As I learned from watching my father in action for decades– it was not the thing itself that would get under his skin and send him into a long-lasting rage, it was the maddening principle of the thing being done to him.  The indignity of being held powerless, no matter the indisputable rightness of his position, the arbitrary stupidity of the other position.  

This was no doubt instilled during his powerless childhood when, between a father who could not earn a living and a mother who couldn’t control her rage, though she may have cloaked it in some religious guise, he was subjected to whatever happened to him with no regard for what was right, or just, or decent, or what his perfectly justifiable feelings about the matter might be.

It is this being made invisible that is the truest, most violent curse of poverty. You are not even a person, sir.   The tastes I’ve had of this invisibility are hideous.  I had them in court many times, while standing in the shoes of the poor and powerless threatened with eviction.  I get tastes of it to this day, trying to live on a low fixed income and forced to engage in futile arguments with under-paid idiots under no obligation to do anything but tell you they are powerless too, sir, and similarly screwed, and who, in the end, read you their masters’ regulations and tell you to have a nice day.  

This was a large part of my father’s fury to become middle class, to become wealthy enough, he thought, to become exempt from this invisibility constantly poured over the poor like tankers of cold piss.   The kind of wealth that makes one exempt from these indignities is a rare kind indeed, it takes tens of millions nowadays to even get into the room where you can be considered for a life of dignity.  Though even minimal wealth will insulate one from the worst of this galling invisibility.

Easier, by far, is to acquire the well-adjusted mindset one prays for in the Serenity Prayer, to know the difference between the things I can tackle and the things that will only drive me insane by grinding my soul into dehydrated urine.

I am reminded of this by the spiral of rage I fell into yesterday trying to verify my “priority” confirmation to have an agency’s mistake corrected so I can resume the health coverage I have paid for every month for ten years.  That I will run out of hypertension medication before coverage begins again, and have no coverage in the event of a stroke or accident, everyone agrees, is a shame, and that’s why we gave you priority in the backdating of your claim, sir.  However, you have to understand, sir, that priority means many different things.

 And we are not responsible for what the other office does, we don’t do anything in-house, and are not obligated to provide you with any information whatsoever except to verify that your claim is still labeled “priority” and still being expedited.  It took only 12 days to be electronically transmitted from this office to the one who decides, and it’s still marked priority, sir.  Can you imagine how long a non-priority case that doesn’t involve running out of hypertension medication might take?  How many people are being fucked far worse than you, sir, not eligible for any health care ever?

I get this propensity to be enraged by this kind of bland, business as usual fuck-yourself-in-the-face, sir, directly from my father.   He instilled it by doing the same to me, and to my sister.  

“He would be just as upset if he lost the 35 cents change he got when he bought the paper as he would if one of us was hit by a car.  Everything was of equal weight to him as tragedy,” my sister reminded me.  And it was true.  If you asked him, once he’d calmed down again, it wasn’t the 35 cents he’d misplaced, obviously, it was the loss of control it symbolized, the fact that his system for keeping track of things had broken down.  That he was powerless.

Which is what rage is all about.  A person who does not feel violated, and powerless, is not likely to lash out with anger.   I’d intended to go into the hideous subject here of the politically required “n-word”, a word more offensive in many ways than the hateful old word it replaces: nigger.  To say “nigger” these days is to violate a new and deeply held taboo.  To continue treating people like niggers, well, sir, you can’t use that word, no matter how descriptive, apt, perfectly fitting, the conversation is over, once you put hate speech into it, I’m going to report you for acting like a damned n-word.  

But here is the most basic thing about being treated like a nigger, you just have to take it– or, if not, don’t get all moralistic about it when we put you in a fucking choke hold. 

Substitute any other word here, if you prefer, though nigger sums it up best.  You can say kyke, spic, greaseball, habib, sand nigger, wog, chink, gook– but let’s keep it simple.  Nigger is the gold standard, the centuries-old American word of choice used to describe someone with the power to do nothing but accept the, admittedly very bad, situation.  Nigger was the word, and inferior condition, used to justify American Slavery, Jim Crow, every atrocity.  Slaughters of blacks by whites that the ruling racists re-branded as “riots” happened periodically and were quickly forgotten, the didn’t happen to people anyone had to care about, they happened to faceless niggers.

Like the massacre of defiant Blacks Easter Sunday, 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, the one that resulted in the acquittal of all the killers involved.  Like the destruction by fire of the middle class black city of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, the Black Wall Street, and the detention of all black survivors in prison camps afterwards, a century of legally winked at lynching, states’ rights as code for we decide what’s best for our niggers, thank you, welfare reform to wean n-word parasites off the tax tit, defending cops who once in a while kill unarmed Blacks against the misleading and hateful accusations of fucking n-word animals.

Why did my father have such a strong identification with persecuted Blacks?  He grew up as a nigger, the poorest, dumbest, most powerless kid in a town run by Ku Klux Klan sympathizers.  He imparted the feelings of this identification with the poor and the crushing powerlessness of poverty most effectively to my sister and me.

It is the principle that is so hard to digest, maybe impossible.  Ask for the director’s name, the director of a public agency, someone who as a member of the public you should have access to, especially when there is no other meaningful avenue of appeal.  You will be told that you can hire a lawyer and subpoena that person’s name, they are under no obligation to provide the public servant’s name to you, a mere disgruntled member of the public.  

This unreasonable denial of a reasonable request will sting briefly, but the longer lasting stink is being reminded of the larger principles, like corporate laws that insulate wrong-doing corporations from liability or the lack of promised transparency by our Hope and Change “most transparent administration in history” president.  

After all, it is nobody’s business how many people are accidentally, or inadvertently, or collaterally killed in your name.  Drones are better than boots on the ground, everyone agrees, and much less expensive.  The less the public needs to know about civilian casualties the better.   Secret trade deals are better, politically, than ones that will get Americans all pissed off, like NAFTA.  That’s the principle when a public servant tells you that you have no right, as a mere member of the public, to any information you can use to try to get redress for things that, with all respect, sir, you have no way to get redressed.  Have a nice day.

“This piece is true enough, as far as it goes.  But you should go back and delete that nigger paragraph.  Too incendiary.  I was never squeamish about language, you know, but I’d urge you to be careful when using a word like nigger.  It’s just pouring gasoline on a fire to use that word, no matter how perfectly it sums up what you’re talking about,”  the skeleton of my father continues smiling, the only expression he’s got these days, taking a beat to let the point sink in.  “You know what I’m saying?  Not for nothing…”

My father’s first concern when I came to talk with him that last night of his life was to make sure I was recording our talk.  He wanted to leave me a primary source to ponder, to work from.  The recordings show we began talking, or at least recording, at 1:33 a.m..  The last short recording is time stamped 3:18 a.m.   This shows we talked for around two hours, him with great effort in a voice that was incredibly weak and strained.  A lot was said, obviously.  

The nurse was smiling at me from ear to ear as I passed her in the hall when I left.  This suggested to me that she and my father had talked about his anxiety over how he was going to talk to me.  They both, likely, were surprised to find me so mild, so ready to help make his passing as easy as I could for him.  She clearly wanted to hug me as I passed her on the way back to the parking lot.  Perhaps she did.

Here’s the thing about having the primary source right in front of you– you can see how your imagination will often recall something quite different from what the record shows.  That last night of my father’s life I operated somewhat foolishly as to the primary source we were creating.   Each time my father asked for water, which he needed every few minutes, I shut off the recorder.  In the emotions of the conversation I did not always remember to turn it back on when we started talking again.  Thus I have a recording of about 35 minutes, instead of the full conversation.  What is recorded on that record, as my father must have known, is about all I can remember with absolute certainty.

I offer you one example that jumped out at me when I listened to our chat last night.   In the previous post I have my father saying, and I’m pretty sure he said it:  “Those stories Eli told you, he pretty much hit the nail on the head.  Only he spared you the worst of it, how awful it really was.  My life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”

I distinctly remember those lines, particularly “my life was pretty much over by the time I was two”.  The recording has my father saying:  “You know, you caught bits and pieces of it when you talked to Eli about me. He hammered it on the nose.”

The record does not have him say anything like “my life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”   He may well have said it, and it made the impression it made, or I may be remembering some synthesized version of the statement, created from the full context of what he was talking about.  Though I’m also sure he said it.

Maybe it was the first thing he said when I walked in, as I remember it, and we talked for ten minutes or more before I put the recorder on.  Perhaps his reference to Eli hammering it on the nose was just a restatement of what he’d said moments before, when he also told me that his life was pretty much over by the time he was two.

“Or, perhaps, it was what you wanted to hear me say,” says the always complicated skeleton that used to help my father get around when he was alive. “You always had a vivid imagination.  Do you remember that sadistic crew that lived up in the attic over your bedroom when you were a kid?   They had this kind of guillotine contraption you described to us, that you could hear them wheeling over your bed.  Your dilemma each night, trying to sleep below it, was which way to position your body when the blade fell to avoid the worst.  Do you remember all this?”

Obviously I do, since I am the only one actually in this silent conversation, old man, but continue.

“Your dilemma was, they knew the orientation of your bed and were determined to surprise you one night by dropping the blade.  So sometimes, when you heard them wheeling it, you’d reverse yourself so that your pillow was at the bottom of the bed and your feet were at the top, where your head had just been.  Then you braced yourself to have your feet cut off at the ankles, instead of your head, if the worst happened.  Young paranoid’s triage, we might say.”

Sometimes, when you are trying to make sense of things that make little sense, it is good to just let the other person run with it, particularly in the absence of primary sources to the contrary.

“I appreciate your attempt to fairly tell the story of my life, my values, to write the manifesto I might have written about my beliefs, what I learned about life and the world.  I really do.  It is not easy for an almost eleven year-old skeleton to express this, but here I am, telling you plainly. “

“I think it’s also admirable, if typically quixotic, that you’re writing this story in hopes of giving the full context for why you believe in your student-run program as much as you do.  Giving all the backstory of a difficult father, scarred by poverty and abuse, who nonetheless imparted these humanistic values, I applaud the whole thing.  May you publish the Book of Irv, may you get some publicity and attention, may somebody fund your program, may the kids do great things.”

“But I think it is also only fair to give the reader a bit more context than just your point of view.  I expressed sorrow for the first and last time, pretty much, and asked for your forgiveness, for sure for the first and last time, as I was checking out.  Prior to that time, as you’ll recall, I yielded nothing, nada, gave you not a single point.  I told you, at the end, that I knew now that you’d been right all along, reaching out to your father, and that I’d been wrong, unable to reach back.  You won’t find that in the record, stated as succinctly as that, but we both recall I made a point of making that clear.  Anyway, the thing the reader should know, is that I was your implacable enemy for most of the time we knew each other.  They should read the book knowing that.”

“And now, on the threshold of old age, you’re trying once again to do what you might have done at 24, or 35, or 40– write a coherent explanation of difficult things that might get you paid.  Make the story interesting enough, write it with enough conviction and engagingly enough,  you might sell a book.  Some publisher will hopefully give you money to sit at your keyboard and write the full manuscript, if they think they can sell your book.  That would be great, not working for free.”

“And, for the record, I thought Me Ne Frego should have been published, but you gave up after that little idiot at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux opined, from the short sample you’d sent her, and the synopsis, that unfortunately the protagonist had not seemed to have undergone the kind of dramatic transformation that is necessary for any compelling narrative.  Her name was Strauss, the author of that thoughtful rejection letter, was it not?  And she had a degree in literature from a top Ivy League School.  Who should know such things, if not her?”

“OK, then, here’s my point.  You expect the reader to come with you, to be moved by what moved you.  The reader should also consider this: everybody tells their version of events.  Meaning this– people lie, consciously or not.  You know I always hated your brother-in-law because of his eccentric relationship to the truth.  The point is, how does the reader know what is real and what is bullshit?”

“Do you really expect, for example, anyone to believe that nice little fairy tale about walking on a hill with Arlene as she pulled a chain and gave you that illuminating insight about your life?   It’s a neat story, I’ll give you that, and I love the way you slip in that ‘Mozart IQ’, that was cutely done, but the fact is, we never had a friend named Arlene.  And, even if we had, the story she told you was not true.  It was your fault.  All of it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s nap time here at the First Hebrew Congregation Bone Yard.”

And I am left awake, wondering about the man who insisted to his eight year-old, when the kid was done vomiting after seeing the footage the Nazis shot of their Final Solution (talk about primary sources, Jesus), that the slaughter of his mother’s dozen aunts and uncles was merely an abstraction.  “Nobody ever knew those people, you’re just being dramatic to think they had anything to do with you.”  

“Fine, I was wrong to say that.  Have me admit that now, from my grave.  Now, please, Elie, leave me to my nap.”

When my father was hospitalized, suddenly, for what would turn out to be the last few days of his life, I made a quick plane reservation and headed, by public transportation, to La Guardia airport.  At 42nd Street, where I switched trains, a man was singing on the train platform.  He was an older man, down on his luck by the looks of it, and he sang uncannily like Sam Cooke.  

He was singing one of my father and my favorite songs, You Send Me.  I began recording it.  As he hit that long “whoa-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh” between verses the E train roared in, drowning him out.  I stepped on and headed to Queens for the bus to La Guardia.  Very cinematic, I thought at the time.  I had a ten second snippet ending with the train’s roar recorded on my digital recorder.  I’d intended to play the wonderful imitation for my father, but there was no point.  There wasn’t enough of the man’s beautiful singing on it.  The abrupt end was the very image of death.

Throughout our life, despite having much in common, my father was a determined adversary.  This started long before I could speak, when, according to him, I stared at him “accusingly, with those big black eyes”, from my crib next to his side of the bed.  Accusingly, because, apparently I could already see the future, knew, somehow, the long fight that was in store for us.  Because of my accusatory stare they had to move the crib, and eventually move to a house where I could have my own room.  His response to any suggestion that my conversations with Eli were giving me insight into this adversarial relationship was typical.    

“Sure,” he said, angrily dismissing the idea, “listen to fucking Eli.  Eli’s full of shit. He’s a great source of history.  Did he tell you how many times he was almost a millionaire, how every business he walked away from was somebody else’s fault?  Everyone he ever knew fucked him, as the always honest Eli will tell you.  Ask his kids about him, they’ll tell you what a great father he was to them.  Eli’s version of history is complete bullshit.  Go ahead, keep listening to Eli, you’re really getting some fucking wisdom there.”

The old man wasn’t giving me much credit, of course.  I listened to Eli and I argued with Eli and through this process came away with what I considered close to the truth of whatever matter we were discussing. Eli had no ax to grind against my father.  He was very proud of my father.  He told me so every time we talked about him.  

“Yeah, but Eli, you have to admit, both my father and my uncle are somewhat insane,” I would say.  

“OK, somewhat insane, that’s OK, fair enough.  But if you had seen where they came from, the horrible situation they came up in, and compared that to where they wound up, both well-educated, respected professionals with nice families, living in beautiful homes, you would see what I’m talking about.  You could never have imagined either of those dirty little urchins coming out of that place they grew up amounting to what they both amounted to.   You have to see the whole picture.  Somewhat insane, OK, but I’m very proud of both of them, your father especially.”

There was no question that Eli had no ax to grind in this particular case, though he had many axes he was constantly grinding.  He told me whatever he did about my father’s life to help me understand a very complicated and troubling puzzle.  And, in a sense, a very simple one.  Add up the facts.  

In a time when everybody was poor, your father’s family was more poor than anyone else’s.  As well-spoken and quick witted as your father is now, when he arrived in kindergarten he was treated as a big retard by the other kids because he spoke not a word of English.  When your father was first able to stand his mother began whipping him in the face every day.  Do the math.  Somewhat insane?  Well, I’d say that’s pretty goddamned good.

I got it, too.   It was only by having these pieces to give context to the aggravating whole that I was able to make any sense of it.   This information allowed me to realize the guy couldn’t help being paranoid, and guarded, and macho, and unsympathetic, and bullying, and maudlin.  In time I was able to realize he couldn’t help being that way and it helped me get past some of the hurt and anger.  The damage was done, and was in some ways unforgivable, but at least it was understandable.  What I learned from Eli was a huge help to me.

My uncle, who always cowered around his much bigger older brother, was the person my father kept asking about from his deathbed.  “Is my brother on his way?” he wanted to know.  I had a call, he was at the airport, I drove down and picked my uncle up.  He stopped the doctor in the hall, asked if a liver transplant was possible for his 80 year-old brother in the last days of liver cancer, wasn’t there a possibility to get him a liver in time to save him?  I gently pulled him away from the doctor.  He and my father clung to each other, the sight of it was very poignant to my sister and me.  After my father died my uncle sat by the body, until the members of the chevrai cadesha arrived to take the body and prepare it for the funeral.  My brother-in-law sat and waited with my uncle and dead father, a not un-moving detail.  

We sat with my dying father throughout the day and at some point in the evening, my uncle said we should let my father rest and we all left for the night.  I’d bought my father a small digital recorder and, before I left, I showed him how to operate it.  “If you think of anything you want to say to anyone, you can record it on here,” I told him and he nodded and told the nurse to put it in the drawer next to his bed.    

Then, trying to sleep back at my parents’ apartment, I realized it was absurd.  My father was clearly dying and I was trying to get a good night’s sleep.  My uncle, for all his intelligence, was a fucking rigid idiot who tried to make rules for everyone around him.  I got dressed and left without waking him up.  On the drive to the hospital I came as close as I would come to shedding tears.  I got choked up, thinking about the many wasted years when my father and I could have been friends, helped each other, instead of being enemies, harming each other.  

It was probably one a.m. when I reached the hospital.   I made my way through the quiet halls and was greeted warmly by the night nurse, an angel who had quickly bonded with my father.  She was a black woman, slightly resembling a couple my father had been close friends with at one point during his life, and they seemed to get each other immediately.   She was very protective of him and was clearly glad I had arrived.  I went in and left the door open.  

My father was awake, as though he’d been waiting for me.  “Did you bring the recorder?” was the first thing he said.  A lifelong fascination with history caused him to date things and to be aware of the historical significance of primary sources.  We were about to create a primary source.  

“I left it with,” and I said the name of that angelic nurse, a name I’ve forgotten now, sad to say.  

“Oh, she put it in the drawer,” he said gesturing feebly in the jerky, ghostly way he gestured those last few days of his life.  I got the recorder, switched it on and laid it on his chest.

“Those stories Eli told you,” he began, “he pretty much hit the nail on the head.  Only he spared you the worst of it, how awful it really was.  My life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”

(arbitrary end of part one)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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