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the chest, told him that it
took one to know one and
that he’d better watch out
or he’d wind up skewered
butt-first on a flagpole.
Grabbing the front of my
father’s shirt, the man said
that he bet the last time my
father got lucky was probably when he’d found a box
of Girl Scout cookies.
A woman at the Y desk
picked up a phone—a
crowd had gathered—but
my father gestured to her
to put it down and, very
calmly, he addressed the
man, and the way he did it made me
think ‘Uh-oh!’ because although my
father could be polite and accommodating most of the time,
when he was seriously roused—
watch out!
“Sir,” he said to the man. “Allow
me to inform you that I have known
more good women in my lifetime
than have ever existed in your imagination.”
The man warned my father not to
be a professor wise guy, made a fist
and said the only reason he’d been
holding back was because he didn’t
like to hit little old men who wore
glasses. At this point, my father, who
was five-foot-six and weighed perhaps one-fifty, handed me his
glasses, stepped forward, and
pointed to the ceiling.
“Well, look at that,” he
said, and as soon as the
man looked up, my father
stomped down hard on one
of the man’s feet and let loose
with a swift one-two combination
to the guy’s midsection. When the
man doubled over, my father gave
him a terrific roundhouse chop to
the side of the head that dropped
him straight to the floor.
“In my youth, you see,” my
father said, “I studied at the Educa-
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tional Alliance on the Lower East
Side with the late, great intercollegiate champion Colonel David
‘Mickey’ Marcus, and I also had the
good fortune to take several lessons
at the Flatbush Boys Club from the
equally great Lew Tendler, who himself had learned the trade, in and out
of the ring, from the immortal Benny Leonard.”
The man opened his eyes but
stayed where he was while my father
advised him never to discount the
benefits of a good education in
teaching us that the use of verbal
insults against those we deem inferior only served to reveal our own
shortcomings.
A
22
fter word of the incident
got around, my father
became a hero to my
friends who, when they
hung out at my house,
would ask him for boxing
tips, and it turned out that my
father knew more than a little about
the sport. He had published a novel,
Star of David, when he was in his
early twenties, and it was based in
part on the life of Barney Ross, a
Jewish boxing champion who’d also
been a war hero and had, from the
hadassah magazine · august/september 2013
morphine they gave him
for pain when he was
wounded, become a drug
addict, and then a recovered drug addict. My father had been a pretty
good bantamweight himself in Police Athletic
League competitions,
though he never did
A.A.U. or Golden Gloves,
and when my friends
asked, he’d offer them
basic stuff about feints
and jabs and being alert to
an opponent’s weaknesses
and, using Ross as an
example, about the will to win,
which derived, he asserted, from
fighting for something larger than
yourself.
My friends would become entranced any time my father told
them stories about Ross: how Ross’s
father was a Talmudic scholar who
owned a grocery store in Chicago
and was killed by gangsters in a
holdup, and how the family was
made so poor by the father’s death
that two of Ross’s brothers, along
with his sister, were placed in an orphanage. The result was that whenever Ross was in the ring, he’d imagine he was fighting against his father’s
murderers, and when he won the
first of his three world championships, he used the prize money to
rescue his brothers and sister from
the orphanage.
After telling us about Ross—or
about Tendler, or Leonard, or “Kid”
Kaplan, or Abe Attell, or Daniel
Mendoza, or other great Jewish
fighters—and after giving us some
pointers, he’d stop, hold up an index
finger to indicate that the most important advice was coming, and then
touch his tongue with his finger and
emphasize that because it could produce words that allowed you to
avoid a fight, or if you had to fight,
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everybody, especially when
it came to the shits of the
world, left me pretty cold.
Why be kind to people who
were mean and screwed
over other people? Why
forgive people for unforgivable acts? For all his sophistication and his knack,
especially when it came to
women and books, to discerning crap from quality, he
also had a surprising willingness to suffer fools gladly.
I must have seen myself
as one of those fools, since
I had a fairly well-developed talent for depriving
myself of those things—like
sticking with interesting
women who actually liked
me, or making sure to
spend quality time with my
father—that might have
offered more focus and
direction, and more comfort and joy. Thus my tendency to change jobs (and girlfriends) regularly, to find jobs far
from home and to stay away from
home for years at a time.
When my father died, I was living
in New York City, renting a 350square-foot studio apartment on the
Upper West Side while teaching
math at an Upper East Side private
school, and even though I was less
than three hours away by car from
Northampton, Massachusetts, I hadn’t visited my father there for nearly
a year. His wife of thirty-one years—
my mother—had died eight years
before, at fifty-seven, from an
aggressive form of lymphoma, and
he’d taken early retirement soon
after that but had stayed on in the
home in which they’d lived, and in
which my sister, Florence, and I had
been raised. The rabbi of our synagogue called me with the news and
told me he believed my father’s
Why be kind to
people who were mean
and screwed over
other people?
Why forgive
people for
unforgivable acts?
the point, and what worried me from
time to time: I’d never had much of
a desire to do anything in particular
with my life.
But when I’d say this to him—
that I sometimes wished I was more
like this person or that person,
friends who’d become doctors or lawyers or teachers or businessmen, who
owned homes and had kids and the
rest—he would seem puzzled. Why
did I compare myself to others?
“Think of yourself as having taken
the scenic route,” he’d say. Or he’d
tell me that in this I was really just a
quintessential man of my times—a
free agent, much like those professional athletes who moved to different teams and cities every few years.
And weren’t we, after all, all free
agents these days?
By the time I was in my late twenties, his words of praise, along with the
repeated injunction to be kind to
24
hadassah magazine · august/september 2013
death had been relatively painless—
that he’d become short of breath
while swimming at the Y, had gone
home and telephoned his family doctor. His doctor told him to go to the
emergency ward at Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, and that he would
meet him there.
They never met. They found my
father at home, slumped over on our
living room couch, cell phone in
hand. He was sixty-nine years old,
and it pissed me off that he hadn’t
even made it to the proverbial three
score and ten—that, to use language
he was fond of, his number had
come up long before it should have.
I rented a car and drove up to
Northampton that evening. My sister, four years older than I, flew in
from Cleveland that night with her
husband, Larry, and their three children. The funeral took place the
next afternoon. We honored my
father’s wishes—he’d left specific
instructions—and sat shiva in the
traditional manner for a week, with
all mirrors covered, hard wood
benches for me and Florence to sit
on, and with the rabbi cutting the
lapel of one of my good jackets with
a razor instead of pinning on a piece
of black cloth.
On the day we got up from shiva,
Florence and I met with my father’s
lawyer, who said he would arrange
for the probate and, eventually, if we
wished, the sale of the house. Florence and I said we’d return in a
month or so to divvy up furniture
and other things we might want to
keep, though I wondered, with
embarrassment, where, given the size
of my New York apartment, I would
put things. Florence urged me to
consider moving into the Northampton home, rent-free—the mortgage
had been paid off years before—and
look for work nearby. “As Dad liked
to put it,” she said, “let’s try to see
where the opportunity in an unwel-