My grandfather loved Joseph Stalin. He would quote Stalin with joyous reverence like Stalin was the greatest leader and thinker that ever lived. If anyone mentioned to him that the former Soviet leader was actually a ruthless murderer, if anyone dared to cite the millions of his own people Stalin slaughtered, my grandfather would slam his fists down on the closest table and scream about lies and propaganda.

To his death in 1987 at the age of 82, my grandfather would never concede that communism was a failed experiment. But he never moved to the Soviet Union, instead visiting a few times and traveling elsewhere, choosing to stay in New York, where he was born, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Maybe he felt like he still had work to do in the US to stir up the revolution he knew would eventually hit us tsunami-like, bending and then breaking our consumeristic ways. Or maybe he ultimately liked the little pleasures of American life, like going to the theater.

My grandfather worked in marketing. His job was to convince people to buy things. He hated capitalism, but in the end, he earned his paycheck from it. As a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA, he was also blacklisted, which meant at times he couldn’t find anyone who would hire him.

My grandfather lived through the Depression. He was that generation, the one that refolded tin foil. He stockpiled Ivory soap in the utility closet because you never knew if the stores would run out of it again. That was his little secret we discovered when he died: hundreds of bars of Ivory soap.

**********

My father avoided direct confrontation with his father. When my grandfather started talking about politics, my father would slip into another room or change the topic of conversation, maybe by making a joke. But my grandfather did not like to have the conversation lightened or steered in another direction. He was dogged about Stalin, itching for an argument that he was determined he would win. The funny thing is that my father, while decidedly not a member of the Communist Party, was politically liberal. He didn’t actually revel in capitalism as my grandfather liked to believe of him.

I don’t have any memories of my father and grandfather hugging each other or otherwise showing affection beyond maybe a pat on the shoulder or arm, but I don’t actually recall even that. My father rarely touched me, but my grandfather always greeted me with a warm embrace.

**********

There were several times in my father’s career as an epidemiologist that he had to publicly reject my grandfather’s politics. He had to denounce his father in both written and verbal statements when he was applying for prestigious and influential roles, such as representing the US at a world health conference. He had to explicitly say he was not a member of the Communist Party. My father did not like being forced to state anything publicly about his politics, but he cared more about being able to improve public health. I never heard exactly how my grandfather responded to his adult son’s official stance rejecting him. But I know that my father felt that no matter what he did, no matter how many lives he saved, he would still never get his father’s approval.

He married my mother, a wealthy college-educated Jewish woman from Baltimore who represented exactly the world my grandparents despised. She grew up with a nanny to care for her. Her father was a businessman, a Republican even. After he became a doctor, my father was drafted into the Korean War, but did his service stateside, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He worked his way up in academia, solving epidemiological puzzles and helping advance medical treatment all over the world. He dwelled and thrived in the world of peer- reviewed science and medical conferences. He saw scientific thinking as the opposite of both his great-grandfather’s Orthodox Jewish religiosity and his father’s political dogma.

My mother believed in my father, supported him through medical school, through two breakdowns in which he had to be hospitalized. The second breakdown came when he learned that my mother was pregnant with me. He was already overwhelmed by parenting my brother and sister. There are very few photos of my father holding me as a baby.

My father, mother, brother, sister, and I lived on the Main Line, the tony suburbs of Philadelphia. When my grandfather visited our historic home for the first time, he said to my father, “So this is how the bourgeoisie live?” My father told the story about my grandfather’s disgusted reaction to our house often at dinner parties. He was a sophisticated storyteller with impeccable timing for a punchline or an unexpected twist. People found my father witty, specifically, academic types, with their own set of social rules and attractions.

When he was in a good mood, in his tweed jackets, my father could draw and keep a small, but fawning crowd. If he wasn’t the center of attention, he tended to leave parties early. When in a bad mood, he found his fellow human beings repellent. He was particularly downtrodden after visits with his parents.

**********

My grandfather was born Herman Stolowitz. He grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, poor, with his seven brothers and sisters crammed into a small apartment. His father was a tailor, a deeply religious Jew. Engrossed in the study of the Torah and the Talmud, he expected all his children to live in strict accordance with generations of tradition. He and my grandfather had a tense relationship. After he left home, my grandfather Americanized his name to Stolley. He didn’t just eschew religion, he actively hated it. He rejected it, which means something significant when you think about how many generations before him struggled to maintain their Judaism in the face of threats, beatings, and death, in the midst of Cossack attacks, in wars meant to extinguish us forever.

According to my grandfather, his father was a harsh man. Though he rebelled against the confines of his father’s religious dictates, he parented with his own rigidity. According to my father, he was harsh and unrelentingly critical of his children, especially the more he drank.

My grandfather and grandmother both buried themselves in the Communist movement. They weren’t the only people of Jewish heritage drawn to the Party. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the Communist Party USA was filled with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, heavily involved in community organization and labor unions.

FBI agents came to my grandparents’ apartment on several occasions and once stopped to talk to the entire family as they were walking down a neighborhood street, perhaps to ensure that the neighbors saw that they were under suspicion and to sow the doubt that they might even serve as spies for the FBI. FBI visits didn’t stop his zeal any more than did the blacklisting.

**********

As a little girl, I would sit cross-legged in front of the closed door to my father’s office, playing with my Fisher Price little people. I knew my father was on the other side of the door, engrossed in his work. He would step over me when he had to leave his office to use the bathroom.

When I think of my father’s missteps in raising me, I know he had received no guidance on how to be a loving parent.

When I asked my father about his childhood, sometimes he would reminisce about playing stickball in the streets, drinking egg creams, and listening to radio shows. But more often than not, he would say he was born an adult and change the subject.

My father wasn’t harsh or mean. At least he managed not to pass that on to another generation. He cracked sardonic jokes. We talked about pandemics, diseases, and world events at dinnertime. My brother, sister, and I competed for my father’s attention, each trying to outdo the other with our ability to keep up with his intellect. My sister and brother could more skillfully hold a conversation with him. The youngest, the baby, the mistake, I was forever eclipsed. There was one man in my life who doted on me: My grandfather. The man who had berated and insulted my father on a regular basis would boost my confidence every time he saw me.

“You have a special skill,” he would tell me. “You have all the ideas, everything you need to be a great writer, inside of you.”

**********

A few times a year, we would drive or take the train from Philadelphia to visit my grandparents in New York. My father, usually so insistent on being prompt, would stall until my mother would get impatient and yell at him to get out of the house or we would miss the train. On the train I would sit separately from my parents so I could ignore my father’s glazed expression, a man trying to calm his nerves or perhaps contemplating all the ways in which he could avoid directly confronting his father.

If we drove up, my father played his classical music so loudly I would put my fingers in my ears. When I got older, I used the headphones on my Sony Walkman to block out the screeching of the violins, preferring Duran Duran or the retro Rolling Stones or whatever else I was into that particular month.

Once we arrived, we would take a rickety elevator up to their floor, then walk down the dark hallway to their apartment, with my grandmother waiting close to the door. She wasn’t a soft sort of person. A former teacher, she liked to give out instructions. She wore a wig because she’d gone bald, and I spent part of my childhood terrified that I would inherit a female baldness gene. She was just someone to say hello to before I ran into my grandfather’s arms.

My grandfather was warm and loving until after the drinks. But those first moments were always a delight. He was so different than my father, so engaged when greeting me, always crouching down to my level. He would look me in the eyes, grab the sides of my face and cry out “So beautiful. What a face on you.” My grandfather would ask me to bring my poetry, and we would sit down and work our way through my efforts, page-by-page. “You have both looks and talent,” he would say.

When you are a child, perhaps even when you are an adult, sometimes it’s easier to concentrate on how someone treats you, how much love they show you, rather than looking deeply at who they are as a whole, how they move through the world, the other people they’ve hurt, perhaps deeply. While I knew my grandfather had scarred my father, I couldn’t resist him. Not long after we arrived, we’d eat lunch. My grandmother would bring out bagels, cream cheese, and canned salmon because they weren’t the type of people to splurge on nova lox. Nova lox was for the wealthy Jews who didn’t care about poor people. Revolutionaries ate canned salmon, parsing out the wet, red chunks onto the cream cheese, picking out the tiny bones with a fork and placing them on the side of their plates, while sitting clustered together at a flimsy card table.

After lunch, we would head to the living room packed with books and booklets, where my grandfather sat in a scratchy faded armchair studying Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, underlining key sentences in red pen. I still have some of his books and every once in a while, I open up one of them, trying to understand why he underlined a particular passage or to decipher his notes in the margins.

My grandfather tried to get a rise out of us. “Is it fair that you have so many clothes while other people don’t have any?” he would ask me, while I lounged on the pullout couch. “That’s why this system of government isn’t working. The rich get rich off the poor. People like you live off the misery of others.” I would usually say, “That doesn’t sound fair,” and my grandfather would beam with delight. Maybe he thought he could convert me. These were the afternoon conversations my grandfather liked to have. His features would sometimes get contorted with rage, the extent of which generally correlated with the amount of alcohol he drank.

I found my grandfather entertaining, his viewpoints a stark contrast to what I was learning in public school or what I heard in the living rooms of my friends’ families. It was like watching a fascinating television show. I curled myself into a ball while I absorbed my grandfather’s arguments, shelving his comments to evaluate and mostly dismiss later.

My father had learned survival skills growing up with my grandfather, which meant you avoided a fight until you had to have one, and when you did, you made it count. It was rare to see him battle someone, but when he did, it was terrifying. In this way, my father and I were not so different. The biggest fight we had was against each other, years later, as adults, when he admitted to decades of cheating on my mother. I cut him out of my life for a year, long after my mother appeared to have forgiven him and allowed him to return home.

**********

The one time I witnessed my father losing his temper and confronting my grandfather had to do with me. When I was twelve, at the height of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, I wrote a poem about nuclear war and disarmament. When I showed my grandfather my poem, he could not stop praising it. He asked to keep a copy of the poem. Without asking either my permission or, more importantly, my father’s permission, he submitted the poem to the leading communist newspaper in New York. The paper published my poem, and my grandfather sent me the clipping by mail. I was thrilled and ran into my father’s office to show him.

He turned quiet and grave. He took the folded newspaper page from me.

That night, my father called my grandfather and yelled at him for going behind his back to publish my poem. At first, I was furious because I thought he didn’t care about my desire to be a published writer. But then I listened to what he was saying.

“You don’t know what kind of effect this will have on her later in life,” my father yelled.

“You had no right to do that. She’s my daughter.”

My father and grandfather didn’t talk for months after that.

**********

My grandfather and my father both rejected the religious and mystical aspects of Judaism. When I was about ten, my father and I took a walk through our neighborhood. I was telling him about what I was learning at Hebrew school, which my mother had dictated I attend. My father asked me, “If I told you that God was a giant rabbit, would you believe me?”

“No, that’s stupid.”

“And yet what you are telling me right now is about as believable as a giant rabbit God,” my father said.

He made a good point, and I decided not to talk to him about my own religious beliefs again. But I also retained his lessons and so I moved forward with a combination of belief and skepticism, my own ambivalence.

**********

I went to Sarah Lawrence College, an expensive private liberal arts school outside of New York City. My father had also gone to private college and medical school through a series of scholarships. Private college was probably another area in which my grandfather was conflicted. It wasn’t the communist way, but perhaps my grandfather still retained the Jewish cultural emphasis on higher education.

When I was first accepted at Sarah Lawrence in the fall of 1986, my grandfather, recently diagnosed with the prostate cancer that eventually spread throughout his body, asked me what I planned to study. When I told him literature and writing, his eyes lit up with pride. “That’s good. That’s good,” I remember him saying, his frail body hugging me. “You have so much to share with the world.” I grasped onto him thinking that when he died, I would lose the man who most believed in me. A year later, my grandfather was gone.

My watch stopped the day my grandfather died.

My father called me in my dorm. Someone had to get me from my room. This was back in a time before cell phones were ubiquitous, when not all dorm rooms had phones. I stood in the hallway at a phone mounted on the wall, in a small, semi-private booth, leaning into the receiver.

It’s been more than thirty years, but I can remember what I was wearing: a black turtleneck, a thrift shop plaid miniskirt, black boots, and a watch that could no longer tell time.

“Your grandfather’s dead,” my father said, his voice tight and controlled. “I’m here in the
city.”

“Do you want me to come join you now?” I asked.

"Yes, can you come?” My father needed me.

It was quiet in my grandparents’ apartment. My grandfather’s chair was empty. I looked through his books, with all the underlining and exclamation points.

“My watch stopped,” I told my father. “It stopped when Grandpa died.”

My father gave me a look and an exasperated sigh. He had raised me to understand the difference between correlation and causation, to analyze a situation with a skeptical mind and honed critical thinking skills.

“You think there’s some meaning in that?” he said.

“Maybe.”

I didn’t tell him that I thought my grandfather had stopped my watch as a way of saying goodbye. I also never told my father that for the next year, my grandfather visited me in my dreams, always in a fog, calmly handing me books, saying, “Read this. It will help you.” The books he handed me were filled with empty white pages.

**********

My father killed my grandfather.

No, that’s not quite accurate. My father wrote him a prescription for an excess of painkillers, knowing my grandfather might take them all at once. I understood even at the time that they were both acting within their personalities and belief systems. My grandfather didn’t want to suffer through a lingering, painful death. My father thought that people should be able to choose how and when to end their lives.

**********

A few weeks after my grandfather’s death, my father sent me a new watch, a Timex. He had also photocopied his research that depicted why the watch he picked for me was the most reliable choice. I had wanted a Swatch as a fashion statement but hadn’t told him. I wore the new watch for years.

**********

My grandfather missed the collapse of the Soviet Union by about two years. He never saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of the Iron Curtain. I watched it on a small black and white television and thought about my grandfather. I called my father.

“What would Grandpa think of all this?” I asked him.

There was silence on the other end of the line. My father never answered my question. I could hear him breathing.

“It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” my father said, and we agreed that it was astonishing to watch history unfold, a regime break apart on live television.

**********

My father mostly let us alone as we were growing up, never burdening us with the high expectations he’d had to carry as a child. But low expectations are their own kind of burden. I used to wish that my father was a little more outraged when I got caught smoking pot or skipping school. But it would be a lie if I said he didn’t care. Whenever I fell apart, he was there, sometimes sending for me from across the country to come home to recuperate. I remember calling him from California because I was going to get a “C” in one of my classes in my first year of law school. I was devastated, sobbing.

“Why are you worrying about this grade?” my father said. “In one hundred years, nobody will know that you existed let alone how you did in your property class.”

“This is supposed to make me feel better?”

“It might make you feel worse about life, but doesn’t it make you feel better about your grades? They don’t matter because nothing you do matters.”

The funny thing is, it did make me feel better. And it gave me great material to use at bars and parties. Like my father, I know how to entertain a small crowd, so long as I’m in a good mood.

**********

My father died in a similar fashion to his father, using morphine to help hasten his death after the same type of cancer took over his body. My grandfather took pills alone in a darkened room. My father waited for my brother, sister, and I to leave the room to die, also on his own, also in the dark.

My DNA makeup, according to two genealogy websites, is somewhere between 98 and 99 percent Ashkenazi Jew. I come from a long line of Jews, ancestor after ancestor, nomads gathered together in tribes or, later, shtetls. I go to synagogue. Sometimes I even study the Torah and the Talmud, wondering what my great-grandfather would have thought of me.

But mostly I write. There are times I look up from a story or an article to see that I have been submerged in my work for hours. I don’t study religion or communism or science, but I have my own framework from which I view the world, one of novels, poetry, law, journalism, police procedurals, religion, and mysticism all thrown together.

**********

Not long after my father died, I had a dream that I was a child again, and he was holding my hand. We were in an ice cream parlor, the old fashioned kind, serving sundaes, floats, and egg creams like my father drank as a child. My mother was dressed in a red polka-dot dress, laughing, looking young and happy. She drifted away. I looked up at my father, and he smiled down at me. He was a young man. He had a moustache, like he did briefly in the 1970s.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” he said to me.

I panicked.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just down the hall.”

“Don’t go.” I knew he wasn’t going to come back to me.

“I have to,” my father said.

“I can’t make it without you,” I told him in my little girl voice.

“You have everything you need,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”