Little Failure: A Memoir

My mother, fearful that there would be anti-Semites queuing for cherries (they have to eat, too, you know), would whisper for me to be quiet or there would be no Little Red Riding Hood chocolate candy for dessert.

This is the creed I have made for myself: Day Zero. A new start. Keep the rage in check. Try to decouple the rage from the humor. Laugh at things that are not sourced from pain. You are not them. He is not you. And each day, with or without my parents’ presence, my creed proves to be bullshit.

“On Rubenstein Street, I had my first love,” my father says. “Right over there.”

My mother, her ambition stifled, channeled away by history and language, has given birth to my own. The only difference is: I have no God, no family myth, to cling to, no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page.

The ethnic cable is on, advertisements for shady Brooklyn dentists and new Queens wedding halls struggling to pump out the joy. I feel my father’s stare needling my right shoulder. I can calculate his stare from almost any distance on earth.

My father’s favorite saying to me: “Maybe after I die, you will come pee on my grave.” It is supposed to be sarcastic, but what he’s really saying is “Don’t let go.”

With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric.

We are not an overly sentimental people, I hope, but we have an uncanny knowledge of just how much to save, of how many wrinkled documents a Manhattan closet will one day hold.

Twenty-six million died on the Russian side in World War II, nearly 15 percent of the population.