My dad had always been accident-prone. I’ve already recounted here how, when I was maybe four, he’d managed nearly to knock himself unconscious lowering a garage door, and then later, to my great dismay and confusion, had jokingly explained his bruises as a result of my negligence. His clumsiness made him — as mine has made me — a constant threat to himself.
Given his clumsiness, my mother was horrified, but probably not terribly surprised, to look out the window one weekend afternoon in 1991 when my dad was watering the strip between the sidewalk and the street and see him lying prone, with the hose doing St. Vitus’ dance.
He’d had a stroke, his second in five years. This one would leave him unable to walk.
He hadn’t taken spectacular care of himself. He probably consumed as much alcohol in a year as a moderate drinker, a shot and a beer after work type, would have consumed in a week. He smoked at most four or five cigarettes (nearly all “borrowed”) a day. Men of his generation weren’t gym-goers for the most part, though, and didn’t know what we know now about nutrition. (Which I sometimes think is that everything’s dangerous in its own way.)
At the hospital, he shared a room with a guy with an Irish surname. My dad’s generation, at least the part of it that grew up in the American northeast, was acutely conscious of ethnicity; I think you see traces of that in the way Mr. Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack — a couple of dagos, a schwarze, a Jew, and a limey — teased one another. One afternoon when my mother and sister and I came to visit my dad, he announced, perfectly seriously, that he and “the Irishman” would be singing a program of Irish songs for other patients later in the evening.
I would bet a great deal of money that the only two Irish songs my dad had ever heard were those performed by Lawrence Welk’s in-house Irish tenor on TV. My guess is that he’d probably have been able to get through the first two lines of “O Danny Boy,” or even through the “from glen to glen” line. But if I knew my dad, as I’m not so sure I ever did, he’d almost certainly have responded to any expression of doubt about whether he’d prepared adequately for his forthcoming performance by saying, “Oh, hell, I’ll just wing it.”
My dad loved attention, and was a fervent life-of-the-party type — a frightful mismatch for my terribly shy, painfully reserved mother. I can’t remember their having attended a single party over the course of my childhood without my mother screaming at him the following morning about how embarrassed or abandoned she’d felt. My sister and I have come to play the same roles. There’ve been times when I’ve entered restaurants with her and been so embarrassed by her manic glad-handing that I wanted to hide beneath the table we were being shown to. Our parents all over, you see — she as our dad, and I as our mother. But where my dad would invariably profess great contrition when my mother railed at him, my sister becomes furious at me when I urge her to de-escalate her charm offensive (exactly the right word!), to the point of not having invited me and Claire to her recent third wedding.
Every night before sleep, I picture my dad singing “O Danny Boy” for God and not knowing the lyrics beyond “from glen to glen”, and God, winking and saying, “Gil, did you not bother to rehearse, for Christ’s sake?”
Showing posts with label Gilbert Mendelsohn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gilbert Mendelsohn. Show all posts
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
My Grandparents
I’ve believed for 16 years that the final paragraph in Ian Frazier’s Family is the most beautiful in the English language, but only today did I start plowing through the dense biographical minutiae of the first chapter, which served to make me ashamed that I know so little of my own grandparents.
I believe my paternal grandfather, Lewis Mendelsohn, to have been the son of a butcher who immigrated to this country from Berlin in the late nineteenth century. Lewis became a father in around 1914, when his wife Rose, whose own parents were from Lativa and elsewhere in eastern Europe, gave birth to their son Irving Philip in New York City, followed in March 1917 by my father, Gilbert Robert Mendelsohn. The family later moved down to the coastal resort town of Wildwood, New Jersey, where Lewis ran his own butcher shop. I gather he did reasonably well even during the Great Depression. I surmise from my dad’s allowing my mother to browbeat him mercilessly throughout their marriage that Lewis’s family was very much a matriarchy, and Lewis pretty passive. The only time I met him, when I was around four, I found him pretty frightening.
As I observed here before, the tradition at the time was for everything to be invested in the older son. My understanding is that my uncle was nicknamed Bunny in infancy because a neighbor supposedly told Rose Mendelsohn that he was as cute as one; in my household, having a brother, brother-in-law, or uncle Bunny was as natural as breathing. He married a gentile woman and served in the U.S. Air Force. I always marveled at how very impersonal were his and my dad’s letters to each other.
The grandfather after whom I was named (Jewish tradition precludes naming a child after one’s self, as is so popular among gentiles, so no Gil Jr. for the author), Jonchif Nissen (I’m guessing at the spelling) Kaufman, and his future bride, Celia Kaufman (no relation) both came to America with their respective parents from the environs of Odessa in the southern Ukraine a generation after Lewis Mendelsohn’s parents came over from Berlin. I’d always bought the idea of fervent Jewish solidarity, and was shocked to learn through my reading that the German Jews who came over in the 1880s treated with naked contempt the Russian ones who came over with my maternal grandparents.
I have no idea why the Kaufmans headed for the Midwest, which was crawling with Scandinavian and German farmers, but they did, winding up in Minneapolis. Celia’s parents ran a boarding house. I have no idea what John Ned’s (his name was anglicized at Ellis Island, I think) did, but I do know he was a roughneck. He and Celia married young and had their first daughter, my mother, in their early twenties. John Ned was commonly brought home bloody and semi-conscious. I suspect he and Lewis Mendelsohn would have found each other immensely distasteful. A little more of his eagerness to put up his dukes would have served me well on the playgrounds of my childhood.
During her girlhood, my mother was repeatedly traumatized, both by her family’s poverty and by her father’s open disdain for his kids. On one occasion, she was sent home from school for smelling, and was forever after painfully self-conscious, and fastidious about her appearance. A conspicuous stain on her clothing one night in around 1996 was the first indication to me of the dementia that would later obliterate her a few years before her death.
The world’s a strange place. After the repeal of Prohibition, John Ned Kaufman made a fortune in the wholesale liquor business; Jews are taught to think of alcohol as the province of the goyim, but it was Jews who started Seagram, for instance. John Ned bought his family a gorgeous home in a swanky part of town, but wasn’t a more loving father than he’d been as a hooligan, and was dead at 42.
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I believe my paternal grandfather, Lewis Mendelsohn, to have been the son of a butcher who immigrated to this country from Berlin in the late nineteenth century. Lewis became a father in around 1914, when his wife Rose, whose own parents were from Lativa and elsewhere in eastern Europe, gave birth to their son Irving Philip in New York City, followed in March 1917 by my father, Gilbert Robert Mendelsohn. The family later moved down to the coastal resort town of Wildwood, New Jersey, where Lewis ran his own butcher shop. I gather he did reasonably well even during the Great Depression. I surmise from my dad’s allowing my mother to browbeat him mercilessly throughout their marriage that Lewis’s family was very much a matriarchy, and Lewis pretty passive. The only time I met him, when I was around four, I found him pretty frightening.
As I observed here before, the tradition at the time was for everything to be invested in the older son. My understanding is that my uncle was nicknamed Bunny in infancy because a neighbor supposedly told Rose Mendelsohn that he was as cute as one; in my household, having a brother, brother-in-law, or uncle Bunny was as natural as breathing. He married a gentile woman and served in the U.S. Air Force. I always marveled at how very impersonal were his and my dad’s letters to each other.
The grandfather after whom I was named (Jewish tradition precludes naming a child after one’s self, as is so popular among gentiles, so no Gil Jr. for the author), Jonchif Nissen (I’m guessing at the spelling) Kaufman, and his future bride, Celia Kaufman (no relation) both came to America with their respective parents from the environs of Odessa in the southern Ukraine a generation after Lewis Mendelsohn’s parents came over from Berlin. I’d always bought the idea of fervent Jewish solidarity, and was shocked to learn through my reading that the German Jews who came over in the 1880s treated with naked contempt the Russian ones who came over with my maternal grandparents.
I have no idea why the Kaufmans headed for the Midwest, which was crawling with Scandinavian and German farmers, but they did, winding up in Minneapolis. Celia’s parents ran a boarding house. I have no idea what John Ned’s (his name was anglicized at Ellis Island, I think) did, but I do know he was a roughneck. He and Celia married young and had their first daughter, my mother, in their early twenties. John Ned was commonly brought home bloody and semi-conscious. I suspect he and Lewis Mendelsohn would have found each other immensely distasteful. A little more of his eagerness to put up his dukes would have served me well on the playgrounds of my childhood.
During her girlhood, my mother was repeatedly traumatized, both by her family’s poverty and by her father’s open disdain for his kids. On one occasion, she was sent home from school for smelling, and was forever after painfully self-conscious, and fastidious about her appearance. A conspicuous stain on her clothing one night in around 1996 was the first indication to me of the dementia that would later obliterate her a few years before her death.
The world’s a strange place. After the repeal of Prohibition, John Ned Kaufman made a fortune in the wholesale liquor business; Jews are taught to think of alcohol as the province of the goyim, but it was Jews who started Seagram, for instance. John Ned bought his family a gorgeous home in a swanky part of town, but wasn’t a more loving father than he’d been as a hooligan, and was dead at 42.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
A Good Man Whom I Admire
After the stroke that immobilized him, my mother wouldn’t let my dad come home for fear there’d be a fire and she wouldn’t be able to drag him to safety; he found himself in the same grimy Santa Monica convalescent hospital where my mother's mother would soon die. I left these decisions to my parents, and will go to my own grave filled with shame for having allowed my dad to die in such a miserable setting.
Not that he’d have been easy to move. He might have been severely disgruntled, but not to the point of considering spending money on himself, not this second son of one of those Jewish families in which all hopes had been pinned on, and every spare cent invested in, the firstborn son. When I spent a day taking him around to other care facilities in the area, all of them brighter and fresher-smelling, he rejected them on the basis of their being more expensive.
That my parents spent so little on their own comfort almost certainly had to do in large part with their wanting to leave me and my sister as much as they could. What they left, given the frugality they taught me, might have lasted the rest of my life if not for the fucking recession. How deeply infuriating to think of all my parents’ (and tens of millions of other parents’) years of self-denial coming to nothing because of the greed and megalomania of the million-dollar-bonus boys on Wall Street.
My dad had hoped as a very young man to be a medical illustrator, but it didn’t work out for him. Once having allowed my mother to talk him into relocating to LA (from Washington, DC), he sold toys in Westwood Village and equestrian supplies in Santa Monica before getting a drafting job at Hughes Aircraft, where he spent the next 35 years; in the world my dad lived in, a job was a lifetime thing, as too was a marriage, however loveless. Not counting my mother's ever-more-naked loathing, he hardest thing I ever saw him have to go through was an extended period of unemployment in the early 70s when Hughes’s aerospace division tightened its belt and laid him off. I think he felt invalidated, confused and adrift. A part of me is glad he didn’t live to see how intimately his own son would come to know those feelings in his own life.
My dad’s greatest pleasures were in drawing caricatures and in flirting with women. At one point, he hooked up with an agent of some sort who’d get him caricature bookings at different events, fairs and corporate wingdings and so on. I think it was very aggressive flirting that caused this agent to stop representing him. It must have broken my dad’s heart.
There was bacon in my household when I was a child, but never pork per se, eating which had famously sickened my dad at one point in his early twenties. But when I invited him to lunch one day in my 28th summer, he scanned the daily specials, ascertained that a pork dish was the cheapest thing on offer, and ordered it. He’d have given me his last dollar, but couldn’t bear the thought of my spending a dime more on his meal than I had to.
On approximately a million occasions, I’d go outside — my mother forbade him to smoke inside — to ensure my dad was still breathing after my mother had sliced him up with her tongue. He would blithely remind me that all married couples argue; I felt as though living in a Lewis Carroll novel. After my dad's death, my mother told me all she’d ever wanted was to see if just once she could make him stand up for himself. For my dad, though, any attention was as pleasurable as any other. He might actually have been more comfortable with my mother’s avid contempt; when I got old enough to be able to embrace him at the end of visits and tell him I loved him, he was mostly embarrassed.
I failed during their lifetimes to even begin to appreciate how much my parents loved me. I post this in honor of the 93rd anniversary of my dad’s birth — and a couple of days after the eighth anniversary of the last time my daughter deigned to speak to me. What goes around really does come around.
Not that he’d have been easy to move. He might have been severely disgruntled, but not to the point of considering spending money on himself, not this second son of one of those Jewish families in which all hopes had been pinned on, and every spare cent invested in, the firstborn son. When I spent a day taking him around to other care facilities in the area, all of them brighter and fresher-smelling, he rejected them on the basis of their being more expensive.
That my parents spent so little on their own comfort almost certainly had to do in large part with their wanting to leave me and my sister as much as they could. What they left, given the frugality they taught me, might have lasted the rest of my life if not for the fucking recession. How deeply infuriating to think of all my parents’ (and tens of millions of other parents’) years of self-denial coming to nothing because of the greed and megalomania of the million-dollar-bonus boys on Wall Street.
My dad had hoped as a very young man to be a medical illustrator, but it didn’t work out for him. Once having allowed my mother to talk him into relocating to LA (from Washington, DC), he sold toys in Westwood Village and equestrian supplies in Santa Monica before getting a drafting job at Hughes Aircraft, where he spent the next 35 years; in the world my dad lived in, a job was a lifetime thing, as too was a marriage, however loveless. Not counting my mother's ever-more-naked loathing, he hardest thing I ever saw him have to go through was an extended period of unemployment in the early 70s when Hughes’s aerospace division tightened its belt and laid him off. I think he felt invalidated, confused and adrift. A part of me is glad he didn’t live to see how intimately his own son would come to know those feelings in his own life.
My dad’s greatest pleasures were in drawing caricatures and in flirting with women. At one point, he hooked up with an agent of some sort who’d get him caricature bookings at different events, fairs and corporate wingdings and so on. I think it was very aggressive flirting that caused this agent to stop representing him. It must have broken my dad’s heart.
There was bacon in my household when I was a child, but never pork per se, eating which had famously sickened my dad at one point in his early twenties. But when I invited him to lunch one day in my 28th summer, he scanned the daily specials, ascertained that a pork dish was the cheapest thing on offer, and ordered it. He’d have given me his last dollar, but couldn’t bear the thought of my spending a dime more on his meal than I had to.
On approximately a million occasions, I’d go outside — my mother forbade him to smoke inside — to ensure my dad was still breathing after my mother had sliced him up with her tongue. He would blithely remind me that all married couples argue; I felt as though living in a Lewis Carroll novel. After my dad's death, my mother told me all she’d ever wanted was to see if just once she could make him stand up for himself. For my dad, though, any attention was as pleasurable as any other. He might actually have been more comfortable with my mother’s avid contempt; when I got old enough to be able to embrace him at the end of visits and tell him I loved him, he was mostly embarrassed.
I failed during their lifetimes to even begin to appreciate how much my parents loved me. I post this in honor of the 93rd anniversary of my dad’s birth — and a couple of days after the eighth anniversary of the last time my daughter deigned to speak to me. What goes around really does come around.
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