A Meditation on Fatherhood (And a Lack Thereof)
A Father's Day Card
Having been dead to my father for decades, my father’s father’s (never my grandfather) was now nearly dead to everyone. And I wish this were the story of how I flew into Israel, unplugged him from his life support and stopped him from cheating death the same way he had my grandmother. But I am not that man and this is not that story.
This was supposed to be a father’s day card, but I cannot talk about my father without talking about his father. And my father cannot talk about his father without a faraway look of pain settling into his expression. So, I will endeavor to describe a man I never met to explain the man I know so well.
He was never introduced to me–intentionally–as I would later come to find. As a child, I knew that he existed, haunting Israel corporeally, but there was no life present in a man described only in past tense. When I posed follow up questions to my father, he would explain tersely that his father was “dead to him.” Certainly the excommunication of a parent is immensely personal, and the detached lucidity of his tone warned me not to dig into his stony exterior.
My only exposure to a quarter of the grandparently love to which I felt so entitled were bygone, sun-scarred photos of a family smiling inauthentically. I raged against this man even though I had never sized him up in person. Instead, my understanding of him was limited to a patchwork quilt cobbled together from scraps of anecdotes delivered from frown-lined faces tilted sinistrally in remembrance.
But it is hard to hate a man you have never known–especially one who might be the key to understanding the origins of the Hochberg-ian anxiety with which I am so painfully familiar. To that end, I began to sneak questions to my dad while his hands were occupied, figuring his brain’s defense mechanisms would be weakened in times of physical activity. My hypothesis proven correct, I was able to gain deeper insight into this man my father had excised from his life, learning precisely why he had never been allowed into my own.
By profession, a vain biochemistry professor who never earned the Nobel prize he was so certain he deserved, at home, an exacting presence that dominated my father’s psyche. A violent man who ruled his children with hand permanently half-cocked in threat, my dad’s two siblings were spared by virtue of birth order: his older brother having already fled the house, his younger sister protected on account of her age and gender. Caught in the middle, my father faced the brunt of his force, his brain most deeply penetrated by those barbed tendrils of paternal influence. A victim of his own success, he sacrificed three futile years going to the best medical school in Israel in search of his father’s approval before realizing he did not want to become a doctor.
My grandparent’s contentious marriage was finally fractured courtesy of his affair with his much younger lab assistant. The man had suffered from crippling self doubt and recurrent panic attacks, only surviving his doctoral program with the support of my grandmother, yet he still cheated on her in this way. An event that culminated with my grandmother scrawling “adulterer” on the back of his collared shirt in lipstick, leading to public embarrassment. Returning home, he tried to raise his hand against her, leading to my father and his brother having to physically restrain him and exorcize him from their family home. These events transpired right as my father reached adulthood, meaning he was a medical school student by day and marriage therapist by night, explaining why when I looked at photos of him when he was my age, he always looked so much older than I did.
Renouncing his misguided attempt at medicine, my father moved to Los Angeles to become a recording engineer and live with his wife, Miri, though that career and wife now bear the prefix of “first.” When I was a child, he explained the decision as his way of exploring the world and pursuing his passions. It was only once the October 7th attack took place that he confided in me it had been because while he loved Israel, he was unwilling to raise his child in a country that would require them to serve in the army. In the time that transpired between his leaving home and hearing from his father again, my father had become a software engineer and became married to my mother, Marcia, both of which stuck.
With the old man’s health worsening dramatically, he reached out to my father’s siblings to invite them to visit him, which they did, albeit halfheartedly. My uncle and aunt visited the man on his deathbed, with the next generation in tow, reporting that he had been unemotional, even unapologetic until the very end. My father shrugged off the referred invitation, explaining that his father had ceased to exist for him since that day, one that occurred when my father was thrust into the head of the household role in 1981.
When my father received word of his father’s imminent death I expected to see tears, whether for the hurt he had felt or the time he had lost, but they never came. Instead, his response was to reflect on how similar he looked to this picture of a dead man, wondering if this was a preview of what he would look like in old age. Witnessing it, all I could think was how cruel it is to share a face with one who caused you so much pain.
Yet my father successfully kept his nuclear family together at age 18 and developed into a loving man and caring father, succeeding in his quest to grow up to be nothing like his own father. In my father’s own words “I never understood how my father allowed himself to treat his children this way, and once I became a parent, I understood it even less.” So great is his love for his family, the question of whether it originated because of or in spite of the hurt his own father caused him rendered moot.
Now that his presence was gone from the world, I finally felt comfortable excavating the vestiges of his life on the internet. Named Avraham after the biblical character who is reputed to have lived 175 years, he only survived a half as long, passing away at age 78 in 2016. Most striking was his appearance, familiar ears and an unmistakable head shape making him appear like an evolution of my uncle. I recognized the ego of his words from the mouths of the other male members of my family, though in fairness, he was trying to cure cancer.
There is a piece of him in me too, by definition given our shared genes, but clearer still in the heredity of personality. Callousness and selfishness, his two most salient traits, are ones I recognize flickers of in myself, causing me to worry that being an asshole might skip a generation. While I have the rest of my life to separate myself, he can only ever be defined by the actions he has already taken. In Judaism, one is meant to honor the dead with “may their memory be a blessing.” Yet in this case, the blessings are the children that succeed him.
Most painful to read posthumously was his line, “[l]ike any good Jew, all that I dream is that my offspring will be comfortable. So if in the end there will be a drug, I hope that something will come of it for my children and grandchildren.” What’s come of this man has mostly been pain for his family, but he is responsible, albeit in the worst way, for my father transitioning from boy to man, and ultimately, to father. In the spirit of weak men bringing about hard times creating good men, in this case, a weak father brought about a strong one whom I have to thank for my good times.
Love you Abba.
2: G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain: A Postapocalyptic Novel