The Scientists: A Family Romance

by Marco Roth Narrated by Michael Goldstrom

Overview

This is a frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir.

With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician-from the time he could get his toddler tongue to pronounce deoxyribonucleic acid, or recite a French poem-Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s.

What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how growing up quickly can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review

The Scientists is an act of love—a circumspect, often bitter, always studious love—and thus an act of both filial piety and defiance.
—Jessica Winter

Publishers Weekly

In this powerfully forlorn debut memoir, literary critic Roth mines the silence and shame he experienced growing up on Central Park West in the 1980s and ’90s as his scientist father died of AIDS. Never allowed to reveal to anyone at his elite Dalton School the truth of his father’s debilitating health, which the young only child was told had resulted from a freak needle accident with an infected patient in his father’s malaria research lab at Mount Sinai Hospital, the author tried to assume the normalcy enacted by his mother, a pianist and artists’ grants writer, yet the adolescent was haunted by his own sense of inadequacy and inability to save his father. Before he died in 1993, when the author was 19, the father, an old-school liberal Jewish New Yorker exquisitely educated in literature and the arts, had imparted some of his favorite books to his son, like Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and Goncharov’s Oblomov: these became clues to Roth’s own unhappiness and dissatisfaction while in college at Oberlin, then Columbia, and provided precious emotional links with his father. The publication of his aunt Anne Roiphe’s memoir 1185 Park Avenue, essentially outing her brother (Roth’s father) as a homosexual, floored the author, and he tried to get at the truth, both from his aunt and from his mother, which eluded him. Roth’s work is a ferocious literary exercise in rage, despair, and artistic self-invention. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Riveting...Part mystery, part tragedy, part spiritual and intellectual biography. It's beautifully written and as honest as a book can be.” —Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

“A gorgeous memoir no one will be able to put down.” —Mary Karr, author of Lit

“The Scientists is an act of love—a circumspect, often bitter, always studious love.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An unsentimental backward glance...This slim, fierce meditation takes readers into realms where more emotional, confessional tales rarely tread.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“Circuitous, elegant, and fiercely intelligent...With the wisdom of a good reader and the humility of a lost soul, Mr. Roth sorts through the mess of his past—in order to plot his escape from it.” —The Economist

“Beautifully intelligent and moving...A literary detective story and also an object lesson in the way the self can be constituted by literature.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“An exquisitely written and intensely interior book, one that eschews the contemporary memoir's penchant for epiphanies, redemption, and tidy resolutions...Extraordinary.” —Laura Miller, Salon

“This is the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional—an education for our times.” —Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review

“Marco Roth's memoir is a farewell to a bygone Jewish American culture—polyglot, intellectual, Europhile, psychoanalytic—and simultaneously a renewal of that culture. It's both moving and tough-minded, a book of high intellect and deep feeling the like of which nobody else could write.” —Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision

“The Scientists manages to recuperate for our time a certain kind of personal, idiosyncratic, private writing that moves at the speed of an actual very high intelligence. No one in our generation has written anything like this.” —Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

“The Scientists is...not simply a perceptive and highly literary memoir but a book about attempting to uncover the mystery of a father's life after his death, and the posthumous intimacy that forms.” —Alexander Aciman, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] beautifully sharp memoir...Marco Roth turns his analytical eye on the culturally rich milieu of his upbringing and the mode of education he received within the walls of his home...The Scientists is composed with the same analytical eye for influence that the critic has brought to the table as an editor and writer for n+1. A less diligent memoirist might have easily restricted this meditation on retrospective reading to more defensive, sentimental territory, and Roth's acknowledgment of the uncertainty of his purpose is commendable both for its bravery and its awareness...The Scientists is still, at its most fundamental, a family romance: elegiac, rife with frustrations of desire and secrecy...Roth's prose, which has been well tuned by years of academic writing and meticulous study of literary classics, is luminous and graceful. His gift for building plot from domestic drama is similarly patent; his story is gripping, and The Scientists: A Family Romance is a burning work, alive with all the romantic potentials one would expect of a canonical classic—or, better yet, of a family life lived deeply, richly, and painfully.” —Ryan Sheldon, Blomblog

“This book is suffused with real pain...The best things in The Scientists are Mr. Roth's spiny meditations on sex and ambition and family and love and death. The sound this book makes is the sound of a keen mind on shuffle. He strongly evokes a generational sense of malaise...[The Scientists] lingers in the cranium.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Roth's prose evokes a calm, contemplative feel, with occasional flights of poetic fancy...The Scientists is at its strongest as Roth tries to unravel the mystery of his father. That relationship, fraught as it is, brings forth Roth's humanist side, as he tries not only to understand his father, but also to redeem him...The Scientists evinces a compelling portrait of the intellectual as a young man.” —Viet Dinh, Lambda Literary

“Marco Roth's affecting memoir The Scientists...evokes that world of intellectuals, Oriental rugs and a postwar highbrow aesthetic of Schubert, Turgenev and Mann. This is less of a confessional memoir than a fiercely intellectual one, but that's not to say it's not emotionally powerful...This unsentimental memoir is a cautionary tale about hyper-intellectualism in which emotional life is at the back of the bus.” —Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune (Editor's Choice)

“Roth brings a wistful dryness to his work; he is relaxed in the peculiar details of a story that limns much of what is universal between fathers and sons...Here a strange, perfectionist family becomes worth pondering. The Scientists produced a son worth knowing.” —Karen R. Long, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“To the extent that lucid, self-lacerating prose can break a cycle of frustrations, The Scientists is a literary triumph.” —Steven G. Kellman, Forward

“Profound, intricate, literary, a little gossipy and more than a little heartbreaking—such is Marco Roth's echt New York memoir, The Scientists . . . Far from confessional, Roth's exploration is tough-minded, beautifully written, sometimes wry and self-mocking and always faithful to the complexities of his own feeling an thinking, his own failures and frailties.” —Elizabeth Benedict, Huffington Post

“What makes The Scientists singularly brave is not the nature of its disclosures but the fact that Roth, a great writer, risked appearing mercenary or opportunistic in order to write it. He staked his relatively young reputation on the belief that he could convey absolute honesty and resist the impulse to curry sympathy or self-mythologize. At times Roth comes off poorly—overly sensitive, or too eager to think where he might feel—but it is a measure of his honesty that he never seems oblivious to his faults. In revisiting experiences more painful than many of his readers will ever have to endure, he is incapable of weakness or insincerity...One marvels at Roth's inner life, which he has rendered so richly. If one begins this book asking, ‘Just who does he think he is?' that reader will certainly finish it thinking, ‘Glad I asked.'” —Stefan Beck, Barnes and Noble Review

“The Scientists is...a book worth reading...The memoir is at once about the process of maturation, and an example of how to write...intelligent and emotionally moving. More importantly, The Scientists is a brave and honest examination of shifting cultural values, liberal hypocrisy, and privileged guilt. Above all else, it is an exploration of the best way to live one's life—which is, after all, the very point of literature.” —The Coffin Factory

“A lyrical depiction of education, family relationships, self-knowledge, and ‘a culture that believes no one should suffer, least of all in public.'” —The New Yorker

“[The Scientists] is a moving exercise in literary detective work.” —Aaron Hicklin, Out Magazine

“Nothing seems embellished in The Scientists. Roth wasn't looking to tell a coming-of-age story or write a book that feeds into his idea that the modern reader views literature as ‘spectacle'—as he wrote in a 2006 issue of n+1. Roth's concern with The Scientists is to tell his story, the story of a dark period in his life and the way he coped with it. He isn't trying to feed juicy pieces of gossip to sell the book, rather he takes the brave step of telling his story the only way he seems able to, and it has paid off in dividends by the time you finally close it.” —Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“The Scientists: A Family Romance is a profound memoir.” —Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch

“[Roth is] self-aware, perceptive and soulful...[The Scientists] feels wisely grounded. It's an elegy not just for a lost parent but for what Roth's bio calls ‘the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side.'” —Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

OCTOBER 2012 - AudioFile

Roth’s introspective memoir turns around his relationship with his father, a medical researcher, both before and after the elder Roth’s death from AIDS. Narrator Michael Goldstrom’s voice is engaging and comfortable to listen to. He reads at a good pace, with great sensitivity to the text and with such naturalness that it’s easy to forget he’s not the author telling his own story. Though we necessarily share Roth’s point of view and he writes with a saving irony, some of his thoughts and behavior may seem selfish, foolish, or cold, tending to distance the listener. But Goldstrom delivers what could have been harsh or lugubrious material with a soft touch, keeping the listener intimately involved and sympathetic. It’s an affecting performance of a sometimes bleak work. W.M. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

The debut memoir about the formative years of a New York intellectual who tells his story out of "a more-than-ordinary fear of reliving [his] past elsewhere." The only son of a medical scientist and a concert pianist, literary critic and n+1 founder Roth grew up in an Upper-West-Side atmosphere where reciting the classics and learning about biology with his father were the norm. Just as he was about to enter high school, he discovered that his father, who claimed to have contracted HIV through laboratory exposure many years before, was dying of AIDS. The family home soon became a suffocating space of denial where "the important thing was to behave as though nothing were wrong." At the same time, Roth's father developed a morbid interest both in the scientific literature about HIV-AIDS and in sharing the information dispassionately with his son. The author made halfhearted attempts to escape by attending Oberlin College, but he returned to New York on pain of being cut from his father's will. After his father's death, Roth traveled to Paris, ostensibly to study with Jacques Derrida, but more to find release from the ghost of his father. Upon his return, his father's sister presented him with a manuscript in which she alluded to her brother's homosexuality. Her claims caused Roth to begin an investigation of his father's life through the novels that the elder Roth had given him. Eventually, he uncovered the truths his father could not articulate. As a study of the relationship between literature and life, the book is intriguing, but the critical literary perspective Roth brings to the subject at times translates as a lack of emotional engagement.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169897517
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/18/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

 

The couch where my father died was also the couch where he taught me to read. I might as well start there: my alphas and his omega joined by a piece of furniture. It was a white sofa bed, pushed up against a wall the color of late summer nights. The room was supposed to be the apartment’s dining room, but served more as my father’s library. Sitting on the couch you faced two twelve-foot-tall bookcases, crammed to the top, with a third just like them on the right. The books both beckoned and frightened. Some of them were forbidden, placed high up on the top tier, after my mother once caught me leafing through a three-volume German history of the Second World War and its trove of Nazi photographs: glorious flamethrowers, the parade of tanks, the piles of corpses like so many broken dolls. Other books I didn’t want to see at all. The cover of something called Freddy’s Book showed a horned, hairy, and goat-footed man, hanging in a thicket of thorns.

“’Tis the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil,” my father quoted at me, when I asked him to move it or turn the spine around. So the book stayed there, an object of dread, to admonish and terrify me until I grew brave enough to take it and read. It turned out to be a fairy tale about a misshapen but very human monster, a sort of Frankenstein’s creature, who learned, in the somewhat happy end, to live with his deformities.

It wasn’t a completely comfortable couch. The raised stitches on the cushion covers and armrests made it look hand-knit, but they left lines on bare flesh. I used to pick at the knots of fabric whenever bored or anxious during our weekend lessons. “Don’t destroy it,” my father said. English came first. The primer of choice, or at least the one I remember first actually being able to read, was called Nobody Listens to Andrew. The illustrations were Dick-and-Jane-like, a crew-cut boy in knickerbockers, girls in frocks with bows and neatly parted hair. The story, however, was not. Because nobody did listen to Andrew. He was just a boy with a busy family, a father who read the newspaper and smoked a pipe, older siblings, and in the end, maybe, Andrew ran away for an afternoon, or hid out in the treehouse in the backyard, or perhaps there was a bear lurking and he tried to warn everyone, but no one listened, turning it into an inverted version of the boy who cried wolf, a parable for a more responsive generation of parents. I never knew where my father found the book or why he’d picked it out. It didn’t make much sense to me. I was an only child and everyone seemed to be listening to me all the time.

These first lessons were followed quickly by French, the seventeenth-century fabulist La Fontaine, “La Cigale ayant chanté tout l’été,” we read together. Then I’d recite the tale of the ant and the grasshopper back at him, four lines at a time. That was classical education: “Repetition is the mother of memory,” my father quoted again, as I stumbled over the lines at first. I kept up, eager to please, waiting to catch him in a secret smile of approval. Repetition may have been the mother, but my memory had a very visible father. Sometimes I was attentive, other times, leaning back, I’d run an imaginary rat through the maze of interconnected honeycomb moldings on the ceiling. Staring down, I’d idly trace the arabesques of the Persian rug with my toe.

When my wandering attention finally convinced him no further progress was possible, my father released me to entertain myself. I skipped off across the dining room along the carpet’s red rhomboid medallions, making myself go back to the beginning if I missed a step, then jumped from peacock to antelope along the hallway’s animal carpet until I reached the open arch leading to the enormous rectangle my parents called “the living room,” although we really used it as a music room. It was barely furnished: a small seating area with a couch and glass coffee table at one end and the piano and stereo system at the other. The far wall was a bank of six windows looking out onto Central Park.

Weekend afternoons, two or three times a year, the room filled with a group of Chinese, Chileans, Poles, Italians, the random Yugoslav, and Jews from New York’s five boroughs, my father’s favored colleagues from the hematology and epidemiology divisions of various New York hospitals. I was put in charge of opening our front door to the arriving guests, who included elderly couples with Middle European accents from around the neighborhood, the shaggy poet who lived in the apartment across the hall, my mother’s musician friends. They sat on the rented chairs I’d sometimes help unfold and listen to a string quartet run through the program they would play at Lincoln Center the following week, or a recital of a Schubert song cycle, or, once, a brass quintet my father had discovered busking outside in the park. Their trumpets shook the windows and left our ears ringing.

I looked for my mother’s curls bobbing up behind the pianist’s shoulder as she turned pages, then I searched the rows, trying to catch a cue as to how the music was going by reading the faces around me. If someone met my stare, I’d shyly switch to where my father sat on the edge of a black armchair, trying to meet his eyes, gray behind his oversized black-framed glasses. He hunched forward, his chin cupped in his palm during particularly complicated passages, the lines on his broad forehead creasing, his broad lips pulsing gently, as if he were keeping himself from humming along. He was overweight in those days, a pudge of stomach visible when I caught sight of him in profile as he greeted guests, his upper arms rolled with what I now recognize as fat instead of muscle. I no doubt thought of him as bigger than he actually was. Although a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two, when he stood up at the end of the concert to thank the musicians and invite everyone for hors d’oeuvres he seemed, for that moment, to command the room. The rare moment when he stood next to my mother at the end of the evening, in the entrance foyer, as they saw our guests to the door, he seemed even taller. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder.

When no one was around, the living room was a lost continent, an America I could enter only by swimming across an expanse of open parquet until I’d reached a small kilim at the center. In quieter moods, I would lie on one of the rugs reading D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths or, absurdly—as it seems now—the Signet Classics editions of Shakespeare’s history plays my father gave me after he’d taken me to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at the old Thalia movie theater on Ninety-fifth Street. The seats at the Thalia sloped upward, the front row higher than the back row, in a way that forced your eyes to the top of the screen. I remember the battle scenes, the knights hoisted onto their horses by cranes, the whooshing flights of English arrows, and not much else. I cannot now tell what possible good it did me to lie there, warmed by the sun streaming over the trees, reading Shakespeare uncomprehendingly, making sure to ignore the notes. I lingered over the mysterious list called “Dramatis Personae.” When I got further, I read mostly for the plot. I had perverse rooting interests, an odd sympathy for the murderous Richard III. Iambic pentameters did not come flowing out of my mouth. I was about eight or nine.

I’d lie on the carpet underneath my mother’s Steinway B. It was a warm place. If my mother came in to play a Scarlatti sonata, for instance, or the accompaniment for a Schubert song, I’d listen while feeling the vibrations of chords and the thump of pedals push through me. Cadences and phrases flowed and mingled somehow with the patterns of the carpets. My father had brought most of them back from Iran and Lebanon when he’d traveled there in the early 1960s, but I ignored their provenance. They were as eternal to me as meadows, and they were my meadows. Peacefully, I’d continue to draw out, in the weavings, what I was sure must be the music I couldn’t yet read, according to some secret law of association now beyond recall.

My father wandered through and sat on a sofa at the opposite end of the room underneath a giant oak-framed mirror that doubled the space. I’d watch him and my mother’s reflection as she managed her small hands and petite frame around the keyboard’s widest intervals with only the rarest flaw. “She plays beautifully, your mother,” he’d say to me, rarely complimenting her directly. This way of mediating kindness through me confirmed my sense that I was the center of our family life. Of course he could simply have been performing an object lesson in kindness, telling me how much my mother needed to be praised. She did need to be praised and she did play beautifully, although no longer professionally, and then no longer even semiprofessionally, and then, gradually, hardly at all.

Who was to say if all this was good or bad? I was the definition of “precocious,” which probably pleased my parents, but nobody feels precocious at that age. The mixed shame and pride of standing out only comes later. When I learned to recite “The Crow and the Fox,” in French, or repeated a joke in a Yiddish accent to family guests, or sat straight, with my hands folded at concerts, in imitation of the grown-ups I observed around me, it was because I could do these things, make a game out of them. I also knew my father would be ashamed of me if I didn’t do them. I grew used to an imperfect understanding, a shadow of meaning that fell across the pages as I turned them, incomprehensible directions, a sense of an always wider world simultaneously close to my grasp and beyond it.

I hid myself in the front hall closet, closed my eyes, and pushed against the coats, going deeper, reenacting the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, waiting for the moment when the hangers became tree branches and my mother’s inherited furs became talking versions of the creatures they once were, live to the touch. I discovered I could give myself the illusion of a greater distance than was there by closing my eyes and reaching out into the darkness, expecting to brush the wall and thrilled when I didn’t.

Other gaps frightened me: between the “train and the platform,” as the subway conductors announced, also between the elevator and the landing. Our building’s was an old elevator and didn’t always stop perfectly, leaving a step up or step down and a glimpse into the shaft’s void. I dreamed often of a world between the floors. Riding alone, I’d be let out somewhere that was like our hallway but not our hallway, the walls a darker shade. The people inside were not my parents. They were like them but older, and they kept cats, which we didn’t, because they made the apartment smell like pee. “I live on the fourth floor,” I’d say. “But where’s that?” they’d say. Oh, I must be on the other side of the building, I thought. My mother was always talking about people on the “other side”—the building was in fact divided into North and South sides, joined by the common back stairway and landings where we left our garbage for the maintenance staff to carry down in the freight elevator they sometimes let me operate—so I guessed this was what she meant. The strangers would then let me out onto the back stairs, which turned into a narrow crawl space, the light growing dimmer behind me as I pushed on in the dark.

My mother remembers my childhood as a happy time. We were each of us alone together without rivalry or loneliness, restlessness or fear. The apartment was our temple: like the old Penn Station and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but scaled down for domestic life. The architects had balanced openness and views over the park with cloistered spaces like my parents’ upstairs bedroom and the kitchen, once reserved for servants, where the three of us clustered to eat at one end of a thick-grained table meant to seat eight. Under the high ceilings, even the heaviest pieces of mahogany furniture had only a friendly solidity to them, as if planted rather than placed.

My parents bought the apartment at the 88 Central Park West co-op in 1969 for $135,000. The Upper West Side then was an up-and-coming neighborhood, still considered edgy and derelict in places. Lincoln Center had recently been completed. Along Sixty-ninth street, musicians and teachers in cheap brownstone tenement apartments shared stoops with working-class Irish and Puerto Ricans who’d moved on up from Hell’s Kitchen. The doormen lived a couple of blocks away, as did the cabdrivers; their parked, off-duty hacks punctuated the drab side streets with cheerful yellows. We met their children in a playground made of concrete-and-wood copies of ancient structures: a ziggurat boasting a slide, a Greek amphitheater for a sprinkler, a sandbox contained within the concentric rings of a Saxon hill fort. For the first few years, my parents’ fellow co-op board members included a painter, a well-known poet and professor, a theater actress, a few doctors and lawyers, and several elderly and well-off Jewish refugees who had managed to escape Europe in the 1930s.

Maybe it was the early bourgeois bohemian character of the building or the fact that my father then earned only a modest researcher’s salary at the Bronx public hospital where he also taught medical students, and had spent a fair amount of the money he’d inherited on his mother’s death to buy the apartment—or simply that he’d grown up on the then-fashionable East Side, on Park Avenue—“The most boring street in the world,” he called it—but, for some reason, he insisted we were “middle class.” This phrase echoed through my childhood. It explained why we did not own a country house in the Berkshires or the Hamptons, like my friends’ parents. It explained why my parents voted Democrat, why my father drove four-door Japanese compact cars, and why, instead of shopping for his suits at Saks or having them custom-made, he bought them, ill-fitting as they were, at Syms. It explained many things and also nothing at all, although it crucially shaped my sense of social justice. If “middle class” meant large apartments on Central Park West, then there was no reason why such housing shouldn’t be available to most of us, in a truly egalitarian society. It was only logical.

For my father, the phrase invoked an acceptance of one’s limitations as much as anything else. We were, according to him, a family of average height, average means, average talents distributed evenly, and average ambition. He said this one day shortly after I brought home my first low math grade, when I was twelve. I thought I heard a false note in this determined paean to mediocrity. Even earlier, I’d understood there were people my father called “Philistines”: people who didn’t listen to classical music, who watched sports on television, like my mother’s father, people who were ignorant of world history like my father’s sister, and who didn’t care for art or literature like my mother’s brother, an engineer; there were those who “preferred Coca-Cola to champagne,” as my father wistfully said when Reagan beat Mondale (quoting Adlai Stevenson when he lost to Eisenhower). I’d seen actual, historical Philistines in my illustrated history of the Jews, “sea peoples,” the book mysteriously called them, with beards, cruel faces, and spears, who worshipped fish-shaped gods like the one in my coloring book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I knew these people were the historical enemies of the Jews, that I was a Jew of some kind, though not the synagogue-going kind, or the Zionist kind, either; that although the Philistines outnumbered the Jews, the Jews still sometimes defeated them, as David defeated Goliath, and as Samson had, with the jawbone of the ass. It seemed then that my father meant me to be one of these Jewish heroes with unruly, curly hair like Samson’s, to resist these invaders who’d brought him such grief.

Besides the Philistines, there were people my father denounced passionately as hypocrites. There were a lot of those: people who cared about school only for status or money; people who went to synagogue to show off their clothes, their daughters; people who talked about justice but wanted power or money or status, also called lawyers, like our distant cousin, Roy Cohn, the head lawyer for Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. I knew a few other things about our family, things he’d begun to tell me—not directly, not exactly. They were legends, like the stories in the Bible, as remote from our lives as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

There had been a poor man, once upon a time, Moses Philips, my great, great grandfather, selling bits of cloth from a pushcart on the Lower East Side. The poor man was a clever man, an industrious man, and his pushcart begat several pushcarts which begat a company that supplied material for shirts and so begat in its turn a company that made shirts my father never wore, Philips Van Heusen. The man had a son who took over the business. He moved from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of Park Avenue, and that son sired a son of his own to take over the business, and also, as in a fairy tale, three daughters. The eldest married the heir to a paper company, the middle daughter married a banker, and the youngest married for love, a tall young lawyer, a sturdy swimmer and athlete born in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately, my grandfather was no hero or charming prince; he was a Grimms-tale schemer, marrying for money. They had two children, my father the younger by four years.

He had been sent to private schools he didn’t like and summer camps he hated. Boy Scouts were children dressed like fools led by fools dressed like children. A gentleman was a man with an expensive tie. A cousin of his was sent to military school for fighting a bully who’d been beating up my father. I’d learned that their world, both our world and not our world, the world he escaped from, was full of phonies, vulgarians, and frauds. Those people were not “middle class.” My very name, European, ending in a vowel, my father once explained, was intended to be a symbolic break with those people who’d tried so hard to make my father “a real American.” He’d been a junior to his father’s senior, named after him while he was still alive, a deliberate affront to Jewish custom. This act of base assimilation, my father complained, robbed him of his identity before he’d even had one.

This, my father told me emphatically, was not to be my fate. According to my mother, he used to hold me aloft when I was a baby and say, “You are a person.” He would say this to me later, too, although with various inflections. It was such an obvious statement, I was totally mystified by it. What else could I be? I was an only child of the “Free to Be You and Me” generation—despite my parents’ distrust of popular music, we actually owned the record, the one where Mel Brooks is the voice of a baby girl who thinks she’s a boy, William finally gets a doll, and fussy princesses get devoured by cannibals (“‘Ladies first,’ she said, and so she was, and mighty tasty too.”).

“Free to Be” was an odd mantra for my childhood, especially because there were so many kinds of people my father obviously disapproved of. According to him, he’d basically given up on his own family when he was thirteen, reinventing himself as a changeling. He first did this through religion, plunging into his bar mitzvah studies. He’d briefly turned Orthodox and learned Yiddish, in 1952, well before the Yiddish revival movement became part of a more distant generation’s nostalgia for lost roots. He spoke it largely to provoke his family, who had left behind both their language and sincere religious observance as remnants of the old country, reminders of the poverty and oppression they had escaped as though fleeing Egypt.

By rebelling through a resuscitation of history and discarded traditions, rather than by embracing the emerging counterculture of drugs and jazz—perhaps because this rebellion happened so early in his youth, before he had complete freedom of the New York streets—my father also, unintentionally, brought himself into conflict with what would become the dominant trends of American counterculture. The ordinary symbols of American rebelliousness were anathema to him. When the rhythms of the weekend drum circles in Central Park pulsed through our windows, my father declared it was “jungle music” for “shvartsers,” rock and roll was so much screaming or “geschrei-ing,” even the avant-garde, contemporary classical music my mother began to take an interest in was only fraudulent noise.

As part of my middle-class childhood, my parents sent me to a half-French, half-English school, just across Central Park from us, on Sixty-second Street off Fifth Avenue. The Fleming School, despite its fancy location, was actually a daring experiment for its time and place, and middle class in exactly the way my father used the term. It was a small school—no more than two hundred children in kindergarten through eighth grade—overshadowed both by the Lycée Français, an official outpost of the French state educational system, and the richer and more pedigreed New York private primary schools, like the Ethical Culture School, where my father had been sent as a child. Ethical Culture had since moved within four blocks of our apartment, but he refused to send me, just as he refused to send me to Hebrew school, or summer sports camps, as had been done to him. I was going to be my own person.

 

Copyright © 2012 by Marco Roth

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