelyn’s;  Arlene bright and entrepreneurial, Russ,  professional bass player and hipster– both wildly entertained by Irv’s wit

Caroline and Ralph: close friends of Evelyn and Irv’s until one cataclysmic day when Irv threw them out of his house for good

Gladys: dear friend and colleague of Irv’s, only person his children recall him spending hours on the phone with

Harold:  close, long-time friend of Irv’s, a genius who “put  a price of $75 on our friendship”

Evelyn: colleague, friend, close to the entire family; member of MENSA, Socialist, singer of protest songs.  One of the most dramatic falls from grace in the Book of Irv.

“You do realize,” said the skeleton, “that you’ve written all the pages you need, sketched out all the material you require to begin assembling the Book of Irv in earnest.  At this point it’s absurd to have any more of these ongoing imaginary chats with a fucking skeleton.  This is just your typical neurotic pattern.  

“Look, your entire life you have done any number of things with assurance and style.  The one thing you have never done is the truly hard work of bringing your products into the marketplace and getting paid.   Wouldn’t your life be much easier, much more sustainable and understandable, if you were recognized, and paid, as the writer you are?  

“You have sometimes done 98% of the work to make something as good as you can make it, I’ll give you that.   You seem to have an absolute aversion for doing that final 2%, the daunting part that’s no fun, that seems somehow uncreative to you– creating the monetary value of what you do.”

That’s fair enough.  I have a sheaf of rationales right here, starting with this antiquated machine I am tapping on right now, which makes it difficult to cut, paste, organize, but the basic point is fair enough.   I am here at this balky machine because I had to stay another night in a sweltering house to pick up a neutered kitten from a vet in College Point today.  You make a good point though.  I can only say, I am still searching for an elusive piece of the essence of the story here.  There are some elements still missing.

“There will always be essential elements missing, that’s life, Elie, even in a Hollywood script.  And, anyway, wouldn’t these missing pieces be easier to find as gaps in the narrative once you start organizing and constructing the story itself?”  

Quite likely they would, yes.  

“Yet you persist in nattering with a pile of bones.  Does this make sense to you?”

In the moment it does, in an odd way.  

“‘Odd’ is a good word for it,” said the skeleton.

Look, you worked, and worked.  You worked all day and then, after a nap on the couch and a fight with your children over dinner, you drove off to another job you did at night.   What you thought as you drove to that second job is anyone’s guess.  You eventually saw your youthful ideals as a threat to what you’d acquired during a life spent largely running away from your fearful inner life.  

When you retired, and finally had the time, you did not reflect, though you finally had the leisure to reflect.  Instead you read every newspaper you could find, once you had a computer you added the Jerusalem Post and others. Your real self-examination began only after you got the death sentence, six days before the end of your life.

“What’s your point?” asked the skeleton testily.

It’s a life strategy, the most common one there is.  Keep yourself busy.  Don’t stop running the treadmill long enough to wonder what you’re doing.  If you stop to wonder that, the whole thing collapses.  Work is synonymous with being productive, after all, and we’re taught that work is the most moral use for one’s time.  It has the added benefit of leaving no time for brooding on things that might gnaw at your soul.  Wear yourself out chasing material security, live in a nice house.  Let the emotional chips fall where they may.  

“Well, your current life as a gentleman farmer is made possible only by the fact that my life strategy was mindlessly chasing material security.  No little irony in you lecturing me about my misguided values when you are the pontificating beneficiary of those values.”

I have an old friend whose nightmare is being forced to sit down and write his innermost thoughts on a page.   He would rather do anything else.  The idea of not working, unless he’s on vacation somewhere beautiful, is terrifying to him.  Me, my fondest hours are spent doing something that would cause this fellow to jump out of his skin.   We have different needs in life.  Perhaps I’m cursed to think I’m engaged in a long search for truth, to the exclusion of things most people find much more important.  

“You poor fuck, I did that to you,” said the skeleton, sadly.

I understand about success, and I’m trying to pursue it now, trying to figure out how to get paid for what I do.  It is easier to pursue success if you leave creativity out of it, but that seems impossible to me.  Makes me a despicable, spoiled prick on one level, an idealist on another.

“We can both live with despicable, spoiled prick,” said the skeleton.

I can’t escape my need to be creative, I’ve tried, I can’t overcome it.  I know it sounds weak, self-indulgent, petty, but I have a compulsion to draw, play guitar, improvise.  I literally can’t live without doing these things.  For years it caused me great anguish, watching hacks succeed in each field while incredibly talented people I know were reduced to misery, perceiving themselves as failures, in spite of their impressive achievements, because they did not have what it takes to become ‘professionals’.  When I was a lawyer, sitting in court, I was constantly drawing on my copies of the legal papers I drafted.  I carried a dozen pens and mechanical pencils in my lawyer bag.  I once brought a ukulele into the Civil Court and played it in the stairwell waiting for my case to be called.

“You always were a talented little fuck, nobody can really argue that point, even though, in fairness, Elie, who gives a rat’s perfectly turned thigh?   I understand it created some dilemmas for you.  As long as you realize your problems are the problems of a despicable, spoiled prick,” said the skeleton.

I could agree with that assessment wholeheartedly if I lived the life of a spoiled bastard.  I take some comfort in my lack of covetousness.   Houses, cars, clothes, beautiful musical instruments, fabulous travel locations… none of these things mean much to me as rewards.  If I never eat in a fancy restaurant again, I will feel no poorer.  

“Well, bully for you, then, you’ve got the world on a string,” said the skeleton.

My dilemma remains.  Until I sell your fucking story, I have not succeeded.  I am a perplexing mystery to everyone who truly cares about me, until I get paid.

“Well, that makes me happy, you know, to have become the hallmark of your success or failure as a human at the age of sixty. Pretty neat, really,” the skeleton said with a wry wink.

Pretty neat, yes.  Look at my past options for a second and you will see that my dilemma was not as uncomplicated as it might seem at a quick glance.  

I’ve always been squeamish (‘exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated’) about advertising and commerce, the most sensible uses for drawing talent, or a way with words, for that matter. Advertising copywriters and idea men make big bucks.  The dream of becoming Picasso, selling even scrawls produced using a brush stuck in my ass, was a ridiculous one, encouraged by grandma, in all her vainglorious madness.  I have come to see the job of the museum artist for what it is: convincing rich people that your work is profound, getting them to love you and your work, bid large sums for it.  

I understand that the music business is only a livelihood for the most talented, ambitious 0.01% of people who have musical ability.   Virtually all of those who make it big have to have, in addition to musical talent, top 1% looks (or at least a unique and not ugly look), insane marketing smarts and a stroke or two of brilliant luck.  Outside of making it big, or being a studio player, there are very limited gigs for otherwise talented players.

“Boo fucking hoo, this is what you’re doing today?  Really?” said the skeleton.

Righty-Oh!  Off to pick up that blue eyed kitten from the vet on College Point Boulevard.  Ha hey!

“You might call it ‘false masculinity’, I suppose,” said the skeleton of my father, philosophically. “It was a kind of hyper-masculine pose where I pretended nothing could penetrate my armor, and that anyone who didn’t wear armor was a weakling who couldn’t take a punch.  It embarrasses me now to realize how transparently weak that pose is.”

It’s a pose of strength, with an emphasis on pose.  It’s a stance taken to give the impression of great strength, by revealing nothing but disgust poised to explode into righteous anger.  It answers need with silence, withholds that which is most needed.  

“Well, it is a pose, and it does create a certain impression,” said the skeleton. “The thing is, I suppose the beauty and horror of it, is how easy it is to do.  You can completely negate your opponent solely through body language, facial expression, non-verbal cues and, if words are needed, a few clipped, terse ones are all it takes.  The main thing is to give nothing, cede not a millimeter.  Less is more.  Think of that mask of masculine malice Clint Eastwood wears in so many movies.  The squinted eyes, the stony stare, the upright posture, the monosyllabic rejoinders, the unstated but perfectly articulated threat of violence.  It is an implacable pose, for sure.”  

Here’s the really devilish part, that pose of strength works best when deployed against vulnerable people, people prone to fear, like children, naturally weak and dependent, intuitive and easily confused.  It takes nothing to make a child feel like the innately inferior race ruled on summarily in Dred Scott, ‘with no rights that the white man was bound to respect.’  

“Well, listen Elie, you have a problem here.  What you’re saying is true, but it’s not a story element.  You’re committing the cardinal undergrad writing shortcut– telling rather than showing.  You want your reader to feel what you’re driving at here, abstraction won’t do.  You’ll have to dredge up some painful ancient memory where you were made to feel exactly the way you are describing here.  You have to narrate it, show us this mechanism in action, make us feel how it felt.  Just laying it out abstractly isn’t going to butter the biscuit, as your friend the madman was wont to say,” said the skeleton.  

Funny you should mention my friend the madman, dad.   The way he turned into a hissy, provocative version of Uncle Paul in the end.   Mom always hated Uncle Paul because she found him to be a bully.   He bullied her because he thought he could get away with it.  He was afraid of you, so he was overbearing with mom, whenever they were alone.  

“Well, that’s the classic bully, the person was bullied by someone stronger and it instills this burning need to take it out on somebody. In my brother Paul’s case he was bullied by his much bigger older brother, me, and he takes out his rage by tormenting people he feels like he can dominate.   Funny, you always saw Paul as a mild-mannered, bright, kind of corny guy who just wanted to be liked.  Mom saw that other side of him early on, which you saw for the first time much later on, that year you and your sister went to spend Passover with him and Barbara.  You were an adult already when you saw that enraged, autocratic Paul that mom was so repelled by.”

Yeah, it is funny how it can sometimes take literally decades to see exactly what was on the end of your fork all along.

“Naked Lunch,” said the skeleton.  “Well, anyway, you’ve transcribed your full-color notes on this point and can fold up the tents for the night.   Why not go get some sleep?”

“The story of a brutalized life can’t be grasped unless you understand the lifelong damage trauma produces.  They refer to this trauma-induced damage now as PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you can find it in the DSM that every shrink has on his desk, it’s now a well-known syndrome.  The trauma will trigger echoes throughout your life, put you right back into it, where you will have to fight for your life,” said the skeleton of my father.

“That’s one reason I had such undying hatred for pedophiles, the lifelong damage certain adults do by putting their own need for domination and pleasure above the life and well-being of a child.  Child molesters perform the archetypal atrocity — never aware of anything beyond their own raging desire, devoid of  empathy. 

“From the point of view of the survivor of an atrocity–  imagine living through the trench warfare of World War One, somehow surviving that sickening, senseless slaughter.  At the end you and the other survivors leave the battlefield crusted in filth, stinking, sticky with the blood of your friends who were slaughtered.  They have to cut the uniform and boots off you.  They give you a shower and a new uniform, a haircut and a shave, pat you on the back and send you home.  They have a parade for you when you arrive back home in your French village, or in London, or Berlin, or Fort Lee, New Jersey.  The stench never leaves your nostrils, and at night when you wake up from a nightmare, you will not be reassured to find yourself in your own bed,” said the skeleton.  “It’s like one of God’s curses from Levitcus 26, for the lucky ones.  ‘As for those of you who are left…’

“Eddie got back from Vietnam where he saw a lot of combat, he became a cop.  You remember Eddie, a handsome, dashing guy, a man’s man, charming, great sense of humor.  He used to say he had no patience for the whining vets who wanted to blame the government for their problems, that they should just man up and suck it up and stop blaming other people because they were fucked up and so on.  Then he marries the beautiful, smart, lovely and accomplished Christine, you remember, at their wedding you pinned me to the spot, made me admit I’d abused you and your sister, which I did… but anyway, do you remember how things ended with them?  

“With the most normal and lovable All-American hero and the love of his life, that super-couple everyone wanted to be around?  Things ended badly for them.  He was fucking everything that moved, I understand, with a wife like that.  He even tried to put the moves on one of her daughters.  She wasn’t a little girl, you know, she was in college, but… what the fuck was he thinking?

“It reminds me of what Lance Rentzel said when they asked him about reports he was cheating on Joey Heatherton: ‘why would I go out for a hamburger when I got steak at home?’  I know the quote’s attributed to Paul Newman, but I always imagine it was Rentzel.  Which would have meant Lance would have had to have said it prior to exposing himself to that ten year-old girl, whose family wouldn’t settle, and he not only fell from grace, his filet minon divorced him.  

“Anyway, you know, you always paint our family dinner table as a scene from the First World War.  You have biplanes strafing, barbed wire, coils of chlorine gas rolling in, the enormous piles of human shit, washed with piss, one forgets that thousands of men in muddy trenches have to shit and piss every day, and deal with lice, and crotch rot, and stink foot, and gangrene and all that other crap, that’s before they are ordered to go over the top with bayonets fixed and charge into the machine guns.  

“You were being poetic, I suppose, describing our family dinner table like something out of Ypres in World War One, but you were not completely wrong about it.  It was like that, in some fundamental way, you captured its essence.  It was a war.  I always called it a war, each meal was another skirmish, another battle.  I don’t dismiss the trauma of trying to eat your dinner every night at a table where your father is snarling and assuring you that you will lose the fucking war, no matter how many battles you may win, I am saying this to make a larger point.  

“When you are the victim of systematic and inescapable brutality, generations of our ancestors used as punching bags, and worse, or those poor bastards who find themselves on actual battlefields, facing sudden death from any direction for reasons they can only think of in terms of bravery, honor and defense of their fellow soldiers …

“Look, Elie, I’m talking emotionally now, you will have to comb and iron this into something more presentable, the point is, those who have not experienced these traumatic things will have find it impossible to understand what you are even talking about.  It’s like the way I always mocked you, ‘boo hoo, my father is so mean.  Grow up, you little wimp….’.  You don’t say that to a seven year-old.  I mean, you only say it if you are twisted that way.  The only thing that will twist you that way is having been brutalized.”

I understand the workings of this infernal machine very well, dad.  Now I do.  I understand it clearly now, though it was a little out of focus for me for the first few decades.  

“Well, you will be doing a great service if you can lay this out clearly for others to see,” said the skeleton, giving me my next assignment in this long voyage to tell his story.  “You have to make sure they can actually feel that moment, when you snap awake, in the middle of the original trauma that turned you into a monster, choking on all those feelings, with only a terror to survive.”  

And that moment of clarity and moral resolve when you choose not to be a monster.

 “Yes, do not neglect to describe that moment,” said the skeleton, urging me to go to sleep now myself.

“Look, you’ve come to the hard part,” said the skeleton, yawning.  “Remembering everything you could about my life and writing it down, day by day, as it came to you– what your professional writer friend called ‘the memory dump’ phase– well, that was the easy part.  Now that you’ve got 180,000 words worth of memories dumped… heh.  Good luck putting it into a nice salable narrative now.”

Indeed.   

“Now, like everything else in life– if you want to sell it, there has to be an immediate dramatic focus that gets a reader’s attention, makes people line up to buy it.  No publisher is going to pay you without the marketing department’s promise that they will get paid way more.  No profit in selling something for no profit, you dig.

“It’s got to be sexy, even a story about celibacy has to be sexy.   You want to read about some priest who tortures himself because he finally jerked off?  Nah.  You want to read about the explicit torments that finally broke this charismatic monk (even if he was, or especially if he was, a real-life troll) and made him vividly spank the puppy.  I can’t tell you how to frame this story, but ingeniously frame it you must.  You haven’t told my story until it’s a tale people need to hear the end of.  A story with a pay-off they’ll pay for.

“It’s not like I killed ten people from a tower, or physically beat the shit out of you and your sister, or was a famously violent racist demagogue, or a beautiful and shameless young female celebrity, or even was assaulted by cops and the recipient of a huge cash settlement from the city.  I wasn’t fabulously rich, I wasn’t particularly talented.   I didn’t do anything to make me famous or newsworthy.   Was I even remarkable in any way?  What is the real story here?”

Leaving aside the question of why I am wrestling with it here, on a ‘public’ website, I have an idea of the shape it needs to take.  It starts with a heated and relentless 45 year argument with seemingly no end.  The argument ends, the last night of the angry old man’s life, with too-late agreement, the deathbed gift of reconciliation for the man about to die, after he admits most of the blame was his for the long war.

The reader wakes up in a room where the war is raging, fire is belching out, there’s screaming, machine gun racket, the death-groans of mortally wounded animals.   There is no apparent cause for the war, as senseless and brutal as any, but a young child is being angrily blamed for starting it, continuing it.  Both adults are furiously wailing at the kid, trying to get him to admit he is a fucking war criminal.

We see the accused kid at the beginning, a baby in his crib, old enough to hold his head up and turn it to his father, but not old enough to do much more than that.

“You were certainly old enough to stare at me accusingly with those big, black eyes,” says the father, “you never took your goddamn eyes off me.  Every time I turned my head, there was you, with those two big, black eyes, boring into me, accusing me of God knows what.”  

Panning back the camera shows we are not in a random insane asylum.  This is an ordinary kitchen table in a suburban home, although the table is on fire, with the rat-tat-tat of strafing machine guns, the whiff of rolling chlorine gas, the pounding of the big guns.

“You’re so goddamn melodramatic,” the mother says to the boy, opera wailing in the background, her eyes burning with passion.

“Leave your mother out of this,” snarls the father, “you started it, you continue it, you fight us every step of the way and you may think you’re winning, you may even be winning this battle, but you’re going to lose the war.  I guarantee, you will lose this war, mark my words.”  

The camera once again pulls back to take in the wider scene, assure the reader again that we are not viewing a tight shot in a madhouse.

We are also, of course, viewing a tight shot in a madhouse.  There are thousands of these madhouses on every block in suburbia, on every floor in every city.  I always think it a kind of blessing that I grew up in a house where the war was at least out in the open.  

That could be the PTSD talking, trying to put a positive spin on the terror of it, I suppose.   Can it be that some things are just horrible with no redeeming features?   

“It can certainly be that some things are just horrible with no redeeming features.  You want one?  Poverty.  Big word for only three syllables.  You want another one?  Rage. One syllable, total motherfucker.   But most horrible things, it’s true, I’ll grant you, there is usually some kind of redeeming feature.  The scale that we weigh such things on is very tricky to operate,” the skeleton made a crazy balancing gesture on an invisible scale between his bony hands.

You got that right.  I’m taking objectively horrible senseless brutality, and weighing it against the many infinitely precious things that came with it.  But not without a phenomenal cost.

“Not without a phenomenal cost,” said the skeleton.