Paul KahnTHE DEEPENING FOG (Part 3)My grandparents on both sides were immigrants to America. They were central European Jews, members of the huge wave of newcomers who transformed this country in the early years of the 20th Century. Escapees from a brutal and pervasive anti-Semitism, they were brave and ruthless people who were willing to abandon everything and everyone they knew in order to find a better life. In the process they stunted or denied certain sensitivities. My paternal grandfather was uprooted from his home and apprenticed to a tailor at the age of seven. In this one blow his childhood was destroyed, and he became a withdrawn indentured servant. My paternal grandmother's mother died when she was very young, and her father, a traveling tinsmith, abandoned her to an indifferent stepmother. Raised without love, she became an insecure, suspicious, vengeful person. Neither of them had the capacity for empathy. Several times my father has told me the emblematic story of when an uncle purchased the first automobile in the family. He celebrated one morning by offering rides in this glamorous symbol of freedom and affluence to all of his relatives. My father, a young boy at the time, was eating breakfast when his uncle drove up their street. Full of boyish excitement, my father wanted to run out and take his turn at this adventure. But his parents forbade him to move until he had finished his eggs: my grandfather labored in a sweatshop to put food on the table, and it was not to be wasted. They were deaf to my father's pleading to be released. They couldn't understand his acute desire to take part in the fun or his anguish when his uncle drove off for the last time, leaving him behind. The bitterness of those eggs stayed with him his whole life. A striking parallel is that both my grandmothers married men they could control. While they would gamble everything on a new life in a new land, emotionally they were not able to take risks, preferring relationships they could dominate. In the old country their marriages would have been arranged. They used their new freedom, not to find love, but security. A similar caution colored the immigrant generation's relationship to America. They lived in separate neighborhoods; they maintained their old customs; they associated exclusively with other Jews. By dint of hard work and perseverance the immigrants gave their children, first generation Americans like my parents, the opportunity for education, assimilation and upward mobility. The children pursued these opportunities with great industry. They knew what their parents had sacrificed to provide them. They knew how fortunate they were to have escaped the deadly anti-Semitism of Europe. But, while they were bound to their parents by a sense of obligation, they were also separated by a vast cultural divide. They were Americans, with that quintessentially American trait of experimentalism and self-creation. This often baffled and distressed their parents. My father decided one Yom Kippur that he didn't want to fast. When my grandmother caught him eating crackers she was so violently upset that she became physically ill and had to spend the day in bed. After that, his rebellion against tradition became silent but no less persistent. He attended Boston Latin School, which all clever Jewish boys who lived in the city were expected to do. But when it came time to choose a college he defied his parents' expectation that he go to Harvard and become a doctor. Instead he found his way into the study of group dynamics and began his professional life as an administrator of a Jewish community center. My grandparents didn't even have a word in their vocabulary by which to understand what he did. This estrangement from his parents, characteristic of his generation, is what led by father to become an observer and manipulator of human nature. His family spent their summers in the seaside community of Revere, and he virtually lived on the beach, a motley, seedy world of penny arcades and hucksters. He studied how the con men played on people's gullibility and greed and drew solace from the thought that, if he was lonely and misunderstood, the common run of humanity was not worth belonging to. Later he would use his outsider's knowledge to become a successful fundraiser. His technique was based on the insight that people didn't donate money out of simple altruism but from peer pressure and the desire for self-aggrandizement. Like the con men he knew in his youth he would lurk in the shadows, manipulating others. And, if he did it for ostensibly good causes like supporting community agencies and building hospitals and temples, his Machiavellian success still reinforced his sense of alienation. My generation came of age in the 60s. The term "generation gap" was invented to describe the cultural divide between us and our parents. Their world view was shaped by their beginnings in poverty and their tempering during the Great Depression, but we would see the results as a corrupt materialism that discounted humanistic values like racial equality and pacifism. The United States had taken advantage of a vacuum in power that had revealed itself during World War II and had emerged from that conflict in a dominant position. Our parents, proud, victorious, self-confident American citizens, had bought for us unprecedented wealth and leisure to support our search for self identity. We owed our ability to indulge in this search, to have a prolonged childhood to their hard work. In my case this permissiveness was partly a response to my disability. My family and society in general had lowered expectations of me: they offered no clear path through which I could become an independent, self-supporting member of the community. Instead I was marginalized. Curbs, stairs and narrow doors made me feel unwelcome in the world. Constantly I had to struggle to reject being merely the passive recipient of other people's projections. They wanted me to be weak and allow them to pity me, so they could feel stronger. They wanted me to be dependent on them, so they could enjoy the power of controlling me and never have to think about their own eventual dependence. They wanted me to represent bodily fragility and death, so they could maintain the illusion that they would live forever. So, while my peers rebelled against the expectation that they would assume the roles and perpetuate the values of their parents, I rebelled against the expectation that I was powerless to even make that choice. But we had rebellion in common. Along with many of them I turned to the promise of creativity. I enrolled in art school as a painting major. For a long time I practiced visual art -- drawing, painting and sculpture. Then, as my body weakened, I turned to "painting" exclusively in language, creating plays, poems and essays. Art making has continued to be a realm in which I can function independently, in which I cannot be threatened with loss and in which I can transform the inchoate mess of my emotions into something valuable. And this alchemical impulse is the one thing I have been true to throughout my life. These words are a desperate attempt to work that magic with my father's decline. And, indeed, there is a strange, sad beauty in the way his life now parallels mine. Now he has lost stature. Now he is the outcast, rejected by his former friends, the inferior, the one whose right to exist can be questioned. *** My father asks, "What am I good for?" I try to reassure him that we, his family, love him and need him. This seems to comfort him somewhat. But for how long will he be reachable? Just in the last few weeks he has lost the ability to read the hands of a clock. He is getting more agitated and irrational, refusing to bathe, refusing to take his medications. These changes only go in one direction and have only one end. So, I must treasure him as he is now and as he will become. And at this stage there are still enough vestiges of his old self to make that relatively easy. He still has a sense of humor, occasionally getting off some good quips. He still is devoted to my mother. He still wants to be generous father, offering me financial help with the recent trip I took to see a play of mine produced. I know that as his dementia worsens it will become harder to have a meaningful connection to him. But I also know that it is not his fault if he is difficult at times and immured in his own sense of reality. And it is my task now, not his, to learn how to mourn and let him go into that deepening fog.
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