It was a terrible journey. To get to a port with a ship bound for Europe, the family, together with an uncle who had decided to join them, had to travel by car from Tel Aviv to Haifa—a distance of just sixty miles, but hazardous ones, in those days. By then, civil war had broken out in Palestine between Arab nationalists and Jewish Zionists, and blockades, bombings, ambushes, land mines, and sniper fire were all increasingly common. Midway along the route, the uncle was shot in the front seat. My father, seven years old, sat in the back and watched while he gradually died. In later life, my father’s normal volubleness always veered around this tragedy; either from lingering trauma or out of an instinct to protect his children, he recounted it without elaboration, as bare biographical fact. I know only that his family, lacking any other option, continued on to Haifa, where they left the body, then sailed to Genoa and made their way to Germany.
They stayed for four years, settling in a little town in the Black Forest. My father played in the woods and learned to swim in the river and befriended an enormous sheepdog named Fix. At school, he mastered German, the language in which he first read Kidnapped and Treasure Island, and was sent by his teachers to sit alone in the hallway for an hour each afternoon during religious instruction. On evenings and weekends, his father set him down in the sidecar of his motorcycle and drove him all over the country, an adorable bright-eyed decoy atop a stash of Leica cameras and illicit American cigarettes. It was a pleasant existence, but also a precarious one, and the older my father got, the more he understood that his family was in trouble. The money they made was stashed under floorboards and rolled inside curtain rods; there was talk, not meant for the children to hear, of near misses and confrontations, of whether and where and how much the authorities had begun cracking down on smugglers. Over time, it became obvious to my father that his fate hinged on the question of whether the visas or the police would arrive first.
By luck, it was the visas: in 1952, my grandparents packed up their children, made their way to Bremen, and set sail for the United States. My father began throwing up while land was still in sight, and even if the ocean hadn’t been pitching beneath him, it is easy to imagine why he would have felt unstable. By then, he had lost, like Elizabeth Bishop, two cities and a continent, along with almost all of what should have been his family. He had lived on a commune and in a war zone, in the Middle East and in Europe, in the burning forge that made Israel and the cooling embers of the Third Reich. He was not yet twelve years old. He spent almost the entire voyage in his steerage-class berth, at sea in both senses, miserably ill. Only when his parents told him that they were drawing near to port did he struggle up to the deck to look at the view. That is my father’s first memory of his life in America: coming unsteadily into the sunlight and wind and seeing, there in the narrow waters off of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty.
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My father could not have known, that day in New York Harbor, that the most difficult parts of his life were already behind him. But I do think he had an intuition that, in putting so much distance between himself and his past, he was incurring losses of a different kind—the kind that, for immigrants and refugees, are often the price of making a home in a new place. His native language, a private creole of Yiddish and Polish, evaporated with the dispersal and death of his immediate family, all of whom he outlived; his native land he saw just once more in his lifetime, fifty years after leaving it behind. One of his final conversations, with a Lebanese friend and fellow refugee, concerned Edward Said’s definition of exile, as a loss so profound that it darkens all future achievements. This my father—a man who found as much as he lost, including enduring happiness—could not entirely endorse. But he knew intimately the cost of assimilation, one of life’s stealthiest forms of loss, as well as the abiding yearning for an unrecoverable home.
Still, it is a testament to the life my father made for himself in America that the upheavals of his childhood seemed like distant history by the time I came along. Upon arriving in this country, his family had settled in Detroit, where he was sent to attend Americanization classes in the leaky basement of the local public high school. His real Americanization, though, took place on his own time, partly on the street corner where a local electronics shop kept the television in its window turned to cowboy shows all day long, but mostly in the nearby alleyways, the de facto playgrounds of inner-city Detroit. Well into his seventies, my father could wax lyrical about those alleys, which he loved—for their trash cans, which were excellent for finding interesting things that other people had thrown away; for their high, narrow walls, perfect for handball; but above all because they were a place to go when his parents were fighting in the family’s cramped apartment. As those arguments intensified in quantity, volume, and viciousness, my father, by then thirteen, started spending less and less time at home.
Some of what he found on his own was trouble. He smoked his first cigarette that year, sneaking one of his father’s Pall Malls in the bathroom and graduating within weeks to a pack a day. (He switched to a pipe when my mother got pregnant and smoked it for years. I loved everything about it—the smell, the quiet pock-pock-pock, the long, fuzzy cleaners I could wrap around my wrist like bracelets—but eventually my sister and I wised up to the dangers and successfully lobbied him to stop.) He also made a best friend, a kid named Lee Larson, the wisecracking, whip-smart son of a local bar owner, and together the two of them drifted toward low-grade delinquency. Even decades later, when his life had taken a turn for the upstanding, my father could not quite keep the fondness from his voice while describing how he and Lee, together with a few other friends, once spent months stealing one traffic cone at a time from all over Detroit, then sat on a hill above a main artery at rush hour, watching the commuters slow to a crawl while diverting around the giant nonexistent roadworks they had made.