The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography Read Free

peritonitis exacerbated by a ten-day siege of hiccups during which he was unable to sleep or to keep down food. After he’d lost nearly thirty pounds, his shrunken face disclosed itself to us as a replica of my elderly grandmother’s, the face of the mother whom he and all his brothers adored (toward the father—laconic, authoritarian, remote, an immigrant who’d trained in Galicia to be a rabbi but worked in America in a hat factory—their feelings were more confused). Bertha Zahnstecker Roth was a simple old-country woman, good-hearted, given to neither melancholy nor complaint, yet her everyday facial expression made it plain that she nursed no illusions about life’s being easy. My father’s resemblance to his mother would not appear so eerily again until he himself reached his eighties, and then only when he was in the grip of a struggle that stripped an otherwise physically youthful old man of his seeming impregnability, leaving him bewildered not so much because of the eye problem or the difficulty with his gait that had made serious inroads on his self-sufficiency but because he felt all at once abandoned by that masterful accomplice and overturner of obstacles, his determination.
    When he was driven home from Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital after six weeks in bed there, he barely had the strength, even with our assistance, to make it up the short back staircase to our second-story apartment. It was December 1944 by then, a cold winter day, but through the windows the sunlight illuminated my parents’ bedroom. Sandy and I came in to talk to him, both of us shy and grateful and, of course, stunned by how helpless he appeared seated weakly in a lone chair in the corner of the room. Seeing his sons together like that, my father could no longer control himself and began to sob. He was alive, the sun was shining, his wife was not widowed nor his boys fatherless—family life would now resume. It was not so complicated that an eleven-year-old couldn’t understand his father’s tears. I just didn’t see, as he so clearly could, why or how it should have turned out differently.
    I knew only two boys in our neighborhood whose families were fatherless, and thought of them as no less blighted than the blind girl who attended our school for a while and had to be read to and shepherded everywhere. The fatherless boys seemed almost equally marked and set apart; in the aftermath of their fathers’ deaths, they too struck me as scary and a little taboo. Though one was a model of obedience and the other a troublemaker, everything either of them did or said seemed determined by his being a boy with a dead father and, however innocently I arrived at this notion, I was probably right.
    I knew no child whose family was divided by divorce. Outside of the movie magazines and the tabloid headlines, it didn’t exist, certainly not among Jews like us. Jews didn’t get divorced—not because divorce was forbidden by Jewish law but because that was the way they were. If Jewish fathers didn’t come home drunk and beat their wives—and in our neighborhood, which was Jewry to me, I’d never heard of any who did—that too was because of the way they were. In our lore, the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility. Regardless of internal friction and strife, it was assumed to be an indissoluble consolidation. Hear, O Israel, the family is God, the family is One.
    Family indivisibility, the first commandment.
    In the late 1940s, when my father’s younger brother, Bernie, proclaimed his intention of divorcing the wife of nearly twenty years who was the mother of his two daughters, my mother and father were as stunned as if they’d heard that he’d killed somebody. Had Bernie committed murder and gone to jail for life, they would probably have rallied behind him despite the abominable, inexplicable deed. But when he made up his mind not merely to divorce but to do