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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

פקיח ונבון

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen years before I was born they killed almost everyone in my family.  Though I was always told not to worry about it, I did worry about it.   

My father, a perceptive man with a degree in history who could tell a pretty good story, might have sat down and tapped out an illuminating account but he is dead now too and can’t do much these days.  Before the end, when he could have been writing this all out, he was busy reading several newspapers every day, walking the dog, napping.  I am the last one in my line left to tell the story, including how they killed nearly every one of us, continue to kill so many of us.

My father left it to me, in his final, grandest joke, to grapple with the increasingly slippery ghosts of this story.  

We do not give a rat’s perfectly formed buttock for men who grapple with slippery ghosts, I know that as well as anyone.  I myself smirk whenever I pass such a man. You will hear no cluck from me if you slam this heavy tome shut now.  I will try to make it worth your while, that’s all I can tell you.

Life goes on, and, even if it won’t, this is a true golden age for episodic television, great actors are performing well-crafted dramas that move with insight and cunning from one emotionally fraught moment to the next, gathering momentum as they go. We binge watch now, many of us, and are relieved, on demand, of everything else while we do.

So I’m writing the account my father, a dreaded and articulate man, might have written if he ever wrote anything down. A hesitant hunt and peck typist who occasionally gave long speeches in front of groups, he never prepared his remarks on paper. He prepared them carefully in his mind, you could hear that at once from the organization of his talks.

He’d glance down at notes, but they’d be a few words on the back of an envelope to remind him of where he was in his thoughts. He had this wonderful facility, like the way the Romane (Gypsies) have always learned music.  See the shape of the song clearly in the air, in the mind, let the flourishes fall where they’re called for. The matter of style.

Style is also how the most unspeakable civilities are carried out, routinized, turned into mere artifacts of history. Read Dred Scott and you will appreciate the power of style to carry the day. That Chief Justice, smoothly working the levers of the law to assure everyone that under our law, and with the best of intentions on everybody’s parts, a Negro is still a Negro.

(that’s it for tonight, boys and girls, end of first stab)