It’s been noted, astutely, that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.  Both love and hatred require tremendous emotion and engagement with the object of the emotion.  Indifference?

“Yeah, yeah, it looks profound at first blush,” said the skeleton, “but given the choice between a mother who whips you in the face and a mother who is merely indifferent?”    

Context is everything, as you have noticed during your long dirt nap, as you may have known all along.  You tell a story with your life, hopefully.  Oddly enough, that helpful young woman from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux was not all fool, the story of life is about change, evolution, becoming a more nuanced and able person, learning from a lifetime of mistakes.  Becoming more humane.

“Well, your friend Adolf bragged in Mein Kampf that his philosophy of life, his weltanschauung, was fully formed by the time he was fifteen.   He had hardened into the mature genius he would later become by the time he was a pimply, enraged adolescent.  Impressive, no?”

My point exactly.  The mark of the complete asshole is a refusal to change, no matter what transpires.   It may seem like a small thing, but when I used to accompany Francoise on guitar and I’d make her so nervous and self-c0nscious she’d sing out of tune, I came to recognize something ugly in myself I had to change.

“A little spark of the man who made you, eh?” said the skeleton.

Which was transmitted to my father directly from the woman who made him, who had in turn had received it from Leah, Azriel or some combination of people in Truvovich prior to her journey to a life of misery and privation here in America, starting in the summer of 1914.   It’s a choice between a cycle of blame and anger or striving for change.  

“Well, blame and anger are much more immediate, they’re right there in front of you in a given moment.  Anger is tangible and blame is straightforward, they’re satisfying in some immediate way.   Change is subtle, chimeric, it moves backwards, forwards, sideways, it’s unpredictable, often invisible.  Rage is dependable and easy to hold on to.  

“That’s not to disagree with what you’re saying, that it’s better to learn not to be a complete asshole than to insist on your right to be one.  It’s just not something that most people feel they have the luxury to do.  Or the self-confidence to try to do, maybe.

“Look, we fought about this your whole life– how much people can or cannot meaningfully change.   We’re born hard-wired with certain abilities, talents, predispositions, reflexes.   Not everyone is born with the same degree of equanimity, for example.  Some babies are more easily frustrated than others, they’re cranky little fucks and they give their parents a hard time from day one.  Other babies are by nature placid and easy-going.  

“You can change many of the surface things about yourself, I’ll grant you that, but the deeper ones, the hardwired reflexes — it’s an open question.  I’ll leave it at that, it’s a coin toss, although my personal view is that the propensity to easy anger, for example, can’t ever really be defeated.”  

Fine, but you overcame the understandable impulse, instilled by your violent, enraged little mother, to whip your own children in the face.  You never did it.  

“Well, I never used a whip and lashed either of you in the face, though what I did was just as bad, really.  You know, when I think of those brutal skirmishes around the dinner table I’m ashamed of myself.  I was the fucking adult, even though I acted like a two year-old.  All you and your sister wanted were parents who had some wisdom and sympathy to offer.   How powerful are the words ‘I understand’ to a child who has just poured their heart out to a parent?   Those are two words you and your sister never heard from us.  That’s my fault, you’re supposed to develop some fucking insight as you go along.”  If a skeleton had eyebrows, he would have furrowed his.

This brings us right back to the point I was getting at above.  Being shouted down when you’re trying to express your frustrations is aggravating as hell, but at least there’s engagement.   Worse by far, oddly enough, is getting no reaction at all.

“Well, that’s why you started acting out so much in school, class clown, playing the harmonica in class when the teacher was trying to teach, ostentatiously pretending to sob every time the class sang ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’– a song about pot, by the way, according to a long time urban myth, anyway–  all the rest of that attention-seeking behavior.  

“Your mother would get into shouting matches with you and your sister, I learned early on how much more effective it was to just clam up at crucial moments.  Elegant, simple and very direct way to whip a child across the face with complete moral deniability.”

Well, moral deniability is important, I’ll grant you that.  As long as you can deny moral responsibility, you’re home free.  Hey, do you remember mom shaking me that time, demanding to know…

 “‘What did anybody ever do to you to make you so fucking angry?!!!’ and she chanted it rhythmically as she shook you by the shoulders.   That was great.  I mean, you have to love something like that, looking back on it,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

Oh, I do, absolutely.  That was great, makes a cool anecdote, even struck me at the time as brilliantly insane.  You know, the mother shaking the upset kid and demanding to know what his fucking problem is.  It’s classic.  But you were the real stylist in that scenario.  Do you remember what you were doing?

The skeleton said nothing, just regarded me with that inscrutable rictus.  

Exactly.  

“Well, I did a pretty good job fucking you and your sister up with that silent movie sphinx routine.  And look, the beauty part was, by doing nothing I could always insist I hadn’t done anything. You know, what could be more satisfying than having the person you abuse believe they did it to themselves?  You say nothing, it’s their word against your non-word.”  

Yeah, like Switzerland during Nazi times.  Neutral, you know, fair is fair.  We don’t like the Nazis, we don’t dislike the Nazis.  We are even-handed, you know, and we are nobody’s enemies.  We don’t take a moral position, we deal strictly in wealth and discretion.  They were ahead of their time, the Swiss.  

And you know, it worked.  It was years before it dawned on me that the Swiss were not peace loving people who took a principled stand that two wrongs don’t make a right.   They were the bankers for the fucking Nazis.  

“You know, Nazis are going to give you a lot of shit about the constant Nazi trope in this ms.,” said the skeleton, “not to mention the fucking Swiss.”

Well, at least I won’t be like Switzerland about it, eh?

I had nothing to do with the inscriptions on my grandparents’ tombstones.  My father’s parents were gone long before I arrived, and my mother’s parents, buried in a section marked by a monument to the slaughtered Jews of Vishnevitz,  got the standard beloved parent and grandparent things chiseled into their headstones.   Thinking about it now, they were the only two family members of their generation to be buried in coffins.  

It was my father’s parents’ headstones in a parched area of the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery that got me thinking.  My grandfather was immortalized in Hebrew as a “simple, straight man.”   I don’t recall at the moment what is carved into my sainted paternal grandmother’s stone.  It was “simple and straight” that I read and translated off my grandfather’s headstone that caught my attention.

“Yeah, Ben came up with those epitaphs,” said the skeleton, from his grave on top of the hill, closest to the road but also above all the other graves in the cemetery.  “He was a rabbi, he knew Hebrew.  I guess with my father that was the best Ben could do.  You notice they’re buried in a crowded little area at the bottom.  That was the pauper’s section, you see how the stones are crammed together down there, some of them are crooked?”  

I had noticed that.  I also took care to come up with accurate Hebrew epitaphs for my parents after my mother picked out their headstone.  My father is immortalized on his headstone as “איש צנוע ונבון” a modest, brilliant man.   My mother’s inscription, which I labored long to find, reads “לב  של משוררת” heart of a poet.

But this is years earlier, when Yetta died a long, painful, clawing death from colon cancer.   She died in the bedroom I grew up in.  I remember how deathly her feet looked after she finally gave up the ghost.  They seemed unnaturally long, stretched, the toenails dark.  My parents were at that time considerably younger than I am now.  I went with my father to the funeral parlor on Queens Boulevard.  

The solemn salesman in the dark suit took us into the coffin showroom.  He guided us toward tasteful, beautifully finished coffins, with polished brass, or even gold, handles and trimming, some costing thousands of dollars.  Years later Sekhnet’s cousin, who died suddenly at 62, was buried in one of these Cadillac coffins, a stately mahogany model that gleamed next to the open grave.  It appeared to be top of the line.  His grieving sons had a lot of money and his dying wife, who had never expected to have the love of her life go before her, probably endorsed the expenditure.   

“This is a beautiful model,” the salesman in the black suit said.  My father and I pretended to inspect a $4,000 model, my father cutting his eyes toward the price tag and nodding to me.   We eventually selected a more modest one, I don’t remember the price, but it was one level above the plain pine box.  The coffin salesman, who clearly worked on commission, was disappointed.  When he saw where this sale was heading, he had pointed to a shoddy looking particle board coffin behind the door and said, dismissively, that it was their least expensive option.

“Did you see how that floor model of the particle board coffin had a warped lid?  I mean, you couldn’t even hammer the pegs in to get that sucker to close,” chirped my father cheerfully as soon as we left the disappointed ghoul at the funeral home.  We laughed about it, and the whole solemn dance the respectful slug in the black suit had performed for us.

“When I go, I want a plain pine box, remember that,” said my father that summer day in 1979.  

I did.

The woman who gave birth to my father always called him “Sonny” just as she always whipped him in the face when he was first learning to stand.   There was a terrible distance between Irv and his mother Chava, I always got the feeling, though Chava died young a few years before I was born and so I never got to meet her.  I don’t get the sense that my father ever trusted his mother or felt very close to her.  Why would he have?

It was his mother-in-law, Yetta, who he called Mom.  My father adored Yetta and Yetta loved my father unconditionally.  In Yetta Irv found a mother’s tender love for the first time.   Beyond that, he was Yetta’s clear favorite, the number one son she’d never had, my mother being her only child.   Yetta was a dynamic, opinionated, bright and talented woman who inspired hyperbole.

“Your grandmother could make a battleship with a needle and thread,” my father rose to the heights of poetry to tell my sister and me.  Yetta had worked for a famous designer, Helena Troy, perhaps (my mother would know the name, but she’s silent on the matter now) attending fashion shows to steal the ideas of other designers, which she would smuggle out in her head, committing them to memory and making the mock-ups without patterns or, apparently, any hesitation.  She was a genius dressmaker, had been since she was a girl.

“She had a business in Vishnevetz, making clothes.  She had several women working for her, she was still a teenager,” my mother told me once.  It didn’t surprise me.

“Grandma could have been the first female president of the United States, if she’d been born here,” my mother told me from time to time.  I never gave it any credibility, Grandma was not, to my knowledge, a great reader, or a serious student of politics, or a born organizer or a party stalwart or any kind of expert in the distasteful arts all professional politicians must master.  She had strong beliefs she was deeply committed to. She was blunt, brutally honest and unable not to be.

“I know, I know,” she would say sympathetically, smiling warmly, waving her big hands after a cruel remark came out of her mouth, “the truth hurts.  I know, I know….”

That Yetta and Irv deeply loved each other there could be no question.  In fact, I’m pretty sure Yetta had a hand in choosing Irv as a husband for her rebellious daughter Evelyn.   Evelyn had been born Helen, didn’t like the name and changed it to Evelyn.  A beautiful girl, extremely bright, with a good sense of humor and a lively personality, Evelyn had numerous suitors.  Yetta locked horns with the most persistent of these suitors, a handsome, dashing, headstrong fellow named Art Metesis, a young man her daughter was madly in love with.

My mother and Art wanted to get engaged, may have already become engaged.  Yetta would not hear of it.   Like Aren and Tamarka busting up young Chava’s romance with the red haired Jewish postman, like Chava and Eli busting up young Irv’s romance with that Connecticut widow, Yetta apparently busted up the romance between her daughter and Art.

After my mother died I searched everywhere for the blue leather- bound poetry journal I remember my mother having when I was a kid.  In the very last box I found not the notebook, but a folder with about a dozen poems, most of them corny ones written for her fellow senior citizens on special occasions.  One poem was a passionate love poem I scanned and sent to my sister.  My sister blushed when she read it and said it was surely not written to our father.  It had, to the best of my knowledge, been written to Art Matesis.

Art was hot-blooded and so was Yetta, when it came down to it.  There was a horrible scene in Yetta’s kitchen on Eastburn Avenue, just off the Concourse, and nobody was backing down.  At the climax of this shouting match Art apparently crushed the glass he had been holding in his hand, in a show of superhuman strength, and left, one imagines, cursing and bleeding.  As far as I know my mother never saw Art Matesis after that.

I don’t know how long it took, but Yetta eventually convinced her daughter to go out with Stamper’s cousin Irv.  Stamper was Yetta’s good friend, Dinsche was her name, and the Stamper she married was a Communist and all around good guy.  Dinsche grew up in Truvovich and had come over on the same boat with her cousin Chava, my father’s mother.  

Chava would bring the boys on the train from Peekskill and they’d visit their cousins a few floors above my mother’s apartment.   My mother’s kitchen window looked out over the courtyard of her building, it was on the first floor.  She glared at the two hicks from Peekskill as they walked toward the front door, following behind their evil looking little religious mother.  

Yetta eventually convinced Evelyn to go out with Irv, who Yetta thought was a wonderful boy.  Evelyn eventually relented and went out with the hick, just to get Yetta off her back.  To her amazement the hick was urbane, funny, self-effacing and seemingly interested in, and informed about, everything.  They went out again and had another great time.  Yetta welcomed Irv with great shows of warmth that must indeed have warmed him.   After a short while Evelyn and Irv were going steady, then engaged and then married. They made a handsome couple on their wedding day.  My mother adored Irv, maybe more than Yetta herself did.  

My mother almost always took my father’s side and so, for the most part, did my grandmother.  There is only one incident I can recall when Yetta took my side against both of them.   I had been on crutches for a month, and my first day off crutches, on a blazingly hot Saturday, my father kicked me out of the Jewish camp he directed and made me walk a few miles up hill to the nearest restaurant to wait out the Sabbath.    

Ironic, the timing of the injury that put me on crutches.  The near severing of my left flexor hallicus longus,  the long tendon on the underside of the foot that moves the big toe, happened on Father’s Day, 1978.   The Yankees had just had their asses handed to them in Fenway Park, I’d been in the bleachers watching the Red Sox use the Yankee pitchers for batting practice, launching countless home runs over our heads.  

We were cooling off after the game in an icy pond in Wellesley.   When I put my foot down, feeling for the muddy bottom, I felt a sharp sting.  My friend almost fainted when I held my foot up, urged me not to look at it, there was blood everywhere.  He had me keep pressure on it as we rushed to a doctor.   Apparently the sting had been a slice from a razor sharp broken bottle on the bottom of the pond, the severed tendon was hanging out like a gruesome white tongue.   When the shock passed, and the pain killer wore off as the sun was coming up the next morning, I woke up in agony that must have been similar to crucifixion.  I hopped into the next room and woke my friend who dashed off to a 24 hour pharmacy and brought me more pain killers.

The doctor had warned me not to put any weight on the foot for at least a month.  “If you do,” he said, “you will never dance again, never run, never walk properly.  You will tear that flexor, which is more than 3/4 severed already, and that will be that.  If you let it heal, you will be fine.”   He didn’t have to tell me twice.  I had no intention of never again chasing down a long fly ball in the outfield of Inwood Park.

I’d been off crutches a day or two when my girlfriend’s father offered me a ride past the camp where my parents worked.  They were on their way to a bungalow a few miles away.  I hadn’t seen my parents in a while, and the plan was that the following day my girlfriend and I would spend the day at camp, where she had also gone, and head back to the city in the evening.  For some reason, a loudmouth I knew slightly also hitched a ride with us.   My girlfriend’s father dropped the two us at the camp and continued on with wife and daughter to the bungalows.  

The loudmouth immediately began braying loudly like the donkey he was, trumpeting our presence as we walked, waving his muscular arms over his head like a returning hero calling for applause.  I told him to keep the noise down, not really sure about coming into the camp on a Saturday, although we were walking, not riding in a car, which is forbidden to religious Jews on the Sabbath.   He told me to calm down, that my father was the director of the camp and that nobody was going to do anything about it.  He continued to bray and strut triumphantly.  

Word of our arrival reached my parents’ cabin before I did, and my father was already furious when I got there.  “What the hell is the fucking thought process here?” he wanted to know.  

I explained that we hadn’t driven on camp property, were obeying the laws of the Sabbath, I’d told my acquaintance to be cool but he was, apparently, incapable of it, and so forth.  My father was not having any of this.  

“You know exactly how this makes me look, and you did this deliberately,” my father said.  “I can’t have one set of rules for the camp and another set for my son.  You can’t stay here. You have to leave.”  

My mother protested, “Irv, it’s a hundred degrees outside, there’s no place for him to go within miles, he just got off crutches, can’t he just stay in the house until Shabbat is over?”  These were all reasonable  arguments, but my father was having no part of them.

“Well, good shabbas and fuck you too,” I said, leaving their little white cottage, the screen door slamming behind me.  Up the long steep hill on the rocky road, along the gravelly shoulder of the parched highway for a couple of miles.

When my grandmother found out about this, she was outraged, did not take kindly to my father’s position.  My mother tried to justify it and Yetta uttered the immortal line, in Yiddish.  “You stick to his ass like a wet house dress!” she said.  The ass being a tuchis and the wet house dress being a nassah shmatta, a wet rag.

Outside of this one incident, however, I remember no other time Yetta found fault with her beloved son-in-law Irv.

My father’s mother, Chava, came from the doomed Belarusian (then Polish) town of Truvovich.  More of a hamlet than a town, from what Eli told me.  As far as I can tell it was on an elbow of the Pina River just southeast of Pinsk, a short ferry ride from that Polish city.  My uncle always said the family was from Pinsk.  My father’s cousin Gene told me that Truvovich was on one tine of a three tined fork in the river, on the other two tines were Vuvich and another muddy hamlet with a similar name.

There is no trace of any of the three hamlets anywhere now. My numerous searches, and the searches of a friend in Poland and my cousin in Israel, who spent a day with the researcher from Yad Vashem, have all come up empty.  There is one further source, a large format world atlas my friend’s uncle had, printed circa 1935.  The town should be in there, now that I know where to look.

I have seen two pictures of my paternal grandfather, whose place of origin in Eastern Europe is unknown to me.  I’ve seen perhaps a half dozen photos of my grandmother, born and raised in Truvovich.  I was surprised when my uncle told me to make sure to take the two framed portrait photos of his grandparents when we were emptying his house for sale.  He was in assisted living at the time, needing the assistance because he lost the use of his legs after his stroke.  

His mother had, apparently, lugged the two almost life sized head shots, in their heavy wood and glass frames, across Poland to the port and then across the ocean and from Ellis Island to her brother’s home, then to a couple of slum dwellings on Manhattan’s lower east side, then to the house on Howard Street in Peekskill where she lived out the rest of her life.  

My uncle was a meticulous man, and though he hadn’t seen the photos in a long time (and I’d been unaware of their existence until then) he told me they were in one of three places.  I was intrigued by the existence of these portraits of my great-grandparents.  My search of the attic, basement and other likely storage place, like my search for Truvovich, turned up zip.  

As we were leaving the house for the last time something told me to look in the sunroom.  For some reason, probably related to her encroaching dementia, my aunt had locked the sunroom.   We unlocked it and went into the airless chamber.  Looking around there was really no reason to look behind the white wicker couch against one wall of the pretty much empty room.  Yet that’s where the two portraits stood, against the wall behind the couch.  I studied their ghostly images (probably captured in a photographer’s studio in Pinsk early in the twentieth century) and tried to imagine their life in that vanished little town.

Leah and Azriel Gleiberman, my father’s maternal grandparents.

I thought about a question I was asked by a once close friend right after my father died.  “Did you let him have it?” he asked, “did you tell him off for good one last time?”  

The question struck me as insane.   I answered him that my father’s death had been about him, not about me.  He was the one who was dying, I said, and I’d done what I could to make his passing easier.  I cannot imagine the difficulty of leaving this fucked up world.  

“Well, you acted like a mensch,” said the skeleton of my father, “and you helped me a lot in those last hours and I am forever grateful, if such can be said by a dead man.”

I’m wondering now if I was too hard on you, judging you so harshly all those years for telling me to suck it up and be a goddamned man, when I was eight or so, and sick to heart after learning about the murder of everyone in our family left in Europe.  

“You were not too hard on me, what I did was inexcusable.  Even if you can understand it now, more than fifty years later, it does not excuse my behavior.  You were a boy, a sensitive kid, and had just learned about the most nightmarish thing any child can learn: in this world there are gangs of laughing people who will murder whole families of people and dance over their dead bodies.  Across history, and in my lifetime, many of these gangs have been delighted to kill Jews, like our family.   What kind of world is that?  

“You go on a class trip to the United Nations and get the pep talk about a new world risen from the ashes of World War Two, a world where diplomats will now work together to keep the peace.  While they’re working together to keep the peace there are gangs of laughing people murdering huddled victims all over the globe.  At the U.N. brows are furrowed, ancient enemies debate who deserves to be avenged by mobs with crude but deadly weapons, resolutions are blocked by powerful nations.  There has been more widespread war and mass murder since Hitler than ever before.  It’s just what homo sapiens does.  When in doubt, wipe ’em out.  Put your finger anywhere on a world map, chances are pretty good there are armed gangs killing another group of people.

“But, as I mentioned the other day in connection to my mother’s life, I was terrified to think about it very much.  I was afraid to think about it at all.  I was the man in the house and I was supposed to be strong, go out and hunt and bring home the food.  I was frightened that if I opened that door to the horrors of the recent past I’d never be able to close it.”

I can understand that.  I searched for hours yesterday for any clue about the doomed little hamlet your uncle and later your mother escaped from.   Not a trace of it on the internet. How is that even possible? A settlement across the river from Pinsk, seventy years after people lived there, gone without a murmur? Of the tens of thousands of Jews who lived in Pinsk we have the grim statistics, the dates on which the “aktions” took place, how many were killed, etc. We presume they marched your mother’s family off to be shot with the rest of the Jews in the area, took a giant rake and raked the muddy little hamlet into the nearby swamp.

“Well, you see, that’s what I couldn’t consider.   I never met my Uncle Yudel, Aunt Chaska, Uncle Volbear. Only Yudel ever made it to the United States. Aren sent for him at one point, then Yudel got sick. ‘America is no place for a sick man,’ Aren told him, ‘here you have to work’, and he sent him back to Truvovich where he eventually met the fate of everyone else back there. Yudel came to America and was sent back before I was born. I never even heard the story until Eli told it to you.

“I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse for you, and you probably don’t either, having an endless hunger for these kinds of details. You seem to have an ability to probe into these things without screaming. That, coupled with too much time to probe…. I literally can’t imagine the torment of that. I always worked two jobs; when I wasn’t working, I was exhausted. When I had a little energy I’d read the Times cover to cover, listen to the news, read one of the many left wing publications that were published back then. Then, thank God, it was time for me to go to work.

“Whatever I may have thought of the fate of my aunt and uncles, of my grandparents (who were probably long dead before the local anti-Semites got a crack at them), of the earlier life of my mother, it was like the twitch of a horse’s ear.   I’d flick away the thought like a horse flicking away a black fly. Really, what is the point of imagining such painful things?   Better to work.”

Arbeit Macht Frei, baby. You know, I understand that this is the way of the world.

“If I may cut you off, you are working right now as you tap out these words. You have always worked, you just don’t get paid most of the time, or you’re paid pennies on the dollar. You work in silence and your work is greeted with queasy, confused silence. I don’t know how you do it. Nobody who thinks about it for a minute knows how the hell you do it, or why you do it. I’m not looking for your explanation, I’m just sayin’” said the skeleton.  

Fair enough. Not everybody has the stomach for what I do. I don’t seem to have a choice, it’s what I was designed to do.   Part of it is being kept in the dark about the most compelling parts of the story. I have to fucking know. Knowing won’t give me much, I know that too. But I have to know everything I can.

“You poor, poor bastard. And I did this to you,” said the skeleton.

Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You couldn’t consider the things I am working with, they would have reduced you to sobbing helplessness. You leave all that to your over-sensitive little son, it’s fine.   I got it. I will always have it.

My father’s most formidable armor was dreadedness.   He would get an implacable expression on his face to show he was ready for your worst.  The look was very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic expression of hatred and superiority.  I suspect you could have shown a photograph of my father’s face at such times to a native of any culture in the world and they would have said, in their language, “dreaded aspect”.   That fearsome aspect, perversely, invited the attack he was now grimly prepared for.   Bring on your worst, lay on MacDuff, let’s see what you think you got, punk.  

My sister reported once getting a telephone message from our father and that his voice alone perfectly conveyed his dreaded aspect.  “From the first word I began to cringe and after a few seconds I wanted to rip my eardrums out just to make it stop… it was…” and as words to convey her horror failed her, she pantomimed how horrible it was, gesturing around her ears with an agonized expression on her face to show how desperately she wanted the relentless, dreaded voice to stop.  

That he was not always like this should be clear by now.  He was also funny, smart and capable of great kindness and sensitivity.  He was not only the monster that is easy to sum up as the D.U., the Dreaded Unit.  It’s just that if you see this expression on a parent’s face, and their readiness to angrily back it up, it’s impossible to forget.  You know this persona is waiting, ready to loom and do battle at any time.  

Did he show this dreadedness daily, weekly?  I really couldn’t say, more than weekly, possibly less than daily.  The fact is, he showed us this hard face often enough that we both know it very well and to this day are sensitive to the nuances of this dreaded aspect whenever we glimpse it in the world.

The thing that’s impossible to understand as a child is that this super tough pose that says “I am ready to, and capable of, smashing your face without lifting a fist” is not something a human really chooses to assume, especially with their own children.  It is a reaction related to the fight or flight reflex.  It comes about not out of toughness as much as from fear and anger.  

The anger was somewhat understandable, the fear behind it much more subtle and impossible for a child to get a glimpse of in any case.  I didn’t get any insight into the fear until I was close to forty years old.  

Eli, during one of my regular visits to his tidy one bedroom cottage in Mount Kisco, NY, revealed the main source of my father’s terror, anger and combativeness.  He revealed it reluctantly, an eye witness who had mulled over the decision to testify for decades, who stepped forward to give crucial information during the final moments of the long sentencing phase.  At this point he and I had discussed many other matters, this revelation was clearly not one he was anxious to make.

“Listen,” he had told me in his gruff voice when we began recording some of the sessions, “these things I’m telling you are for you, for whatever use you can make of them in your own life, and for your sister, nobody else.  I’m telling you these stories to help explain some difficult things that are impossible to understand, so you can start to make sense of some of these complicated, insane, twisted stories, the sometimes cock-eyed, convoluted and unexplainable behavior of certain members of our family.”  

He could see I understood this and then, because I was writing all the time, he added  “these are not stories you should write about, in any form, until everybody in them is dead.  People would be hurt by many of the things I’m telling you, even if you think you are presenting them very objectively and with perfect fairness, or even if you think you’re fictionalizing them.  The people you write about will know it’s them, and they’ll be hurt, and they won’t forgive you.  I’m telling you these personal details to explain impossible things for you.  When everybody is dead, the stories I’m telling you are your’s to do with what you like.  While we’re alive, not a word.  You understand?”

I did, even as the piece I wrote about him immediately after he died was a tissue of pure bullshit.  I was in the process of completing work for a Masters in “creative writing”, which the New York authorities had deemed functionally related to teaching third graders and which put me on a slightly higher pay level with my Common Branches teaching license.  I’d included an Eli character in my thesis, my adviser had told me the dynamic character deserved his own book and convinced me to remove the character from the narrative that became my thesis.  I wrote a fictionalized short story about him instead.

In trying to weave reality into fiction, and explain the sort of lovable rogue Eli was, I made up a completely implausible story involving Eli, his millionaire half-brother’s yacht (Dave never had a boat that I know of) and a semi-drunken sexual escapade with his half-brother’s beautiful young Brazilian wife, conducted on deck, under a tarp, while the cuckold slept in one of the cabins beneath them.  It was an absurd story in just about every way, and conveyed almost nothing of Eli, certainly nothing of his character.  There was barely a whiff of psychological truth in it.

I was idiotic enough to mention the short story to Eli’s oldest daughter at the funeral and even stupider to mail her a copy when she told me she’d love to read it. After all, I was a cousin who had befriended her difficult father and had known him well, spoken of him with great nuance and love at the funeral.  She hoped that whatever I’d written might give her an insight or two into her own supremely problematic dad, now that he was gone.  She had no reason to suspect that in the piece I’d mentioned to her I’d been not only an unreliable narrator, but a deliberately and artlessly lying one.  

I described an invented confession of an unspeakable betrayal that had never happened.  I added, in my hubris, ‘he reported this to me with a deep regret that demonstrated, beyond any doubt, the truth of his story”.  The truth of the story I had completely invented, a story that never could have happened.  Eli was a rogue, but not that kind at all.  What an asshole move on my part it was writing the story and then sending it to Eli’s daughter.

 The deep regret with which he described this illuminating event in my father’s early childhood left me no doubt that he was revealing something painfully true that he had witnessed more than once.  

For some reason I picture the room very clearly, although it’s a room I’ve never seen, a room that was never described to me.  I see an austere room with a high ceiling and dark wood all around.   There are dust motes drifting in the slanting shaft of late summer afternoon light coming through the one narrow window.  The room is virtually airless.  It is a room from a nightmare of poverty, fear and violence.   My tiny, red-haired grandmother is seated at the head of the table, at a seat Eli described as her seat.  She always sat there, the way we always sat in the same seats around our family dinner table.  Next to her seat was a drawer.  In that drawer she kept the heavy, canvas wrapped cord for her iron.  

Eli paused to make sure I remembered what these heavy, rough cords were like.  I did, I’d seen a couple during my early childhood, from before the age of ready plastic and rubber for insulation of electrical wires.  These frayed, abrasive cords were much thicker and far less flexible than a modern day power cord.  They were round, not flat as most power cords are today.  They contained numerous heavy wires and the insulation was a series of wrappings, the outermost being a kind of rough burlap.

From the time my father could stand, any time he did anything that displeased his tiny, religious mother, a woman who as far as I can tell led an unhappy life of limitless frustration, she would yank open that drawer.  Her little hand would grab the rough, heavy cord and she’d swing it violently into the young boy’s face.

“In his face?” I asked Eli.

He nodded with infinite sorrow.  There was a pause as we looked at each other.  Then he said “after a while, all she had to do was rattle that drawer and he’d….” and the eighty-five year-old popped out of his chair and stood straight up, quivering in fear, eyes cast to the ground.

A light went on in the universe when I heard that story. Things I had no chance to understand suddenly came closer to my grasp.  I was flooded with empathy for my little father.  Imagine being a one year-old, a two year-old, and being whipped in the face by your own mother?  

“My mother, may she rest in peace,” he always began any story about her.  There were almost no stories about her.

ii

We had dinner the other night with my father’s first cousin, Azi, and his wife Sue.  It was a wonderful time.  We had a few great laughs and Azi, who greatly resembles my father, although a much more easy-going version, reminded me of him uncannily when he cracked up laughing.  My father could be reduced to helpless hysterics when he found something hilarious.  My sister and I suffer this same helplessness at times, when something is truly too funny to be able to stop laughing about.   Azi didn’t fall into this state, but we had a couple of good long laughs during our leisurely dinner.  

I mentioned the manuscript I am working on, this Book of Irv that is now about 450 pages long.  I described how, about 100 pages in, my father’s skeleton suddenly started piping up.  I told them I’d thought it was a bit of stagey device at first, these conversations with a dead man, but soon found myself looking forward to the daily talks with the skeleton, conversations that often surprised me.  Yes, these were talks I wish we’d had when he was alive, but these written ones were the next best thing.  I told Azi I woke up every day looking forward to talking with the skeleton, hearing what he had to say.  

He smiled and later asked me if I’d put any of the pages on line.  He seemed very happy that I had.   I told him I’d send him the link or he could google bookofirv, one word, and it should pop right up.  The following afternoon I sent him a link to the intro, along with a few follow-ups to our chat during dinner the night before.  I included two names of siblings of our grandparents’, Yuddle and Chashki, that I hadn’t found in his on-line family tree.  I expressed my surprise to learn, from his family tree, that my father, like him, had been named after Azriel, my father’s grandfather and Azi’s great grandfather.  I told him how much we had enjoyed the chance to have dinner with them.

What follows is likely the paranoia of a child over-sensitized to signs of dreadedness and reasons for dread.  Or, maybe not.

Late last night I googled bookofirv and, to my dismay, it popped up right above a link to gratutiousblahg with its catchy, pugnacious description:  warning: gratuitous fucking f-word and passive voice use, and another one called Fucking Moods.  I then clicked on Book of Irv and found, to my surprise, that it had been visited seven times that day, by one reader, in the United States.  This struck me because the site is generally visited by zero visitors on any given day.

The intro I’d sent him the link to had not been visited directly, which is indicated in the WordPress statistics when a link to a particular page is clicked on.  I assume it must have been Azi reading through the entries, looking at the photos, before my email reached him.  It may all be pure coincidence.  It’s possible Azi may not even have regular access to a computer during his visit to the States.

Or, it’s also possible, says the son of the Dreaded Unit, that the expression Azi had in a couple of the photos we posed for after dinner– probably a completely inadvertent micro-expression like the ones we often have in photos we are not ready for– the only glimmer I’ve ever seen on his face of my father’s dreaded aspect– and my sister was struck by this glimpse too, was a grim foreshadowing of his reaction to my emerging portrait of his beloved first cousin.  

As the last family member alive, outside of my sister and me, he may well have been offended by references to Tamarka, his grandmother, after all, a woman he undoubtedly loved, described in only the unflattering context I knew her from. Mentioning my father’s surprising lifelong bitterness toward Azi’s mother might have hurt him too. 

“What did I tell you, schmuck, about writing these things about people who are still alive?” I can hear the angry voice of Eli rasp.  “Even if everyone else is no longer alive, this guy is the son and grandson of the woman your father had little good to say about.  You both took my side against his mother?  Really?  She moved to Israel when you were a kid, how much contact did you have with her?  Asshole, do you think before you do things, even at sixty goddamned years old?”

“Eli,” called the skeleton at the top of the hill to his cousin in his grave below, “you’re a fine one to call somebody else an asshole, having been, not exactly, shall we say, a model of discretion during your long battle of a life.”

“You’re only talking that way, Bub, because you know I can’t come up that hill and kick your goddamned ass,” said the skeleton of my father’s first cousin.  “And because you know how much I love you, which would not, by the way, prevent me from knocking the shit out of you, if I could somehow get up there, which, unfortunately for me and lucky for you, I can’t.”

I made the mistake, recently, while talking with my sister and recalling the terrible skirmishes over our family dinner table, of making a grotesque comparison.  This proneness to hyperbole, something my sister and I both have to be on guard against, we got from our mother, a poet and exaggerator of bunyanesque proportions. 

“No,” my sister said firmly, and I realized at once she was right, “you can’t say Auschwitz.”  I know it was a disgusting metaphor, and also inapt and she was quite responsibly drawing a line and not letting our conversation get completely out of hand.

“That’s true, sorry.  That was bad,” I said, and we paused for a moment.

“OK,” I said “it was like the no-man’s land between the trenches in World War One. A muddy expanse between barbed wire, with random machine gun fire, the groans of dying horses, biplanes swooping in to strafe us, chlorine gas rolling in over the hill, and we had no gas masks.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

This poison gas reference didn’t offend her, chlorine, although nasty business, was not always deadly, like Zyklon B.  The reference to rolling chlorine gas was proportional, and just part of warfare in those years, and helped to convey the scene of horror we faced every night over our flank steak, tossed salad and Rice-a-Roni.  

Onto this hopeless, senseless battlefield stepped our tired father every evening, still rumpled from his desperate late afternoon nap and mentally preparing, right after dinner, to drive out to his second job, as a kind of community organizer among Jewish teenagers in the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea.  

It would often start right away, as my mother was serving dinner.  There would be a grumble, a snarled response, voices would rise quickly, escalate, then the flash point and it would be open warfare.  I would yell something intolerably mean back at my sister and she would slash, with her lightning quick reflex for the jugular, and our mother would leap in and we’d both jump on her and pummel her into submission.  My father usually exhibited a certain reluctance to enter the fray, odd, in hindsight, because he was the main architect of the larger war and its most vocal supporter.  He’d often begin with a heartfelt appeal to our mother.  

“Feed me after them!” he would  plead, lowing like a wounded bull.  “Jesus Christ, I’ve asked you a thousand times, Evvy” he had a bit of the hyperbolist too, “feed me after them.  I’m begging you.”    

This rare show of vulnerability in our father, he only made this plea when he was beside himself with despair over the whole situation, would act like a tonic on my sister and me, and we’d turn our full attention to him.  It would take literally no time, then he was in the middle, swinging away with every verbal bludgeon that came to hand.  While pausing for a breath he would sometimes moan again “Evvy, for the love of God, feed me after them…”

Our mother, to her credit, would never consider splitting up the family at dinner that way.  After all, it was the one time of day we were all together.  For another thing, it would be twice as much work for her, after a day slugging it out with her two difficult kids.  The daughter had been such a placid, easy baby.  The boy was always trouble, it’s true, but these days it was hard for my mother to decide which poison was worse.  

I guess her dilemma was the same as the one my sister and I sometimes wrestle with.  Although she had dubbed our father the D.U., The Dreaded Unit, an uncannily fitting name our father seemed to take as an honorific, she always argues that our mother was by far the more dangerous of the two.  I grant her the points, but I always find the D.U. was capable of more damage when he was swinging two two-handed swords and bellowing his war cry.  

“It’s a matter of taste, really,” I will sometimes say.  

“Look, there’s no debate that the D.U. was very, very bad,” my sister will allow, “but she was much worse.”  And she will draw out the “much” like Rosie Perez, to emphasize by how large a margin she feels our mother was worse than the Dreaded Unit.  

“On a colorful side note,” said the skeleton, “you remember the Waner brothers, both Hall of Famers, who were nicknamed Big Poison and Little Poison?  Pitchers and opposing managers started calling these two hitting machines Poison and the names became part of baseball folklore.  Big Poison was a star when his brother came up to play beside him in the outfield, and they named his kid brother Little Poison, of course.  But Little Poison was actually bigger than Big Poison.  Ain’t dat some shit?”  

Sho nuff is, dad.

historical footnote from Wikipedia, which backs my father’s story, in the end:

Paul was known as “Big Poison” and Lloyd was known as “Little Poison.” One story claims that their nicknames reflect a Brooklyn Dodgers fan’s pronunciation of “Big Person” and “Little Person.” In 1927, the season the brothers accumulated 460 hits, the fan is said to have remarked, “Them Waners! It’s always the little poison on thoid (third) and the big poison on foist (first)!” But given that Lloyd was actually taller, this story would seem somewhat incongruous.

As Frankie the Caterer, who outweighed me by maybe forty pounds, held me off balance against the cupboard and began throwing punches toward my face, and grunting as he did — and, I have to say, the grunting pissed me off as much as anything– I started to get really mad.  

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this position, and I hope you never have, but it really does make you angry to be treated that way.

 “You’re hilarious, Mr. Talking to the Reader Amateur Hour,” said the skeleton.  

I’m not kidding, it really is infuriating when somebody tries to beat the shit out of you.  I hadn’t been in any fist fights, and had avoided all beatings, in spite of my long habit of speaking disrespectfully to bullies, but instincts took over.  I emulated Ali’s Rope A Dope, covering my torso and face with forearms and fists.  Off balance as I was I could get no leverage to hit back.  This arrangement worked in my favor as well, because Frankie couldn’t get much leverage to put any real power behind his punches, which were landing mostly harmlessly on my arms.  

About the only thing I could do was yell, and since there was no point pretending we were friends at this point, the things I yelled would have curdled the milk in a respectable woman’s tea.

My yelling really served no good purpose, except to curdle the milk in the tea of the respectable ladies who owned the place, Daughters of the American Revolution, directly above us, and alert them that some enraged, toilet-mouthed black man had evidently broken into their beautiful mansion and was violently assaulting the off-duty policeman, their friendly caterer Frank.  

“His name is Frank, isn’t it?  That greaseball?” said one of the women, referring, with the political incorrectness that is the birthright of such women, to Frank’s Italian ancestry.  

“The wop?” said another, “I believe his name is Francis, or possibly Frank.”

We were getting nowhere fast, Frank and I, and since the music was loud in the dining room, and we were behind closed doors at the far end of the kitchen, nobody but the Daughters of the American Revolution directly upstairs were hearing any of the perfectly offensive, frightfully disrespectful things I was yelling.  Frank kept grunting and hitting, I kept snarling.  Then five or six of Frank’s colleagues came running into the kitchen and pulled us apart.

Two of them restrained me, nobody restrained Frank. There was a little pause, as these off-duty policemen stood in a little half circle figuring out their next move, how to stage the scene correctly so that everything played out the way they needed it to.  The guy with the mouth like a fucking perp — well, it would be easy enough to pin the assault on him, he was clearly the aggressor, but they were sort of thinking about how to best proceed.  

My mind was working fast too at that moment.  I was being held, my arms pinned, and Frankie, who hadn’t managed to get a good shot in, was standing a few feet away, still mad as hell.  I knew, somehow, the chances were pretty good that as long as I struggled, and was being held by two guys, I’d give Frankie the chance to finally bash me in the face.  I could see he wanted to and was probably most comfortable pummeling a man his friends were holding.  Policemen famously make loyal witnesses who will not rat out a brother on the job or off.

Instincts, again.  I let my body go slack and said quietly to the guys holding me, “I’m OK, let me go please.”  I sounded so reasonable, and was putting up no resistance, that, to my surprise, they released me.  I noticed the suddenly confused expressions on everybody’s face.  

Then I said to Frankie “after what you just tried to do to me, what’s to stop me from doing the same to you?”  I could see it perfectly in my head, a crisp punch to the cheek, spinning his head, followed by a hard shot to the stomach, he doubles over, pound him to ground, kick him once, leave.

As soon as the last syllable was out of my mouth I realized nothing stood in the way.  I punched him in the face.  It was not the heroic Hollywood punch I’d imagined a millisecond before, but it was a solid, if slightly tentative hit.  They started moving in, I realized the rest of my plan would have to be abandoned.  I moved quickly, telling everyone it was over, leaped nimbly over a long waist high metal table (my legs were strong from bike messengering and I was trim), landed lightly on the other side, bowed, like the admirer of Bruce Lee that I was, and left the kitchen.  

I joined the party, began excitedly telling somebody what had just happened.  Found a friend of my bother-in-law’s who was a lawyer, told him I might be needing him later, said the same to his friend the shrink.  Just then my father rushed over in his tuxedo, red-faced, with the keys to the car in his hand.

“I don’t know what the fuck is the matter with you, I don’t know what you’re on, but this party is over for you.  Take the car and get out of here, the police are on their way,” he said in one hot breath.

“Excellent,” I said, not taking the car keys he was thrusting at me, “I’m going to file assault charges when they get here.”   

“The cops are on their way, and you’re getting out of here now,” he insisted.  

“You’re telling me to flee the scene of an assault when I am the victim of the assault?  What the fuck are YOU on?” I yelled back.

 “Lower your voice,” he hissed, steering me toward the vestibule outside the ballroom.  

“They already called the police, they’re on their way.  Frank is a cop.  I don’t know what the fuck is the matter with you!” he motioned to the front doors, elegant double doors with narrow panels of intricately cut glass inlaid in them.  

“Let’s talk outside,” I said and pushed the door open with the back of my open left hand.  

“You balled up your fist and smashed the glass on the door in a fit of violent rage!” insisted my father afterwards, and forever after.

Showing the cuts on the back of my left hand, a tiny scar is there to this day, did nothing to disabuse him of this image of his enraged out of control son violently ruining the expensive wedding, deliberately smashing the glass with the back of his weaker, guitar fretting hand, and then, typically, trying to rewrite history to make himself the victim.

What followed was me being detained by police in a coat room for  the remainder of the wedding, my incriminating bloody left hand wrapped in a cloth napkin.  I was eventually questioned and told the story to a cop who nodded and said, “curse, shove, punch, yeah, I got it.  Look, this happens all the time at weddings, sad to say.  People have a couple of drinks.  I once punched out my brother-in-law at a wedding, and we’re good friends, we laughed about it later.  Emotions are high, this happens at weddings, unfortunately.”  

Maybe it happens at cop family weddings, where men are used to acting like men on TV, they don’t use passive aggression or withering wit to express their hostility, they act like men, use their fist, a beer stein, a bat, whatever I can use to fucking bash your brains in, big mouth.  My family had never seen this kind of thing, at least if we don’t include the rude treatment they probably got from the people who murdered them en masse back in Eastern Europe.

I myself wasn’t used to it.  What followed was grotesquely familiar, though.  I was generously given the lion’s share of the blame for the ugly incident, blame my parents griped about forever.  The lawyer friend of my new brother-in-law had negotiated a deal– Frank, a gentleman, would voluntarily drop the assault charges against me if I waived the right to file any charges I might be thinking of bringing against him.  “It’s a good deal,” the lawyer assured me.  After all, five police witnesses had seen me punch the caterer in the face, which I’d also admitted to doing, the rest was my word against the caterer’s.  I took the deal, but I wasn’t particularly gracious about taking it.

Talking to people in the weeks after the wedding, I found that virtually nobody there had been aware of how I had successfully ruined the party.  Each one expressed shock when I told the dramatic story.  My sister had been unaware of it at the time too.  

“You deliberately ruined your sister’s wedding,” my parents kept insisting.  “You provoked and assaulted the caterer for no reason.  You have a violent fucking temper!”  They were like two dogs with a bone, they would not let it go.  It enraged them over and over again, that I had simply, maliciously, decided to violently provoke and attack an innocent and decent person in the middle of the happiest day in all of our lives.  Never mind that I’d never been involved in a fist fight in my life, outside of this one.  I was long overdue for a good ass kicking from somebody, the way they saw it.

They both readily understood how somebody could want to punch me in the face over and over.  This struck me as one betrayal too many, the distilled compounding of a lifetime of my parents’ both taking everyone else’s side over my own, my point of view being dismissed as mere blame-shifting justification.  If a stranger tried to punch my lights out, he must have had a damned good reason.  

Having read my detailed account you might be inclined to think my parents could have employed a bit of nuance in analyzing things, might have realized that few conflicts in life are 100% one person’s fault, but you’d be missing the point by thinking that way.  

“Very clever,” said the skeleton, “you know the real reason you are writing this book.  To get the last fucking word, to prove to everybody that you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.  You want to pontificate and hand down the final wise word on everything, years after the rest of us are dead and can’t defend ourselves.”

That must be it, dad.  So the ending is like this:  I went to my parents house a couple of nights later, after a day of riding my bike in lousy weather to make a few dollars.  I confronted them about their implacable refusal to listen to my side of the story.  They did not like being confronted.  My father was smug, my mother was enraged.  

“That’s all you know how to say ‘suck my dick! suck my dick!  suck my dick!’,” she worked herself into a frenzy, saying it over and over, like a Tourretic parrot, in a high pitched imitation of her violently insane son.

“Suck my dick,” I told her, using the regrettable, dismissive phrase for perhaps the last time in my life.

My father weighed in.  “You conveniently leave out the most important part of the whole incident,” he said.  

When I asked the obvious follow-up he said, “you had no right to be in the kitchen in the first place.  Once you went into the kitchen everything that happened was your fault.  You were wrong, but of course, you could never admit that.”  

At this point, if we’d been a cop family, fists would already have been flying, my mother would have broken a platter across the back of my head, neighbors would be rushing toward the house.

Instead, finally having heard enough, the maddening futility of the whole exercise exhausting me, I walked over to my father on the couch and held up one finger.  

“The most important fucking thing about the incident was the violence that occurred, and escalated, from verbal to physical.  If you think they are exactly the same, think again.”  He glared at me.

“Don’t make me get up from this couch,” he warned, like he was talking to a five year-0ld.

 I watched my father’s eyes watching my finger as I brought it smartly across his nose.  

“Don’t make me get up from this couch,” he growled, not moving a muscle.  

“You’re a cunt,” I said, moving toward the door to leave.  

My mother started screaming about this.  Her screams sounded like the screams of someone being scalded to death.

My father maintained his cold, steely demeanor.  “I’m writing you out of the Will, you’ll get nothing from us,” he told me.  

“Fuck you and fuck your will,” I said.  

“Give me the keys to the house,” he said, “you’re not welcome here anymore.”  

“I’m keeping the fucking keys and coming by to terrorize you whenever I feel like it,” I informed him over my mother’s screaming.

I left and rode my bicycle towards the train station on Hillside Avenue.  It was raining now and I put on my rain gear.  On the way to the train I passed the home of Florence and Mike, two good friends of Arlene and Russ.  Florence was an excellent artist, a great soul and one of my favorite people in the world.  I was one of her’s too.  Mike was a good guy, very bright, idealistic, an excellent piano player devoted to Bach, as was Florence.  

I knocked on their door, went in and told them the story.  They were very sympathetic, predicted that it would take a while but that all this would eventually blow over.  We had a couple of laughs at some point, I think, and I rode off to the train feeling a lot better than when I left my parents’ house.

What I remember most clearly of all of these thirty year-old events is the feeling I had the next morning when I woke up.  

The rain, which had become torrential by the time I got back to my apartment, had stopped.  When I opened my eyes after a long sleep the sun was shining outside.  Birds were singing.  I was struck by an incredible feeling of lightness I’d never felt, not before or since.  It was literally like a heavy weight had been lifted off my shoulders, my neck, my brow, my chest, my back, my arms and my legs.  I was euphoric to be free of my parents.  The feeling of relief was almost palpable, I could practically taste it.  

“It was not to last long,” said the skeleton.