Although Irv ate steak almost every night for dinner he was a lifelong lover and defender of animals of all kinds.  We always had a dog in the house, and he taught my sister and me one of the most merciful provisions of Jewish law:  always feed the animals before you yourself eat.  He, above any of the rest of us, took care of the dogs, walking them, feeding them, giving the most pitiful of them daily injections of insulin for her diabetes in the last years of her life.  There is a great photo of him lying on his back on the sofa, exhausted after work, his glasses on top of his head, with Winnie, the Westie, on his torso, cradled in one of his sleeping arms.

He could not encounter a small dog any place we visited without picking it up, under the armpits, and giving it a few gentle swings. The little dog’s front paws would always be held stiffly in front, an incomprehensible expression on the dog’s face.   No dog ever nipped or protested this treatment, his good will evidently came through to them.  He used this same technique on selected young children, sometimes with more mixed results.  

Although he long professed a disdain for cats, and let us stipulate here that they are largely stand-offish creatures, he recognized my cat, Oinsketta, as an individual and grudgingly came to regard cats as OK.  Oinsketta, for the record, was one of the most dog-like cats I’ve ever known.   A great individual.

Human love of sympathetic animals, the first was the dog, goes back 14,000 years, we learn (cats only 12,000 years).  The first domesticated dogs and humans made a mutually beneficial pact back in very primitive times.  That bond has never been broken.  My sister and I get this love of dogs directly from our father.  And from our mother, who also had a great love for dogs, for most animals, even if my father was the main caregiver.

Although he ate steak almost every night during his working life, a sign of affluence that meant a lot to him in those days before the harmfulness of eating a lot of red meat was known, he cut way back later.  He also joined PETA.   This tenderness toward animals will assume a more poignant tone as you get to know Irv better.

For a good part of my childhood, before society thought to set aside the shortest month of the year as Black History Month, every month in our home was Black History Month.   Our father was what wittier racists might have referred to as a Race Man [1].  He loved soul music, Sam Cooke in particular.   He bought every one of Mr. Soul’s records at Sam Goody’s in downtown Brooklyn as soon as it came out.  He’d listened to and loved Bill Kenney, Sam’s idol, when Sam and he were boys.  

He actively worked for the cause of integration.  He had several black friends who came by the house from time to time.  This was unheard of in the 1960s, even in New York City.  His friend Olvin, a jovial man who looked like a black Hoss Cartright on Bonzana, stepping out of the house and seeing the strained expression on the neighbors’s face, extended his hand to my father and said “it’s a beautiful house, Mr. W., and my family will love it.  I’ll take it.”

“The color drained out of Sonny’s face, I thought he was going to keel over.  You should have seen it,” my father reported with delight.

It was a rare thing in those days for a white family to spend the day in nearby St. Albans, at the home of a black family, as we did one Sunday afternoon in the early spring, the year “Cloud Nine” came out.  I remember Donald, Rani’s little brother, and I kept spinning that 45 over and over, and how the girls danced.   The Eversleys lived in a fine, upper middle class home, a mansion really, but nonetheless.   It no doubt raised a few eyebrows when we integrated Pastrami King with the Burnetts after graduation from sixth grade.

I learned in pretty good detail the bones of the struggle for Civil Rights well before I was ten.  I knew about slavery, about de jure and de facto segregation, about lynching and the freedom rides.   I know this because when I heard the news of the murder of Malcolm X on the radio I knew immediately what a tragic catastrophe it was.  

I was alone in my parents’ room when I heard the news of the killing.  I recall how hard it hit me.  My father had obviously made me appreciate Malcolm and what he stood for prior to February 21, 1965.

The identification with the oppressed was always very strong in the house.   It’s clear to me now this was partly a psychic accommodation to having the roots of our family tree plucked out of the earth, the histories of our forebears extirpated, disappeared.  

Tonight on the radio I heard the descendant of slaves describe the pain of being unable to trace her family back before slavery.  I truly heard it.  I imagine my father did too, whether he could acknowledge it or not.  

1:   My mother had chafed at being referred to, with less wit, as a “Nigger Lover” when she supported integration of the elementary school my sister and I attended.

In the newly formed Human Relations Unit, Office of Intergroup Relations, as Coordinator of Student Programs, Irv met with the brightest, most troubled kids in the city.  In those days gangs of Italians and Blacks would square off in the newly integrated cafeterias of the high schools.   Puerto Rican gangs would fight for their piece of turf.  My father would go to the schools, find the leaders, and take them on weekend retreats for sensitivity training.

He related easily to these kids born into dead-end situations, fighting for self-respect.  I suspect the kids related to him, his identification with them was genuine and most kids react well to this.   He wasn’t there to bust them or make them fall in line.  His mission was to get them to talk to each other, become friends.  They did talk, role play, work as teams, imitate each other, laugh together, eat together.  Many, indeed, became friends when they got to know each other.  The most charismatic kids in the high school would make peace, so would everyone else. It was exhilarating work for a short time.

There are more stories about this Mod Squad my father headed for a couple of years, but the short version was reported by my exhausted father a few years later.  

“The program worked great with the kids we reached, the ones we worked with.  They actually got along after those weekends we ran.  The problem was when they graduated and their little brothers and sisters began killing each other.”  

I remember visiting him in the hospital around that time, but that is another story for another day.

I am touched that you’re earnestly digging into the truths of my life, the mysteries I didn’t begin to untangle until Death was already sitting on my chest those last days.  I really am.  You seem to be proceeding without rancor, which is the most touching part of this whole exercise.  I deserve a little rancor, more than a little, to be honest, that much is beyond dispute.  I’m grateful for the dispassion, is all I’m saying.  

Of course, I have a few questions on this day set aside for platitudes about the great progress in Civil Rights, and, even though I am an eternally grinning skeleton with no further stake in the world of the living and nothing but time on my hands now, I need to ask them.  

Do you really suppose writing these things is the best use of your time?  I ask this because you are going to be a senior citizen soon and time does not go on forever.   Do you really imagine anyone gives a rat’s cuisse about the abandoned dreams of a dead guy from a mostly murdered family?  

Is there some redeeming message here for the reader in this Book of Irv or is this just more attempted self-therapy for you?  To put it more bluntly, is there a compelling reason you’re working for free on yet another project you seem to believe in?  

I don’t ask this just to be arch, it’s a serious question.  You’re a talented and sensitive person, you’ve always been that way.  But you’ve lived in the world long enough to realize that nobody but your grandmother, your proud parents and one or two friends really give a shit about that.  You’re a good listener sometimes, that’s wonderful, I applaud you for it. But, really,  beyond making the person you’re listening to feel listened to, what is the point?

Since we’re celebrating the life of the slain Civil Rights leader today, let’s take a quick look at the world before and after.  A very quick look, and then you’d better get back to trying to make order of this chaos in here, a much better use of your time at the moment than channeling even my profound musings.

For whatever reason, I didn’t find time or need to mention to you and your sister that, in addition to my work at the Human Relations Unit at the Board of Ed, which you know all about, I was a speaker on behalf of school integration after Brown v. Board of Education.  

You know all about that case, decided two years before you were born, old man, and how it supposedly struck down the pernicious fiction of “separate but equal” in education.  You taught in some of those Harlem shit holes almost fifty years after the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be desegragated with “all deliberate speed.”   Remember that one white kid who was there for a couple of weeks in 1991?  How Miss June said “look, Whitey, we integrated now!”?  

Anyway, I was part of a speakers’ board who was sent to speak to parents and teachers about school integration.   This was in New York City, in the late nineteen fifties.  The first time I spoke the audience received me like I was a Jew preaching Communism and miscegenation in Alabama.   They assaulted me verbally and started to charge the stage, they were already throwing shit at me. On my way out the back I took a rancid tuna fish sandwich to the face.  I had to throw away that tie and sports jacket.   We barely got out of there in one piece.  Your mother could not stop crying for days afterwards.  

After that they sent two cops with me, they stood on either side of the little podium where I told these frightened racists that we were entering a new era of social justice.   You were a baby at the time.  It’s one of the things I’m sorry we never got to talk about.  I know your sister was surprised when you mentioned it to her the other day.  I may be dead, but I still hear things.

Anyway, fast forward almost sixty years and we have Bernie Sanders about to speak at a rally someplace, Chicago maybe.  He’s disrupted by two earnest but very shrill idiots.  They burst on to the stage demanding the right to be heard so they can preach to the converted.  “Black lives matter!”, they begin to scream.  They are hysterical about it.  And they are right to be hysterical.  

Almost fifty years after the immortal Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is slaughtered, the same people who are denying that enormous changes in earth’s climate are taking place are snarling that blacks should shut up about being killed by police in disproportionate numbers.   What about all the blacks killed by blacks, they ask.   That’s their answer.  How can you complain about cops shooting blacks when blacks shoot blacks?  This is the level of discourse in our great democracy.  

You studied law, you know more about the devilishness of the details than most people.  You can set it out plainly, I’m sure.  But I ask you again: what is the fucking point?  Malcolm X was right when he told Alex Haley about progress in race relations.  You remember the image: pulling a deep thrust knife an inch out of somebody’s back and calling it progress is far from actually removing the knife and operating to repair the wound.  

God knows I don’t mean to stomp on the burst balloons of your idealism, far from it.  The world needs people of faith, belief, a strong vision of justice, of healing the world.  I don’t blame you and your sister for taking that lesson from what I taught you.  It was the best of what I taught you, the seek justice for the powerless part.  I wouldn’t wish it on you, though.  

Anyway, you have to get back to your cleaning and I’m just about out of strength at the moment.  Talking from beyond the grave is not as easy as you may think.  Speak while you can, that’s my advice.  And thanks for thinking of me. 

It was hard for me to put together an image of my father’s father, Eliyahu.  I never met the man I am named for, he died a few years before I was born.   My father rarely spoke more than a few words about him, ending always with “may he rest in peace” uttered in Yiddish accented Hebrew.  

I have two photos of him, dressed in his best suit, wearing a fedora in one.   He has a wry expression in the photograph with the fedora, standing next to his wife, his younger son next to her.  The kid looks about sixteen, which would explain my father’s absence from the family photo.   Irv would have been in the army.   I should scan that photo so you can see my grandfather’s expression.  An expression as telling and elusive as the Mona Lisa’s.

The man is a mystery I learned as much about as I could from other sources.  My mother never met him and my father, as I said, rarely said anything about him.  I never learned where he came from in Europe, though he crossed the ocean as a very young child.  I was surprised to learn he spoke English with no foreign accent.  He was a man of few words in any case, communicating mostly by shrugs, it seems.  He was raised by a cruel step-mother who frequently hit him in the head with whatever came to hand, including wooden boards.  His wife, who hated him, spoke mostly Yiddish and always struggled with English.  

I am muddling this portrait, which is already muddled enough.  Maybe it is too soon in the Book of Irv to bring up this mysterious character of Irv’s father.   I have almost nothing to go on, except for the eerie resonances echoing between this dead grandfather and my own life.    

I have very few stories about him, and these came through my own diligence ferreting them out of my father’s first cousin Eli, Nehama’s half-brother.  More about those two later.  Eli, who was seventeen years older than my father, and also born in America, describes the life of my infant father and his parents in the slums of lower Manhattan in the years right before the Great Depression.

“Your grandfather had a job delivering herring on the Lower East Side.  He was a big strong guy and he’d carry the barrels of herring into the shops and collect the money.  He drove a cart, horse drawn.  The horse knew the route and he’d stop at each store and your grandfather would get down and wrestle the barrel into the store.  This went on for some time and then the horse died.”

“So they got a new horse and sent your grandfather out with the herring.  He had no idea where the stores were, he never paid attention since the horse knew the route.  He just drove around all day.  He came back at night with all the herring still on the truck. His boss asked him what the fuck the idea was and your grandfather shrugged and was fired on the spot.  Not long after that my father sent me down with the truck to bring them all up to Peekskill.”

Where they lived in humiliating poverty until my father was rescued by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  My father turned eighteen less than six months later and was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces.  He served for 36 months and never again lived in Peekskill.  Shortly after the war his father, a non-drinker, died of liver disease at the age of 56 and is buried under a headstone identifying him as a simple, straight man.

“People said he wasn’t ‘fayik’,” Eli told me, “but it wasn’t so.  It’s just that he emotionally checked out after his step-mother got done whacking him in the head.  He didn’t say much, but he was fayik, he had a good sense of humor.  Sometimes I felt like I was the only one who realized this.  It was his manner, the way he reacted to things, which was no reaction.  He was very funny, completely deadpan.  You’d look at his face and he’d be like this,” and Eli turned his face into an emotionless mask.  

“Two eyes, a nose and mouth,” he said and he zipped a finger across his mouth.

I never got a definitive definition of “fayik” but it seems to mean ‘with it.’  Apparently my father was among the many who believed his father wasn’t fayik.  The most compassionate thing I ever heard my father say about his father was uttered the night before he died.  “My father was an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world,” he said in that terrible strained voice he had right before the end.

Cleaning takes precedence today– when you go decades without moving from one home to another, or seriously tidying, it takes more than a couple of days to make a dent– but my father’s story also won’t wait.  I set the timer to ten minutes.

Israel I. “Irv” Widaen grew up in Peekskill, a once prosperous town on the Hudson River less than an hour’s drive from New York City.  His poor family had been taken by truck from the slums of New York City to the little town of Peekskill where his cousins lived. Shortly after they arrived the stock market crashed.   My father’s childhood spanned The Depression, he was five in 1929.  From its appearance today I’d have to assume Peekskill was hit hard by the worldwide economic collapse.

On my demented Aunt’s bookshelf in her assisted living apartment there was a brown paperback called Peekskill, USA. Written by Howard Fast, it was a detailed account of the Peekskill riots on two summer days in 1949.  Events Fast predicted, in slightly purple prose, would live forever in the history of the human struggle for equality and justice.  

I’d like to ask Fast about that prediction.   The Colfax Massacre of 1872 doesn’t live in history, a town full of blacks slaughtered by an army of local whites, their bodies left to rot in the sun on Easter Sunday.  It doesn’t live anywhere.  History is a brutal teacher and pays little attention to the passionate Howard Fasts of this world.

My father, a twenty-five year old college student a few years out of World War Two, made the trek from Syracuse to Peekskill, supporting the cause of Brotherhood. We can debate how close his beliefs were to Communism, I never really got a sense of it, but I know he was radical in his belief in a better world.   Paul Robeson was the featured performer, I think Pete Seeger was probably there.  

So was every local Ku Klux Klan type, anti-Semites who believe Communist race-mingling Jews are the cause of all the troubles in the world, baseball bat wielding white men threatened by any vision of the world that might see Blacks and Jews as the same as them.  And their teenaged sons who threw rocks the size of softballs through the windows of cars ambushed on the narrow road leading into the concert ground.   State police stood and watched, some nodding and saying “wow, isn’t that a shame?”.

Also a shame, I never got Irv’s account of the events, outside of a few short snippets in passing.

Not to say that my father, with all his astuteness, was a reliable narrator.  He’d had to change history to live with it, and he did so resolutely.   He’d been raised powerless, now he would have control.   He could laugh at the darkest things, it was gentler ones he had more trouble seeing the humor in. 

“He hated to see us laughing,” my sister once observed.   And it was true.  If we were laughing at something he said, it was fine.  But if he came upon us and we were just laughing, for reasons he didn’t know, that was upsetting to him, somehow.  

Of course, you must rely on my representations about my father.    I knew him as well as anyone could, he told me that as he was dying.   He regretted very much that he’d been too obtuse to let people closer to him.   It was one of those terrible things you can hear people muse about as they lay dying.

My father’s father is buried in the pauper’s section of Peekskill cemetery under a stone inscribed “Eesh Tam veh Yashar”.   “Eesh” is a man.   “Tam” is a word many Jews will recall from the Passover story, one of the four types of people in the world.  “Tam” is the simple son, the one who gets a simplistic answer to his childish question.   “Yashar” means straight, a compliment to soften the blow of having ‘simpleton’ inscribed on your tombstone.

“Ben wrote that for my father’s gravestone,” explained my father when I asked him about it.   Ben was Nehama’s husband, a rabbi.  More about Nehama later.   My father didn’t put much emotion into his explanation, he rarely said more than a few words about either of his parents.

After Irv died I ran my proposed epitaph past a learned rabbi friend of mine.   He liked the couplet, even as I shuddered just now after translating it with google to get the Hebrew words to insert here.

פקיח ונבון

Carved in stone now, over my father’s grave.  Peekayach means clever, wise, sharp.   It was the word I intended as it describes the old man well.   My father was clever, wise and sharp, even if his wisdom sometimes didn’t extend to the most important things a person would like it to.

Navone I’d intended to indicate his modesty.   He was a self-effacing man much of the time.  He didn’t take himself too seriously, except when he couldn’t help it.  When my rabbinic friend signed off on the phrase I assumed I had chosen the right word.  

The word I thought I’d chosen was actually צנוע (tznooah), which means modest and humble.

Navone, it turns out, was an idiotic word to pair with Peekayach, though few will know it.  Peekayach veh Navone means:  Smart and wise, or clever and intelligent.   So much for profound summaries of a human life carved in stone.

Wait.  I am an idiot.   At my uncle’s funeral, an extremely sad affair attended by six of us on a frigid winter’s day, I took a photo of my parents’ nearby gravestone.   I just consulted that photo.  The words inscribed on my father’s tombstone are these: איש צנוע ונבון

Eesh Tznooah veh Navone, which Google translates  “A modest and prudent man”.   Exactly what I’d intended.  My friend the rabbi would not have let me have Aronowitz inscribe a dumb line about how smart and intelligent my old man was.   I am sorry, old friend.  What is the matter with me today?

I am the keeper of what is left of the old man’s life.  I would not be an unreliable narrator, if I could help it.

I think of my father, and his journey from humiliated little poor boy, the“dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill”, to Corporal Israel in the Army Air Corps, to fledgling Communist, to scholar studying for his doctorate in American history at Columbia, to intellectual and Civil Rights advocate, police escorted speaker on school integration, to brash street-talking bad ass idealist in mutton chops, to director of Zionist youth movement, to increasingly bitter older and older man, to suddenly dying man finally telling the whole truth on his last night on earth.

The story of his life is like a cloud of smoke, something the wind will eventually carry away.  A workman will wonder, if at all, what the words “peekayach veh nahvone” on his headstone mean, or, more likely, what odd language the words are carved in. And, pausing for a break in the demolition of the old cemetery hidden by the winding country road, who the hell was this tribe, buried here under undecipherable inscriptions?

When I say “they killed” almost everyone in my family, I mean men with guns, mostly, following the orders of other men with guns.  On my mother’s side I was finally able to learn, with some detail, who these men were, when and where they fired the shots, what became of the bodies.

On Irv’s side there is only Night and Fog, a muddy shit hole of a hamlet wiped off the world map and the endless rage of the characters who survived in America.  No details but the names of three of the main characters, Chaski, Yuddle and Volbear, remain.  The accursed little town across the river from Pinsk itself … poof.

It would be fair to say I was haunted by this family history, as much by the stern instruction not to think about the murders as by the gristly, arbitrary murders themselves.  All that was left of this horror in the house where I grew up was a hopeless obsession with social justice.  My sister and I were imbued with it to a destructive extent since it is something the world itself doesn’t give a rat’s well turned thigh for.  

In fairness, I feel the same way about the history of American slavery, the ongoing slaughter done in my name by our weapons makers, the vast, life-swallowing institution of inherited poverty in the richest nation on earth.

“Stuck to care, motherfucker,” the skeleton of my father chortles from his grave on a hill in Peekskill, but he chuckles without mirth.   He knows he is largely the author of this Book of Irv, whether he wants to write it or not.  It’s the story of how a young boy without a chance grew up to put his kids on the hook.  What that hook is precisely, I will describe to you as well as I can.