But what if you, and Zaydie, and consequently I, were all wrong? What if there are greater possibilities out there? You and particularly Zaydie believed in ultrarealism when it came to everything about the world: the world doesn't change, people don't change, you have to be careful enough to size everyone up and base your decisions on what they are, and not just what they are, but what you are.
But Zaydie was proof in himself that people DO change. The world literally wanted to kill him, kill Bubbie, kill Faygeleh, kill Rokhel, and after six years, just when they thought they were out of the darkness, the world did get to Faygeleh and Rokhel: through typhus and a gunshot crossfire (or a gunshot execution, I've heard two contradictory stories). But Zaydie came here, mastered new businesses, mastered English, mastered a new financial system, and by the time of his hematoma he was every bit the businessman he was in Poland before the War. Did he change who he was by doing so? Or was that always the person he was and the outrageous inner strength which he exhibited in the face of all and clearly passed on to his son?
We don't know anything about other people: it is possible that people change, situations we think implausible do happen, and people rise to them who on paper seem unlikely. You never believed that: not about your kids, not about history, not about yourself. You were that you were: the world is as it is, and you made a life off appeasing a brutal realism, and that realism rubbed off on your oldest son. Your eldest son had enormous dreams that he thought impossible for decades, and to an extent he shelved them just like you did yours. The irony is that no one on earth was better cut out to make their dreams a reality.
At various times you wanted to be a(n) historian, a real estate speculator and a Hollywood producer, with your abilities you could have done all three brilliantly, you could have run a Fortune 500 company, you could have been an innovator, an entrepreneur, a government public servant at the highest level; but you decided to play your life small: stay out of the arena, dominate your many friend groups with the size of your personality, always go for the risk-free investment and never spend an unnecessary penny. That was your life, you led it as you saw fit and you approached the world with a cynical irony; but I can't imagine it satisfied you, and it certainly didn't satisfy you when you saw that your children had big dreams.
Whether it was children or friends or the world, you took a kind of glee in puncturing illusions. You were determined to make us realize that dreams were unlikely, and therefore not worth pursuing. But some of us struggled sufficiently with everything else that the dreams were the realistic pursuit and the conformity was your dream, we were backed into a corner because we had so little support to support what we were good at. In despair, we turned to your realism and aped your glee just as you aped your own father's.
I can hear your protests in my head, and it's true, you went through the motions of support at every point, however tempted you were to withdraw it, cut me off, throw me out as a teenager and young adult, try to beat the crap out of me. But you made your opinion known at every opportunity. It's very difficult to have proper fortitude to pursue things when you hear only that your ambitions are stupid from the person whose support would have made the most difference to morale: and whether it was the actual ambitions or the compromises you wanted from me, the difficulty was much the same.
I was never really cut out for realism, which involves a practical knowhow that eluded me from time immemorial. If I was capable of rising to practicality, it was made far more difficult by all the things you pointed out of what I did wrong.
But after all this, I see how easily this letter can turn into a factory of grievance, and that is not what I want for our relationship going forward. I want us in memory to have the peace we didn't have in life. The family is a lot quieter now, and with such agreeable people around me it's much easier to see that the world can be a peaceful place.
Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I was in DC that day: three weeks into college. I could see the smoke billow up from the Pentagon and realized I was face to face with the living history we'd already talked about so many times. My response to that solemnity was to meet a girl that day. By two o'clock we were making out in front of the TV. We had a couple hookups but she didn't want a relationship. She ended up getting engaged to my favorite professor, thirty years older. She was weird, I was weird, the professor definitely was weird... He's dead now, she's an FBI agent, I'm... what am I?
Ten years later, a very close friend of mine showed me a clip of the 9/11 crash set to the Benny Hill music. I had a 30th birthday party at which at least 50 of my DC friends came to Baltimore to see me off to my new chapter: some came from as far as California, Massachussets, New Jersey, New York, and if I remember correctly Chicago and Texas. It was one of the best, worst, and weirdest weekends of my life, and after the woman I was involved with had a drunken freakout in my apartment at 5 AM as ten of my friends tried to sleep on my floor, a couple of my best friends and I consoled ourselves with that clip, which almost made us fall on the floor laughing. Your comment when you saw how well loved I was at that point in my life was "Who'd have thought you had so many devoted friends?" Then you were mystified why I got mad.
Like you, I was not born with the gene for solemnity. Unlike you, the lack of solemnity was always who I was at my core. I was one of nature's bohemians who by thirty stuffed himself into the role of a bourgeois with extraordinarily unnatural contortions. You were talented enough that whatever your natural role in life, you could transform yourself into whatever was needed. I do not have that talent. I wasn't cut out for business, I wasn't cut out for suburbs, I wasn't cut out for synagogues. By seventeen I realized I was a writer by temperament and ability, and even in today's financial difficulties for anyone but people like you, I should have tried to live a life of the pen: writing small articles for small publications, meeting other writers, other journalists, other critics, other novelists and poets, getting manuscripts rejected a thousand times in the hope of one yes.
Instead, I have a blog with thousands and thousands of posts which I write in near-isolation: not really sure who my readers are but trusting on faith that I have them. I'm still paid to write articles: they've even won major local awards. I'm a performed composer by a few major organizations. I have volumes of incomplete novels of breathtaking ambition: and even if they're esoteric I know they're good, and I know in my bones that one day they will have a small audience, even as I know that one day my essays could have a larger one. I have been a d-list local celebrity as a violinist in a popular local band. I have been a conductor, opera director. I've taught at Hopkins adult education. At the end of that class I made a student cry with my summation, and another told me I'd be world-famous one day. I was a featured writer at the Times of Israel and my tribute to Amos Oz on his passing was featured more prominently than the feature from the President of Israel. I've taught Jewish literature at synagogues: Kafka, Babel, Singer, Zweig, Bellow, Grossman, and have shared bills as a classical musician with one of the most well-known musician in Baltimore. And yes, there's the odd right call in business, right calls on big issues which you got wrong and were forced to admit later in moments of humility, which did exist even if you should have had more. It's not a life without real distinction. But I think by the end you decided to turn a blind eye to whatever I was doing professionally, knowing that whatever little success I had, you would disapprove of the direction it took.
More importantly, for twenty-five years I've kept up a network of friendships since college that defined my life far more than my friendships locally ever did. What they had, what they share, is an idealism you always discouraged except in moments when it was convenient to upbraid us for having bad attitudes. It's 2026, but their New Deal democratic liberalism gave them the morale, the will, and the practical sense to make the world a better place to live, one policy at a time.
It's not because they have blind belief in optimism: it's because they have a belief in other people great enough to persist in the continual, agonizing search for infinitesimal new specs of knowledge: statistic by statistic, collated and collected in good faith, then putting the results into action. I don't know if the world ever improves, but if the world improves, and it's a big if, then it's because of people like them.
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