Excerpted from The Twentieth Century Passes: a memoir of my father’s life.
An earlier version of this essay was originally published in Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History.
By the time I was born, three of my grandparents were already dead. They had died young, in their early 60s, just before and after the birth of my sister, Sharyn, nearly eleven years before me. My parents had had me, their third, unplanned child, late for those days, my father at 42. The only grandparent my brother and I knew was Minnie, who had left my father, Mac, and his older sister Goldie in infancy – as had, separately, their father and Minnie’s soon to be ex-husband, Yoina – to travel from their shtetl in Ukraine to a new life in America. During my first decade, Minnie had already entered her 70s, but she looked, to a child, a hundred and ancient if a day, and with her square, weathered face, the stocky block of her body, and her kerchiefed head, she could have been, during her frequent Sunday visits to our Queens Village garden apartment, any Babushka plucked the day before from a field in Podolia. And by then she had been living in the United States for nearly fifty years.
We felt no love for Minnie. We had, the three of us, my older brother Jeffrey with Sharyn and me, very early on some idea of what she had not been to our father, and it would have been otherwise, anyway, not easily accomplished, without some assistance, to turn from Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo on early American TV to Russian peasantry and the Pale of Settlement under Czar Nicholas II. Minnie would arrive to our home on Sundays dutifully retrieved by her son from her apartment off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, to which he would return her by car at the end of the afternoon – two round trips of two hours each for every Sunday visit. Minnie would visit us accompanied by her companion, Charlie, a large, round, gruff old American character with finely parted, black lacquered hair and a fat cigar permanently chewed into the corner of his mouth. Imagine him beside Damon Runyon at a Jack Dempsey fight. Like everything else about the history of our family prior to my birth cries, I never got it entirely straight or clear from Mom, but apparently Charlie, who was some fair number of years younger than Minnie, was actually her first or second cousin, and her seduction of him away from a promising career (one must do a uncountable mental crunches and stretches to conjure Minnie as seducer) represented no small scandal in its day. Charlie was friendly in his crusty way but also himself – he had, after all, shacked up with the likes of Minnie – uncommunicable to us without a kind of characterological translation beyond the skills of anyone involved, a being, then, too foreign to understand for the suburbanized children of Eisenhower’s America.
Minnie appeared before us each time in all ways odd and distant, and vastly inappropriate. On every visit, we were brought before her at the dining room table as if in presentation to an idiot Queen, all terse and awkward decorum, in anticipation, it could have been, of a detached and senseless laugh. Minnie would beam a smile of grandmotherly pleasure upon us and fix somewhere on each face one of those gross and comic, heavily smeared lipstick kisses. There was then, otherwise, no further effort at actual personal contact with us. What there was, until Minnie grew too old and the visits ceased, was the ritual of found-gift giving. Planted at the table, each grandchild in turn summoned to stand beside her, Minnie would reach into and draw out from large Alexander’s or Mays Department store shopping bags a succession of soiled and broken toys she had retrieved from the street or some other collection of refuse: punctured rubber balls, wheelless cars, half-used pencils, lone figurines, all held up with wonder before our eyes, in the presentation, as if baubles brought from China. Sharyn, Jeffrey, and I would receive each gift in a state of stupefied thanks, and then pass it to one parent, who would pass it to the other, who would next, for safekeeping, place the item into a bag, which would later, after Minnie's departure, complete the cycle of its existence as a garbage bag bound for a refuse room chute. Gift giving over, we grandchildren would depart – to leave the adults to their adult time together – but not before being quietly directed to go to the bathroom to wash our hands.
Sometime after Minnie left Ukraine – sometime before the Russian Revolution – she divorced Yoina and remarried. This marriage produced one of my father's four American-born half siblings, a brother, Jack. What became of Minnie's second husband before the Galsworthian scandal of Charlie’s seduction I do not know. Yoina proved more productive in his second marriage, springing off my father's two other half-brothers and a half-sister. These uncles and aunts made of Yoina, along with, of course, Aunt Goldie, were the foreign or strange, always affectively estranged, regularly, bitterly resentful and recriminatory extended family that served to set for my siblings and me the bounds of our family love as very narrowly nuclear.
Around the time of Jeff’s Bar Mitzvah, our parents, Mac and Helen, experienced a falling out with Minnie’s American-born son, Jack, and his second wife. It proved useless to try to find out from Helen precisely why. From the little I could ascertain, it was no one's finest hour, neither Jack’s nor my parents', and as such not characteristic of my parents' behavior. I gathered from my mother that there had been, over time, some growing tensions with that second wife – even, on my mother's part, some unverifiable suspicion of a secret, ugly act by the woman against our family, against, in fact, me: a phony call to my mother’s employer during the workday that I had been rushed from school to the hospital with a ruptured spleen. In the outcome, Jack and his wife were not invited to the Bar Mitzvah. Unsurprisingly, this ruptured the relationship, and the two families (and Goldie, too, bonded to Mac in infancy) did not talk for over ten years, until Minnie’s death in 1972.
Long before her death, Minnie’s health had become too fragile to sustain any longer those occasional trips from the Bronx to our Queens apartment, so Dad assumed sole responsibility for relationship with her. The rest of us, without regret, including Mom, fell out of Minnie's life. Almost every Sunday, even after our move to the much farther Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, Mac would drive to the Bronx to spend an hour visiting with his mother and then return. He did this early enough that I, a late-night denizen and sleepy daytime teen, had barely roused by the time he returned. I was not too sleepy, though, to note my father’s appearance walking through the door. I observed as he planted his elbow on the kitchen table, sunk his grave face into his hand, heard as he told my mother how it drained the spirit from him to see how Minnie lived, crushed what remained for her to treat him as she did.
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Minnie's apartment sat on a side street off the Grand Concourse, once a grand boulevard and destination for upwardly mobile, Jewish poor relocating from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By the 1970s, it was long since run down and its own form of Lower East Side to new generations of Spanish speaking immigrants. Minne’s apartment, Dad said – what Minnie permitted him to see of it – smelled of filth within its state of disrepair. Mac could only guess at the full picture, though, because Minnie would never permit him to venture past the kitchen, just beyond the entrance hallway. So that is where they sat, at the table, when Dad paid his visits. It was where Minnie kept at her side the shopping bag in which, Mac presumed, were the bank books and the cash Minnie had hoarded over an ungenerous lifetime of unskilled labor and which she would not let from her side or sight even in the company only of her son. When Minnie left the room for any reason, she took the bag with her. If Mac tried to ease her mind, she berated him.
When Minnie finally died, in her mid 80s, I think it was a relief to my father. She broke her hip from a fall in the kitchen, where she lay on the floor undiscovered for days and died. The building superintendent smelled her decomposing body, called Jack, who called my father for the first time in eleven years, and my grandmother's death fulfilled a crucial pattern of her life, in drawing her children together as a consequence of her leaving them.
By the time Minnie died, Sharyn had just moved to Denver, hometown of her second husband, and Jeff was on his hippie tour of Europe, so it fell to Mac and me, at nineteen, along with Jack and his own youngest son, to sort through Minnie's belongings. The sad reminder of our reunion at Minnie's apartment, in an old Jewish neighborhood, was just how much the four of us were alike, my immigrant father and his American half-brother, my American cousin and American me. The pleasure of that reminder mixed with the sordidness of the task.
The remainder of Minnie's apartment was all my father had guessed it to be. The living room, which he had never been allowed to view, we discovered to be stacked from floor to the ceiling with boxes. Of a couple of corridors through them, one led to Minnie's bedroom, the other to a cot at the far corner, to which Charlie had been banished among the stacks of boxes, cast from Minnie's bed at some undetermined loss of her pleasure. That exile had come to an end a year or so earlier. Charlie had lain in his cot, gangrene spreading along his legs, until, finally, Jack discovered his condition and had him removed to a hospital, where the legs were amputated and Charlie soon died.
We set to opening the boxes in a treasure hunt of bizarre and perplexing discoveries. Many we found piled with old magazines. Others held objects wrapped in thirty-year old newspaper and more: a plate, a candy dish, an old plastic baby doll. Cockroaches scrambled and fled from every crevice, in every direction.
The plain truth is that Minnie possessed nothing that anyone would have wanted, and Jack soon enough arranged through the super to have the apartment's belongings junked. We searched for money. Bank books and cash. In addition to those Dad had correctly supposed Minnie to be hoarding in her shopping bag, he and Jack both anticipated more to be in the bedroom, and they were right. But it took most of a day, sifting through dirty linens and clothes, to find them all. One we found hidden among the pages of a book in the very bottom drawer of a tall dresser. In search of more, Mac sat on the queen size bed to peer into one of the night tables, and in an instant jumped to his feet as a score of roaches scattered out from beneath the mattress and raced pell-mell across the bed cover.
We held handkerchiefs to our mouths and noses. We wiped the perspiration from cheek, brow, and neck. We all bore into the task, but we all also exclaimed for the others to hear, just for the feeling of solidarity. Then Jack, bending down into the closet to search its floor, stopped and called out.
"Look at this," he said, wheeling around, extending his arm.
There before our speechless selves he held out into the air a plastic baggie in which were roiling perhaps a hundred cockroaches, in what appeared a single mass of black and brown bugs crawling and spilling over one another in an aimlessness and ugliness of our own disgust, and each of us knew, amid our ordinary wonder at what the bag was doing in the closet, and how the roaches had all come to be in it, and what they were all doing in it together, that that bag was it, that bag was everything, it was all, and we would never forget it.
The day’s task ended, the search complete, and sick with fatigue and too much life, we entered off the other side of the Grand Concourse what was even then the relic of an older time – a Kosher cafeteria-style deli. For decades, when it thrived, Jewish immigrants had sat at its crowded tables, in the memory of pogroms and hard journeys, and argued with one another and made each other laugh. The four of us sat amid their echo and salved ourselves with food and drink, each of us weary in his private wonder – chewing and feeling as we did every muscle of the throat contract and push in the swallow – at the squalor of the sprit that produces such putrefaction of the flesh.
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Then we parted, to speak again, and drove our separate ways, my father and I back over the Tri-Borough Bridge that lofted us high over the Bronx, the East River, Manhattan and Queens, our destination. Mac, careful and steady as he ever was in his driving, drove us home, his eyes fixed where he had learned since he was a boy to direct them, from dirt roads to mountain passes to sea passages – on the way forward. I, his youngest child, unplanned and unexpected in the world, had already begun to look backward.
AJA
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Bank books and roaches, let's go to the deli. Just fine, fine writing. The Grand Concourse.
Beautiful, harrowing writing.