My Father, His Father and Ben

My father has never mentioned his father's name. " 'He' hit me for whistling like a peasant, 'he' brought home a carp for the holiday, 'he' took me to the rabbi, but I didn't want to go." He did this or that. What my father has left me of my grandfather is a silent old man with a long white beard, a horse, a cart, a cow, a mud-and-log house--an Old Country grandfather fixed in my mind like a Chagall painting. That's not enough, of course. The stylization of art does not satisfy the craving for history.

My father seems to have been his father's favorite child, perhaps merely because he was the eldest. I know this for several reasons, but here is the way I remember it: Sometimes my grandfather took my father to town with him. One of my uncles tells of clinging upside down, in a jealous rage, to the underside of the cart. Today, in 1966, I have a double vision of the past, as if someone has forgotten to turn the film--this fat old uncle with a head that shakes, a nervous old headshaker, peering through the slats of the cart as clumps of mud belt his behind --a child wanting also to go to town. There was an even younger brother, still suckling, too young to want to go to town. In our family his name is now never pronounced. It is put aside for a different reason from the loss of my grandfather's name.

In their little village near Kamenets Podolski in Russia, just after the century began, life was hard and dark for everyone, but harder and darker for Jews. However, the human race does not permit (continued on page 100)My Father(continued from page 97) utter darkness; we try to grow sharp sticks to point holes in it. Hasidism, the religion of light and drink, ferocious and funny stories, dancing and lovemaking, beat like a stick through the Jewish towns. It was also a religion of medals, magic and charms. Jews raved and sang; Jews rolled in the woods in public ecstasies. They conquered the miseries of the police and a murderous peasantry by rocking and rolling.

Not all. My father, aged 12, one year short of being a man, was already a socialist, a freethinker, a revolutionist, and he wanted to ride away to America and pick up the gold in the streets of New York. He would carry a sack with him. The czar's barbarous army or the golden freedom of America--is that a choice? His father knew that to stay in Russia meant conscription and death, but America was godless, a living death. He preferred the death he knew. This silent man sought to pass the remainder of his days with his children nearby, his wife, his cart, his horse, his cow, his hut, his fish on holidays. My 12-year-old father clung to the idea that he would go to America to be a man, another man. They must have fought over this. My father was beaten with a stick.

At last my grandfather grew weary of beating his eldest son. The boy was unknowable by stick; he was slow to learn, and my grandfather, who would willingly have spent his lifetime studying the Talmud with him, begrudged the hours he spent hitting him. Instead, father and son came to an understanding. They would travel to the nearby town to consult the wonder-working rabbi about making a way across the bogs and borders, past the czar's police and the famous Dutchmen of western Europe, toward glittering America. They agreed to abide by the rabbi's judgment in the matter. My father secretly resolved that he would obey the wonder-working rabbi's decision only if it were the correct one. Thus, he reasoned, he had nothing to lose. A wonder-working rabbi provided fair combat for a mentally working boy with constricted scruples and his mind made up.

My father was loaded by his father into the horse-drawn cart, along with eggs, a chicken, cakes and other gifts for the rabbi, and silently they jolted across the irrational ruts of the mud road. Animals and drunken peasants slowed their passage, but the divine guardian of roads and souls kept the spokes in their wheels, the metal shoes on their horse, the patience in their hearts. My father wanted to whistle, but knew better. Instead, my father, aged 12, silently rehearsed to himself the knowledge that he was an atheist, a socialist, and intended to go to America and take the name of Gold, in honor of the freedom given to men by the gold in the streets of New York; he thought all this through with great care, sorting it out and looking at the last star of morning, fixing it like the star in his mind in case the rabbi tried to work magic upon him in order to make him forget or deny or surrender. Inside he was whistling. Silent whistles were emitted by his pursed lips and between his clenched teeth.

The wonder-working rabbi listened to both my father and my grandfather. He asked: How often beaten? He asked: Did the boy study Talmud-Torah from dawn to dusk? He asked: Those cookies, did the little mother make them herself? He pulled his beard, turned his large veiny eyes on the two petitioners and nibbled from the speckled cookies my grandmother had baked as a tribute to his wisdom. He must have been a very wise man. Many crumbs on his beard. And when he pulled his beard--many crumbs on his lap. He knew that his reputation for all-seeing foresight would suffer a decline in the district if he pronounced the wrong decision. My father was burning, at the high temperature at which a 12-year-old man burns, to go to America. In any case, he would go, with or without permission. The rabbi understood this. In one case, the father would be bitter and unreconciled, and the boy would steal away in the night, guiltily, with only his mother's sobs to wish him well. But if the Nameless One blessed the rabbi with a favorable word, father and son might still be reconciled. That could be the other case.

The rabbi said to the boy: Go to America, but wait two months until your bar mitzvah. Go as a man.

Even then my father was not a man of pure principle. He wanted to go to America right now, at age 12, but he decided to wait until age 13, in order to please others and get all that he desired, which included the respect of his family.

The rabbi also said: And wear this medal around your neck, it will protect you from harm.

My father said: And my brothers? They too must go to America.

The rabbi said: Wear this medal. They are babies yet. Let be what God wills.

My father said: Give me some medals for the babies, too.

The rabbi said: They must come to see me at the proper time.

My father said: What is good for me will be good for them.

The rabbi took a cookie and did not deign to argue. Arguing at this point would be less a matter of principle-- should a baby go to America who can barely dress himself?--than a matter of bickering. In due time, an appointment could be made to discuss it. Solomon dealt coolly with 12-year-old bickerers. Sternly the rabbi chewed his cookie.

My father, choking down his shame and disbelief, accepted the medal which the rabbi hung about his neck from a fairly clean string. All the other atheistic and socialistic 10-to-l 2-year-old boys of the village would mock him, would accuse him of failing to whistle at rabbis, but my future father knew what he really wanted, and what he really wanted could not be altered by consenting to wear a medal until he finally turned the bend in the long road that led from the Ukrainian village to the Western world.

My father's father paid proper respects to the rabbi, and then the two went home, jiggling in the lightened cart, without the load of eggs, the chicken, the cakes, but with a decision that brought peace to the family. After they got back, by absent-minded habit, my grandfather peeked beneath the cart to see if any of his other sons were clinging to it. It would have made more sense to look sooner, but time and sequence were not his specialties.

My grandfather entered and said to his wife, "The boy will stay."

He would not spoil the Sabbath by adding, "But the man will go."

He went back outside to wash and prepare for the evening prayers. He hugged his other son, the one who always wanted to cling to the cart when my father went someplace. He dandled his third son, the babe in arms. Then he kissed his five-year-old daughter. His wife was worried by this show of affection. "What's the trouble? Are you deceiving me?"

"The boy will stay," he muttered. My father recalls that his face was wet. He was weeping. He pretended it was wet from the basin of water, but there were fresh tears after he washed.

Two months later, when my father, the 13-year-old man, left for America, smuggled away in the night to avoid the czar's police, the first act of freedom that he remembers is tearing the medal from his throat and flinging it into the muddy tracks of the road. He didn't believe in charms. He knew who made his luck-- himself. In the dank night of Russia, his last night in the bosom of family, he pronounced a curse upon good luck. The stars above would be his light and his adornment. He would not give the medal to any of his brothers. If their father wanted one, let him take another load of cookies to the rabbi.

• • •

Along with Columbus, although a little later and without the blessing of Queen Isabella, my father started something. In after years he used to tell his friends in the steam room of a health club in Cleveland, Ohio--see, he had nice clean feet, no calluses--that he was descended from rabbis and came over on the Mayflower. But this was a joke; his (continued on page 140)My father(continued from page 100) father was a Hasid, a believer in miracles, and not a rabbi; and the only Mayflower he came on was the Mayflower Moving & Storage, which carried him once from Indianapolis to Cleveland. My grandfather believed in miracles, and no miracles happened to him; my father believed only in decision and will, and made his own miracles. My father's sister and younger brothers occupied most of his will and his powers of decision in the years until a grand duke's assassination at Sarajevo finally forced him to put away thoughts of his home village.

One by one, thanks to the money my father earned in New York, carrying water to the builders of skyscrapers, later cutting and sewing goods, later rolling cigars, his brothers and his sister were brought to America. A few dollars--one brother. A few more dollars--another brother. A few more dollars--the last brother. A few more dollars--a sister. Now they were all here, and soon the parents might be persuaded to leave their hut, their cart, their horse, their cow, their rabbi in Kamenets Podolski, for Hester Street in New York, where thugs in caps and policemen in blue and the stunned, dazzled, newly arrived immigrants strolled. Somehow there was a great deal of noise, though no one seemed to be shouting.

Each member of the family took my father's lead and accepted the name Gold upon arrival. It was simple and pronounceable, and it meant something. Mainly it meant that they were American. They guaranteed their intention with a name that cut to the heart of America.

The only daughter was here, the oldest son was here, the youngest son was here, the miscellaneous sons were here. There was no reason for the grandparents to put off the future with religious excuses. In 1912 my father had a gold tooth installed in his head by a dentist on Delancey Street who specialized in internal decoration; it replaced a perfectly adequate pale tooth. He then spent the rest of his money on a trip back to the Old Country. He wore fresh clothes, green shoes, and flashed a quick but modest smile to show the gold tooth. He whistled down the road. He whistled whenever he felt like it. Remembering that he had a man's task, to persuade his parents to come to America and take a new name, he felt like stopping his whistling.

My father's father pointed out that the Ukraine was closer to Jerusalem than New York, and that when the Messiah comes, it will be just too far to roll from New York.

My father conceded this well-taken point, but remarked that it was a long roll from the Ukraine to Jerusalem, too. And if you had to take a long roll, why not take it from the Lower East Side, in the good company of the family?

His lather thought this one over. With lips pursed, but not whistling. He mentioned that he might discuss it with the rabbi.

The rabbi, my father said, will tell you what you want to hear anyway, and will eat all the cookies.

"Hanh?" said his father.

My father said never mind, that the children were well, and they all wanted to see the family united in America. His mother said very little, but noticed that my father was skinny despite his gold tooth. If he had a gold tooth, he should also be fat. Also he shaved his chin, cut his hair and, in general, seemed in great danger.

"How is Ben, my baby?" she asked.

"Lonely. He misses you. He needs his mother. He wants to know when you're coming. Doing fine."

"Well, who put such ideas in his head? A baby like that."

"I did," my father admitted. "So now?"

Still and still, it was true that all the children had gone to New York. At last the old people promised to give up both godliness and easy rolling to Jerusalem in order not to lose their children. Maybe the Messiah would send skates, too.

My father returned to New York to earn the money to send for his parents. They promised. It took a little while, because he was already working to keep his sister and brothers alive, and sometimes one or the other could not find a job, and there were depressions or strikes or layoffs or illness or one or another manner of disaster. Sometimes Ben was lazy and wouldn't sell his papers. Sometimes they went without eating. Ben was the youngest; he sometimes said--foolishness --that he wished he were home. My father told him: America is now your home. But Ben had not been ready to leave his parents.

On one terrible day, a day that grew worse in memory as healing time passed, Ben again said to my father, "I want to go back."

"What's the matter, you crazy? There is no back."

"It was a mistake. I shouldn't have come. You made me come. I got no business here."

"Momma momma momma, you want to go to your momma."

Ben stood up. "That's right," he said defiantly.

My father wanted to hit him. Then he blinked; that was as foolish as going to the rabbi. He also had stood up, but he sank down in the chair of the room they shared near the truck terminal in Canton, Ohio. He said, "Ben, you try for a little while. You're just a kid. Why don't you try?"

"OK," said Ben. "Maybe I'll go into . the Army."

"You're too young. You're a foreigner."

"They'll take me. They make you a citizen."

"They won't take you." And then my father yelled at him: "Peasant!"

"OK," said Ben, and picked up his cap and his book and went out to night school. He studied English every night, as did my father. This evening my father didn't go to class. He stayed home, drinking tea and brooding. The Army! Foolishness! (Later I asked him what language he thought these thoughts in, English, Yiddish or Russian, and he looked at me in astonishment. I thought, he said.) He decided, in whatever language, that he would hurry his parents; Ben needed them in America. And he . would keep an eye on Ben. For some it was a great relief, a freedom, to leave home and parents and old wasting ways to make a life in which a man chooses everything, even his name. But for some, for Ben, it was a burden. My father, not understanding this, recognized it. He drank tea, ate half a loaf of bread with sugar, and waited under the bare bulb for Ben to get home from school. "You want to talk some more?" he asked.

Ben said, "You already told me," and went to bed.

My father sat up, figuring. The parents must be brought soon. There was the money and there was his father's stubbornness. But it must be soon.

If my lather's will had been in control of history, the will of the family would have been done. Instead, the War of 1914 began. Before the parents could make the journey, they were killed in some obscure fashion. There was an unrecorded pogrom, followed by a fire. The maps had never recorded this village, and now what had never been recorded dropped out of fact. Dust and ruins. A new time dug its heels into the bones of the old time. Gone were the ancestors, gone were the hut and cow and cemetery nearby, gone even was the wonder-working, cookie-loving rabbi in the next town. The mother would never see her baby Ben, who was not doing fine without her. The old name of the family was lost in the smoky fires of pogrom and war. For good and all, the survivors were committed to America.

• • •

In America, my father became a father long before he conceived his own children--father to his brothers and sister. There was no prohibition against whistling. And there was the reverse of his father's desire to stay in the same village--move from New York to Chicago, from Chicago to Indianapolis, from Indianapolis to Detroit, to Canton, to Cleveland. The gold in the streets of America turned out to be Sam Gold, born something else. He trailed his greenhorn siblings from town to town across the American plain. All but one took this as the normal way to live. One, Ben--but was that really his name?--remained a child, no good at work, sulky, locked in and closed down, unhappy. Ben had been the youngest, long at the breast, and his mother's favorite. She knew he would be her last baby.

My father married. His brothers and sister boarded with him for a time, out of habit, but then found their own rooms; all but one brother found wives, the sister found a husband. Ben, the youngest, stayed on with my parents for several years as a boarder. "Until he gets used to things," my father said.

"So we'll have to get a place with an extra room," my mother said. "He can't sleep in the kitchen."

Then I was conceived; I was born. Families take shape, forming and reforming like amoebae, and now Ben had to find his own family. It was time to learn adult ways.

Ben moved out. He went from job to job. He fell in love. The girl disliked to be taken out in the truck, which smelled of lettuce and tomatoes, ripe fruit and wet scraps of paper bags. "Is that how much you carer?" she asked him. "You don't even clean out the cab?"

"I come straight from work," he explained. "I took a good hot bath first, relax me."

"Well, in America a fellow tries to smell good--himself and his machine. Some people, for example, they don't smell like a pharmacy although they rightfully could."

Ben borrowed my father's motorcycle. He polished it up and bought springy black clips for his pants. The girl rode once on the jump seat, holding him by the belt, and he told my father, "It's good. She just has to get used to."

But he was wrong. The girl was not interested. "Too green for her," my mother said. The girl was a cute little dumpling from Canton who had nearly finished high school. She chose Ben's rival, a pharmacist--well, a man who owned a drugstore--well, it sold mostly candy and patent medicines, which almost makes it an apteha. Ben couldn't answer back to an almost drugstore. It wasn't his fault. But about this loss: he couldn't get used to.

Ben was forgiven his many failures because he was the baby. After my mother had put him up for several years, he lived away and came for meals; then he lived away, took his weekday meals away, but came for meals on Sunday. "Ben," said my mother, "you're always losing weight. You're like a rail. You got to eat every day three squares, not just when you're company."

"I ain't got a good appetite," Ben said. "It's natural with me, the bad appetite."

The eldest brother had quarreled with his father and made his way to America with the weight of decision on his shoulders. He had made peace with his father, too. Carrying this burden, both the quarreling and the peacemaking, had forced him to become a man. My uncle who had clung upside down to the slats of the cart, the nervous headshaker, Morris, was always one machine ahead of my father. A motorcycle when my father had a bicycle, a truck when my father used a motorcycle, a Chevy when my father had a White pickup, a Pontiac, a Buick, a pink Imperial to carry his shaking head on its Sunday tours of the grandchildren. And my father saying tolerantly, "Well, he likes nice transportation. Personally, I go compact."

The girl in the family married a salesman--steady. She learned to keep his accounts for him; she took an interest in selling. She read a book entitled The Romance of Salesmanship, and thus was able to conclude, "You know what? Selling can be romantic." She knew that the secret of her husband was not to be discovered between the pages of this book, but it wasn't her fault. Perhaps he had lost it on the roads that led from one hardware store to the next. But she made her deal and stuck with it.

As these normal processes continued, Ben just followed along. America was not his doing; it was clone to him. He had not finished with his childhood. He trailed from one brother to the other, to his sister, back to his eldest brother; he found a job, or a job was found him or given him or made him; he obeyed. He had not enough of a past in the Ukraine to make a future in Cleveland. Though the word "boredom" would not have occurred to any of these people, Ben had trouble getting himself through the day. He signified nothing to himself. He wanted neither automobile nor work nor wife, or he wanted them not enough, or he was removed from relish and hope, ambition and the conviction of his powers. He was still a child, but a grown-up child is not a real child; instead, he was childish. He played with me as a child plays with a child, and it made me uncomfortable. He was not supposed to be a child. He laughed too much; he yelled too much when he roughhoused with me; he panted and grew red in the face. He kept glancing at my father for his approval.

"Don't get the kid too excited," my mother said.

"What's the matter, he's just playing," my father said.

They were talking about Ben as if he were a child in their presence, as if he were a thing, absent by his nature. Though my father defended him, he stopped roughhousing with me.

Busy with other hilings, absently, my parents worried about Ben. Well, in time he would learn--grow up and have a good appetite.

Noisy, brawling, weeping or alcoholic fathers must, to some extent, inoculate their children against the fearsome separations wrought by excitement. My father usually had things under control. He kept the lid on. I have seen him drunk once. On a Christmas Eve it was; he stamped into the house after the fruit store closed, wearing his sheepskin coat, snowy and wet and laughing in a way that frightened me. My mother kept trying to shush him (babies sleeping) and crowd him into bed. He reeled through the hall, and when his wild eye fell upon me, it made no connection. He was roaring, but what about? Nothing. Perhaps his Hasidic father sometimes thus celebrated the God-given right to roar like a beast. Perhaps he roared for the unforgettable and the forgotten.

I hid behind a door and put my nose in the crack. I watched my father. If he pushed the door--less nose.

In silence I watched him, and in a terror of loneliness. To be present when a father laughs, and yet to be so alone! My wet nose was in jeopardy. This was no Hasidic mystery. There was no ritual to grasp at; it was his festival, his alone, personal, excluding. He was thick and powerful in tufted, yellowish sheepskin, and a silvery crating hammer, with flat double prongs, stuck out of his pants pocket. There was also a bulge of holiday money--a good day's business. He had come from the party he gave in the back room for the young Italians who worked in his store. Probably Myrna, the bulging widow clerk, the heaviest thumb on any scale in town, the tightest corset, had led him to wildness. She always wanted him to let go, push and shove, be a truck driver with her. My mother could settle that score later. It was Christmas Eve; this was America: all down the streets of Lakewood, Ohio, children and parents put their lives together in momentary communion. Only in our house did the lather celebrate without making his meaning clear.

Why did this come to be my model of isolation, separation?

I understood nothing. It had no connection. It was without reason. Even cruelly might have been easier--a Slavic father who came home drunk to beat his wife and children, or brought Myrna with him, or stayed away all night.

My father was happily exalted, shaking his sheepskin coat, but absent from us in his soul, lips wet and eyes gleaming. Ben was sitting unnoticed at the kitchen table. He had finished a plate of lamb chops. The little gnawed bones lay white on the table. He sat hiding in plain view as my father crashed through the house. He came to find me behind the door and, without a word, patted my shoulder. Then he stood behind my mother as she said, "Sam. Go to bed, you'll sleep." Ben was a part of this scene, as he was a part of the next one. I stood stiffly, refusing to leave. I think it was 1931, when I was six.

I saw my father absent in another way a few months later. It was spring, and there was a continual drip of rain. On my way to school I watched the miserable hobos huddled on the slow Nickel Plate freights that ground through town on their way west to Toledo or Detroit, or east to Pittsburgh, or to some nameless other destination in the wastes of the Depression. The sheepskin was in moth balls. The wild laughter had been put away. But there was a connection in loneliness.

My father's youngest brother was first ill, and there was silence in the house, and then he was in the hospital and dying. "What's that?" I asked my mother.

"He's dying." I must have looked puzzled, because she added: "He wants to live."

Ben, very quiet, was brought back to our house. He had my parents' bedroom. I came in from school and took off my rubbers without help. I heard him groaning, and my mother--sometimes when I wanted her--spent a long time talking with him. She would let me look at him briefly from the doorway, but then she shut the door. Now he never spoke to me, although he used to scream with laughter. He lay in bed for what I seem to recall as months--hush, smells, worry. Perhaps it was only a clay or two. Then a silent limousine came for him. He returned to the hospital.

"No hope," my mother told a neighbor. She also told her: "He drank lye."

I overheard this, and promised never again to tell a lie if it could make you so sick. She looked at me in silence and only repeated, "He changed his mind. He wants to live."

My father left his motorcycle in the garage. He drove the truck to the store. I think Ben had been driving the truck before this happened.

"Now he wants to live," my mother said. "After he burned himself all out inside. It's late."

I recall my father receiving the last news by telephone. He asked thick questions; not a word of it can I remember. He hung the earphone back on its cradle and fell into a chair at his accustomed place at the kitchen table; he put his head in his arms and wept with choking sobs. I first tried to stand near him to be noticed, but then grew frightened and pulled away. My mother, doing something with vegetables at the sink, was also weeping, but remained herself, with a hand on my head. She was running water over beet greens, washing out the sand. There were tomatoes, turnips, green onions, lettuce, stalks of Pascal celery in the sink, sending up fresh smells of wetness and earth. I was probably pushing into her skirts. "I want Daddy to stop that."

"His brother's dead. He's sad."

"I want my Daddy to stop that!"

I prowled about him as he wept, feeling courageous, as if the sight of my father, brokenhearted, were a danger which could somehow hurt me and I dared it to. Also I felt some primitive reverberation of his sorrow. This sense of his sorrow that night has increased very much with the years. Now that I have lived until the age he reached when his brother died, I begin to understand his heaviness, the yawning emptiness of regret in his body.

"It's a total loss," my mother said. "Sam?"

When my father did not stop his crying, my mother said, "Sam. The children."

He got up, went out, and I heard the screech of his motorcycle in the spitting cinders of the driveway. Mother ran to the front of the house to stop him, but he was already careening down the street.

When he came back, a few hours later, the tears were gone. He said to my mother: "I'm selling that machine. It's too dangerous."

My brother and I were in our pajamas, ready for bed. He was gazing at us with eyes which it is a part of everyone's voyage on earth to recognize, even in golden America. We cannot turn away; we find these eyes everywhere, and eventually in the mirror.