“You seem surprised,” says the grinning skeleton of my father from his underground bed in Cortlandt, NY, “that telling the story of my life seems to have taken an inevitable swerve to the dark side.”   Now that he mentions it, no, I’m not really that surprised.  

“Picture me trying to write about my mother, may she rest in peace, or my father, may he rest in peace,” says Irv’s skeleton with that winning smile skeletons always have.  “I might as well try to write about my feelings about all the aunts and uncles, and mom’s aunts and uncles, who wound up murdered in pits, or starved, or dead of disease because, well, you know.”

He pauses a moment to let the subject fade.  “I want you to know, I applaud your effort to tell a nuanced story of my life, I really do, and to put my values in perspective, but, seriously, in light of everything, do you think such a thing can be done?”  You know, now that he mentions it, no, probably not.  

“And of course, Elie, you realize full well that I’m incapable of saying the things you are transcribing now, as plausible as they may otherwise be,” he says with the great sympathy he was generally able not to let himself succumb to.  

“As to the sympathy, well, some things are much easier after death.  Look, that long struggle I had during my life to never be wrong– done!  I can admit anything I told you on my death bed.   Read the transcript, I left those admissions for you to work from.”

Sure thing, pops, let’s go to the videotape.

For the person following this emerging portrait of my father (heh, you know who you are) I will say this about Tain Lee Chow.  It was a Glatt Kosher Chinese Restaurant, the first in Queens, founded and run by my father and the last, and most enduring, of his surrogate sons, a shrewd businessman named Benjy.   It’s an interesting but probably minor chapter in Irv’s life, after he retired, an experiment in being his own boss.  Benjy took care of all the details and my father spent most of his time in the kitchen, chatting with the crew, turning beef spare ribs, taking the noodles out of the oil.  That’s why he and his clothes smelled so strongly of Chinese Noodles when he got into the car.

But an odd and telling detail of my early life occurred to me yesterday while listening to Jane Mayer give an account of the early life of the fucking Koch brothers.   Their father was a monstrous capitalist who imparted his values to his sons in part by leaving them in the care of a strict German nurse.  While toilet training them she insisted they defecate first thing in the morning, or else they’d get castor oil and enemas.  Makes sense, in light of that, that Charles and David grew up to be the ruthless, tight-assed fascist twats they did.

Irv, stationed in Germany right after the war, lived among the nation that had murdered everyone in his family who had not found refuge in the United States.  He came home, went to college on the G.I. bill, married my mother, Evelyn, and they eventually had a son.  Their son, by all accounts an unaccountably angry baby, had a nurse, a German woman.

How can this be, I wondered when I recalled the small handful of stories about her yesterday.  I put the few puzzle pieces I have together.  Though she was German, she must have been Jewish.  My father wouldn’t buy a German car, it was impossible he’d put me under the care of a German nurse, unless she was a Jewish refugee. Of course, there is no way to  verify this, but I strongly believe it must have been the case.  In any case, in their imitations of her she had a strong German accent.  Good enough, I say.

I know there were issues with toileting and the training of this angry baby.  For the rest of their lives my parents referred to shit as shize.  This was a corruption of the German word scheiss, as in “wir scheissen auf die freiheit” (“we shit on freedom”) a phrase I learned had been a slogan of fascist youth in the time of Hitler’s rise to power.  The New York Times translated it “we spit on freedom”, to no-one’s surprise.

Odder still, this German nurse apparently used to refer to me as der Fuhrer.   That cranky Jewish baby?  Hitler.  Funny, no?   (Correction a few years later:  der Kaiser!  She referred to me as der Kaiser, not the fucking Fuhrer….)

Why my working class parents, living on my father’s small beginning teacher’s salary, had a nurse for me is another question. Perhaps she was a baby sitter who took care of me a few times when my mother needed a break from her demanding son?  

It’s a slightly disquieting feeling, smelling strongly of the death that waits for all, to know there is nobody alive I can ask about most of the things I am writing about here.

I pull the car over to pick up my father and as he gets in I’m overwhelmed by how strongly he smells of fried noodles, what we used to call Chinese Noodles.  These deep fried noodles were sprinkled on top of a bowl of Won Ton Soup, dipped in duck sauce as an appetizer, some old-school Jews put them on top of their Chicken Shah Mein (aka Chow Mein).  Why my father smelled like Chinese noodles at the end of his working day I shall describe presently, just not right now. 

I pause to remind us all again that consistency is not a particularly human trait.  Dogs and cats may be pretty consistent, we are not. We bark or meow according to circumstance, and as much as we may claim to abhor barking or meowing, we will do either one much of the time if the occasion calls for it loudly enough.  More than that, our own contradictions rarely trouble us, even if the same quirk in others usually will.

The mark of an evolved mind, it is said, is the ability to hold two or more contradictory truths in mind at the same time.  The greatest recent example I’ve seen was performed by Jane Leavy in her great, supremely nuanced biography, The Last Boy; Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.   On virtually every page we have evidence of what a heroic man, loyal friend and lovable character he was, along with as much evidence of what a despicable asshole he was.  On the same page, in the same paragraph.  And there is no contradiction, Mantle was apparently all of those things.  I try to offer this installment on my father’s impressive honesty and chilling denial in the same spirit.

My father loved Lenny Bruce.  He loved Malcolm X and Richard Pryor.  He loved them for their brilliance and originality and, just as much, for their unflinching honesty about intolerable injustices.  He hated hypocrisy and valued true honesty above most things, and he instilled those values in me and in my sister.  But not without a fabulous twist he himself had no insight into.

There were things he defended tirelessly and blindly.   He constructed towering, complex, unassailable cases for things that were absolute bullshit and would not hear the other side of issues he dismissed.  He prevailed in these hectoring arguments primarily by constantly refocusing the argument to narrower and narrower grounds, further and further from the point he was trying to avoid.  He had regrets about this as he was dying, his almost insane capacity for denial, the ultimate untruthfulness in a man who truthfully loved honesty.

This capacity for denial extended, amazingly, to a kind of Holocaust denial [see body of previous post– ed.] when he insisted my mother’s twelve aunts and uncles killed by Ukrainians, while Nazis nodded approvingly and smoked, were just abstractions.  No reason to be upset about strangers being killed face down in a mass grave, was his position to his upset young son, even though these strangers were undeniably his grandparents’ siblings.   It doesn’t get crazier than that, I think.

At the same time, he was a lover of the truth, particularly when it was dispensed sharply and darkly, with wit and irreverence.  He quoted Lenny Bruce at the dinner table, when he was in a good mood.   We all laughed with him and Lenny.   My father took great delight in this guy pointing to the strutting emperor, clothed only in his arrogance, and calling out, look, you can see his dick!  Look, there’s a mole on the side of his dick and one ball is twice the size of the other one!  Holy shit, how does he fuck with that thing?  

At the magic word “fuck” the cops storm through the tables to put him in cuffs, as he continues to riff, the band cracking up, the guys from the kitchen hanging out the door to listen.  They’re laughing their asses off until Lenny starts reading his trial transcript every night instead of doing his act, goes broke, is found dead, naked by the toilet, with the needle still in his arm.

Malcolm X, too.  Check out the statements he made, particularly in the final chapter of his dramatic life.  Like Martin Luther King, Jr. at the end (he remained Jr. to the end of his life, his father, MLK Sr. outlived him by decades) he was calling out monstrous institutions and fearing no man.  Marked for death he continued to speak out clearly about the things that mattered to him most passionately.  Not a Civil Rights movement, he argued after leaving the fanatical Nation of Islam, a Human Rights movement.  Take this to the United Nations, America is persecuting a large minority, formerly held as chattle slaves, denied the rights guaranteed to them in America’s own amended Constitution.  A Human Rights issue, he insisted, phrasing it correctly, putting it in its proper context.   Shots blew him apart, police and government involved in the cover-up, likely the killing too.

I understand that we are not consistent, and it is not the worst thing in the world to be inconsistent.  It is not like my father didn’t have the capacity to reflect and change his positions, it’s just he was extremely well-defended.  He had a lot to defend against.  Seeing his excruciating past too clearly, rather than focusing on becoming and remaining middle class, might have crippled him.  That was his fear anyway.  It is not an uncommon fear, open the door to the horrors you avoid and— arrrrghhhhhh!!!!!  Most people correctly work overtime in any job they can find to avoid winding up in that shadowy, terrifying room.

Irv always opposed capital punishment, except in the case of child molesters.  He believed their crime was the most heinous of any, was a compulsion, that they could not be rehabilitated and the only way to prevent the incalculable damage they did, and would continue to do, to people at the most vulnerable time in life, was by killing them.   I understood, and understand his passion on the subject, though we disagreed about his conclusion.  After all, it’s a short step to executing all rapists, violent sadists, guilty looking career criminals with court appointed lawyers working for pennies on the dollar, or random poor blacks, charged with crimes and at the mercy of a merciless system of justice.

We argued about the death penalty for these abhorrent creatures from time to time.  Then a neighbor of his, a friendly fell0w retiree with a good sense of humor who my father got to know when they’d walk their dogs together, was arrested for having sex with several neighborhood boys.  Apparently it had been going on for a while, in a house I’d visited many times when I was a boy.   The pedophile was the father of my first best friend.  A likable man, a former marine, I’d always thought he was cool.

My father told me the neighborhood boys were all crying when they took Shep away.  They loved him.  The police found Danish child pornography and anal extenders, I remember my father telling me.  It was kind of an open and shut case against the retired dentist.  The next time I was over at my parents’ house for dinner I put the question to my father.

“OK, dad, they’ve got Shep in the electric chair, all the documents signed and no pardon from the governor.  Can you pull the switch?”

I watched my father’s face as his mind worked.  It was a sophisticated mind that reflected honestly, if given the chance, and his answer was not long in coming.

“No,” he said, “I’d have to conclude that Shep is a very sick man, not evil.  No, I couldn’t put him to death.”

Thinking back on that moment now, it makes it all the more poignant that we didn’t have these kind of reasonable discussions more than a couple of times over the decades we knew each other.

The next one like it was many years later.  As far as I recall he was on his death bed in a Florida hospital.

My father liked to mention his high threshold for physical pain. He took great, manly pride in his above-average ability to withstand pain.   I don’t know whether he had a high threshold for pain or not.  I imagine that he might have learned to keep an impassive face when, as a young child, his mother whipped him furiously across the face with the heavy, chafing cord of her steam iron.

When he was on his death bed I asked him if he was in pain.  “Only psychic pain,” he said.  

It’s possible that the kind of death he was dying, which I witnessed the very end of, was not physically painful.  Liver cancer eventually shuts down the kidneys and when the kidneys shut down you have increasing fatigue and finally one last breath and you’re done.  A mercifully painless way to go, still, I have no idea what other pain he was in, though psychic pain is often quite enough, thank you.

“I want to talk to you, later.  I’m still putting my thoughts together,” he told me from his deathbed the afternoon I arrived.  

By the time I sat with him the last night of his life he had put together his thoughts in that impressive way he had.  He spoke like he was dictating a final draft of a book to an amanuensis.  The verbatim transcript of the recorded parts of that last conversation reads as though edited by a skilled wordsmith.  I know about his psychic pain in great detail, and will go into it at length later on.  

But while his threshold for pain may have been high, his tolerance for frustration was very, very low.  As self-possessed as he usually was in any public setting, in private he was prone to being overcome with frustration and bursting into a tantrum.  I can think of a hundred examples, but maybe the most poignant was his reaction to the random theft of a long letter he wrote me, a review of my master’s thesis Me Ne Frego [1].

He had worked for the Board of Education for many years, retiring with a pension, and knew what a maddeningly Kafkaesque outfit it was.  Meritocracy had little to do with the hierarchy there, and he had swallowed gallons of bile in his dealings over the years with imbecile supervisors and idiots promoted to positions of power based purely on the dexterity and shamelessness of their ass-licking. 

He watched my struggles when I worked for a series of these highly qualified supervisors, as I was fired from one school and moved from that sizzling frying pan to the next.  I did this for about five years, the average attrition time of a new teacher, and finally wound up in the perfect storm of a nightmare class set against an incompetent and destructive new principal.   Unqualified to be the principal of a Harlem elementary school is about the nicest way to put it.  The woman was a living nightmare.  Here’s a quick snapshot, since I am talking about her:

Minnie Frego was an insecure, crazy woman desperate to be loved. I hated her and didn’t have the compassion not to, nor the sense or skill to hide it from her even a little bit, even as I smiled, pretended to like her and we danced our clumsy, for me deadly, dance.

“We’re not here to date each other and fall in love,” Ms. Frego said from the stage of the auditorium.  She was addressing all of her teachers, assembled by her for another required emergency after-school meeting.

“She’s looking right at you, Widaen,” Violet said out of the corner of her mouth.

“Shut up,” I said.  Minnie was looking at me, a little jealous of the friendship I had with a female colleague.

“Is what I’m saying funny, Mr. Widaen?” asked Minnie from the stage.

“Not at all,” I said, and there was a twitter of laughter from my colleagues who knew me as an ironic man.

I wrote the manuscript, a novel length description of my long nightmare at the Board of Ed, in fulfillment of the Master’s Degree Requirement for elementary school teachers.  Ironic, I know, but Creative Writing was deemed functionally related to my duties as a “Common Branches” teacher and so I happily took the writing degree instead of one in Phonics or Advanced Departmental Analingus.

(I know, I know…)

Another irony is that I was, while taking graduate courses and working on the manuscript, exhausting my legal remedies against Minnie Frego’s arbitrary and capricious firing.  After arbitration that decision rested on air and should have been overturned after an Article 78 proceeding that would have allowed me to resume my teaching career with back pay for the lost time.  Instead, since nobody told me about the 90 day statute of limitations for an Article 78, my slam dunk appeal was time barred and I wound up blacklisted. 

When I completed the manuscript I sent my father the heavy tome in the mail.  He read it and called to tell me he liked it very much.  The comment I recall is “it was remarkably devoid of self-pity.”  This was salient because the narrator realizes he’d brought on his troubles by his own inability to simply keep his mouth shut and smile.  My father told me he was working on a longer reaction to the book and would send it to me.

“Did you get my letter?” he asked me a week or so later.  It was rare to get any letter from him, rarer still to have a long review of what is, to date, my greatest sustained literary work.  I’d been greatly looking forward to his comments.  I told him I hadn’t received it.

“I sent it a week ago,” he said, “it was seven or eight pages long.  It’s odd you haven’t gotten it yet.”   I agreed it was odd, went down to check my mail and — nada.   A little research revealed that, for the only time in the 40 years I’ve lived here, some junkies, delinquents or criminals had broken into the mail distribution box on the corner and all that day’s mail had been lost.  I had to request a couple of duplicate bills I hadn’t received.  I called my father back to tell him this.

I can still hear his howl of pain.  He cursed and yelled for a while, a mortally wounded lion slain by an army of hamsters.  I never got a word in the mail about Me Ne Frego, nor another comment about the manuscript he’d admired.  It was all just too fucking frustrating for the poor guy.

[1] fuck, talk about frustrating, here’s the intro to “Minnie Frego” I was just able to open on my computador  (keep scrolling, actual footnote at the end of these glyphs):

ò òINTRODUCTIONó ó:€<font€color=€”red”>ÔÿÔò ò€Me€Ne€Fregoó óÔÿJÔ€

<font€size=5>€ñBñÔ#†¼þt¼XX5B¡#ÔñBñÐ d ´ ÐÌÔ‡îz`î¼¼þtÔñDñà àñDñAlthough€opinion€is€divided€on€the€marketing€wisdom€of€doing€so,€IÐ d ´ Ðcontinue€toÔ#†¼þt¼îîz`%#Ô€Ô‡îz`î¼¼þtÔcall€this€book€ñ;ñò òñ;ñMe€Ne€Fregoñ;ñó óñ;ññ<ñ.ñ<ññ=ñ.ñ=ñ€€For€non-Italian€speakers€and€thoseÐ ˆ Ø Ðreaders€whose€knowledge€of€€the€history€of€fascism€may€be€spotty–€”me€neÏfrego,”€a€salty€expression€of€non-concern,€was€a€rallying€cry€of€the€ItalianÏfascists€during€the€years€leading€up€to€the€Second€World€War.ñ>ñ€ñ>ññ?ñÌÌà àñ?ññ>ñ

ñ>ñ€It€was€a€verbal€sneer€of€bravado,€famously€spoken€by€€Il€Duce€himselfÏafter€his€armies€invaded€Ethiopa€in€1936,€using€planes,€bombs,€machine€guns,Ïand€other€state€of€the€art€weapons€to€slaughter€an€army€mounted€on€horsesÏand€camels€and€armed€with€primitive€rifles€and€swords.€€When€newsÏcorrespondents€asked€him€if€he€wasn’t€worried€that€invading€an€AfricanÏcountry€might€cause€an€international€incident€Mussolini€grabbed€his€crotchÏand€in€an€operatic€gesture€of€disdain€barked€:€”Eh!€Me€ne€frego!”€€(“it€meansÏas€much€to€me€as€rubbing€dead€skin€off€my€ass”).€€The€New€York€TimesÏtranslated€Mr.€Mussolini’s€slogan€as€”I€don’t€give€a€damn”€which€does€conveyÏthe€sense€of€it,€though€without€the€piquance.€Wounded€fascists€would€scrawlÏ’me€ne€frego’€on€their€bandages€with€their€blood,€mutter€it€with€a€smirk€as€aÏleg€was€amputated.€

€€Ìñ@ñÌñ@ñà àThe€phrase€retains€currency€in€modern€Italian,€macho€men€and€womenÏare€referred€to€as€€me€ne€freghistas’€and€the€quality€of€being€a€tough€son€orÏdaughter€of€a€bitch€is€called€€me€ne€freghissimo’.€€€In€my€experience,€it€is€aÏpose€usually€struck€in€situations€where€one€has€the€least€power€over€theÏprevailing€stink.€€Sometimes€the€smirk€and€the€sneer€of€me€ne€fregissimo€areÏthe€only€defenses€circumstances€allow.€€€

ÌÌMinnie€Frego€is€also,€by€pure€coincidence,€€the€name€of€the€last€principalÏI€worked€for,€as€a€full-time€regular€teacher,€at€the€New€York€City€Board€ofÏEducation.Ô#†¼þt¼îîz`à#ÔÐ X,¨’$ ÐñCñÔ‡X5BX¼¼þtÔñCññEñà àà ` àà ¸ àà àà h àà À àñEñ

Irv would have been howling in despair and anger at this point.  I was able to pull this up, by taking a few deep breaths and coming up with a workaround:

“Me ne frego”
-Benito Mussolini
INTRODUCTION
I call this book Me Ne Frego. I have to explain the title to readers who aren’t fluent in the history of fascism. “Me ne frego” was a rallying cry of the Italian fascists during the years leading up to the Second World War. It was a verbal sneer of bravado, originally spoken by Il Duce himself after his armies invaded Abyssinia. When news correspondents asked him if he wasn’t worried that invading an African country, sending bombers against men with rifles on horseback, might cause an international incident Mussolini grabbed his crotch and in an operatic gesture of disdain barked : “Eh! Me ne frego!” (“it means as much to me as rubbing dead skin off my ass”).

The New York Times translated Mr. Mussolini’s slogan as “I don’t give a damn” which does convey the sense of it, though without the flavor. Wounded fascists would scrawl ‘me ne frego’ on their bandages in blood, say it smirking as a leg was amputated.

Minnie Frego is also, by pure coincidence, the name of the last principal I worked for at the Board of Education.

Emotional roller coaster, emotional trampoline, edge of that fucking ravine in Vishnevitz August 1943– call the motherfucker what you will, my knuckles are fairly white these days.  A few notes, then, for future posts on the Book of Irv that came to me while walking today, to be amplified one at a time in the near future.

1) High Threshold of Pain, Low Threshold of Frustration

My father liked to mention his high threshold for physical pain. When he was on his death bed I asked him if he was in pain.  “Only psychic pain,” he said.   While his threshold for pain may have been high, his tolerance for frustration was very, very low.

2) Great Candor and Honesty, Great Denial

My father loved Lenny Bruce.  He loved Malcolm X and Richard Pryor.  He loved them for their brilliance and originality and, just as much, for their unflinching honesty.  He hated hypocrisy and valued true honesty above most things, and he instilled those values in me and in my sister.  At the same time, there were things he defended tirelessly but was completely blind about.   He had regrets about this capacity for denial, the ultimate untruthfulness, as he was dying.

This capacity for denial extended, amazingly, to a kind of Holocaust denial [insert Sam and Yetta piece here– ed]

3)  Soul Music

I mentioned that my father bought every Sam Cooke album as soon as it came out.  The thing about Cooke that thrilled my father was the same thing in Bill Kenney that thrilled Sam Cooke.  It was soulfulness.   Cooke would take a beautiful melody and make it more beautiful with his small, perfect improvisations on it.  He was famous for  singing with melisma, a graceful, bluesy sliding between notes on a single syllable, using his voice like a great horn player uses his horn.   Even as a boy, I always loved Sam Cooke’s singing above all other singers.

My father also greatly loved cantorial music, also sung with great soulful longing.  I did not love cantorial music.

I had an ongoing debate with my father about how much people can really change our fundamental natures.  It was one of several ongoing debates we had over the years.  Since his death I’ve come to see his position more clearly and understand the reasons for it better than I ever could while we were arguing about it.  Nuance was missing from our debate, and empathy.  I can see and feel the nuance of his argument now where I couldn’t before.

The matter of contention was how profoundly one can change.  I took the position that great personal changes are possible, if enough effort is expended.   His position was that by the time we are two we are pretty well set in our behaviors and can only change superficial aspects of how we react to the world.  

That this contradicted his insistence that childhood must be left behind when we grow up and take responsibility as adults was not lost on me.  None of us are models of consistency, and if we look for logic in human affairs we will often come up empty.  If I had seen that he was talking about his own life, frozen in the emotional reality of being an abused two year-0ld, I might have understood it differently.  If I’d learned earlier of the unthinkable abuse he was subjected to as a young child I’d have had much more empathy for him all along.  We might have actually been able to help each other.

They have recently identified a genetic predisposition for happiness, after having long known of the genetic link to depression and other emotional maladies.  Surely there are genes that make one more or less predisposed to every emotion.  Nature versus nurture, again.  

The baby born with a sunny disposition, the easy baby, will have an easier time of it, being easier to deal with.  The snarling prick baby will be treated accordingly, and so we have the intricate dance of nature and nurture.

A child raised in an angry home will become much more sensitive to the tones of voice preceding an outburst.  They have brain scans of children who experienced childhood trauma showing changes in the brain itself.  It is a long and fascinating subject and my time and focus are waning at the moment.

I am making notes here for a book about my father.  This is an online first draft I plan to work over, pound into a book.  This debate over how much and how profoundly one can change is central to the book, to grappling with my father’s life, to appreciating his early optimism about change for the better and his increasing pessimism about anything good coming of anything.

My sister asked her brilliant ten year-old son, shortly after our father’s quick death from undiagnosed liver cancer, if he’d noticed grandpa seeming particularly unhappy lately.  “How would I know?” said the boy, and my sister nodded at how profound the young poet-to-be was.  Irv was not a happy camper in those golden years.  How could he have been?

It gratified me greatly when, once during this ongoing argument, my mother chimed in that she had seen great changes in me.  She had seen me increasingly master my temper over the years.  I’ve made difficult, conscious strides in becoming a milder person.

And yet, my father’s position has a lot of truth to it too.  Things that would not get a rise out of most people make my blood instantly boil.  How do I know they don’t make other people’s blood boil?  I don’t.  I just know they seem like small things, things that should not produce such anger, but they can set me off instantly.  I react better than I did, most of the time, but am still subject to these lightning strikes of temper.  I wax Tourretic when the computer has a little fun with me, for example.  Not everybody has this reaction to a device being a little playful, or corporate voice menus that insist they are serving you better than a human could, or obtuse low-level bureaucrats saying “I know you are, sir, but what am I?”.

“I rest my case,” says the grinning skeleton of my father from his underground bed not far from the haunted little town where he was traumatized as a boy.

It is not so simple, dad.   Few things are.  We will get back to this.  The Book of Irv will not inevitably wind up on the pile of promising ideas I’ve started to work on and later abandoned.  Unless, of course, it will.

Irv was five years old when the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929.  His family had no stock, but, being already poor, they too lost everything.   Their difficult life suddenly got even harder.  

When my father started school at the beginning of the Great Depression he was the biggest kid in kindergarten.  His only trouble was that he didn’t know any English, having heard only Yiddish spoken in the home.  

The school called his mother in to find out why a boy born in New York City did not speak English.  Chava, his mother, summoned her best English and said to the principal in her heavily accented English:  He’ll learn.   This was rendered “heel loyn” in the comical version of the story I heard from my father’s first cousin Eli, who probably provided her with the rejoinder.

His mother was right, though, he picked up English quickly.  In a short time he was well-spoken in English, but the early going must have been exceedingly tough.

The mockery of the other five year olds before he could speak made a deep impression on young Irv.  He went to his death believing he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.  The statement shocked me; nobody who’d conversed with my well-spoken father could picture him as dumb.  I asked how he could say he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.  His answer was emphatic: “by far!”.

He invariably described his early life as one of “grinding poverty”. His family’s extreme poverty was confirmed by others in the family.   It was a terrible, gnawing poverty, as most poverty is, and worse than most of the poor neighbors’ poverty, since his mother apparently insisted on giving much of what little they had to the synagogue as charity.

When I was a teenager I got my first pair of eye glasses.  I chose frames something like John Lennon’s, thinking the wire frames looked cool.  When I put them on my father smiled a sad smile.  

“Man, those were the glasses they gave you when you were on Relief,” my father said.  “They were a badge of humiliation, those wire frames.  If you wore those glasses everybody knew how poor you were, that your father couldn’t make a living, that you were on Relief.  I wore those for years, and it was humiliating to me.  Now they’re cool.  How times change, eh?” 

Relief was the forerunner of Welfare, FDR’s innovation to provide a livelihood for people who had no work during the Great Depression.  My father started life identifying with those who had nothing.  He had little choice, growing up in very dire circumstances.  

Working two jobs most of his life was his solution, he worked night and day.  Our mother worked too, once we were old enough to fend for ourselves after school.  He gave his children the decent start in life he’d never had.  The thanks he got was having to deal with two ungrateful middle class pricks at steak dinners he paid for every night.

There is much more to the story than that, of course, but I am laying out the bones here, just the bones of the story at the moment. 

“Seenas Cheenam!”, (Yiddish for senseless hatred) is the only phrase of my grandmother’s I ever heard quoted enough to remember.  Irv’s mother uttered this, in exasperation, to her sons, as the prelude to a display of rage.  She said it whenever her sons fought or quarreled.

“This is not what you should be writing today,” says the skeleton of my father, emphatically.  Today, on his hill in Cortlandt, NY, his grave is covered with two feet of snow.  He’s right, I need to get back out there and continue my digging, see if I can tunnel a path out to the feral kittens and give them a feed.  They are hunkered down somewhere under all this snow.

But I did want to make a note of this key phrase that explains so much about the living contradiction that was my father.  The once-living contradiction, I suppose, if you want to be technical.  Contradictions endure, I’ve noticed, especially in the case of a parent.   A parent is also a riddle.  Take my father’s mother Chava, for example.  

Chava’s younger son, my Uncle Paul, was a small man and by all accounts a sickly child, much doted on.   Chava’s first child, a daughter, died, either still-born or shortly after birth.  Her next child was a gigantic baby she named Israel Irving, after a terrible struggle birthing him with her tiny body.  She always called him Sonny.  Talk about seenas cheenam, I dug up some insight into that double edged, twice-cooked phrase.

I never met my grandmother Chava, she died shortly after my parents’ wedding.  There is a black and white photo of her at the wedding, old at sixty-two, wearing sun glasses to cover the eye that had been removed not long before.   My mother met her a few times during the courtship and had only a small handful of stories about her.  

The first time my father took her up to Peekskill to meet his mother my mother made the mistake of wearing red shoes.   My father’s mother took Sonny aside and told him sternly that red shoes are for shiksas (non-Jewish women).  She apparently had the same opinion about brown shoes– no Jew should wear anything but a black shoe, according to her strict view of matters.  I learned this unusual fact the first time I bought a pair of brown wingtips.

“She was a great cook,” my mother told us at dinner one night, “and I’d ask her for recipes.  She’d show me how to cook something, ‘you throw in a little handful of this, and a handful of this…’ but she had these tiny hands.  The recipes never worked for me.”  My mother held up her good sized hands.

I’ve been told Chava was barely five feet tall, red-haired, beautiful, religious and with a bad temper.  As invisible as my father’s father was to me, his mother I could easily picture, though I heard as little about her as I did about him.  What I heard made a huge impression on me, she loomed scarily in my imagination.  The most important thing I learned about her I got from my father’s first cousin, Eli, who was her beloved nephew.  I was close to forty when Eli revealed this to me.

There are a lot of details to be filled in between that last sentence and this one, but I have to get out there and try to dig my way to those freezing kittens.  They will be wanting a feed today, of all days, to help them stay warm.  

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me this gift insight, after describing his great love for Tante Chava, and how they fell in love at first sight when his father and he picked her up at the ship that brought her from what is now an undesignated spot on the outskirts of Pinsk in present-day Belarus.  The American-born Eli was a handsome boy and he described his aunt as a goregeous red-headed girl, bursting with health and joy as she came toward them.

It was Eli, perhaps a decade later, who came down to the Lower East Side in his father’s truck to transport the unfortunate little family up to Peekskill where his father could watch out for his little sister and her luckless little brood.   He told the story to me out of love, it was story he was not happy to tell, but he knew it would explain things that were otherwise incomprehensible.

“Your grandmother had a bad temper.  She had a Glieberman temper,” he paused to let me recall the many shows of red-faced rage I had seen from him and others on his side of the family over the years, “so you know what I’m talking about.  A real temper.  She used to sit at the head of the table in the kitchen and there was a drawer next to her.  She kept the cord to her steam iron in that drawer.  You remember those old, heavy cloth wrapped electrical cords?”  

I did, from when I was a boy.  They were covered with frayed burlap, a rough, sturdy cloth covering from the days before plastic was supple and insulating enough to be used for this purpose.

He then described to me how she would fly into a rage, reach into the drawer, pull out the heavy cord and whip my young father across the face with it.  

“How old was he?” I asked.  

“From the time he could stand, he was maybe a year old,” he said, with infinite sorrow and tenderness.