Roy’s father was born on August 13, 1910, in the village of Siret, in what following World War II became Romania, close to the border of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, he moved with his family to Vienna, the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were Austrian citizens. In 1917, the family resided at number five Zirkusgasse in the neighborhood of Leopoldstadt, near the ferris wheel in Luna Park Roy would first glimpse in director Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Roy’s grandfather’s profession as listed in the Vienna city directory of that year was printer. The Great War ended in December of 1918, at which point the family—father, two sons, one daughter, mother—made their way to Czernowitz, where they remained until April 1921, when they left for Antwerp, Belgium, from which port they took ship on the 14th of that month aboard the S.S. Finland bound for New York. From New York City they continued to Chicago, Illinois, where the family established residence for the remainder of their lives. They were Jews, fortunate to escape Europe before the Nazis perpetrated their murderous campaign to expunge the race from the continent.
Roy’s father, who died at the age of forty-eight on December 5, 1958, not quite two months after Roy’s twelfth birthday, never spoke to him of his Austrian childhood, nor did Roy ever hear him speak either German or Yiddish, as his father did. (Roy’s grandmother died before he was born.) He became an American, a Chicagoan, and a criminal who was arrested several times for receiving stolen property and violations of the Volstead Act, known as Prohibition, during the years when the sale of liquor was illegal in the United States. His longest jail term was one year. Roy was, therefore, by birth a first-generation American, the son of a gangster who died young. Like his father, Roy eventually made his own way without much help. He wanted to know where his father came from, so he travelled first to Vienna, later to Romania, and found out. What Roy discovered did not surprise him; what did surprise him was that among those who had been closest to him, Roy was alone in his interest: neither his brother nor his mother particularly cared. Roy was not sure why he thought they would.
For Roy, the question that remained was why, during the twelve years he knew him, his father chose never to share with him any information, let alone details, of his or his immediate family’s pre-American existence. As William Faulkner famously stated, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.” This was a sentiment with which Roy agreed, and so he hated knowing that he would never know.
For his seventh birthday, in 1953, on an unseasonably cold and snowy October afternoon in Chicago, Roy’s mother took him and a few of his friends to see the movie Phantom from Space. It was in black and white and the title figure could appear and disappear at will; one moment visible to earthlings, invisible the next. This is how Roy’s father remained in his memory, a kind of phantom, there but not there, and no longer here; not enough for Roy.