One night in 1968, my father was in a Manhattan ballroom for the first time in his life, watching Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. hand me an award. The expression on his face was the essence of “nachas,” the word immigrants used for the joy and pride their children give them to redeem a lifetime of suffering.
I had been six or so at a Fourth of July parade when the colors came by and my father’s hat went flying from his head, knocked off by the beefy hand of a red-faced man behind us pointing at the flag. Shame and rage rose in me, but my father only smiled sweetly, nodded and bent to pick up the hat.
Years later, I read that, as a child, Sigmund Freud was told by his father that a man had grabbed his new fur cap and flung it into the mud, shouting, “Jew, get off the street.” Freud recalled angrily asking, “What did you do?” His father answered calmly, “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap.” In dreams, Freud would later note, a hat may stand for male genitals.
My father never talked about the past. I knew him only as a man who went to work early, came home late, ate his dinner, kissed me goodnight and went to bed. We did not play ball or go to games or listen to them on the radio. He told no stories and passed on no fatherly wisdom. He expected nothing, envied no one. He just slaved sixty hours a week to put food in my mouth, and he loved me without words. What I learned about his life came later and not from him.