“Gee, you never mention your dad.”
We’ll get the bad stuff over first. In the 1960’s, the self-righteous Catholic burghers of Oxburg taught their children, over the dinner table, that the Jews crucified Jesus. Our schoolmates were hell-bent on paying us back. We guys carried our schoolbooks underarm, pressed against our hips. My tormentors “dumped” my books, coming up behind me in the halls and giving my notebook a solid, downward shove that sent everything flying. On a daily basis. Until the jocks told them to stop because the resultant mess was disrupting their walk to class!
This inbred hatred meant that every Easter, a cross was burned on our lawn. Since April in some years was dry and the grass brown, like as not, the resulting brush fire brought fire trucks with their wailing sirens and spinning red lights.
Which annoyed the neighbors. “Why can’t the Jews and their neo-Nazi enemies live somewhere else?” they complained volubly. “If the family’s Jewish, why don’t they move to where Jews live? Chevy Chase!”
Portly Sheriff Aloysius Horner would come to investigate.
“Those vandals burned my lawn!” fumed my father.
“The county won’t charge you for the fire trucks,” Aloysius assured us. “Not your fault.”
“They burned a cross on our lawn,” my little brother Timothy— expecting some form of justice or retribution— would point out. “Every year, they burn a cross on our lawn. The same three kids. They’re—“
“And every year,” said Aloysius, “I tell you, Timothy— get over it! Getting angry isn’t going to help anyone.”
Today, they’d say “Suck it up!”
Back then, they said, “Be a man! Get over it! Don’t let it get to you.”
“They burned my lawn!”
“Buy grass seed, Mr. Feingold. It’ll grow back.”
So, there was never any discussion about finding or punishing the perpetrators.
Despite his kvetching, I got my dad to drive me to Sears and let me use college funds to buy a set of weights from the Atlas Dumbbell Co. Weights and a crossbar. You put the weights on the ends of the crossbar, evenly placed on both sides. With that equipment, you could do lifts, press-ups and jerks. I wasn’t trying to set any world records, I just wanted to become sufficiently muscular to defend myself.
I did.
So when my books went flying one day, I didn’t bother to pick them up. I scanned the crowd. Rapidly making his departure was Peter Doyle.
“Hey, Pete!”
“I ain’t done nothin’,” he swore, shrugging me off.
“Hey, Pete!”
“I… ain’t… done… nothin’!” he repeated, turning to face me. Broad-shouldered, wearing his felt bomber jacket with the embroidered name patch, “Peter,” he weighed a good deal more than me.
“Say ‘hi’ to Steve and Billy!” I suggested, hitting him square in the face.
We had a major fistfight. He blackened my right eye and gave me a bloody nose. I K.O.’d the sonofabitch. While he was playing pretty, I swung from the floor and planted a full-on, bare knuckle smash to his jaw. My hand was swollen for a week. Like something in a movie, his dainty little eyes fluttered and he sank to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
“Hey, Pete! Your lights are out!” I taunted his lifeless figure, prone at my feet.
“Hey, Pete!” Jeff Sullivan, walking by with his girl, echoed. “Your lights are out!”
“Who threw these books here? Who threw these papers and pencils all over the hall? What are you boys doing?” the Assistant Principal asked, approaching us indignantly. Mr. Niedermayer. “Wimp” Niedermayer.
Peter was bent forward on the floor, vomiting profusely.
“Well, really! Are you ill, young man?”
The Assistant Principal was, shall we say, ineffectual? I ignored him and collected my books and sundry possessions. I also left droplets of blood everywhere.
“Stop that! Don’t you have a handkerchief? Here, use mine, for God’s sake.”
Unspoken: The fact that it was a fistfight right in the middle of school right in the middle of the day.
No one ever dumped my books again. Now the hoods thought I was cool. They wanted me to join their gang and beat up on other classmates. I declined.
At home, I got no support at all. Wringing his hands, my father fussed and said, “Be a man! Get over it.”
My father’s definition of “lazy” was: adj. someone who doesn’t do the chores you have assigned them.
A government personnel director, he was the original (Model 1950) empowerment freak. “I’ll let you… I’ll let you…” he was always telling us, his pickaninny house servants:
“I’ll let you mow my lawn
“I’ll let you wash my car.
“I’ll let you trim the bushes.
“I’ll let you wax my car.”
If, for any reason, we rejected this once in a lifetime golden offer, he stormed into the house and screamed at my mom, “What a load of lazy sons of bitches you are raising. Totally worthless. They are totally worthless!”
I joined the military to get time off! Even a soldier isn’t on duty 24/7/365, which was what my parents expected, and my dad required.
“Where were you!?!” my mom ranted at me when I turned 16. “I’ve been standing at the top of the stairs screaming your name for the last 10 minutes!!!”
“I was working in the basement, unclogging the storm drain,” I replied, too tired, soggy and fed up to even get angry. “Next time, come find me and save your vocal cords.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I can’t answer you if I can’t hear you. Save yourself the aggravation. If I don’t answer, I’m out of earshot. If I do hear you, I will answer.”
My mom and I never had that conversation again. If the parents in Oxburg were going to act childishly, we kids took it upon ourselves to be the adults.
This happened all the time.
One summer day, my cousin Jimbo borrowed a go-kart. A go-kart! We kids never had things like that. All the money was saved for college. But Jimbo worked for Farmer Pete out on The Flats, repairing barbed wire fences around the paddocks (cows and sheep). He got to borrow 18-year-old Robbie’s old go-kart.
A two-stroke engine, we mixed oil in with the gas, revved it up and took turns roaring around the lower parking lot of Oxburg High. The steering was bent, the seat left your behind an inch off the ground, but we weren’t exactly attempting off-road. It was great!
“You goddam sons of bitches!” Mr. Smith, the physics teacher, screamed, charging out of the building in his shirt sleeves. “I’m working in there. Take your goddam noisy contraption someplace else to race!!!”
“But Mr. Smith,” we replied sheepishly, “It’s the 4th of July, a national holiday.”
“Just get the hell out of here,” he muttered, stomping back indoors.
We understood that whatever he was doing in there (he was making hot July love to an underage summer school lass), he had no official reason to chase us off school grounds.
Being kids, when we found out— from her— that trampy, gum-chewing Patty Campbell was letting Old Man Smith pork her, we stood in awe of her. After all, engaging in sex was such a grown-up thing to do!
Here’s an anecdote: In 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the elementary, junior and senior high schools in Oxburg were instructed to configure fall-out shelters for students, teachers and staff. I don’t know what the other schools did, but in our case, the janitor searched his key ring, came up with the correct key, and opened the metal door leading to the unfinished foundation of the building. This was simply an enormous, underground dirt embankment pressed up against the red brick supporting wall of the school.
“Okay,” Jimbo announced, when 1,200 students, 40 teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, two janitors, the nurse and four kitchen staff were freaking each other out with flashlights in this subterranean space. “Here’s how this is gonna work.”
The brainiest science student in the school, everyone stopped horsing around to listen.
“Tell ‘em, Jimbo!” I said, violently angry and frustrated. “Explain it to them. Speak up real loud!”
“Okay!” he shouted in the gloom. “This is how it’s gonna work. Some missiles in silos in someplace like Vladivostok, Russia are going to be fired at the White House. Following the curvature of the Earth, these I.C.B.M.’s—or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles—are going to follow pre-programmed, gyroscopic coordinates. In other words, they’re gonna miss!”
Total, eerie silence in our underground cavern.
“Oxburg High is 7½ miles from the White House as the crow flies…”
The sound of over a thousand bodies shifting uncomfortably.
“… One of those missiles is gonna fall right on our heads and we’ll all be instantly incinerated! Fried to a crisp in less time than it takes to say ‘Frito Lay’!”
“Who is that?!” Principal Hearst demanded.
“You shut up!!!” chemistry teacher Delores Kilpatrick and physics teacher Benjamin Smith shouted simultaneously. “How dare you say such things! How dare you rile everyone up!? How dare you?!”
“It’s the truth,” I added, venomously. This was deep in my high school schizophrenia phase. I had enough bile in my stored-up anger to fill an ocean.
“You shut up, Kevin Feingold! You shut up, Ricky Barber! You Jews! (This under her breath.) You are both on report. Consider yourselves on report,” Mrs. Kilpatrick howled like a banshee. “Children, pay no attention to the ghost stories and lies spread by these two known troublemakers! Now let’s get out of here!”
We got trundled off to the Principal’s Office. Our parents had to come to school and vouchsafe our future, docile demeanor. I brooded theatrically, threatening suicide. Jimbo thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Here’s the anecdotal part: While we were being frogmarched to purgatory, my blond, blue-eyed high school crush Peggy Sue Cockburn announced to Joey Wall in her incredibly whiney voice, “If I’m going to be killed, I’m not going to my death without ever having sex! Will you have sex with me?”
Sweeter words rarely spoken.
Unknown to the rest of us, Joey took Peggy Sue out in his Ford Mustang the following Saturday night, parked quietly in the back end of Natalie Woods and deflowered her in the back seat of the Mustang.
Growl !!!
I’m in love.
When Peggy Sue explained all this to a gaggle of admiring men at our 20th high school reunion, all you could hear was a deafening chorus of “WHY NOT ME?!”
*
At the age of eight, I brained my father with a hammer. My mother immediately sent me to live with her parents in Sweden. It was 1955. Propeller airplanes took me first to New York, then Newfoundland, then Iceland. From there, I flew to England and finally, Stockholm. Avraham Zakroiski and his wife Rivka were mensheviki, “Mensheviks,” chased out of Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1921. That’s how come ma mère was born in Svedala. (A nickname for Sweden.)
We’re Bialystokers. Abe’s father owned Nahun Zakroiski Bäckerei on Mühlen Strasse in Bialystok. A bookstore. Abe started his working life as a bookbinder. “Waste not, want not,” people brought in their used and damaged books to be rebound. Such is life in the provinces. Stuck in northeastern Poland, the town was White Russian one year, Polish the next. Naturally, the inhabitants spoke Yiddish in addition to Polish and Russian.
Even as a young man, Abe was a political firebrand. It’s in our blood. He never made it to St. Petersburg, but he shook things up 270 kilometers due east in Minsk. The NKVD had him on their Watch List. “Run like hell and don’t come back,” a Jewish army officer counseled him. It took some doing— money they never repaid because the recipients were either in Siberia or dead— but they landed, as refugees, in Sweden, amidst a small wave of Russian émigrés.
Rivka was born and raised in the shtetl village of Zabludova, 20 kilometers from Bialystok. She became a seamstress. A brilliant beauty, on her visits to town to buy thread, needles and cloth, she quickly caught the eye of young Abe.
Once in Sweden, Abe spent his immigrant years working in a steel mill in Örebro. The Mensheviks were Social Democrats. The government of Sweden swung between farmer parties and the Social Democrats. Life was hard, but they had landed among comrades! Abe advanced to the shipbuilding wharves in Karlskrona. Rivka became a dress designer. Multilingual, Abe also became a union rep. By the time I arrived, they’d already lived over 10 years in the capital as city-dwellers.
You knew they were Old School when they shunned a new, spacious apartment in Söder (Southern Stockholm) to live in a cramped, poorly lit abode overlooking the Slussen subway station. Slussen was history! Slussen was police charges, freedom marches, workers united, Easter massacres.
I respected and loved my grandparents. To each other, they spoke Yiddish. They spoiled me outrageously and then would disappear together two or three days at a time, leaving me to fend for myself. Fortunately, Bengt (“Bengi”) Gustavsson had full-time parents. Their entire, extended family— including spinster aunts— lived across the hall and one landing up. On May 1— “May Day” in Europe, the Socialist day of solidarity— Bengi and I took turns carrying the union flag for my grandpa’s chapter. They had a leather harness into which we shoved the base of the flagpole. That mother was heavy!
Nine years old in 1950’s Stockholm, where virtually everything in the home was handcrafted by artisans— feather dusters, rugs, brooms, dishware, the stove, the sewing machine, the radio— I grew up with an abiding respect for the working man. Neither facile nor lazy, I learned to heave-to and get the job done! Child labor, adult labor… In this household, everybody works! Nobody worked harder than my grandparents.
They declared themselves atheists, but part of that was for Socialist credibility. We still belonged to a creaky old Orthodox shul where the crusty Rabbi got my undivided loyalty. I figured anyone that old and gnarled, draped in an enormous white tallis yellowed with age, must know what he was doing. He smelled of dust and scholarship!
Total immersion, I read, ate, spoke, slept and dreamed in Swedish. I never wanted to leave. But no one even asked me. I was put on a boat out of Portsmouth, England at the ripe old age of twelve and sent back to America, where the opportunities for success were considered so much greater.
“If your son’s such a prodigy,” film magnate Harry Cohen told my mom on a visit to New York, where we were spending the summer, “why isn’t he already out in Hollywood making big money? We have child actors! Talk is cheap.”
When I told people that Harriet Weisenthal, the clothes designer, was an aunt, they all wanted an introduction. A melding of the old and the new, Harriet had learned her craft from Grandma Rivka!
On my mom’s side of the family, we were a creative, politically involved group of people from the get-go. My dad’s family seemed like slackers, by comparison. And did he ever resent it! Gliringar, snide remarks, fell from his lips in a steady stream. “Your dad is such a bundle of resentments,” as my cousin Ricky “Jimbo” Barber put it, always a pistol at social analysis.
You talk to my dad’s coworkers in the government, the picture is completely different! In on the ground floor, he was what you’d call “an efficiency expert.” He accumulated personnel credentials at several of the U.S. Government’s largest agencies, the Post Office, General Services Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior. A pacifist, he always worked as a civilian. He could travel out west to an Indian reservation and explain to them how they were doing everything all wrong! “You don’t want open fires using brush and kindling! Hold out for electrification, for God’s sake! Demand your rights!”
Marching to the sound of his own drummer, he was a radical without knowing it.
At one point, he had an office and three employees. One of them was someone I actually knew, Chuck Duchamp. The Duchamps lived only three blocks away. I was trying to kindle a romance with Mr. D’s daughter Ginny. She thought I was “for the birds,” “off the roof,” “out of sight,” all pejoratives indicating that she never intended to become my sweetheart. Chuck’s specialty was reading. He began his stint working with my father by bringing a book to the office every morning and reading it all day long.
“Chuck,” my father coaxed him in conference, “we don’t read books in the office.”
“Oh, okay!” said Mr. Duchamp. “No problem! You got it.”
The next day, he came in with a newspaper and read that all day.
“Chuck,” my dad gently chided him, “let’s not spend all day reading the newspaper. You know, we have assignments—“
“Oh! Right! Yes!” said Mr. Duchamp. “No, really! I hear ya! I’m all over it.”
“W-What are you doing?” demanded my dad the very next day. “I thought we agreed—“
“It’s a magazine! You didn’t say anything about not reading magazines in the office.”
My dad put him on the Space Program Evaluation. The guy never wasted another day! “Do you realize,” he testified before Congress in 1964, “we are sending our astronauts into space in equipment whose only virtue is that the contractor offered the lowest bid? Do you really want to go roaring aloft on bargain basement hardware? I don’t!”
My dad’s office tended to drive people crazy.
“Quality control is a fairy tale,” wrote Michael Napier, reviewing an Army weapons program. The Army felt differently.
“It’ll fly if you remember to wind up the rubber band,” Charlie Duchamp wrote in his review of a design for a military helicopter. Congress and the defense contractor remained unamused.
“This country needs more college graduates in government,” my father proselytized, and for once, he was hailed as an oracle.
“Inspired by true events,” Charlie Duchamp assured me. “We’ve gotten some new hot-shots from N.Y.U. in the office and they’re tearing up the tarmac. It’s all we old geezers can do just to keep up.”
It all reached a head in, God help me, 1973. Thirty-one years in government, my dad gets together with personnel directors from nine different government agencies and writes a classification program. This was his legacy to the American people. How many letters must a secretary at the State Department type to equal a Post Office mail sorter’s morning sort? How many halls must a janitor sweep, window ledges wiped, ashtrays emptied, to equal a stenographer’s three hours of dictation? How many lonely night patrols must a building guard complete to equal a Congressional cafeteria worker’s prep of lunch for both houses of Congress? They created a mathematical program that answered those questions! Algorithms, tables, multiplication factors.
He got a small, trade publisher interested enough to crank out a first printing, Government Classification In the Public Sector. A Workbook. “If this thing catches fire,” everyone agreed, “the entire U.S. Government will be springing after copies! We’ll be in Nirvana heaven!”
Hold your breath. For one shining moment—
Computers came in and blew the whole fantastic program to Kingdom Come. Spreadsheets allowed for comparison of salaries, hours on the job, level of workload, expertise required, miscellaneous factors and ground out the numbers and answers in slightly longer time than it takes to say “Univac computer.” Even I worked as a night guard in a computer building, watching the technicians in their overalls busy behind glass in hermetically dustproof enclosures with an internal air pressure slightly higher than the surrounding environment. Giant reels of tape spun on shiny, fancy silver and sky blue consoles. There was a constant hum in the air, and everyone went home impressed and a little better informed.
No worries! I was in the Army, no skin off my nose. My dad took his act on the road and sold his classification system to India, Taiwan and Peru! Not exactly bastions of computer technology at that time.
“I tried to explain efficiency to the Inca tour guides at Machu Picchu. I don’t know whether they got it or not,” he wrote me. “Your mother and I spent several miserable days in Cuzco, laid up with altitude sickness.”
“The best-known cure is to skedaddle off the mountain pronto,” I wrote back, but he didn’t appreciate the advice.
“We were waiting for the rest of our party…” Yada, yada, yada, always an excuse, a complication, a fuck-up. No wonder we didn’t like each other.
I came to Oxburg for a familial visit in 1997, to the family house where I, more or less, grew up. “Your father’s in the hospital, he’s had a seizure,” said my mom. Burning leave, I spent the next three weeks tending him, first at the hospital, then at home and finally in a hospice. My older sister Rebecca, who should have been there, sent too many flowers and badgered his doctors by phone from California. My younger brother Tim came to visit, stayed two days, and took me aside. “I can’t handle this,” he panted. “You gotta take over.”
“I’m here! I got it,” I assured him. I love Tim. He tried.
My dad had emphysema, liver and heart disease. He was ready to go. We got a visit in the waiting room of the hospice from the “traveling clergyman of your faith,” a Rabbi Beale.
“Beale?” I asked sardonically. “Not the most Jewish of names…”
“An Anglicization of Bialy,” he assured me.
“A Bialystoker?”
“My family, yes.”
“Yeah, we heard that from the Bialystoker Society in New York. ‘You have to meet Rabbi Beale. His people are from the Old Country. He’s in your area.’”
“About your father Bernard…”
“Bernie.”
“Okay, Bernie.”
“He’s ready to go,” interjected my mom from the chintz sofa on my left. “His goose is thoroughly cooked!”
“Well, I think I’d need to hear that from Bernie,” Rabbi Beale said, a gentle, little correction that made me want to strangle the guy!
Fifteen minutes later, he came back out, smiled ruefully, sat down and said, “I owe you both an apology. Sometimes the nearest and dearest are either in denial or have distanced themselves. I was worried you and… Bernie… weren’t on the same page.
“Since everyone agrees on what you want, my job is basically over. Unless…?”
“Unless what?” complained my mom.
“Unless we need more counseling,” I told her.
“Well,” the rabbi concluded, spreading his hands, “I am available if you need me.” He gave us his card. I still have it.
“Have you been back?” I asked, curious.
“To Chicago?” he asked.
“No, to Poland. To Bialystok.”
“Oh! Good lord, no!”
“In the 1990’s, American descendants of the Bialystok Jews flew into Poland on LOT, the Polish airline, took the train up north and descended on Bialystok. I haven’t been there in…17 years… but back then, they were all busy with plans to rejuvenate the place. The only decent restaurant in town was a pizzeria owned and run by an American expatriate.”
“Yeah, wow, um, great!” replied the rabbi. I guess renovation projects weren’t his thing.
In the end, my dad’s doctors put him on morphine, fully aware that it would accumulate and eventually lead to cardiac arrest. That was our 800-pound gorilla and everyone, including my dad, was grateful for the option. He passed away at one o’clock in the afternoon on my 50th birthday. I had just gone out for a smoke. I came back, heard his raspy breathing, and suspected it was time. Taking his hand, I stood by his bed as he passed on to another world. I wished him well on his journey, and for once in his life, Bernie didn’t give me an argument!
For the next three years, his spirit followed me everywhere, day and night. I’d be working on a project and feel him there, looking over my shoulder. Turning, I’d just catch the impression of something hazy, but of course, I never actually saw him. It was a friendly visitation, except that he always gave off the same perplexed emanation: “What are you doing?” he seemed to ask. I guess even at that stage in his spiritual quest, the military was still news to him.
*
yustyoking 
Leave a comment