02
From chapter: ‘Brooklyn’
Written in a ‘novelistic’ style.
Peasants and soldiers; women in furs; tired columns of people wending their way across wheat fields, train lines tunneling through silver birch forests without end.
That’s how the movies had it, anyway. For the longest time, Doctor Zhivago was my only reference to my father’s early life; he had no photos of his Jewish village over in Eastern Europe, and he wouldn’t talk much about life over there. But I saw what the past meant to him when Fiddler on the Roof premiered on Broadway, and he began to cry in the theater.
On a good day, though, my father might drop me a clue about his past before moving on with his work, attending to the next head of hair that needed cutting. I remember him jabbing at this globe he had, with his finger pointing somewhere on the present-day border of Poland and Russia. ‘Maybe that’s my village, right here,’ he said.
This finger-pointing became something of a motif for me, when it came to my dad. I can still see him gesticulating with his digit, waving it around like crazy, when I close my eyes and imagine him. I used to have visions of him in my dreams —or perhaps a strange version of him, mixed with how I imagined my grandfather to be—literally pointing out things that were going wrong in my life.
I always imagined him pointing to New York on a map before he came here, a young orphaned boy of only eleven. But I know that he didn’t choose the location. Living in the shed with his sister while his relatives took possession of the home his dead parents had left behind, before travelling across Europe by train and the Atlantic by steamship, he didn’t get to choose much of anything.