My father’s childhood was objectively horrible, beyond question.  The competitive comparison of traumas is usually an idiotic exercise, since trauma traumatizes in any case.  That said, my father’s life was objectively much more traumatic than the lives he provided for my sister and me, hands down.  That’s one reason my father was so quick to dismiss any complaints my sister or I expressed as the whining of pampered brats, wimps, children who had no idea how bad life could be, however bad we thought our lives might have been.  It makes me wonder about the lives of his parents, which were objectively at least as horrible as his, if such horrors can really be compared.  I know very little about either of those lives, except that each lived miserably in America while the rest of their siblings were murdered by organized groups of anti-Semites back in Europe.

My father’s childhood of grinding poverty was bad enough.  Starting American small-town kindergarten speaking Yiddish only, as the Great Depression began, made his situation even worse, if such a thing was possible.  Worse still, his mother hated his father and hated him, hatred she expressed through furious violence.  She called her oldest son “Sonny” to the end of her life, but that was apparently the full extent of her tenderness.  

His father, who survives in two enigmatic photographs and an epitaph that memorializes a simple, straight man, was described as having a facial expression consisting of two eyes, a nose and a mouth.   Except for stints chopping down trees for the WPA, a short run on a herring wagon and his job sweeping and mopping the First (and only) Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill, he was largely unemployed.  

It does not surprise me now that my father was so reticent about his childhood.   He and his younger brother had a miserable life in Peekskill and, to add to my father’s misery, his sickly younger brother appears to have been something of a mama’s boy. The real mystery is where my father’s many fine values and strongly held humanistic beliefs came from.

Toward the end of his life I spent a lot of time at the cottage of my father’s first cousin Eli, a simultaneously crusty and tender character. Eli’s manner was hospitable and droll or savagely threatening according to the situation, which was subject to dramatic change from moment to moment.  A combative man with a bad temper, Eli never backed down from any kind of fight and he fought those he loved as fiercely as those he hated.  

My father once reported on a Florida to New York drive with my mother and Eli. “Your mother and Eli fought from Boca Raton to the end of the New Jersey Turnpike,” he told me with a chuckle.  I pictured my mother, one arm across the back of the passenger seat, turned to face Eli in the back, the two of them clanging swords the whole ride, neither one tiring, both showing their teeth.  Those two adored each other, and neither could resist a good fight.  I fought with Eli too, you had to, really.  Mostly, in those last years, I interviewed him about the past, and he was happy to talk, a good story teller, honest to the limits of his insight with an impressive memory for details.  Along the way we had a few good fights, but that was not the point for either of us.

“I tell you these stories for you, so you can make some sense out of these tangled, miserable situations we’re talking about.  These stories are for you and your sister, not for anybody else,” he told me when I first began recording them. “I need your promise that you won’t write about these stories until everybody in them is dead.”  I gave my word, feeling like I was agreeing to a lifetime ban against writing about my family.  But the old man, he was around 85 when my regular researching visits to him began in earnest, knew what a relatively short-term promise I was making.  In the blink of an eye, over the course of less than twenty years or so, everyone in the stories was dead.

Eli’s father had been my father’s uncle, Uncle Aren, who my sister and I remember as an old man who always gave us money, kissed us with wet lips pursed under his rough close-cropped bristly white mustache (Eli wore his the same way)  and affectionately patted us on the cheeks with hands that smelled of white fish. He seemed to speak mostly Yiddish, and sometimes carried the Yiddish newspaper, though he had for many years run a garage in Peekskill where my father and uncle both worked.  Although my sister and I never saw it, except once in his agitation that one of us may have sat on his fedora (we hadn’t), he was known to be a man of towering temper.  Uncle Aren’s son Eli, my father’s first cousin, was seventeen years older than my father and had a front row seat on my father’s childhood.  

Aren who had escaped from the Czar’s army during the Russo-Japanese war and learned to vulcanize rubber tires in New York City, had four siblings who lived in a muddy hamlet on the outskirts of Pinsk.  Three of them, along with the muddy hamlet of Truvovich itself,  were wiped away without a trace around 1943.  Aren had two brothers, Yuddle and Volbear, and two sisters, Chaski and the baby, Chava.   Aren was a hard-working man and he saved money and, during Eli’s childhood, some time around World War I, sent for his brother Yuddle.

Yuddle soon came down with tuberculosis.  Aren put him on a boat back to Europe.  “America’s no place for a sick man,” he told his brother, “here you have to work.”  Aren sent for his baby sister, beautiful, red haired Chava, the only other Glieberman who would ever leave Truvovich.   

“My father and I drove down to New York to get her when she arrived.  When I saw her rushing toward us, with that red hair and those healthy red cheeks, she was gorgeous.  It was love at first sight.  There was nothing my Tante Chava wouldn’t do for me, and nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”   I knew that any story I heard about my grandmother, like any I heard about my father and uncle, would be told with love.  

Not so any story I heard about Aren’s second wife, Tamarka, who Eli described as a “bitch on wheels”.  Eli’s mother had died shortly after childbirth.  “I was an instrument baby,” he explained, “and in those days, they didn’t know much about sterilizing anything.  My mother got a massive infection from the dirty instruments and she died within a day or two.  My father was a single man, and he had to work, and he couldn’t take care of a baby.  He was going to give me up for adoption, but my grandmother and my mother’s sisters took me and they raised me on a farm.  And on that farm, among these women who adored me, my word was law.”  

He told this part of the story once to a pretty woman I’d bring up to visit him.  A young woman who loved flattery, and a charming old man who loved to flatter a pretty girl, they hit it off immediately.  He was at his best when she visited.  “I was a boy, five, six years old and my word was law!” he roared as she smiled delightedly at him.  He leaned forward, touched her leg and said, with great sincerity, in his quietest whisper “which was very, very bad.”  

Eli always felt odd man out when he visited his father in Peekskill, with his father’s second wife and two brilliant, middle class children, his younger half-siblings Nehama and Dave.  Eli was rough, and spoke plainly, he was a brawling high school dropout from the city, with a bad temper.  His father’s second wife apparently had little use for him.  The feeling was mutual.

“A bitch on wheels and ugly as an ape.  And she had my father by the balls,” he said.  

I was surprised, knowing Aren’s reputation for toughness.  “She dominated Uncle Aren?”  

“If she told him to jump, he’d ask ‘how high?'” he shook his head and sneered.    “So, anyway, your grandmother was a like a slave to her.  She worked as a nanny in the house, took care of the kids, and she cleaned, and cooked and Tamarka loved having a slave, and my father didn’t say anything.  In the beginning it was like she was working off her passage, my father paid for the ocean crossing and gave her room and board and she was repaying the debt.  But it went on for years.  That bitch didn’t want to lose her slave, you understand”.  

“There was a young mailman in Peekskill, a Jewish guy, with red hair, and he stopped by the house every time he delivered letters to them.  And they would talk and they hit it off.   Tante Chava and he fell in love, and he wanted to ask her out.  They wanted to get married.  Well, you can be sure that wasn’t going to happen, Tamarka wasn’t going to give up her slave.  They busted that up right away.  It broke your grandmother’s heart.”

I found it poignant that my father never knew anything about this story, except for the part about his mother’s slavery at Tamarka and Aren’s.  He and his little brother went along when their mother was forced to continue as a domestic there.  “We used to dig our thumbnails into her rubber tree plants when she made us dust them.  We wanted to kill those plants, but they were unkillable.  We used to hate going there.”

When Chava came toward the end of marrying age Aren set up an arranged marriage to a tall, quiet man whose slightly haunted looking face was two eyes, a nose and a mouth.   He’d not had it easy, either.  He’d been the favorite punching bag for his cruel step-mother, who knocked him to the dirt floor of a primitive farmhouse in Connecticut, in an area where, oddly, Eastern European Jews had once settled to farm.  According to Eli, she sometimes knocked him down with a wooden board to the side of the head.  After a while, Eli said, my young grandfather psychologically checked out.

We fast forward twenty-two years or so years after my father’s birth, to a black and white photograph I still have of my young father, black hair, glasses off, sideways, in ecstatic wrestling embrace with a thin, blonde, extremely Christian looking young woman. They are paused in a struggle across a picnic blanket, my father in an affectionate headlock, gripping the young woman around the waist.  His face is flushed and it is the happiest I have ever seen him looking, in life or in pictures.  My only clue about the photo is a story Eli had told me more than ten years earlier.

“Your father moved to Connecticut when he got back from the army, his father’s side of the family was from there.  He rented a room in a house owned by a young shiksa. She was a couple of years older than him, a widow.  And they took up together, your father was pumping gas by day and at night he was with this shiksa.  And your grandmother couldn’t stand it, so she sent me up there and I busted it up.”  Eli reported this without the slightest idea that he could be saying anything anyone could have an argument with.  I don’t recall arguing about it then or later.  I was simply surprised.

My father, for a long time, was fond of the construction “you show me a man who…. I’ll show you a man who….” .  One of its virtues was its infinite flexibility.  

“You show me a man who refuses to eat the delicious dinner his mother cooked for him, I’ll show you a man who goes to bed hungry.”  

“You show me a man who doesn’t take the garbage out, I’ll show you a man who doesn’t want to watch the Smothers Brothers tonight.”

“You show me a man who tells his father to go fuck himself, I’ll show you a man who gets no allowance.” 

Though he never said “you show me a boy who complains about his father using vicious language against him every night, I’ll show you a boy who never learned the real meaning of abuse at the hands of an enraged, whip wielding mother” he might as well have.

I understand now, as an adult in the last chapters of my life, what I could not have possibly understood as a child, when my father was practicing his version of restraint on my sister and me by not doing exactly to us what was done to him.   As kids, my sister and I had nothing to compare it to, this nightly dose of snarling rage from our father.  We probably thought it was normal, somehow, or that we must have been monsters of some kind.   I don’t mention this here to go into which is worse verbal/emotional violence or physical/emotional violence – that’s a conversation for another day.  For the moment I’ll note that Irv, when I confronted him on the issue as an adult, acknowledged that the two were interchangeable as far as the harm they cause.

Is it worse to beat a child viciously or to constantly tell that child that everything he touches turns to shit, that he is his own worst enemy, that he may win the battle but he’s going to lose the war, that the hatred and evil in him is oozing out through the pores of his erupting skin, that his face is “twisted and contorted in hate” (my sister and I still get a chuckle from that curious phrase) that he is a vicious and deadly reptile, a cobra, a fucking coiled rattle snake ready to strike.  If this collection sounds petty, add applied strategic silence, dismissing all expressed concerns as the whining of a weakling, constant blame and the steady withholding of approval into the mix.  Pick ’em, verbal or physical violence, neither one is a better choice, I assure you.  

I thought from time to time that I’d rather have been beaten, because by fifteen the physical part of it would have stopped.  I saw this one night, much to my surprise, and even my slight disappointment, strange to say, when I rose up from my chair during a violent tongue lashing and angrily confronted him, ready to shut his mouth for him.  That night I saw real fear in his eyes, and he backed down, looking away, muttering to himself, as he sometimes did.

This is the worst of my father, captured in perhaps his most unflattering moment, the coward bully called on it by his young son who is finally old enough to stand up and physically confront the blustering hater across the table.  If there had been a real fight, I’d have stood no chance.  I was a skinny adolescent, he was still twice my size, but I would have gotten a shot in anyway, and the fear of that, and probably his knowledge that he deserved it, decided the matter.  It was a terrible moment, in any case, and only kicked our conflict into a higher gear.

Violence, verbal or physical, generally leads only to more violence.  That violence can be turned against others or against the self.   Most often it is used in combination.  It will do its damage any way it’s deployed.  Violence once instilled can seem impossible to overcome, and the fatalistic conviction of that is part of what makes it so dangerous. 

It’s much easier to punch back when hit than to understand the deep pain that leads an angry asshole to punch you in the face and that returning violence with violence is a loser’s game.  Who cares why the angry asshole punched me in the face anyway?  Nothing gives him that right.  Are you saying his hurt and rage give him the right, somehow?  Fuck him and fuck you and the high horse you rode in on.  Boom!  In your fucking face, asshole!  Works in a bar, in a fight with a stranger, a truculent friend who is about to become a stranger.  Works in the movies, in politics, with the barbarous fucks who hate our freedom.  

With someone you care deeply about other rules must apply.  Empathy is the only thing that has the power to turn aside hurt and rage, to put violence to the side, to restore what is most important, mutual support in a raging world, back in the center of the relationship.

My father, from my point of view, did better than his mother did when faced with rage.  He didn’t do much better, fair enough, but I give him points for the improvement.  Is it better to rage in words, in attitude, by continually withholding what a child needs most, than to rage with the heavy cord of a steam iron lashed across your infant child’s face?  I think it’s beyond argument that it’s better to curse at than whip the baby in the face.  Is it an excellent improvement?  Admittedly not.  But at this point, I give my father at least a bit of credit.  

Writing this way I know that some people I know will be infuriated.  Even though I present this side of my father in the context of his many fine qualities and his deeply held moral values, these are truly ugly things.   Although I claim to offer a nuanced view of my complicated father I am revealing horrible things about a man who is long dead and unable to defend himself.  What gives me the right? some, indignant on his behalf, will demand to know.  

My life gives me the right.  The values my father instilled in me, ironically, give me the right.  What gives me the right is what I have learned– that the ruthless exercise of one’s unreasoning will over somebody else’s is always wrong.  

Take the tendentious adjective out of that last sentence, it’s still true.  OK, let’s rewrite the sentence entirely.  Raging against your fellow human being is not only almost always pointless, it’s destructive and just plain wrong.   Being in a constant rage is the gateway to wickedness; when enraged, all atrocities are on the table.

This is a deeper subject than I can try to dive to the bottom of now, and this attempt may rankle those already pissed off, but it’s a start.  And my sympathy, for what it’s worth, goes to anyone who may be rankled by it.

When Russ referred to his good friend Irv as a motherfucker he was not cursing him, he said it as the superlative compliment.  This is something very hard for white Americans to understand, motherfucker as a synonym for genius.  Russ traveled among hipsters, cats who took their cues from the black musicians they hung out with.  Miles Davis, it was agreed, played like a motherfucker.  Coltrane was a motherfucker, so was Eric Dolphy.   Just a fact.  Nobody was more powerful than a motherfucker.  Picture it, if you can.  See, you can’t.

I must have been ten or eleven when my father returned from one of the sensitivity trainings he conducted as a member of the Human Relations Unit of the New York City Board of Education.  He’d take the rival high school gang leaders to retreats outside of the city, they’d spend a weekend in some leafy setting, role playing, rapping, telling hard truths to each other, bonding.  He came home from one retreat and handed me a mimeographed sheet with the word Motherfucker printed across the top.  

I believe it was mimeographed, printed in that purple ink the mimeograph process (precursor to the Xerox) used.  The mimeograph used an ingenious stencil that was created with a kind of carbon paper.  You could type on the stencil and also write or draw on it by hand.  I used to love seeing my drawings mimeographed, on the rare occasions when teachers let me use the stencils.  The stencil was placed on a drum.  The drum was turned, a pump was activated and ink went through the stencil on to a succession of mechanically fed pages that fell in a stack and sometimes smeared slightly if the drum turned too fast, though the fragrant ink was quick drying.  

Anyway, at the top of this sheet my father handed me in the kitchen one day (which was an early black and white photocopy, now that I strain to recall it) was the word Motherfucker, and below it were a couple of paragraphs explaining its origin.  I wish I still had the sheet.  

My father used the word as a jumping off point for one of his sessions.  He asked a circle of Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Italians what the word meant.  The Italian kid said it meant the last thing you say before fists fly, the weapons come out.  

“You call somebody a motherfucker you’re ready for them to try to take you out.  Fighting word, that’s all it is.  Nothing you can say to provoke the other guy more than calling him a motherfucker.  There is no word in English after that to escalate the level of violence.  The only thing after that is a physical battle.”  

The Puerto Rican hood agreed.  “I call you a motherfucker right before I kick your ass,” he said.

My father looked at the Black kid, who was smirking slightly and shaking his head.

“Tyrone,” said my father, “you have a different definition, I see.  Tell us what the word really means.”  Tyrone brought out the nuance of the word, as it was used on the street, more than the other two and my father gave out the mimeographed sheet for them to consider.

As I remember it the sheet gave the word its roots in American slavery.  The motherfucker was a man like Thomas Jefferson, all-powerful, someone who literally owned your ass and could have his pick of the slave women to have sex with whenever he wanted.  If you were a slave boy and you saw him coming to take your pretty young mother there was nothing you could do.  If you were a slave man twice as strong as the master and saw the motherfucker coming for your girl, there was nothing you could do.  The motherfucker was going to fuck your mother, sister, daughter if he felt like it, simple as that.  It was the law and it was the custom.  So, say this for the motherfucker, as much as you might hate the motherfucker, you had to give him his enviable due — he was a motherfucker, no question about that.  

Yeah, you could also use it as the last thing you said before you capped somebody, or poked him in the stomach with a baseball bat, why not?  A motherfucker kind of deserved that, really.  Live by the sword, die by the sword, motherfucker.  The word could also be used in passing, to express disdain or mild disrespect, to assert one’s right to an opinion, underscore that the person you’re talking to is no better than you.  Like in the sentence “it’s entirely appropriate and fair to say that Jimi Hendrix played guitar like a motherfucker, motherfucker.”

My father was very fond of Lamine, who washed the pots in Tain Lee Chow for a period of time.  Lamine was a gentle dark black young man from Senegal. He was bright and inquisitive.  My father loved saying his name, enjoyed talking to Lamine.  Lamine picked up a lot of English from his conversations with my father.  

One story my father told more than once was about the time the police picked Lamine up a few blocks from the restaurant and beat the shit out of him.  He made his one call to Mr. Irv who rushed over to the precinct and picked him up.

“Why they beat me, Mr. Irv?” he asked my father afterwards.  My father found this simple question very poignant.  It was.  I don’t remember how he explained to Lamine the crime of walking through a middle class white neighborhood while being black.  It is one of those conversations I can only imagine, and it is as hazy as a mumble from the beyond during a seance.  

Did Irv, who was on his way to panic selling his home because he’d seen several blacks walking in the neighborhood, give him the historical explanation he would have given years earlier?   Was my father more the principled integrationist or the knee jerk racial realist of his later years when he answered Lamine?  

I suspect he gave Lamine a thoughtful answer about racism, possibly explaining the difference between de jure and de facto racism as he’d explained it to me decades earlier.   He would have given Lamine a compassionate answer, I know that.  Whether they are beating the shit out of you because the law says they can, or just because they can, makes little difference when you’re getting the shit beat out of you.  My father understood that as well as anyone, better than most.

I should  add that not all situations where we recast unhappy relationships in our lives with new players are neurotic exercises in masochism.  They can also work out wonderfully for one or both parties.  Teenaged Mike Levine was delighted to find a bright, funny, understanding man like Irv, and Irv was happy for Mike Levine’s admiration, adoration.  They both got something they needed deeply out of the relationship they couldn’t get from their birth relationships.   Perhaps the greatest example of this was my father’s relationship with his last and longest lasting surrogate son, Benjy.  

Benjy was an Orthodox Jew, modern orthodox, not a Hasid.  A big man with an outsized, extroverted personality, the camp’s young business manager often led songs in the camp dining room after dinner.  He compiled the updated song book kids used when learning the Israeli songs.  The book was called Benjy Sings.  When the campers clamored for it he would treat them to a ribald song called “Lipstick on My Tsitsis”.   Tsitsis are the fringes of the garment religious Jewish men wear under their shirts.  The chorus chides the singer, lipstick on your tsitsis, shame on you!  After a lot of innuendo, the singer protests that the lipstick got there innocently.  Come on, she was religious, she bent down and kissed my tsitsis!  The teenaged campers loved it.  He was a showman with a good sense of humor.   My parents were both very close with him. 

When they all left the employ of the overbearing Hadassah volunteer executives they discussed opening a restaurant together.  All three loved to eat and Benjy’s expertise was in the food business.  The last time I saw Benjy he was well on his way to 400 pounds.  My mother, who’d been heavy her whole life, until her last few years, when lonely widowhood and chemo left her almost gaunt, told Benjy several times during that last dinner that he was going to die because he was so unhealthily fat.  It was a fair, if annoying, point she kept hammering at as we ate a delicious meal in a kosher Indian restaurant in Teaneck.  It turned out to be the last time she and Benjy ever saw each other.

Benjy and my mother fought about virtually everything, he was as stubborn and opinionated as she was.  My mother once described him as having “little beady eyes, like a pig”, about the most cutting description of a religious Jew’s face I can imagine.  They fought constantly but they truly loved each other.  Benjy and Irv were best friends.

My father felt too young to retire, and there was still money to be made, and neither he nor Benjy ever wanted to work for anybody again if they could help it.  Since Benjy was the businessman, my parents deferred to him on all business matters.  Once they persuaded him, that is, that rather than a kosher steak house they should open a kosher Chinese Restaurant.  Benjy was against the idea, since he’d never had Chinese food.  My parents took him into the city to eat at Moshe Peking.  He agreed the food was delicious, and that there would be a great advantage to being the only glatt kosher Chinese restaurant Queens, if they could get a location in the heart of a religious neighborhood near where I was born.

They found the location, site of the former Royal Hungarian, on Main Street in Queens.   Benjy came up with the name of the restaurant:  Tain Lee Chow.  It is Hebrew for  “Give Me Chow” and had a nice Chinese feel to it.  Benjy created a menu full of witty names for the dishes.  The “perfect marriage of beef and chicken” he called “My Bashaert” — the blessed mate intended for me by Heaven.  They found an excellent Chinese chef, Sonny Chow, who they paid a large salary to each week, mostly in cash.  As long as all kosher ingredients were provided to Mr. Chow he was free to cook as he always did.  The food was excellent.  Most dishes were, anyway.  There were some that just couldn’t be faked, though the customers, who had never had the things being unsuccessfully imitated,  ate them anyway.

The restaurant did well, Irv in the back, by the fryer, with Mr. Chow and his assistants, and a couple of African pot washers like Lamine Souwame, Benjy at the counter.  At first he worked along side my mother, then just Benjy (“fuck you, Benjy” I think my mother said when he tried to convince her to stay) and later a succession of friendly young people who had the customer service skills Benjy lacked.   They had a chance to expand the place when the store next door became available, but though they were at the height of their popularity at the time, and the money was flowing, they all hesitated to take the risk of expanding.  In time the small, mostly take out place, faced competition from other kosher Chinese entrepreneurs and the business declined, eventually changed hands.  Nobody ever got rich from Tain Lee Chow, though it provided several people with a good livelihood for several years.  

They remained close friends for the rest of my parents’ lives.  At my father’s funeral, coming down from the hill where my father’s grave is, I paused to tell Benjy that he was the son my father never had.   I said this matter-of-factly, since it was a matter of fact.   Benjy nodded and said “and he was the father I never had.”  He also said this seriously, without any irony, since it was plainly the case.  It worked out well for both of them, I have to say.

The phone on the kitchen wall rang again during dinner.  My mother picked it up and said “oh, hi, Mike, hold on.”  My sister and I burst out laughing, we howled like monkeys as our father took the receiver on it’s extra long curly cord and walked into the dining room.   This had happened every night this week, exactly when we sat down for dinner.  Mike Levine, our dad’s surrogate son, the first I can remember from that long succession of surrogate sons.  Rather than scowl and curse the way he would have if my sister or I made some demand on him during dinner, he seemed to have infinite patience for this needy high school kid Mike Levine.  

My father was the faculty adviser to the G.O., the general organization run by the students of Martin Van Buren High School.  Mike Levine was an officer in the organization, as far as I can remember.  Mike Levine is in his seventies by now, if he’s still alive, but that’s not the point.  The point is the way some of us try to get things right with surrogates, people with a psychological resemblance to people from our early lives, instead of with the actual people in our lives it is most important to straighten things out with.  

I went to law school with an insane fellow, a later in life law student like myself, who’d taken a Masters in Criminal Psychology or something.   Drinking coffee in the shabby cafeteria, or on our commutes back from Newark, he gave me several insights over the time I knew him.  One was the concept of ‘repetition compulsion’.  People are doomed, by bad programming and early life trauma, to keep reliving the trauma in hopes of getting it right, blindly trying to resolve the underlying issue with surrogates without ever becoming meaningfully aware of what they are doing.  It’s a hopeless cycle, which is why it’s called a compulsion.

I had a close friend for many years, perhaps the most unhappy and demanding person I’ve ever met.  He was smart and adept at wheedling and eventually built a lucrative empire based on this talent for extracting the most from any situation. While building his empire he met a series of people he felt were amazing.  There was a succession of such people, great, selfless, indescribably cool guys who were helping in ways he could never have imagined, amazing, remarkable people.  That was the set-up to each identical three act drama.  

Act two was odd behavior he couldn’t explain, the amazing person was acting differently, less amazing.  There was some vague foreshadowing, what someone with my friend’s vocabulary might have called sinister adumbration.  Act three was identically aggravating, 100% predictable, and had to be told in excruciating detail.  Since I’d heard this same story many times I’d intervene here and ask: did he steal from you, curse you out, do something to sabotage your business or physically assault you?

My question would be met with a baleful look each time.  He’d suck his teeth churlishly and look at me from under his eyebrows.  “Will you let me tell the fucking story?” he’d say with the last of his patience.  “Can I just finish the fucking story?”

I’d nod for him to continue, though I was sick of the endless variations on the same story.  Turns out this guy threatened him, cursed him out and stole from him.  Amazing, really.  What a seamless string of bad luck my friend was having.  Unexplainable, really.

When my father died this miserable friend called every hour, at the funeral, messages while I was on the plane, at 2 and 3 a.m..  This was toward the end of our friendship, when it was dawning on me how much like my father this implacably unhappy fellow was.  When we finally spoke he was hurt and angry that I hadn’t picked up the phone, no matter how inconvenient it might have been for me.  Didn’t I realize how important it was for him to console me, even if he had no real idea how to do this?   Much like my dad would have done, he made the fault mine for the painful stalemate in which we now found ourselves.  

His first question when I called to tell him my father had died was “did you let him have it?  did you tell him what an asshole he was?”  The question caught me like an elbow to the jaw.  What the fuck?  Did I what?  No, actually, he was very repentant, he apologized for the first and last time in his life.  He was the one who was dying, not me.  What?  What the fuck?  

Thinking about it, I had images of his father’s death.  The old man, a master of the parrot joke who had never seemingly appreciated the genius of his youngest son, died a long fearful death over the course of several years.  At one point, not long before he went into a coma, he’d signed a Do Not Resuscitate  order.  This meant when his time came no heroic measures would be taken to bring him back.  He was close to ninety at this time, and in the hospital.  

My friend dutifully attended his zombie father, hoping against hope for some breakthrough, some recognition from the withholding old man that he was a good son.  He bitterly described the many things he’d done for the old man in his hospital bed, suggesting it included wiping the comatose man’s ass and cleaning his balls.  The old man remained ungrateful and uncommunicative.  

Then one day he came out of his coma, called for the doctor, told him he was rescinding the DNR.  “Doc,” he begged, “you have to do whatever medical science can do to save me!  I don’t want to die!”  The doctor agreed and the old man went back into a coma.

He came out again and my friend called to tell me the news.   He was sitting by the bed and asked if I wanted to speak to him.  I’d always liked Al and told my friend to put him on the phone.   “He can’t really communicate, he’s pretty much out of it, but I’ll hold the phone up to his ear and you can talk to him, I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”

When he heard my voice Al became instantly excited . “Eliot!” he said, “so good to hear your voice.  Oh, man, it’s great to hear from you!”  I told him I was sorry to hear about his situation, he asked how I was doing, I gave him a short answer then he asked if I could come to see him.  

“I’m in New York, Al,” I told him and explained that I had recently been to Florida and wouldn’t be back there for a while.    

“Oh, that’s too bad.  I probably won’t get to see you then…” he said, before telling again how great it was to hear my voice.  The next voice I heard was my friend’s.

“You see what I mean?” he said, wearily.

What I did finally see was that in exhibiting patience and trying to be understanding toward this mercilessly unhappy, carping friend, I was trying to learn to deal with my mercilessly unhappy, carping father.  I eventually saw the futility of this.  

Our contentious friendship was a senseless and painful exercise, giving me nothing but more grief.  My father was someone it was psychically important for me to reach an understanding with.  This perpetually hurt and angry stranger I’d associated with for decades?  A stand-in for my impossible father I could do nothing to help, and worse, who could do nothing to help me.

It would be a decade until I realized my father’s complicated and painful life could provide an organizing principle for understanding this ‘long malaise’ that has been my life.  

My father had a talent for malice.  He could inspire deep emotions in people, which made it easy for people to love him and hate him.  It’s been said many times and it’s worth saying here: you cannot truly hate someone you don’t know well. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.  

If your feelings are stirred enough to love someone you may find it an easy leap to hatred when the time comes.  The betrayal of trust/withdrawal of sympathy brings malice.   My father, frequently betrayed and disappointed by those he trusted, was a master of malice.

He could move people, stir their emotions.  He was probably the best funeral speaker I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of a very talented rabbi friend of mine.   My father’s ability to touch a place deep within people gave him charisma.  He drew people to him, at work, in his life.  He had style and was verbally adroit.  He engaged people easily.  He could express deep things with casual ease, create a quick familiarity.   He’d form fast, deep friendships with people who’d laugh at his quick ironies and nod over the heavy insights he sometimes dropped into the conversation.

“Your father is a heavy cat,” said Russ, my father’s hipster friend, a bass player and lifelong recreational drug user.  He gave me my first taste of cocaine, from the pitted blade of his old penknife, when he came up from what the adults were doing around the dining room table.  During dinner he’d asked if he could stop up to rap later, I nodded, then went to brood and listen to the B side of My Goal’s Beyond.

“Is that Dave Liebman on soprano?” he asked.   I looked at the album cover and told him it was.  He knew Dave, had played with him, liked his style.   “Your father is a motherfucker, and a heavy cat and I know he can bust your balls– I know he does bust your balls, and it’s a father and son thing and I do it with Adam and Hal and I can’t give you a good excuse for it.  But you know how much I love him, and Arlene loves him, too.”  

And they did, and I knew.  They loved everything my father said, and they always had animated conversation and a lot of laughs.  Whatever my father said was taken in with knowing expressions.  He basked in the glow of their fond attention, as they dug each trenchant, sharp or wickedly subversive turn.   They were my parents’ best friends and I remember  how much the four of them always  laughed.   They talked politics too, and of things important to them all, but it’s the laughter I remember most.   Arlene and Russ were night owls, and they’d often hang out well past midnight, howling and talking, Arlene chain smoking and the house taking on that exotic cigarette smell of the adult world back then.

After Russ died I spent a few days up at their place near the Delaware Water Gap. Russ used to drive the 80 miles to the city for gigs, it took him about an hour in his VW bug with the bass lying down in there somehow.  Arlene was a fast driver too and it was nothing for either of them to pop into the car and show up in the city, or for a late dinner in Queens.  Arlene and I walked on a rolling hill she told me, in the voice of a tired activist who’d lost, developers had recently bought.  

“Russ and I smoked many a bowl walking on these hills,” she told me, taking out a short-stemmed corn cob pipe.  I knew she hadn’t smoked for years, but she filled the bowl and we paused at a beautiful spot and I cupped my hands around hers as she lit the match.

“You know how much I love your parents,” she said, as the sunset began.  I told her I did.  “Well, I tell you this for whatever use you can make of it.  You may not find it immediately useful, but I think you may have a use for it at some time.  I know you blame yourself for your parents being so unhappy, and they blame you for it too.  It’s natural for you to feel that  you’ve let them down, or that you’re a disappointment to them, and that you’re the reason they’re so unhappy.”

” You know, you are so talented and sensitive and the Mozart IQ and all that and you’re 25 and you haven’t cured cancer and you haven’t been recognized as this generation’s Picasso.  It’s not you, Elie, you really have nothing to do with it, as hard as that might be for you to understand.  Your parents are just both very unhappy people.  They have a lot of great qualities and you know how much I appreciate them, they’re my best friends.  But they’re unhappy, both of them, it’s just the way they are, and it really has nothing to do with you, except that you have to bear the brunt of that unhappiness.  And I wish you didn’t have to, and I hope you won’t have to.  I think you won’t have to, if you really take in what I’m telling you.”

We finished the bowl and almost immediately I felt like Arlene had pulled the chain and a light bulb had gone on in a room that had always been dark.  It was like the moment when Eli told me how the infant Irv had been terrorized by his insane violently angry mother.  A twice in a lifetime moment of sudden understanding, a moment I am very grateful for.

Arlene is long gone now too, as is my mother.  Russ was the first to go, I don’t recall that there was a funeral, as such, though I remember hanging out at the house up there for a couple of days.  I recall that my father was there, and my mother and sister.  The reason I don’t recall a funeral is because I don’t remember my father speaking, which he would have.  There’s nobody to confirm this now, though I can run it by my sister, who might remember.  

The past is largely the work of the imagination now, something I’ll try to conjure as much as I can in the next few weeks.

I was accused the other day of letting my father, The Dreaded Unit, off the hook for being the destructive monster he was, with few exceptions, for his entire tortured life. He was also an idealistic, sensitive, highly intelligent man with enflamed ethics and a great sense of humor. He was both a good man and a terrible man. I aim to present him as both of those things, as fully as I can. I am starting by describing what made him a good man, the subtle details of that. I haven’t begun to lay out his darker side.

That said, I am sensitive to charges of a white wash, cover-up, spin-job, flim-flam, sell-out. I’m sensitive because I hate these supremely common “inevitable” things more than most people do. I get that from my father, who also hated dishonesty wherever he encountered it. Our own dishonesty is always the hardest to see, of course, but few things are more maddening to me than the deliberate withholding or distortion of information, keeping the facts from people who need them the most. It is the first law of criminals and tyrants: tell them nothing they can use against us.

Unlike my father, who could insist to his traumatized eight year-old with all apparent seriousness that the murder of dozens of his family members had nothing to do with him, I try to take people’s feelings seriously, and I don’t run from the facts. Facts are slippery bastards, beyond question, and subject to endless recasting, but I’ve always believed there is a larger truth, an unvarnished version of the facts much closer to the complicated truth than others. Everybody probably believes some variation on this, I suppose, none more than the habitual liar, now that I think about it, but I digress.

I’ve been setting out these stories of my father’s life to put his shortcomings in their most tragic light. I want the reader to care about him, to show what he could have been, what he intended to be, how close he often came to that ideal of himself, rather than just the implacable destroyer he also was.

It’s like putting together a tricky puzzle, on a sticky table, in a dark room. I’ve been operating with the idea that focusing on his humanistic values makes his brutality, which the reader will grasp in stages, all the more tragic and horrible. Focusing on what was best in him, setting his best qualities out clearly has been my work so far. But then I am told that I am letting him off the hook. So let me take a few moments to show you the sturdy, razor sharp hook and how firmly he is hung by it. He described the hook as well as anyone could in those hours of his last night on earth. And I ain’t no holocaust denier, for better or worse, I’ve not gotten to where I am by backing away from difficult truths.

The rage my father displayed when listening to robots prattling about serving him better, instead of putting a human on the phone to help him resolve what he’d called about, was his default setting. He flew into a rage very easily, sometimes over almost nothing. Flying into a rage very easily is not the mark of a highly evolved person. Jewish sages considered being easy to enrage, unless offset by a capacity for quick forgiveness, as the mark of a wicked man. No-one could mistake Irv for a forgiving man. Life is full of outrages, true enough, and indignities are plentiful, but towering shows of temper do little but torture oneself and those around one, do they not?

Showing you the hook now, in a few paragraphs, is not easy. Not because I’ve ever had any hesitation about laying out my father’s childish, stubbornly defensive cruelty, but because it’s a huge subject. I don’t have a ready snapshot that stands in for the rest, though there are tens of thousands in the album. My father’s enduring legacies were rage and despair, let there be no mistake about that.

He was funny, and bright, and sardonic in a way that often came off as hip, if slightly menacing, to friends of mine who encountered him during his life. The most insightful of them could recognize what an overbearing bully the old man was, how his hipster act was just another part of being better than them. He despised many of my friends, people weak and stupid enough to be in a club that would admit somebody like his son as a member, though he could also put a cheerful face on his malice and he had a good deal of warmth and charm to use, when he felt like bringing that to bear. That surface cheerfulness, and his wit, misled a few about the darker essence of the man.

But what kind of book would I have, dear critic, if I told you the prosecutorial story of my father the unredeemed asshole? It would be a boring exercise in false therapy to present my father as a vicious, destructive prick and mentioned only grudgingly any redeeming qualities and values, though they clearly influenced my sister and me to a tremendous and often disabling extent. It’s the struggle to grasp and tell the whole dark story with clarity, like the uphill struggle to do anything difficult and meaningful, that makes the manuscript worth wrestling with. It’s the same struggle that will hopefully produce a book readers will look forward to reading.

There are complete fucking asshole fathers I have met, of course. The world has no shortage of such unredeemed creatures. The guy who punched his young son in the face in front of his friends, beat his wife, snarled everywhere he went and caused a bank teller in Fort Lee to burst into tears and run for the manager while teen-aged me watched, standing next to his son, waiting for the truculent old fuck to take us to a silent lunch. “I’m not dealing with him!” the bank teller wailed as she ran for the manager, my friend’s sadistic father watching with no expression. I’m sure there’s a backstory on him too, some tragic circumstance that molded him into the vicious bastard he clearly was. Hitler had a backstory, a sadistic father who beat him daily, but the backstories of these types hold only so much interest to me.

A mother who slaps her children in the face every day at the kitchen table. A strangled grunt and “whap!” across the kid’s face at breakfast and dinner every single day of childhood. Does the child have every right not to forgive such a mother? Of course. But there is more to the story of that parent than that. In the case of my father, the rest of the story, his many clearly admirable traits, the important work he did superbly, makes his life especially tragic and compelling to me.

Jewish law and tradition, which weaves through my father’s story and my own, even if neither of us in the end had much connection with the rituals, the congregation, the community of other Jews, often makes a subtle, sometimes merciful, point. Above everything else there is an appreciation of nuance in the greatest of our teachers. A friend told me about an illuminating interpretation of the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother. It does not command a child to obey a parent and certainly not to love a parent who is cruel or otherwise un-nurturing. It commands us to honor them and to recognize a duty to those who brought you into the world. What does honoring them mean? It means not letting them go hungry when they are old, not leaving them in an undignified situation.

I think that is part of what I am trying to do in this Book of Irv. I am giving my father the chance, as a decomposing skeleton, to express some of the things he was unable to make clear in life, until a few tottering steps in the right direction hours before his death. I am imagining the potential of the man, my father, in light of his beliefs and the regrets he expressed with seeming sincerity as he was giving his confession to me that last night on earth. I am treating his life with the empathy he was unable to show, except to dogs, abused animals, the gigantic masses of people who are inexorably fucked in our increasingly wealthy world. I am forging the links between his childhood poverty and abuse, his beliefs, and the crucial, often crippling, values he imbued deeply in my sister and me.

If you like, I am using the regrettably merciless fuck’s life to illustrate why I believe what I believe, why I pursue such a likely impossible life path, why trying to live with integrity is so important to me. I am trying to be the change the tyrannical, soft-hearted old man would have liked to have been in his own life. The book is as much about me, really, and my reactions and realizations, as it is about my father.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, have pointed out that forgiveness is primarily for ourselves, to relieve ourselves of the burdens of hatred, anger, injustice. Forgiveness is not an occasional act but a permanent attitude, said MLK, and I don’t doubt that. It is hard, Jack, hard, I know that too. Verging on the impossible if the person who did the damage is unrepentant, defiant, blaming the weakness of the victim for the perceived harm.

Although I was mild and comforting to him as the old man was dying, I don’t know that I can ever completely forgive my father for being such a needy and childish adult, the perpetually wounded two-year old so insistent on being right that he would burn all those around him. I don’t know if it’s possible to forgive someone who wasted most of their great potential in constant, unslakable anger. All he was left with as he was dying was regret and a son, far more merciful than him, to listen compassionately.

But if you have the impression I’m somehow letting my aggravating, bullying father off the hook – think again, dear Sekhnet.

The mechanized  systems all corporations began using toward the end of my father’s life drove him insane.  Within a minute his face would take on a Clint Eastwood cast, jaw set, eyes narrowed malevolently, ready to snarl and kill.   Mechanized receptionists are aggravating to most people who find themselves at their mercy, but they especially aggravated him.  

His favorite moment from Sanford and Son, which he recounted more than once over the years, was an exasperated Fred Sanford, played by the great Red Foxx, speaking into his phone after a long spell on hold.  “Is this a human or a machine?…. well, I’m a human too.”  He’d recall the moment with a fond laugh, a story of a quaint time when humans still picked up the phone to help other humans solve their problems.  My father longed for those quaint times whenever a robotic voice told him how important his business was to them.  Few things got him into a rage quicker than the upbeat hold button robots corporations began to use to save money.

“Please listen to all options before making your selection since our menu options have changed to serve you better.   We listened to you and made this system even better, to serve you better!  To repeat this entire message at any time, including this part, please press 9 at any time.  Press one to be placed on hold while being told your business is important to us; press two to be placed on hold while being told, candidly, that you a powerless, fungible widget considered only as part of our profit calculus, someone we are free to treat with mechanized disdain; press three to be politely told to go fuck yourself, for detailed instructions on going to fuck yourself, please press four….”

I wrote the bulk of this while on hold with the New York State of Health Official Health Plan Marketplace, trying to keep my blood pressure under control.  Today’s call, only one hour and ten minutes (less than half of that time on hold one of the seven or eight times I was placed on hold) may well have solved the relatively unambiguous and well-documented problem I have spent less than eight or nine hours so far trying to solve.  That is my hope, anyway.

“Thank you for your patience, Eliot,” the last helpful one said after placing me on a brief hold for a fourth time.  

“You were lovely, Gloria,” I told the young bureaucrat toward the end of the call, after snarling at her at one point, only about 40 minutes in, in spite of myself.  Then I briefly described the broken system, designed to insure uninterrupted profits for the insurance industry under a law written by a health industry executive, Liz Fowler,  on brief loan to the government.   That there is no process for solving patient problems like mine is no accident, that process would be overwhelmed by thousands of consumer complaints to a system not designed to consider them, since there is no profit in that to anyone.  She admitted to me by the end of the call that she too had been screwed by this imperfect system, designed not primarily to protect patients but the corporate bottom line.  We got off the phone the best of friends.

My father was rarely able to accomplish this highly skilled result.  It was a constant frustration of his, the cheerful fuck-yourself-in-the-face triumph of bottom-line corporate cocksuckers, always taken at the expense of humans like him and Fred Sanford.

“Everything you love will be taken from you.  Piece by piece, and finally all of it.  The passive voice will be used, it will be nothing personal.  They will do it inexorably, the worst, most innocuous, seemingly normal  people you can imagine,” cooed the skeleton of Irv from his snow covered grave.

“The more trivial the kick to the balls, the more it will hurt, sometimes” the dead man said, nodding with great understanding.   “There is the kick itself and what it represents, the larger insult and injury of it.  Each kick is a stand in for the final one– we are taking the breath from your body and you are now dead, bitch.”

“You wrote a beautiful piece about your mother recently, she would have laughed and cried to read it.  Her ashes are sitting in that cardboard box still smiling now, they really are, she’s qvelling.  You sent it to a few people and they all loved it.  It was soulful, honest, heartfelt and funny, I can put it that way.  A hack editor slash mediocre writer slash publisher bought it for $250 but never published it — or paid you for it.  You followed up.”  

“He wrote back that it was indeed beautiful, but, perhaps, I know it sounds funny to say it, the witless fellow said,  too personal.  He wrote that he thought he’d told you it was too deep for him to publish on his superficial site.  So you did good work, work you should have been proud of, had printed on-line with a link to send happily to your friends as you try to move forward through life and– a pile of shit animates itself like a golem and takes a greasy shit on it instead.  You want a few endorphins and a token cash payment, pussy?  Here, take this heaping token of my fucking esteem, I don’t need it in my colon anymore.”

My father always had a way with words.  

“You remember those bitches at Haddassah?  When I was National Director of Young Judaea, and director of Tel Yehudah, they showed how much they valued my work, these upper middle class and wealthy volunteer executives, by countering my request for a raise with an offer that was less than I was making.  You remember that, don’t you?”

I did remember it, well.

“And you recall my impotent rage, and how my psoriasis flared up, and how I told those fucking Haddassah ladies to take their abusive counter-offer and shove the job up their collective asses.   Benjy, who ran all the business operations for the camp and had saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars, had a similar experience and he quit around the same time.  Then we opened Tain Lee Chow and the rest is history.  But the point is, people who by rights should have no right to even have an opinion often become the Deciders, like that insane dry-drunk imbecile Dubya.  You know I’m right,  I know, and I know I’m pouring salt, along with sympathy.”

He didn’t have to say it, because the conversation was already taking place in my head, but those same Haddassah bitches, or their daughters (it was twenty years later), somehow learned that my father was dead and were soliciting donations for the camp in a fund named for him as soon as his body was in the ground.  I got one of their solicitation emails immediately after the funeral, cc’d to me and hundreds or thousands others.  

During a time when mourning Jewish families are supposed to sit for seven days, unmolested and waited on, while the community visits, brings food and company, distraction and love.   Instead of empathy and nourishment (or even a personal note saying ‘sorry for your loss’) these creatures were doing what their type does: sucking blood, marketing, taking the dead body of a well-respected man they’d treated very badly, and putting it on a poster to solicit funds for the camp he directed for many years.

“I admire your restraint there,” said the skeleton who was once holding up my father’s body, helping him move through life.  “I know how you struggled not to be hateful, not to refer to them as ‘cunts’ and you didn’t do it.  There’s no word to describe these ‘creatures’, they… ah, you know what I’m saying.  Nice bit of restraint, though, and I also dig the sly reference to Voltaire’s footnote asking readers to note his discretion in not suggesting that the person in question was in fact the actual bastard son of the sitting Pope.”

Yes, there’s that, old man, our one defense, being wittier than the many syphlitic fondlers out there.

“A lot of good it did them on the edge of that ravine in Vishnivetz,” he said, shaking his skull.  

Well, moral superiority is not a boat you want to try to cross the ocean in.  I remember my old friend’s response when I cc’d her the email I sent to those bitches at Haddassah a couple of days after I buried my father.   She told me I was over-reacting, that they were showing their respect for him by using his name to solicit money, that the woman who’d signed the email was a friend of hers, and a very decent woman.  I once again had to exercise restraint.

“You always have to exercise restraint,” said the skeleton, “and it will cost you years of your life.  You remember I was sometimes hospitalized with psoraisis, my skin would literally burst open from the constant exercise of restraint.”

Your long battle with psoraisis I will recall in detail.  I just note here that you suffered from a very extreme case of it for decades, from the age of 32 into your seventies.  Then I remember in Florida, a few years before you died, mom was scratching your back, you were both lying on the bed, and she pulled up your t-shirt to give you a good raking.  Your skin was clear, for the first time in my memory there were no scales, no redness.

“Yeah,” you said, pointing to it, “since I’ve been retired and living in Florida, in a warm climate with no stress… the psoraisis is gone.”

Well, I guess it had served its purpose by then, dad.

“Yep,” he said, leaning to the side so my mother could reach the rest of his back.