Honoring an Uncommonly Good Man, My Father

This year I particularly want to reflect more on my father’s life. You see, in preparation for my granddaughter Nili’s bat mitzvah. I prepared a booklet that focused on her female ancestors going back 11 generations! (Postscript: a copy of that booklet can be viewed on the Newsletter link on this blog.) It just so happens that both her maternal and paternal grandmothers have what I consider Royal Lineage. That is to say, Nili’s female forbears were related to some of the leading figures in Jewish history of the last several hundred years, and they were often quite remarkable women in their own rights. When I presented the booklet to my granddaughter, I pointed out that her male great-grandfathers, while not as famous, were also uncommonly good people. In particular, I was thinking of my own father and hoping that I would get this chance to share something about him so he won’t be forgotten.

It has been more than 50 years since my father died. Yet every year near the anniversary of his passing, I am overwhelmed with feelings of sadness. As an observant Jew, I have faithfully observed his yahrzeit in the traditional manner: I’ve lit the memorial candle, attended religious services, and recited the “Kaddish.” Rituals of this sort do have a useful role in “working through” grief by pulling our attention into exacting tasks, thereby producing a calmer mind. I shall continue to follow the prescribed rituals; however,  for me, spending time with family or sharing thoughts in writing comforts me more.

When I think of my father, I think of a quiet, stoic, hard-working man who stood about 5’7” tall. Life was never easy for him. He was the oldest child of an immigrant family from Lithuania, and as such he had to quit school after third grade to support his two younger brothers and sister. But work he did. In fact, he enjoyed any kind of manual labor. He was a handyman par excellence, blessed with “golden hands.” He could fix anything. He particularly liked the printing trade, and he taught himself the skills of tool and die making. He had a creative streak; and had he been afforded proper education, I’m sure he could’ve easily been an engineer or an architect. He loved to tinker with things and had his own workshop in the basement of the house which we knew was his sacred place. I sense he was torn between the wish to have his own business where he could be the boss as opposed to the security of working for someone else—as he did as a type setter for a local newspaper -and getting a regular paycheck. He would’ve been more content staying in his workshop designing tools and dies. But family’s needs took precedence as they always did with my father; and he went into business, first, in a meat market and, then, in a family style grocery.

The long hard hours and stresses of business took their toll on my father. While I was still a teenager, he suffered his first heart attack. This would be followed by yet another until a third and fatal attack struck him down one fateful Sunday morning in August 1964. Ironically, on the day my father died, he told others that he was having one of the best days of his life. In retrospect, I now know that he was experiencing the not uncommon phenomenon of euphoria before impending death. But the sad fact is that my father had few joyful or pleasurable days. There were only a handful of times I can recall when he took time for himself to just fish or play golf, and how much fun I had accompanying him on those adventures! He lived a modest no-frills style that seemed sufficient for someone who grew up in near poverty. He worked slavishly for some 30 years to give his family a secure, if simple, home life; and he lacked the slightest interest in conspicuous consumption, ostentation, or luxury. He begrudged himself. It was enough for him to dream of perhaps one day owning –imagine this -a color TV! The only time he indulged himself was when he paid $200 for a secondhand Cadillac, to him the finest thing he ever owned.

The man I am today does take after his father in many ways, from a physical resemblance at least to what I hope is his spiritual inheritance. My father left me little in the way of material wealth. But from him I learned devotion, unselfishness, sacrifice and caring. We moved close to his parents and even in their house for a while so he could help his invalid father. And he was always kind to me, his firstborn. He never raised his voice. Once when I was acting obnoxious and deserving a slap. He hit me, and I know that smack hurt him more.

Yes, I truly loved my father; and as time passes, I love and appreciate him more. But, I must admit, I thought something was missing from our relationship, an ingredient that  compelled me to devote my life to improving communication.  For most of my adult life, I thought my father, a doer rather than a man of words, was never able to share his dreams, his sorrows, and his deep-seated feelings. As it turned out, I had forgotten an important source of information about my father that was squirreled away in a box in our hall closet. In it, I had  stockpiled correspondence that I received during the years that I lived in a dormitory at college. Those were the days before social media when people communicated largely by sending letters; and since I had chosen to give up a full scholarship to the University Wisconsin in my home town of Madison to go to New York City and attend Yeshiva University, I could either keep in touch with my parents and brother by phone calls or by writing letters. It turned out that when I looked at my stash of letters, I had what seemed like hundreds from my mother. But I also had a significant number from my father in his rather neat printing or handwriting that always began “Dear Val” and ended simply “Your Dad.”

As I read through these letters, I realized that my father had shared more with me than I originally thought. While I don’t recall ever sitting down and talking to him about time management, finances, or dating, I was receiving, in his pithy letters, lots and lots of advice and life lessons. He encouraged me to concentrate on my studies but he was even more concerned about my health and welfare. He stressed his belief that you need to combine work with fun and pleasure; and he recommended “conditioning yourself” by engaging in sports or swimming. Time and again he stressed the value of healthy living by among other things reminding me to “watch your waistline.”  He cautioned against working too much or keeping late hours. If I did report that I caught a cold or hurt my foot, he was quick to ask how I was feeling and if I was taking care of myself. When I went through a period of depression and sought psychological counseling in my senior year, he again wanted to know how I was doing but also expressed some concern and fear of a psychologist “practicing on you.” He was always thankful to be alive and said “when you have your health, you bounce out of everything.” As important as what he did say in his letters was what he did not say. He did not have to advertise or spell out how much he loved or cared for me; his words showed his genuine affection. Moreover, not once in his letters did I hear him complain about his own physical condition even though the treatment given to cardiac patients in his day forced him to be more sedentary than he wished or that we now know is essential to prevent further heart attacks. Instead, he would express from time to time the wish that he could help my mother out more in their store and not be cooped up in the house as much. He was constantly praising his wife for working long and hard and having a “handful of problems” to deal with. He would complain at times about my younger brother who was still living at home as not helping out enough in the store and working only “ under protest.” Yet at the same time he praised my brother for generally working hard at school.  He also referred to him as “Romeo,” writing to me that my brother has all the girls after him because he knows how to kid around with them and not take things too seriously. “That’s the way to be,” he wrote giving me the dating advice to “play the field” and, who knows, maybe even find a rich girl.

In short, my undereducated Dad indeed was my first field supervisor. He was teaching me important things, not the conventional American dad stuff, not the Talmudic or academic stuff or the evidence based stuff or what Phillip Roth calls “the  Prince Charming stuff.” He taught me his vernacular of life. My father was giving me, through his letters, implicit financial and occupational advice And although he wanted me to find jobs during the summer when I was not in school either in New York or back in Madison, he never once hinted that I should drop out of the college that he once termed “for rich folks”. Even though I was told that money was scarce and that they had at times to take out loans to pay for my education, he was fully committed to my getting both the liberal arts and yeshiva education. The closest he came to being critical of me was when he seemed upset that I spent money on a camera. “You should leave luxuries and hobbies alone for a while till you get a reserve built up,” he wrote stressing his belief to control “foolish spending.” Ironically, it was that same camera that produced old home movies, now digitalized, that  give my children and grandchildren  a chance to see what my father looked like in scenes that were taken both in the store and in our home in Madison while he was still alive, precious images that I hope will also become part of a trove of family heirlooms.

As exciting as I was to read his actual words, it was depressing and sad because he was always stressed—and I was one of his stressors. In hindsight, I’m not terribly proud of how I reacted – or rather didn’t react – to his words. The person I am now sees myself then as an insensitive, clueless, vainglorious dolt when it came to meeting my father’s needs. Why didn’t I offer to drop out of “the rich folks’ school”? Why didn’t I offer to transfer to the University Wisconsin so I could be closer to help him and my mother? But then I realized that if I had, he would have told me to stay the course. He was a man who believed wholeheartedly in the American dream, and I and my brother were his stocks and bonds, his investments in the future.

Sadly, my father never had a chance to see that his sons, his grandchildren, and now his great grandchildren have all been able to fulfill Herman Karan’s dreams and hopes. Have my brother and I, both psychologists, been able to heed our Dad’s warning and not treat clients as guinea pigs or lab rats is for others to assess. But being away at college at the time he died, I regret not telling my Dad how much he meant to me and how I would miss him. Now that I have rediscovered his letters, my love and respect for him have grown; and every year I will hopefully continue to pay tribute to the memory of the simple tool and die maker who molded me more than I ever realized.