My father was either at work, a lawyer representing workers from the Hotel, Club, and Restaurant Union — men with burns from pots of boiling chicken soup overturning, or women with hernias from moving beds — or he was reading. In restaurants, waiters refused our money and cooks came out to thank him. At home, he read philosophy, history, science, law. His Italian clients returned to Naples with their compensation checks, but Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Arabs preferred NYC. So did he. He was thrilled to escape Orthodoxy and Poland. By American father standards, he was hopeless, knew nothing about sports or American social life, lived in his head, read in his armchair. He was kind, avoidant, loving. We saw him as a warm embracing rock, stable in that armchair, besides my mother’s activity and volatility.
When I came to my parents’ apartment as a young woman, tears would fill his eyes when he opened the door and saw me.
He’d imbibed from his Orthodox Jewish community in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a belief in heroic male intellectuals that kept his eyes on his heroes, first, his Talmudic father, then Louis D Brandeis, Spinoza, Marx, and he assumed my mother, a writer and activist, should take care of education, vacations, houses, garden, food, emotional problems, relatives, bills, broken cars, dinner parties, washing machines. He believed my brothers needed a trip to Washington to the Supreme Court, but not me. “But she was a girl,” he said to my mother, when she pointed out how smart I was. Still, I never doubted his love. Underneath his learning, three-year old Sam, born on Passover, wrapped in a prayer shawl to study Talmud at cheder, still lived: He couldn’t participate in his family’s religious rituals, he said, because God would know he didn’t believewhen he recited the prayers.
Later, he learned to make coffee, chopped wood in Croton, watched baseball. He visited the Europe he’d told us stank of blood” because my mother insisted. He listened to me on feminism. He cried, on Orchard Street, spotting a tiny hunchbacked Orthodox woman and recognizing how little attention he’d brought his own mother’s life and hardships. That was the ’70s. He was born in 1907.
What I learned from him: Find work you love, that serves others. Also, people can learn and unlearn, and change their beliefs. And you can love someone totally and stand firmly against — for example — their sexism. (My students write off people whose language they dislike, while I assume we all carry stupid unexamined opinions we’ve picked up in our own Austro- Hungary’s.) “You live in your times,” my father said, reflecting on his life. He glimpsed, digging in the garden, that dying, he’d return to nature and stopped fearing death. In despair about this era, I think of his friends killed in Spain, his cousin hiding in a Polish cave, his clients’ burns and hernias and his optimism, growing out of his lucky life. “Mark my words,” he said in 1965, “The Vietnam War will be over in no time.”
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Beautiful! Many thanks.
So beautiful-and filled with a wide, deep understanding.