THE ISSUES SURROUNDING JEWISH FUNERARY TRADITIONS, a son’s sadness and conflict when burying his father, and the ways we both identify with and distinguish ourselves from our fathers at such moments, can be overwhelming.
I had, when I was twenty-two, an experience that makes me think that Sigmund Freud took a certain delight—alongside the “self-reproach”—by bucking the expected protocol on the day of his father’s funeral. It occurred the day after my paternal grandfather died, when I accompanied my father to pick out his father’s casket.
I was astonished by the large display room at the Jewish mortuary, with rows of one garish silk-lined coffin after another. The details and price information were on tented signboards in front of each of the fifty or so “deluxe” caskets on view. Aghast when Mr. Weinstein (whose brother, if you can believe it, named his son, the future director of their family’s eponymous mortuary, Morton) tried to convince Dad “to spring”—a term I detest—for a bronze-plated nickel coffin lined with crimson silk, I remarked, “I thought that Orthodox Jews were buried in plain pine boxes.”
Mr. Weinstein turned to me with visible hostility and, staring at my camel hair topcoat, simply said, “Young man, how much did that coat on your back cost?”
Dad, seeing how stunned I was, simply said, in his usual quiet and gentle voice, “Nick wasn’t talking about the cost, Herman. He was talking about good taste.”
That, in a nutshell, was our relationship. My father always defended me.
He did so with such calm, such resolute loyalty, such understated tenderness that my eyes are welling with tears as I remember him.
After my father stood up for me so exquisitely in response to Mr. Weinstein’s high-pressure salesmanship, the indefatigable mortician just kept going. “You want good taste?” he asked excitedly. “Let me show you our Architectural Line.”
In his shiny dark suit, the enthusiastic funeral home impresario strutted over to the next row and pointed out a very ornate white marble coffin, exploding, “Voilà!”
I had had it. “Mr. Weinstein,” I began, in a haughty voice and tone that were far more my mother’s than my father’s. “That motif of the demilunettes over fluted pilasters comes directly from the style commissioned by the Medici, and therefore to me it smarts of anti-Semitism.” I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but at least it made the midget version of Uriah Heep take two steps backward. Dad now went from being my defender to being my most enthusiastic audience. While other fathers would have been disapproving, he was totally amused whenever I behaved like this.
We settled on the simplest oak casket available; while it had some molding and was not as plain as we would have liked, at least it was dignified. Then, on the way home, Dad told me that when he was a teenager he had dated the woman now married to Mr. Weinstein, and that she had had fantastic breasts. His face assumed a look of sheer ecstasy as he remembered them. My father, who was normally not given to self-disclosure, then abruptly shifted the conversation to talking about his fear of having some of his father’s weaker sides.
These were some of the issues Freud faced with those paintings at Orvieto: strength versus weakness, his sense of himself in relation to his father and the connection between death and sexuality, the ultimate aliveness. (I trust that my wife, mainly a novelist but also an essayist of unflinching candor, will forgive me for a revelation of our private life. I often think of the way we made love the night my mother died. A couple of hours after the phone call when we had the information that the end, blessedly, had finally come, Katharine and I fell into each other’s arms passionately and silently, joined in a need to affirm our vitality as well as our feelings for each other.)
MASCULINITY AND JUDAISM, THE TWO SUBJECTS that obsessed Freud, continued to be on my mind a lot during the week following Grandpa’s funeral. My father, my cousin Richard, my uncle Mel, and I paid daily visits to my grandmother’s house while she sat shiva, and it was our role to help form a minyan. Nana had been a ballbuster for as long as anyone could remember, and my father was clearly troubled by his memory of his father’s compliance with her perpetual demands and by his own fear of being a similarly docile husband.
It had amazed me when my father had acknowledged, driving home from the mortuary, that he worried that he perpetuated his father’s legacy of complying with a strong-willed wife. I had often been troubled by the ways he let my mother call the shots about so many things, but I had never thought Dad was that self-conscious.
Dad was, regardless, someone with the exceedingly rare quality of strength in tandem with supreme kindness. He had gone beyond his parents in countless ways. I often think of this.
Recently, I came across a journal entry I wrote in 2009, and I was struck by the way that what I was feeling then I feel still. It was a beautiful sunny late-September afternoon in Paris. In my journal I set the date as “some six years after his death,” which is odd, because it was really eight. Yet when it comes to feelings about my father, although they can vary greatly, time itself makes no difference; he could easily still be alive, robust and energetic, no matter how many years he has been dead. I miss him unbearably, and always have.
The day I wrote that journal entry, I had just returned from the Louvre. The tenderness and humanity of the Donatello relief there, unquestionably authentic, even if the one at the Met is now in doubt, made me feel overwhelmed by the connection that exists between a parent and a child. I then went to see the Louvre’s single Signorelli. It is in the same room as the Piero della Francesca portrait of Sigismundo Malatesta, a painting of such quiet strength—similar to my father’s—that, looking at it, I found it simply unacceptable that Dad was dead. And then I jumped to a destabilizing anguish at the notion of my own death—in part because to be dead will mean that I can no longer look at art.
There are times when I accept the idea of death with the rationality of Le Corbusier, who called it the horizontal requisite to the vertical of life. There have also been occasions when the consuming misery of clinical depression has made a side of me think that the end of life would be the only relief (although inner voices enabled me to know better and to endure the hellfire pain until the miraculous medicine kicked in). But at those moments when life is unbearably rich, human achievement staggering, the givens of the universe and of our bodies of unfathomable splendor, the idea of the end is so untenable that the only thing to do is to shut my eyes to it.
Whenever I am in the latter state, terribly excited by the beauty and wonder of things, the person to whom I want to communicate this, still, is often my father, to whom I wrote ecstatic letters from London and Paris when I made my first trip to Europe as a college student. He encouraged celebration. When my sister was about eleven, and I about five, he began taking us to a large public reservoir surrounded by woods not far from our home, and he would simply hold our hands and talk about the miracles of existence; we took these outings for years. That quality of appreciation—whether of nature or art or trapshooting or the splendor of a Brahms symphony—is what marked him as a parent.
Where did he come from? How did he emerge so unlike his parents, who were perpetually tortured by their lack of money and by my grandfather’s being low man on the totem pole in the family business? What made him decide that the changing of the dinnerware for Passover was a waste of time, the wearing of a yarmulke even in a synagogue an invalid symbol, the adherence to certain but not other kosher laws a travesty when one should worry more about what one could do for humanity? Where did he get the wish for human equality that made him join the American Communist Party as a young man? And how did he find the life companion who was probably the main reason he joined the Party, and then how did he manage to marry my tall, Germanic, blue-eyed, fair-skinned mother, take over her family’s business, and, by the early 1950s, fit in so perfectly as a first-class passenger on the Queen Mary? He was at home in the most elegant milieus not because he was a pretender (he was not), but because he had the true manners that are possible only when one is essentially kind, when one is determined to make life better for almost everyone whom one encounters (another thing that distinguished him from his parents, especially his contentious mother).
This is what sons do; we reflect on our paternal lineage. And as was true for Sigmund Freud in the Cappella Nova eleven months after Jacob’s death, sometimes it is more than we can fathom or bear.