Back to that baby, my father, born on June 1, 1924.   It was a hard birth after a no doubt stressful pregnancy, the tiny mother struggled to give birth to a very large baby.   The mother had lost her previous child shortly after birth and must have been undergoing tremendous emotional turmoil.  The family was very poor, the horse that pulled the herring wagon may have already died, for all we know, and, if so, the breadwinner was winning no bread.  Crime was rampant on the crowded Lower East Side where they lived, violent criminals were organizing into a national syndicate to profit from Prohibition which was already proving to have been a massive mistake.

The second time was the charm for my grandparents, the big baby survived.   It was three of them now in the tiny, hot slum apartment during the airless summer of 1924.   What could go wrong?

My grandmother’s older brother Uncle Aren intervened, packed up the family’s belongings in his truck and they made the then long trek up to Peekskill, where Aren lived.  When this happened exactly is unknown.  My uncle, who was fifteen months younger than my father, may have also been a tiny passenger on that trip up the Hudson River, past Sing Sing prison.  Aren’s son Eli, freshly expelled from DeWitt Clinton high school shortly before graduation, helped the little family pack up and move.

Aren installed the little family on the second floor of a three story house he owned in Peekskill.  Little comes down to us about those first years in Peekskill, except that when Eli moved there around that time he had an altercation with the three Ku Klux Klan member sons of the guy who ran the local hardware store. 

“So you’re the new kyke from New York City,” Eli said they greeted him, blocking his way on the sidewalk in front of their store.  “I dropped the biggest one, stepped over him and said ‘Eli Gleiberman, nice to meet you guys’.  They didn’t bother me after that.” 

“Eli’s full of shit!  He’s a completely unreliable narrator and a notorious reviser of history” my father always insisted, particularly after I began visiting Eli regularly.   Maybe so, but many of his stories had the ring of truth.   Eli was menacing and physically formidable even at 85.

What we can establish, with simple arithmetic, is that my father started school just as the Depression was kicking off.   In September 1929 the boy was five.  His school career didn’t start off well since he didn’t speak any English and he was legally blind.  Outside of that, he probably had a pretty normal adjustment to school.  Here is a picture of him, one of very few from his childhood, that was taken during his early school years.   That’s dad in the middle.

“Who’s that kid on the left?” I asked my uncle, sometime after my father’s funeral.

“That’s Henry,” he said immediately.   Henry moved away from Peekskill shortly after the picture was taken, my uncle said, and does not figure further in my father’s story.

We note that young Irv is still not wearing glasses.  He’s smiling, looking at the camera, seemingly everything is fine.   He’s affectionately draping his arms over his friend and his little brother.   All appears right in the world at that moment, during that literal snapshot of time.   It’s probably fine.

My grandfather, Eliyahu/Harry, was, I’m told, a tall, strong man.   On the Lower East Side, in the early 1920s, around the time my father was born, he had a job delivering barrels of herring to the shops.   He drove a horse drawn cart through the cobblestone streets, the horse would stop, Eliyahu would wrestle a barrel of herring off the flatbed and hump it into the store.  He’d collect the money for his boss, get back on the cart and he and the horse would go to the next stop.  He did this for some time and all went fine.  Until, one day, the horse died and they hooked up a new horse to the wagon.

Eliyahu had no idea of the route, had never paid the slightest attention, the experienced old horse had known all the stops.  Eliyahu rolled aimlessly through the streets of Lower Manhattan behind the new horse, not recognizing any landmarks, unable to read the street signs or the addresses on the invoices his boss had given him.  At the end of the day he returned to the warehouse, cart still loaded with barrels of herring.   That was his last day of work. 

I learned this tale about fifty years after my grandfather died, from my father’s first cousin Eli, who told me most of what I know about my father’s childhood.   Eli was seventeen years older than my father, and so was a young adult during my father’s early years in Peekskill.  To the end of his days my father loved and feared Eli, a rough but loving customer (if he loved you), and Eli loved and was proud of my father.  In the end, he exerted himself to try to help me understand my father.  Eli turned out to be an indispensable source of family knowledge I’d otherwise have only guesses about.  

In the last years of his long life I visited Eli regularly, in his subsidized retirement cottage in Mount Kisco.  We spent hours talking about the long ago past, many times long into the night.  He was a great storyteller and a wonderful host (if he liked you — if he didn’t, all bets were off).   He was somewhat estranged from his three adult children, kids he’d famously ruled with an iron hand.  His tyrannical child-rearing was something he told me he didn’t regret, by the way, considering the fine people they grew up to be.  In fact, he gave a speech to that effect at a family gathering, where he allowed that his treatment may have amounted to abuse, if you will, but still, he felt vindicated by how well everything turned out.   He handed me the speech he delivered to look over.   

“Not one of them accepted my fucking apology,” Eli told me indignantly.  I read him back his words, pointed out that it was hardly an apology, the way he’d phrased it, the complete lack of remorse, and we proceeded to fight it out, the way he and my mother always fought.  He was fierce when angry, short and powerful, built like a sinewy bullfrog, he jumped to his feet, his face immediately magenta, veins popping, the white hairs on his head quivered, foam formed on his lips.  He had the menacing aspect of a panther when he was angry.  After the fight, like at the end of every one of the many fights between Eli and my mother, there were no hard feelings, we hugged goodbye and I headed down the dark, twisting Sawmill River Parkway to my apartment.

I wanted to learn more about my grandparents who’d died before I was born, people my father said virtually nothing about.   I wanted to know about my grandmother, Eli’s beloved Tante Chava, who Eli loved above everyone else and, even more so, my grandfather, a mysterious, silent character whose wry smile I’d seen in the two photographs of him that exist.   In one he is in a dark interior space, probably the synagogue, with his wife and younger son, my Uncle Paul,  at that time about sixteen.   Eliyahu is in a dark suit, wearing a fedora with a wide, downturned brim, smiling a wry and utterly incomprehensible smile.

While Eli had many stories about beautiful, hot-tempered Chava, my grandmother, he struggled to describe my grandfather to me.  He used a Yiddish word, fayik, I’ve never met anybody who could translate (or had even heard of), in explaining how hard it was to describe him.  Google Translate translates fayik as “fayik”.  I have only found one reference to the word on the internet, this frustratingly short fragment:  “The root, fayik, means. creative, skilled or …” summarizing a link that leads nowhere. 

“People say he wasn’t fayik, but it wasn’t so, he was just very quiet, very withdrawn … he had a sense of humor, he was very funny, I may have been the only person who realized how funny he was, because it was so subtle and always done with a completely deadpan face…  no expression at all… He always called me ‘big shot’ ” he struggled to describe the man’s face.  Then he came up with a kind of beautiful haiku. 

“His face was just two eyes, a nose and a mouth,” and he imitated the face, staring straight ahead, like a mask, making a zipping  motion over the straight line of his mouth, to indicate how rarely Eliyahu spoke.

I quickly got the sense that he’d kept his mouth shut to avoid getting socked in the head.  I’d always wondered how my grandfather’s English name was Harry and his brother, one of my father’s uncles on his father’s side, was also named Harry.  The two sons named Harry was like a Polish joke until Eli gave me the obvious explanation.   My grandfather’s mother died and his father remarried.  The woman he married had sons named Peter and Harry.   This evil step-mother did not tolerate the second Harry, hitting him hard in the head with whatever came to hand, including sturdy pieces of wood.   

“So, I guess he just checked out after a while, his whole life seemed to be devoted to not getting cracked in the skull, and Chava could be tough too,” Eli told me.

While many apparently considered my grandfather mentally deficient, Eli saw his dry, deadpan sense of humor, his wit — his hidden fayik nature.   He finally dug up an example.  Eli’s father, my great-uncle Aren, ran a garage in Peekskill.   He hired Eliyahu to work in the garage, he fixed cars and provided parking for others, but because Eliyahu couldn’t drive he was limited to releasing the brake and manually moving the cars around.   Eli took him out one day to teach him to drive, it had become clear it was senseless to keep him at the garage if he couldn’t drive.   

“Peekskill is hilly country,” he said, “and we’re going up a hill and the car starts losing power, and your grandfather is just looking ahead with that face and I say ‘Uncle Harry, give it gas!  Give it gas!” and a second before we start sliding backwards he turns to me and says ‘gas costs money’ and we start going backwards down the steep hill, we’re about to get killed.  I managed to get my foot in there and downshifted and pulled the car over and told him to get the hell out and that was the end of his driving lessons.”

It appears Uncle Aren (who ran my father’s little family) made the right call sending his little sister to explain to the school authorities why her son spoke no English when he started school.

On the first day of June, 1924, Israel Irving Widaen was born in a crowded slum on the lower east side of Manhattan Island.  He was named after his mother’s father, Azrael.  According to Jewish tradition, which frowns on naming a child for someone still alive, this means that my great-grandfather Azrael was already gone by June 1924.  The baby’s last name, at birth, was Widem, shortened a few years earlier, likely by a harried attendant on Ellis Island, from Widemlansky.  It was rendered on his birth certificate as “Widaen”, a spelling my grandmother, who didn’t read English, apparently signed off on.  My father’s father also didn’t read English, and so the mistake stood when my father, who until the age of eighteen was known as Irv Widem, was drafted into the US Army as Israel Irving Widaen.

Here is a key, basic, highly determinative, never considered detail of my father’s early life that didn’t dawn on me until years after my father’s death: he was born legally blind.  For most of his life, up to a few years before he died, when laser eye surgery became common and effective, he had 20/400 vision, vision he said qualified him as legally blind without his glasses.   20/400 means that what the average person can see clearly at twenty feet looked four hundred feet away to the newborn Israel/Azrael.

His mother’s face, for example, after the tremendous exertions this tiny woman endured to give birth to a huge baby (by a husband in an arranged marriage, a man she hated), would have appeared hazy to the uncomprehending infant.   That she may have come to treat the baby as unresponsive, stubbornly, aggravatingly retarded because he was basically blind, never seems to have occurred to anyone.   The effect of this unknown blindness certainly didn’t occur to me until weeks or months into writing every day about my father.   Think of the effect on your life, on your self-image, if nobody caring for you realizes you are legally blind until you are six or seven years old.

I have a picture of my father reading on the couch before dinner, after his day job, before his night job, his thick black-rimmed glasses up on his forehead, or on a nearby surface, the New York Times held a few inches from his face.  He was nearsighted, like the famous Mr. Magoo, but unlike Magoo, he wore powerful corrective lenses that allowed him to drive on the right side of the road, serve in the U.S. military, lead a fairly standard life.   If he wanted to read something he could easily read without glasses, as long as the print was very close to his face.  He eventually settled on bifocals, which allowed him to read through his glasses, holding a book or paper like anyone else.

As he was dying he insisted he’d been the “dumbest Jewish kid” in Peekskill.  This was incomprehensible to me.  Whatever critiques could be made of this often contentious man, it is impossible to argue that he wasn’t highly intelligent, well-informed, quick witted.  In the hospital room that last night of his life I questioned his assertion that he was the dumbest Jewish kid in the small town he grew up in.  “It’s impossible for me to believe you could have possibly been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill,” I said.

“By far!” he insisted, with a “humph!” hours before the end of a long life as a well-read, highly articulate intellectual.

Picture now being born in 1924, a year when the resurgent Ku Klux Klan reached its high-water mark in registered members, with 2.4 million nationwide. It was early in the ill-fated experiment in Prohibition, when murderous gangsters ran neighborhoods like the one where my father was born.  There were no federal child labor laws on the books.  A president sympathetic to the Klan and other xenophobes had signed a restrictive immigration bill into law, imposing strict quotas which effectively meant that the rest of the family in Europe was doomed to whatever Fate had in store for them.   Your little family is bitterly poor, and, try as you may, you can’t make out the details of anything in the world around you.

Infantile blindness and its lifelong effects would have been an interesting subject to follow up with the baby who grew up to be my father, an old man who still believed he’d been dumb because everyone around him, teachers and classmates whose faces he couldn’t make out, laughed at him and called him a big dummy. Another subject I never got to talk about with the man who belatedly apologized for senselessly fighting with me my whole life.

There was a glancing reference to my father’s early struggles in school in the very limited family lore about his childhood.  Like most of the details I know of my father’s difficult early life, this was humorously recounted by that great story-teller Eli Gleiberman, my father’s first cousin, Uncle Aren’s first born son. Aren had saved money and sent for his youngest sister right around the time World War One started.   Eli reported that his tiny, red-haired Tante Chava (many years younger than Aren) was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and that she and young Eli had experienced mutual love at first sight when he and his father went to pick her up from the boat.  Eli was a good-looking kid and, according to him, his aunt’s lifelong favorite.

The story goes that my grandmother Chava was called to school after my father, the oldest, biggest kid in his class, (in addition to being odd in his expressions, presumably) showed up for school without a word of English in his head.   The school sent for her to find out how it was possible for a child born in America to grow up to the age of five or six without learning English.  The answer was that they only spoke Yiddish at home, but that answer really answered nothing.  Eli, by then in his early twenties, probably taught Chava the line she delivered in response to the school authorities.  In a heavy Yiddish accent, when confronted by the school authorities about her son’s lack of English, she said “hee’l loin.”  Eli’s face would light up in his devilish grin when he told that story.

The boy would indeed learn, and become a voracious reader with a vast English vocabulary.  He would go on to graduate from Syracuse University and later get a Master’s Degree in American History at Columbia, one unfinished dissertation short of his Ph D. That would only happen, as it turns out, once someone at the Peekskill elementary school discovered that it was not mental deficiency, but legal blindness that made it impossible for this odd boy to learn his letters.

A related question arises, when I think things over now in the cool light of all of my detective work over the years. My father’s father, Harry, (for whom I’m named– his Hebrew name, Eliyahu, is my name) the “illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world,” I learned not long before Eli died, spoke English with no trace of a foreign accent.  He’d come over from Europe as a baby and picked up unaccented American English, somehow.  Go figure.  Why didn’t he go to school to talk to the authorities? Because he was an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world, I suppose.  His sphinx-like presence, and his mysteriously unaccented English, would have no doubt made things even worse, Aren, the small family’s patriarch, must have reasoned.  He was probably right.