The Twentieth Century Passes
Discover more from Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler
“Talking with My Father” originally appeared in slightly different form within a featured collection of my poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction in the 2015 inaugural issue of Footnote: A Literary Journal of History.
Talking with My Father, 93, While Reading the Sunday Paper over Breakfast, Distinguishing the First from the Second Time
(An excerpt from The Twentieth Century Passes, a memoir of my father’s life — the title, too, of the poem that follows, dedicated to him and my mother.)
***
Until the end of his life at 94, my father liked still to make breakfast for me during my Sundy visits: eggs, with maybe some lox and onions, toast – he liked orange marmalade on it – and coffee. We’d talk politics, the state of the world, read the newspaper together. My brother, too, if he joined us. We’d done that all our lives. Despite Dad’s heavy accent and uncertain command over a fifth language – swallowed increasingly, with age, by hoarse, halting vocalization – conversation was easy within the family, the same vibrant, worldly interests and humor buttressing all.
Except when talking about Mac’s life.
Then the talk became a 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.
Was this the first time, in decades of talk, that Kenya had ever been in the newspaper or 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 Monday’s Ou+Topos.)
from Waiting for Word
The Twentieth Century Passes
for my mother and father
1. There is no way to know where she lost it – along the way, or where the concrete steps reminded her that nothing belongs to us anyway not even ourselves. Her father worked a kiosk on Second Avenue and Eighth Street green and shuttered at night like the sleeping world all its wondrous and awful news now old and locked away. He sold many Jewish papers: The Daily Forward which they moved, unlatching the gated years, latching them behind. She has told me this many times, but for the first time (always, for her) only since the earth rose up to meet her from the drive of Lawry’s restaurant. She can still smell at the threshold of the doorway under the stoop on fourth street the odor of an unfavored child (who married when she could) though she cannot place it anymore. We eat our sandwiches. “Did you like tuna?” she asks, as if puzzling the mysteries. I nod: “It was my favorite.” At that, we both turn to Katherine Hepburn, sixty years ago and taut as a bowstring, wonder if the stars remember every escapade and kiss, or if sometimes in the darkness they sit and only stare at some actor on the screen. 2. The way his hand trembles a little reaching with the key to unlock the lock that opens to his home again. How he cannot hear the lips he cannot see beside him. How in the spreading fog through which he reaches he might see a dirt road and a wagon passing a short, theological bearded and mercantile man crossing in the wagon’s traffic: then fierce riders on bridled fury madly grinning at the bit, their cry and whinny and his grandfather bleeding and bootless on the ground . . . The key finds its home in a century of terror these are its chambers its tumblers made to fit by some smith of hidden craft. There is simple business now: a kettle to fill, the tea to brew a piece of fish, some bread a stretch of the long unyielding muscle that has tread the mill from Orinin to Warsaw, Nairobi to Palestine to gyms throughout New York and Woodland Hills. Some curls and presses, too. What weights are those to carry? On the balcony, beside his dozing wife, in forgetfulness he wills to happen, he sits and fills the distance without care. Though he cannot see it, he knows it is out there, and the salt sea Pacific breathes clean in his nose. This is the key, these are the chambers that tumbled in dreams in the night. From hard beginnings sometimes easy ends.
Sale ends Sunday!
AJA
The Twentieth Century Passes
Beautiful!