Talking with My Father, 93, While Reading the Sunday Paper over Breakfast, Distinguishing the First from the Second Time
Homo Vitruvius represents my literary face to the world while I work on novels behind the scenes. Dedicated to the essay form, both personal and intellectual, with forays into creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and more, it is my weekly creative engagement with the world. Every subscriber, free or paid, is appreciated and valued. As I say, you read; therefore, the writer exists. But if you can afford the paid subscription, that encouragement and support of my work and what I offer here delivers an affirmation almost beyond my ability to express in words. Thank you for reading.
As all estimable and esteemed Vitruvians (which would be all of you) know, I am writing Reason for Being in the World, my experiment in intellectual and spiritual accounting, in real time, from week to week. It is a hybrid work, never more than as planned for this week of history and historical fiction. The first is research intensive, the second imaginatively challenging.
Work, or better to say time, has turned out to be its own challenge since I’m about to start teaching a summer class and I have preparation to do. A major part of the preparation is that in teaching this online class, I need to migrate my introduction to poetry course from Blackboard, the most recent of multiple LMS’s on which I’ve taught over many years, to Brightspace, which is new to me. Migrations are laborious, to new platforms even more so, and I felt myself running short of time to apportion to the contending obligations this week. So I had an idea!
You’ll recall that last week, in announcing my intention to publish the completed Reason for Being as a book, I said I would incorporate into it as additional chapters two previously published essays. One of them is “Minnie,” from just before I began this experiment, the other ‘Exit Interview,” from April. Both directly treat themes I’m developing here and belong as part of the whole published work. So, too, I realized, does something I published on Homo Vitruvius way back last November, when many of you had not yet landed on the planet.
Originally published, to be accurate, as part of my feature in Footnote #1, A Literary Journal of History, the following conversation with Mac, my father, during the last year of his life belongs as part of Reason for Being in the World. We’ll see how I integrate it finally, but it will be somewhere around this point. This conversation reflects both the frustration and joy of conversing with Mac and illustrates how difficult it was for me to extract information from him about his life. It manifests on a personal level a major theme of Reason for Being, which is how we acquire knowledge, especially knowledge of history: what we know, what we think we know, how we seek and come to know as much as we can, what we make of what we can’t know. Given his family’s poverty in rural Ukraine, as far as I know, Mac received no education at all. He was also only four years old when World War I broke out all around him, so that would have interrupted any education to come. All the events I questioned him about were events of childhood of which he’d had little understanding as he lived them. Along the way, Mac knew Yiddish and Russian, some Ukranian, and acquired Polish during his four years there. Then there was English, which he spoke with an everyday vocabulary sufficient to produce, beyond the everyday, concise satirical utterances that were the source of the family’s ironic humor. But limitations in his English expression, atop a lifetime of learned guardedness against lurking dangers and the cruel power of authority, produced a man of few words.
I knew as we were talking that this conversation was one I needed to preserve. I worked to memorize it as I participated in it and recorded it in notes as quickly as I could. This is the conversation we had.
Talking with My Father, 93, While Reading the Sunday Paper over Breakfast, Distinguishing the First from the Second Time
Until the end of his life at 94, my father liked still to make breakfast for me during my Sundy visits: scrambled eggs with lox and onions, toast – he liked orange marmalade on it – and coffee. We’d read the newspaper together and talk politics and the state of the world. My brother, too, if he joined us, as he often did. We’d done that throughout our lives. Despite Dad’s heavy accent and uncertain command over a fifth language – swallowed increasingly, with age, in a hoarse, halting vocalization – conversation was easy among us in the family, the same vibrant, worldly interests and irreverent humor buttressing us against all the vicissitudes.
Except when talking about Mac’s life.
Then the talk became a disjointed naming of parts, parts of a life incoherently disconnected from themselves and each other, parts never named, named but then renamed, of unknown events ordered and reordered, dismembered and remembered, sometimes.
Was this the first time, for instance, in decades of such talk between us, that Kenya had ever appeared in the newspaper or been mentioned between us?
* * *
“I’ve been there,” Mac said.
“Where?”
“Where –
(The repetition as an impatience, a matter-of-factness, an “I lived it, why would it need to be told? It was.”)
– Nairobi.”
“Nairobi. Kenya. You’ve been to Nairobi, Kenya. When the hell were you ever in Nairobi, Kenya?”
“When. On the way here.”
“What were you doing in Nairobi?”
“They took us there.”
“They. (I am his son.) Who’s they? They took you there from where?”
“How do I know? A Jewish organization.”
“From where?”
“Where would they take me from? – from Russia.”
“Russia? But you’d already left Russia. You were in Poland.”
“I came back.”
“You came back from Poland to Russia? You never told us that.”
“Of course.” (Of course.)
“Where’d you go from there?”
“From Russia?”
“From Nairobi.”
“To London.”
“London. Now he’s been to London. By ship?”
“What then, by horse?”
“Where’d you go from there?”
“Then I came here.”
“I thought you came from Bremerhaven.”
“That was the second time.”
(A second time.)
And thus I came to learn, only a year before my father’s death, that he had returned to the Soviet Union for a year during the Great Depression. (See Ou+Topos.)
AJA
If you like writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range, I hope you’ll subscribe. If you do, consider becoming a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius. You’ll gain access to the full archive and a free digital download of Waiting for Word on request. You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. Most importantly, you’ll be supporting writing you appreciate, writing to which I give my all.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
So hard to excavate the personal histories even of those closest to us. Loved this exchange.
Wonderful, Jay. I see how you would have to remember and promptly record this conversation to get the gaps of it right. And, oh, you did! I can feel the delight of new info and frustration with its paucity and humor and character all together. Finely done!