to really begin to understand my brother Abbie, you’ve got to try to picture Aunt Rose, our mother’s sister, a diagnosed schizophrenic who has not been able to look after her own basic needs for most of her life. If Rose is crazy, Abbie was crazy like a fox; they had nothing in common on that score. But something happened to Rose that led her to spend the rest of her days without a purpose, lost in the futility of her life. And in Abbie, the same sense of futility became the source for his extraordinary optimism. Yet his deep optimism, that he carried with him from the cradle to the grave, held the same tragic seed as her despair. His vision for revolutionary change, for a better world to come, came naturally to him. No different from Rose, our parents, or me, Abbie too was caught. Every family has its madness.
What had happened to Rose was the sudden death of her older brother, our uncle Abe, one June afternoon in 1935. Abe, aged twenty-four or twenty-five, took a ride with a friend into downtown Boston to get the diamond engagement ring he had chosen for his fiancèe. The car was a convertible and the weather must have been fine because they had the top down. They took Route 117 out of Clinton to Route 2, one of the frost-ruined paved roads that carried produce from rural Massachusetts to the shops of Boston. A truck passing on their left caused Abe’s friend to swerve abruptly, throwing Abe from the car, killing him instantly.
Uncle Abe’s death, coming some seventeen months before his namesake, my brother Abbie—conceived in sadness and mourning—was born, would be part of Abbie’s inheritance. And when I was born, three years after Abbie, it also became part of mine.
Abe was of medium height, and had curly black hair. Before he died, he ran a restaurant the family owned and was rumored to run a bookmaking operation on the side. Family lore describes him as a risk-taker, a willing child of destiny, and a charmer. The accident came just eight months after my parents’ marriage in October 1934. It served up a deep well of bitterness and guilt as a kind of belated wedding gift to the couple. These are things I surmise. What is factual is that it brought on the tragedy of Rose’s life.
Of course Abbie and I came to know Aunt Rose only later, when her explosive laughter was all that was left of what had been her personality. As the youngest of four children, she spent her childhood as the family jewel. She became the family standout as well, first as New England Spelling Bee champion and then, in 1933, as the first Jew admitted to prestigious Pembroke College. Although large and not pretty, she was well-liked, quick of mind, complex, curious, and trusting.
Rose played basketball on an all-girls’ team and took the sport very seriously. She went to lectures, including one in 1934 by Rabbi Israel Goldman on Hitlerism—nearly five years before the war. She was impressionable and read voraciously everything she could get her hands on, from Matthew Arnold’s poetry to pulp novels. A popular Hollywood magazine once had such an effect on her that she wrote in her diary: “after reading ‘Screen Romances,’ decided to always smile.”
Her brothers and sister—our mother—acted very protectively toward her. In a family without favorites, something special was always reserved for Rose. She was coddled not just by her mother but by everyone. Naturally shy, she began to test her limits. She transferred from Pembroke to the Middlesex Medical School in Waltham on the outskirts of Boston, moved into her own apartment with a girlfriend and, against her parents’ wishes, began to date a gentile.
The accident that killed her brother occurred after she had completed her first year at Middlesex, and in December, back at school, Rose was still feeling unaccountably responsible. Abe had been her favorite brother, the one with whom she shared secrets at a time when, as I’ve learned while reading the diary she kept, she was experiencing a painful process of sexual awakening. She wrote of feeling jealous of Abe’s fiancée, and perhaps felt the accident was somehow connected to her antipathy toward her brother’s marriage. In December 1935, Rose had a complete mental collapse.
After various consultations and mild treatments that did not help, the family admitted her to McLean Hospital, where, after several months, the initial diagnosis of manic depression was revised to schizophrenia. After nearly a year, when the money ran out—the cost at McLean’s was an exorbitant $150 a week—my grandparents, Ida and Jacob, were forced to transfer her to Worcester State Hospital, where, along with hundreds of ice baths, she received no fewer than 150 electroshock treatments over the next fifteen months.
A decade later, she was still at Worcester State and in deteriorating health. The hospital urged that neurosurgery would improve her quality of life. The family went along. A frontal lobotomy was performed in 1946, when Rose was in her early thirties.
Rose didn’t become a vegetable. She is not able to look after herself, but somehow she has kept her sense of humor. I sometimes think that she is the happiest member of the family, even though she has spent the last sixty years in institutions. Abbie used to say—and to this day I can’t say for sure whether he was serious or kidding—that with a little therapy she could get out more, be more active and productive. But she has always been considered part of the family. That was Ma’s doing.
As the eldest, Ma always felt she had to look after the younger children. With her brother’s death and her sister’s nervous breakdown, now it was Ma’s turn to feel overwhelmed by guilt, as if nothing had caused the tragedies as much as her own recent bid for personal happiness. The sequence of events was almost too much for her to bear—her marriage, a brother dead, her only sister insane, both these latter occurrences serving as fresh reminders of the death of her mother’s firstborn many years before. Suddenly her newfound independence and her happiness hardly seemed to matter. Her confusion was temporary, but the guilt was something that would be passed along to each of her three children, Abbie, Phyllis, and me.
Like Abe’s death, the agony of Rose’s madness preoccupied our parents and the other adults in the family while Abbie, Phyllis, and I were growing up. We never tried to make sense of Rose; to us she was wondrously strange and unfathomable, not frightening. In our teens, Abbie and I used to let our friends call her Crazy Rose. And Rose did go mad sometimes, although who’s to say how much that was the result of her illness and how much it was caused by the barbarous medical care she received? But whether she was at the institution where she resided, or with us at home on Ruth Street for a Sunday-afternoon meal, we were taught never to be ashamed of Rose—although I remember waiting in the hospital corridor outside her room while Ma visited and the terror that came over me in waves whenever the other crazy patients passed by.
Describing the end of the life of Simón Bolívar, García Márquez remarks: The revolutionary ploughs the ocean. The words convey our universal sense of futility—I think of Rose. But they also describe that futility transformed into its very opposite: someone able to express his vision so fully that he can beat the odds, harness the moon, plough the ocean. It captures my brother as I knew him at certain moments, when the splendor of his nature showed through the riffs and contradictions.
If the fathomless sadness of our Aunt Rose in 1935 is one of the keys to understanding my brother, another is the meeting of our parents three years before. For some reason, picturing Ma and Dad meeting one night at the bowling alley comes easily to me. I picture it from her side. As I’ve seen him in photographs, Dad had a wide, confident, complex smile. He was large and strong. At twenty-five, he was in his prime, while Ma, two years older, might have felt a little over the hill. Probably she heard his laughter across the room before she saw him. He must have appeared suave but also intelligent, tolerant, and serious. His white shirt was clean and starched, his face cleanshaven. He had a good job at his uncle Kanef’s drugstore. And he lived in—by comparison with Clinton, where she lived—the sprawling and dynamic city of Worcester. Dad must have seemed like a wish come true that night to Ma. And he was the best bowler in the place.
And from his side? They say Ma was sexy. Probably he saw her more as a likely date than as a future wife. I imagine him pleased with her rather than knocked out, and pleased with himself for finding her. Easy pickings. Not yet love.
In his autobiography, Abbie imagines it happened this way:
My mother fell in love with [my father] because he wore a clean white shirt every Friday night. Since my father never spoke of intimate things, I have no idea why he married Mama. It could have been for her looks, for her superb penmanship, or for love. Perhaps nobody knows why their parents married. The reasons hidden in the back of the bureau drawer along with the prophylactics.1
Two years later, in October 1934, they were married. That was fifty-five years before my brother’s death by suicide, forty years before Dad’s fatal heart attack, and forty-five years before the business I had built into the success Dad had always dreamed of came crashing down around my head. These events, along with the divorces and car accidents, the births, marriages, and remarriages, flowed one from the other as naturally as the New England seasons. But on that day life seemed a whole lot simpler: Florence Shanberg and John Hoffman, aged twenty-nine and twenty-seven respectively, were ready for their piece of happiness.
Dad had already begun evening pharmacy classes, traveling by train from Worcester to Boston at the end of each work day. Before long he hoped to become a pharmacist and make much more money. Then he would open his own drugstore. Buy a house. Have a large family. A car. Two cars, one a showpiece Packard or Cadillac. A prominent seat up front at temple. Well-dressed children. Standing in the community. A regular supply of the best Cuban cigars. All the trappings of a man who has achieved something. People listening to his opinions. The respect of his peers. This was the view from 1934. Success meant status and respectability, and seemed close enough for him to be able to reach out and touch it. Then had come the catastrophes of Abe and Rose, changing everything. Nineteen thirty-five had been the year of their misery. By its end, their future seemed to have been stolen from them.
In late November 1936, everything changed again. When, on the thirtieth day of the month, Ma gave birth to her first son, it was like a miracle. The young marrieds, whose home had already been marred by premature death and madness, were surprised by the sudden good fortune of my brother’s birth as by a shattering infusion of light. He was their reprieve from the bitterness that had entered their lives. On the back of a baby photo, Dad wrote, “Hell Unleashed.”
Abbie was a sickly child, sickness coming mainly in the form of asthma attacks. From the very first, he combined the frailty of his health with a lovable and outgoing temperament: He was a ham. But hell in the form of a noisy, sickly, love-hungry, adorable baby boy was just the kind of trouble that our parents desperately needed. And he must have felt from the first just how welcome he was. He must have intuited that the noise he made and the attention he demanded were received by Dad and Ma as nothing less than the signs of a great blessing.
An ancient Hebrew aphorism goes, “Where life is, death is not; where death is, life is not.” And as at the close of the evening prayer, Abbie arrived with the angel Michael at his right hand, Gabriel on his left, Uriel before him, and Raphael above him. In the commotion, Malakh-hamoves, the Angel of Death, vanished. My brother came as a consoling messenger who chased death from the house, and for the rest of their lives, our parents would look to him in expectation of more great good news.
Three years later, on September 13, 1939, I came along. The story goes that after giving birth, Ma got a call in her hospital room from the babysitter, who said that Abbie seemed sick. Ma left in such a hurry she forgot to sign my name into the hospital records. My birth came as an echo of Abbie’s. Quieter, but also sweet. If the lesson of humility was one that Abbie never learned, I learned from day one—as does any younger sibling—the particular kind of courage it takes to enter life preceded by the word “little,” as in “my little brother Jack.”
My arrival, like Abbie’s, was heralded by two stunning losses. The year before, my father’s brother, Jacob, died from injuries sustained in a freak car accident. The story that has been passed along to me through the grapevine of hushed voices among my living relatives is that his car was broadsided by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, who had had a few too many. And that shortly after the accident, while Uncle Jacob was still fighting for his life, the Hoffmans received a visit from several of Worcester’s finest, threatening retaliation if anyone testified against their drunk-driving fellow officer. The officers brought with them the chill of a dark, horribly ancient and familiar world waiting just around the corner from our American Dream. Joining memories of pogroms, of Cossacks, this small act of intimidation would have lent credence to our grandparents’ sense that this new world was not so very different from the old one.
The other death that preceded my birth was that of Ma’s father, also named Jacob, for whom I was named. When Jacob went, it was in the practice of his craft—wrecking. One of the acetylene tanks he used on heavy jobs, to prepare the steel beams for cutting, fell on his leg. By the time he got to the hospital, he was beyond saving; whether death came by pulmonary embolism, shock, or some combination of the two, I don’t know. In the 1940s, when my uncle Sam, back from the war, began to take an interest in reviving the family wrecking business, my grandmother Ida absolutely forbade it, insisting on a safer profession for the family’s surviving male, the last chance of continuing the family name into the next generation.
When Abbott Howard Hoffman—Abbie—was born that November in 1936, he was not only our parents’ firstborn son, he was also the first first-generation child of the greater Hoffman-Shanberg clan, the first Hoffman who might grow up to be a doctor. Furrowing the history of our family doesn’t give me quick solutions to the riddle of Abbie’s nature or my own, but it does provide me with clues.
On our mother’s side, our great-grandfather Saul Shanberg arrived at Castle Garden in Lower Manhattan—the disembarkation station in the years before Ellis Island—in July of 1881 or 1882. He was thirty-one or thirty-two years old and he came alone. Like the millions before him and since, he was one of the have-nots of Europe looking here for better odds. His wife and their two young sons had been temporarily left behind in Rzeszow, a city in Galicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The life that he found here was physically arduous—anti-Semitism was prevalent, work was hard to find—not yet a new world at all. But he found comfort in the ghetto-like Jewish community of the bustling Lower East Side. As a recent arrival, you stayed among your own people and kept a low profile, a stance of apartness already familiar from the shtetls of Europe. The name of the game wasn’t success, but survival. Saul stayed in New York City at first, living on Willett Street with a friend from the old country and working in the junk trade. After a year, he sent for his wife and children. One son, our grandfather Jacob, then nine years old, was sent to him, but his wife refused to make the voyage or to allow the other child to go. When her refusal proved unbending, Saul set about obtaining a divorce through the rabbinical authorities. Very quickly afterward, he married the sister of his best friend—in time to have five children before the end of the decade. His new wife, Betsy, was twenty years his junior.
Sometime in 1896 or 1898, Saul heard that in the Massachusetts mill town of Clinton a dam was being constructed to provide water for the city of Boston. Thinking he might do well peddling to the hundreds of workers who were congregating there, he decided to go and have a look, taking with him his new wife Betsy, and their five children, several of whom were still infants. His eldest son, Jacob, was already grown, and stayed behind. After two days on the dusty, unpaved roads, they got as far as Worcester. Worcester already had a sizable Jewish community, and Saul liked it enough to spend several months there trying to sell his wares. But eventually they set off again, traveling the last sixteen miles to Clinton, his original destination. As the new century began, he sent for Jacob to follow from New York.
In Clinton, Saul plied his trade, buying and selling junk off his horse-drawn cart with Jacob sitting beside him. In 1902, Jacob, in his prime at the age of twenty-eight, married our grandmother Ida.
Born in 1881 in Pskov, a very European cultural center in western Russia, Ida was the daughter of a rich brewer whose beer and schnapps were famous. Ida was accustomed to fine things. She read a lot and could quote all the great Russian novelists. In the old country, she had lived in a large house on an estate filled with servants. She was intelligent and cultured. For so many others life in the new world meant reaching for the golden ring; for Ida it was a kind of downfall. Ida spoke German fluently, and in all her census papers she identified herself as Russian-German, perhaps to indicate that she thought of herself as an upper-class Jew.
Decades later Ma showed me what she said was Ida’s will. It ran on for thirty pages, telling in material terms her precise feelings for friend and foe. There were few friends. To my father—her son-in-law—she left exactly five cents, explaining this was repayment for one occasion when he had kept her waiting for five minutes at the Meola Dairy Stand. My own memory has her once forcing me to sit outside on a wooden chair for three hours after I refused to eat my breakfast. I still have the chair, and my ass still hurts when I look at it.
Ida was the only one of my relatives that I didn’t like—except for her wonderful tzimmes, a side dish of sweetened fruit and vegetables, usually carrots, sweet potatoes, and prunes. Only recently, with a heart heavy for having misunderstood her for so long while she lived, have I come to see her more clearly. She never quite learned how to accept the softness of the new world, was never quite able to see herself in it. And so she was forever building walls and being misunderstood. For her, the new world was an unbroken nightmare. She was not cruel, I see now, so much as stern, bitter, and disappointed.
With grim determination, Ida produced five children for Jacob. Their firstborn died in infancy of spinal meningitis. Their second child, born on November 17, 1905, was Florence, our mother. Ma was followed by Abe, then another son, our uncle Schmule (Sam), and last, a daughter, our aunt Rose.
At the time of his marriage to Ida, my grandfather Jacob was a handsome and a generous man. He had started out in the family trade as a junk peddler: pots and pans, old clothes, old horses, and horse carts. As his family grew around him, he transformed the business into the thriving Shanberg Wrecking Company, which demolished buildings and sold off the remaining scrap metal and other materials.
Wrecking can be a highly profitable business, but it is extremely dangerous. You have to have it in your blood. There is the joy of the architect, the joy of the artist, and the joy of the builder—men who create. Then there is the passion of the wrecker, who levels. They say that Jacob was a wrecking genius.
Abbie and I share Jacob. I was named after him. Abbie inherited his appreciation of the possibilities that open up when you tear something down. Since his death occurred around the time of our births, we grew up with the sense that our lives were in some sense a continuation, a gift from the dead as well as the living.
In 1916, sometime after the birth of the third child, a fire razed their apartment, and Jacob purchased the home of Clinton’s sheriff, a man named John McGhee. Built to be the Clinton jail and sheriff’s quarters, the modest yellow clapboard building at 817 Main Street might have seemed to the neighbors a strange place to raise a family. But the square structure had its own charm and gave the impression of an awkward trustworthiness. Today it is a historic landmark. Of course Jacob had wanted it primarily for the steel used to construct the jail cells in the basement, a wrecker’s dream, which he sold off to help defray the cost of the house.
As the eldest, Ma had to set an example. She was an excellent student and a star gymnast. For pocket money, she did secretarial work at one of the local textile mills. After finishing high school, she commuted to the Bryant & Stratton school in Boston, completing the two-year program with an associate degree in business. And then, still living at home and looking after her younger brothers and sister, she began working as a secretary, joined in the social activities of the small Jewish community of Clinton, and waited. She was shy, did not consider herself pretty, and Ida would not let her date gentiles—which didn’t make for an active social life in Christian Clinton.
On our father’s side, our grandparents were Russian Jews named Morris and Anna Shapoznikoff who bought the name Hoffman from a dead neighbor in the old country. All my surviving relatives have heard me ask why the name was changed; each one has a different story, but I still don’t feel that I know the answer. Morris, Anna, and Dad passed through Ellis Island on November 15, 1908, twenty-five or so years after our mother’s grandfather arrived at Castle Garden. Family lore has it that Dad, aged one or so, had pneumonia when they arrived, so our grandmother covered his mouth with rags, hoping to suppress the infant’s racking cough.
The procedure at Ellis Island at that time was to mark the backs of the seriously ill with an “X” and send them back across the ocean on the same ship that had brought them. Had the immigration authorities noticed how sick Dad was, the family would have been refused entry. And Dad would not have survived the trip back to Europe.
After a short stay in New York, they moved on to Fall River, Massachusetts, then to Malden, and finally settled in Worcester, an industrial town where an able-bodied man could count on plenty of work and where Jews looked out for one another.
Zayde (Grandfather) Morris Hoffman (né Shapoznikoff) was a fruit and vegetable peddler, buying produce from the farms of Grafton and selling it near the downtown market of Worcester. He spent most of the time traveling between the two places, on the same wagon on which the family had made the trip from New York. The most discouraging part for him was that his horses never lasted very long, since the trips were difficult and frequent, and he could afford only the cheapest horses—they went for five dollars. My zayde used to say there was nothing so sad as watching a horse die. Eventually he was able to open his own grocery store on Providence Street, and then the “Spa” on Main Street I remember as a child—across the street from the Perlman Funeral Home—where we could bring our friends for a “tonic,” a Moxie, or a vanilla coke straight from the fountain—or a “college ice,” what is now called an ice cream sundae. Zayde smoked three packs of Chesterfields every day and walked with a noticeable limp. He said he got that from a fall on a banana peel in the old country. And I remember him on his deathbed breathing pure oxygen from two tanks at his bedside and asking for just another cigarette, just another puff.
Bubbe (Grandmother) Anna was the perfect bubbe: ebullient, warm, wonderful. She used to babysit for us on weekends to allow our parents to go off to Boston or New York on trips. Once Abbie and I decided the basement needed redecorating and poured red paint all over it. When Ma and Dad returned, Bubbe Anna said the paint “fell.” And on Shabbas, whenever Dad complained that we weren’t dressed up enough, Anna would say, “It’s not important what they wear. The only important thing is that we’re all here.”
In the recipes bubbe taught us, and which we still use, the unit of measure for spices isn’t tablespoons or teaspoons but “handfuls” and “pinches.” Of all our relatives, we loved and trusted Anna the most, so much so that once when hamburgers she cooked for us tasted strange, we ate every bit without a trace of doubt in our faces. Years later we learned that laundry soap had accidentally fallen into the mixing bowl when she was making the patties.
I sometimes have tried to imagine our grandparents during the last century and early in this century—as young Jews and as poor working people. But it seems so many worlds away. To picture them—crabby Ida as a laughing, marriageable shayner maidele—a pretty girl—old Jacob as a young ragman, his hat tilted back, his body muscular; Morris’s steps loose, his voice free of the cough—tires me out, and seems impossible. The world has changed too much. The closest I can come to that experience is on occasion to notice a tic or habit of my own, or remember one of Abbie’s, that suddenly makes sense as an artifact from the world of our fathers. Perhaps the identification with people in trouble, or the way Abbie always ate as fast as possible, as if that were going to be the only way to get his share, as if there weren’t enough food to go around. And also, perhaps, our always taking for granted that there would be physical suffering in our lives, as if our lives and our grandparents’ were in some uncanny way interchangeable.
A dozen times Dad took and failed the Pharmacy Board exam. It seems so many tries to have tried and failed. I feel not ashamed but proud of the earnestness of my father’s exertions. After his hopes of becoming a pharmacist were dashed, and until the day he died, he never once spoke to us of what had happened. Dad had no words to describe it. Eventually, Kanef died, leaving the store to his son Leonard and excluding Dad altogether, and it was Leonard who told me only recently what had happened.
The hurt Dad felt was so much larger than the small rage he could muster. He wanted nothing to do with failure and longed to identify himself in terms of affluence and success. But even after he eventually earned some amount of success, somehow the sweetness was sucked out of it. All that remained was a bitter taste.
Long after Worcester Medical Supply—Dad’s medical and drug supply company—became a solid component of the city’s business community, I remember how the very mention of the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy rankled him, and the contempt he felt for the pharmacists of Worcester. “Frig you!” I would hear him hiss under his breath as he rang up the purchase if a pharmacist came into Worcester Medical. He believed, perhaps rightly, that they had conspired against him, refused to let him pass the exam because he was a Jew. And his natural response to that feeling of victimization was outrage, followed by resignation. Dad had an inner store of perseverance he was able to call on. He could reach inward and find he had the strength to absorb adversity. But what he was never able to do was fight back. And I believe that just as Aunt Rose’s illness could call forth in Abbie and me the desire to be healers, Dad’s peculiar helplessness made us want to be fighters.
Ma’s approach to the subject of the failed pharmacy exam was a little different. If I ever tried to raise it with her, out came the familiar gesture of the hand: a short, sliding, flat-handed motion, moving from the heart outward. Age-old, it wasn’t a gesture of despair but rather a claim to deeper understanding. It said: Speech too has its limits, not everything can be talked about, sometimes things just happen. Abbie used to say, “Jews survive on ambiguous gestures.”
On March 16, 1941, our sister, Phyllis, was born, a daughter to complete the family’s joy at a time when things all around were looking up. A thousand dollars saved over the years by Ma’s part-time bookkeeping job enabled Dad to put a down payment on a nicer house on Ruth Street, a few blocks from where we were living at the time.
In 1944, when I was four or five, I remember sitting with Abbie on the floor, gathering the nuts and bolts that Dad was dropping as he built the shelves in the basement of his new business (made possible by a $5,000 loan from Ma’s parents), while in the background the radio blared out, blow by blow, the landing of the ships at Normandy. And how proud we were of our uncle Sam who had enlisted. And our slight embarrassment over Dad’s being too old to go.
A year later, I remember sitting again with Abbie in that basement, disassembling U.S. Army first-aid kits, which Dad and his friend Al Tessier had gotten cheap. We got a penny for each kit we took apart. Dad could then sell the individual items—a dressing compound and an envelope of sulphur—on his sales routes. Tessier would go on to make his fortune off of royalties on a gauze pad manufacturing machine he invented. Years later, I remember a Johnson & Johnson salesman in his Palm Beach three-piece suit sitting in Dad’s Worcester office, telling him he would have to drop Al Tessier’s merchandise as a prerequisite before picking up the J & J line. And how proud I was that Dad refused.
At heart, Dad’s business depended on having friends. And the measure of his true success in Worcester was that he seemed to know more people than any other Jew in Worcester who wasn’t a rabbi. His friends called Worcester Medical Supply the “Pill Palace.” If you knew “Johnnie” personally, you could go over and get your vitamins wholesale. Back then, doctors also dispensed medications, and they too would get the wholesale rate from Dad. Practically everybody in Worcester wanted to be on John Hoffman’s good side. But only friends got the free samples.
Once, Dad sent Tessier a personal check and forgot to sign his name. When Al called, Dad told Al to just sign it. But instead, Al came over to the store, bringing the unsigned check with him. Dad exploded in anger and hurt pride. He felt slighted that Al would not sign Dad’s name. I imagine that what offended him was the implication that, out of respect for the impersonal and conventional proprieties represented by his signature on a check, Al would disregard the spirit of their friendship.
A man of his generation, Dad loved to tell jokes that were bawdy but not dirty, and he never once said the word “fuck.” Nor, in all the years that I knew him, did he ever say the words “I love you.” Perhaps his way of showing love was teaching you to do something well, but to us it only sounded like criticism. “You’ll never get anywhere,” he’d say, “if you don’t read at least one book a week.” Yet he himself read books only in the condensed versions available from Reader’s Digest. His source of news was The Boston Record, a tabloid that featured murders, Walter Winchell and, in the ’50s, a gaggle of right-wing columnists taking potshots at alleged Communists.
He’d pick up the Record every weekday evening from Worcester’s number one newsboy, Homer, at the corner of Main Street and Chandler. Grown men hung around that corner, and everyone knew Dad. The most important part of the paper was the page that carried the racing track numbers. The right numbers paid off against the two bits you had placed with the local bookmaker the day before. Just like everyone else, Dad always checked his luck before turning to the day’s news.
His existence consisted almost entirely of work, softened only by the life of the temple and active membership in civic organizations like the Probus and Rotary clubs. He carried in his mind an idea of something sweet called success, which in his dreams could take away the bitterness. We, his family, were a part of his life, an essential part, perhaps even his reason for living. But in no way did we seem able to ease his suffering. And at no time did he feel that his success was so secure that he could rest. He always saw the shadow of the wolf out of the corner of his eye.
On Sundays, he’d head over to Water Street. He’d pick up bagels from Lederman’s and lox from Whitman’s, where he always found time to argue with old man Whitman for shaving the salmon too thin. Then, if business had been good that week, he might head over to see the Weintraub brothers and order up a few very lean corned-beef sandwiches, sour pickles, and hear the day’s kibbitz. On the way home, he’d pick up the New York Times from the Broadway. But the Times was for his family to read. He himself only glanced at the paper, which must have been inscrutable to him, except for the Wholesale Offerings section, which he read slowly and with care, looking for the deal that would make him rich.
Abbie, Phyllis, and I always had the latest toys. When we were old enough, Dad took us on trips to New York, where we saw the hottest Broadway shows, paid for by one of the drug companies as a reward for meeting quotas. We lacked for nothing. But we did not know at the time that these outings were expressions of love. So we felt a hollowness, even a coldness, from our parents.
In his autobiography, Abbie compares Dad to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: “A middleman, who carried home each night the great anxiety [that his suppliers would decide to] ‘go direct’ . . . rendering him instantly expendable.” At the time Abbie wrote those words, Miller’s tragedy was his favorite play.
Ida, Ma’s mother, had decided that she didn’t like Dad as soon as he was introduced to her and held to that opinion for the rest of her life. To anyone who’d listen she’d complain that he didn’t have yeches, the Yiddish word for class, good upbringing, culture. On the other hand, the Hoffman family would complain that Ma was no balebosteh, Yiddish for a good homemaker, and would wonder aloud what Dad saw in her.
Dad used to tell his brother that Ma was a good lover. She may have been. But that he would say so tells me more about the world of loneliness that must have separated them than it does about her lovemaking. I remember Ma as quiet, perhaps cowed a little by Dad. She loved us and felt deeply protective of us. But she also felt a kind of discomfort, or perhaps the better word would be resentment. Whether we somehow made her unhappy, or her attitude toward us was only the outward reflection of an inner sorrow, I don’t know. But her words always exhibited a tangle of contradictions. Thus she would say to me, “I love you as much as I love Abbie.” But that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “As much as” was relative, and sounded evasive to my ears. What I wanted was a straight declaration.
Ma didn’t keep order in the house. Beds stayed unmade, dishes piled up in the sink. Ma made dynamite blintzes; otherwise, Dad, Abbie, Phyllis, and I did most of the cooking. But Ma made the house a warm, friendly place to be. And maybe that was more important than keeping it neat.
She used to type our papers for school and talked with us about our ideas as she did. She had a strong social conscience, and it came out in her opinions. She loved the garden we kept at the back of the house. She loved animals, and looked kindly on the ones I was always bringing home—the snakes from the woods nearby, the squirrel monkey I sneaked onto the plane back from Florida one year. When a friend sent me a baby alligator, I kept it in the bathtub, and Ma agreed to let us take sponge baths so as not to disturb it. So in a way, Ma taught us something about respect for life, for life in all its forms, for the spirit of life—something that didn’t exclude people but didn’t have them at its center, either.
Phyllis remembers, when she was seven or eight, that Ma was reading Anna Karenina. Did she see herself as an unfortunate woman, as her mother Ida did, not unlike Tolstoy’s Anna? When Abbie, Phyllis, and I were grown up with kids of our own, Phyllis remembers Ma turning to her and saying, “I wish I had been as good a mother as you are.”
You often felt that deep inside her somewhere there was something that wasn’t right, some way in which she felt at odds with the world around her. I like to think Ma was—not strange or eccentric—but preoccupied.
It was not unusual for her to drive the car into downtown Worcester on some errand and then return by bus, simply leaving the car wherever she had parked it. Phyllis might say these were small actions of protest and that she wasn’t happy with her lot. Yet on Shabbas, in the flickering somber light of the white candles, Ma was the one who set the tone and made sure that time was taken. And I think Ma was happy enough, at peace, as the center of our family, not permitting herself to reflect too much about the reasons behind things.
During our childhood much of her time was taken up by Abbie’s constant demands. He expected her devotion and he got it. As the firstborn son, he could do no wrong. But Abbie too must have hungered after the words of endearment that were not forthcoming.
Our parents lived in the new world, but they were of the old one. They knew how to work, how to learn, and how to improve themselves. They knew the Jewish tradition and believed in America. But we, nurtured by the emotionalism of radio, and later of Hollywood, were already several times removed from the world of our parents.
I don’t think they were even aware that our world existed, filled as it was, even as early as the mid-’50s, with rhythm and blues and expectations of happinesses that had nothing to do with material success.
Sometimes we put a glass to the wall to hear them make love. There was a lot of noise—at first I thought they must be fighting. In my mind, there would never be any link between what I heard those nights and what I later learned, partly from Abbie, about making love.
What I would learn of joy was not something I can imagine them having known. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I underestimate them. I hope so. But I don’t think so. While Abbie, our kid sister Phyllis, and I were growing up, somehow it was understood that some amount of happiness was to be our birthright, the reward for all they had been through.
As early as I can remember, Abbie used to eject me from our shared bed every night with a hard kick. I would climb back in, heavy with the understanding that, as the defeated party, I would now have to accept a smaller area of the mattress.
One day Dad came home with two surplus hospital beds he’d gotten cheap—complete with the then-new Trendelenburg feature, which raised and lowered the upper part. From then on we each had separate beds, which could be made to rise like sea creatures for purposes of war and defense. But we continued to share the room.
Until I was fifteen and he went off to Brandeis, Abbie was stuck with me. I think it suited him to have someone on hand who could serve both as apprentice and audience; I don’t remember feeling in the way much. Abbie was my whole world. Whatever the game, we played by Abbie’s rules.
Abbie wasn’t mean-spirited, and he wasn’t completely fair-minded, either. But I think he always felt he could do something with me, that I was worth bothering with, that I might reward any efforts he made toward setting me on the right track.
There is a friendship between brothers. It’s colder hearted than the love of a parent, but it’s also a lot more direct, and simpler. And something else: You can always make your mark on a brother, you can mold him. He cannot refuse you. The power of a brother over a brother is great and cannot be set aside. It’s almost impossible for an older brother to resist being a bully. And Abbie was no exception. But to make up for his occasional cruelty and more frequent bruising physicality, he was also filled with largesse toward me, his younger brother, and toward our sister Phyllis, often surprising us with gifts or saying things to make us laugh.
In his autobiography, Abbie describes how I always seemed to be right in harm’s way whenever he was wielding a hammer or a golf club.
Jack’s my younger brother. Not an easy thing. If we were building a tree hut and the hammer fell, Jack’s head was always somewhere beneath, waiting. If I was swinging a golf club driving golf balls into yonder neighbors’ windows, for some reason Jack always managed to straighten the tee at the right moment to get a whack.2
My memory differs from his. Where he was willing to summarize our relationship, willing almost to reduce it to comic-strip proportions, I remember it as complex and changing. I suppose that difference in perspective is typical between a younger and an older brother.
Memory erases pain, and sometimes early pain is transformed into something we later cherish. Once when Abbie was about eight and Phyllis three, Abbie hoisted her on to his shoulders to pilfer some candy from Uncle Schmule’s ration kit hidden in a high cabinet in the kitchen. Afterward, Abbie unintentionally pushed our little sister into a radiator, cutting her head open. Years later, when a cosmetic surgeon suggested removing the scar, Phyllis, by then a lovely, mature young woman, refused, because the scar helped her remember her brother.
One day while Abbie and I were wrestling, Abbie kneed me in the nuts. The combination of pain and the sense of betrayal I felt left me bawling. After something terrible like that, Abbie would lead me back upstairs to our bedroom, our private domain, and spend an hour teaching me to play chess. Not out of pity, but perhaps with an instinctive knowledge that the moment of defeat was among the ripest moments for instruction. In chess he taught me that you’ve got to think seven moves ahead. When you’re playing a guy who’s thinking only three moves ahead, you’re going to beat the shit out of him. Until I was about twelve, we played frequently, sometimes daily. Eventually, I improved by his instruction to the point where I could give him a game. Then he changed the rules to ten seconds a move. One day I beat him at ten-second chess, and he never played against me again.
Later I learned what it meant to play by Abbie’s rules. We were playing mini-football tackle in the living room. As soon as he hiked the ball to me, I called for a quick kick—not something you usually did in living-room ball—and immediately kicked the ball into Abbie’s teeth. With blood filling his mouth, Abbie had the good sportsmanship to giggle and then laugh out loud. He didn’t mind being beaten. He loved a street fight, win or lose. Once every decade or so for the rest of his life, on occasions when we were together, Abbie would bare the chipped tooth, smile, and remind me of the day.
I wouldn’t know how to explain the intensity of the occasional flashes of violence, except to say that at such moments the rage we felt was as real as the love was at other times. We weren’t timid or repressed about expressing anger. It came, then passed and was forgotten.
One of the reasons you couldn’t hate Abbie for long was that, although he was strong for his size, and fearless, he had remained a sickly child. Later in life he tried to hide his frailty. His need to overcompensate may have added to the urgency with which he liked to jump into the middle of things; Abbie could never sit on the sidelines and wasn’t afraid to get hurt. But those of us who knew him well weren’t usually fooled. I think I worried about him most when he wasn’t complaining about anything, because I knew that often meant he was hurting bad.
Often, Abbie’s asthma attacks were horribly frightening. “I’m having an attack,” he’d say, becoming pale, his breathing coming in fits. Abbie said it was like having two tons weighing on his chest, or like being in a vise. Whenever the attacks came, they brought our world to a sudden standstill. If we were on vacation, as far away as Maine, we simply came home to Worcester. Eventually, we got used to traveling with an emergency oxygen supply. Even so, Abbie usually ended up spending a couple days in the hospital two or three times a year, with a big tank of oxygen by his bedside.
In the earliest photos of Abbie and me, he is looking at the camera and I am looking at him. He is laughing, his teeth visible right up to the molars; I am smiling up at him, my mouth lightly closed.
Parts of that model would crumble. There are photos of us in later years with both of us looking into the lens and neither of us smiling; more significantly, I eventually grew to a height several inches taller than Abbie, which was perhaps the only thing for which he never forgave me. But part of that first image of the pair of us would endure like a rock. Even today, with my brother absent, he is my phantom self, and I almost constantly feel twitches of pain or pleasure that are rightly his. Unthinkingly, my mouth lightly closes and I am reassured by the feeling that he is there, beside me or in another state, but there, grinning; and each time the shock is repeated when I remember that he is gone.
From the way he put it in his book, “Jack’s my younger brother. Not an easy thing . . .” you’d almost think that by the mid-’70s when, as a fugitive, he wrote those words, my brother felt guilty about what I had to put up with as his younger brother. Maybe he did . . . Even as a kid, Abbie never let us down if he could help it, and our expectations of him—mine, Phyllis’s, and our parents’—were always of greater things to come.