were at the core of my father’s character; he had an organic identification with the abused and exploited of this world. I remember sitting on the living room couch with him one evening in the last months of his life, following Mother’s death. The year was 1990 and the TV news was filled with the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. The camera lingered on the care-worn face of an impoverished old woman, draped in black, symbolic of the desperate plight of the Russian people. My eighty-eight-year-old father sobbed.
“Who is to feed her?” he asked.
Sympathy for those who suffer is, fortunately, a thoroughly human trait. What made my father become an anarchist was his hatred of those institutions that perpetuated and profited from the suffering of others, namely the State, the Capitalist system, and organized, entrenched religion. In his reading of the world they were the embodiment of arbitrary authority and his hatred of arbitrary, hierarchal authority had no bottom. Nor was there a bottom to his contempt for those who held power within these institutions. He took it all personally.
His scorn could reach operatic proportions.
There was the time he flung a chair across the living room at the grainy TV image of Secretary of State Dean Rusk calmly explaining in his composed manner the necessity of the Vietnam War. “Go ahead, that will do a lot of good,” Mother taunted him. My father despised diplomats.
Then there was the quiet Sunday afternoon he rose from his chair upon reading Kipling and threw his complete works, book after book, out our fifth-floor window. It was an action he later regretted, because he actually admired Kipling’s work, but the man’s war-lust and racism infuriated him.
His comments concerning the “greats” of this world came marinated in lye; he was most defiantly not a subscriber to the Great Man Theory of History.
Of Stalin, the Man of Steel: “That evil sonofabitch is lower than whale shit!” And the sonofabitch had a special twist to it.
Nothing pleased him more than deflating an inflated reputation. He mocked Lenin (“that Mongolian conniver”) and Trotsky (“you mean Brownstein, the tailor?”) as much for the cultish worship they inspired in their followers as for their betrayal of the Russian Revolution. He relished the tidbit that came down from Emma Goldman, who was a close friend of Lenin’s wife during the early years of Bolshevik rule (“Seems the Hero of the Revolution was less than a hero of the bedroom”).
The Founding Fathers fared no better. The thought of them curled his lip. “A bunch of slave owners, autocrats, smugglers. Tom Paine was the only one any damn good—and they got rid of him. Read the Constitution they came up with. See if you like it.”
As an adult I enjoyed playing the foil to his hyperbole; I might say, “President Johnson wants to leave his mark on history.”
To which the answer might come, after a caustic pause: “You mean, he wants to drop his turd on the sands of time!” He was fond of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
Mother said many times my father wore his crusty shell as protection against the pain of the world; the vituperation he used often was not for comic effect. He was in fact the gentlest of men. He never referred to Mother as his “wife”; he felt the term demeaned her. Rather she was his “life companion” and he meant it—although he was not above calling her “my ball and chain” in front of visitors for the naughty pleasure of watching them squirm. He preferred that Abe and I call him by his first name; he did not like the authoritarian implications of “father.” Nor did he demand that we respect him because we lived under his roof. “Respect me if you feel I’ve earned it,” he often said to us. You could argue with Sam, tell him to shut up as we did regularly, and he would do so, meekly. He was delighted when my six-year-old daughter Stephanie talked back to him. “I like a fresh kid! A rebellious child!” he’d say, and hand her a quarter.
Then, for no apparent reason, the broken baritone would burst through the crusty shell. He would start to sing: at home, on the street, wherever the spirit moved him, in and out of tune at the same time. He loved the great IWW songs printed in its Little Red Song Book. “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” was a favorite, though there were any number of others.
Be cheerful and gay, for the spring time has come.
You can throw down your shovels and go on the bum
Hallelujah, I’m a bum
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
to revive us again!
Beyond the obvious mockery and irreverence, Sam saw pathos in the lyric.
I suppose you could trace Sam’s rebellious personality in part to Grandfather Max and to his roots in a shtetl (that is, a tiny secure Jewish community) near Vitebsk, a city just inside the eastern border of Belarus. “Do not go back. Nothing is left,” a friend from that part of the world advised me recently. “The Lithuanian Fascists wiped out everything and everybody in 1941: thirty-five-thousand Jews in mass graves, at least. Anyone tells you he can trace your family is just taking your money.” But in the late 1890s Vitebsk was home to a vibrant Jewish culture that spawned Marc Chagall and so many others.
Grandpa Max was a contrarian from the start. He scandalized the shtetl by smoking cigarettes on the Sabbath and enraged my great grandfather, a rabbi, by renouncing religion altogether. He was an atheist during his waking hours. When he slept, though, between snores you could hear him recite the ancient Hebrew prayers in a clear voice.
Around 1900, Grandpa Max worked as a commissary clerk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
They had a bunch of railroad cars where the track and train men slept and another car where Grandpa Max supplied them with cigarettes, tobacco, underwear, and different things. He also had charge of their feeding, and pinch hit as their timekeeper. So he got to know how exploited the men were and he bonded with them. When they struck for better pay and conditions, his supervisor, in the spirit of the times, called for the Cossacks, who clubbed them from horseback. “How can you do that?” Max asked. “These men slave for you every day. You know they are desperate.”
“You are management,” his boss said, “You have a good job for a Jew. You must decide whose side you’re on. That’s the way it is.”
“Nobody owns me,” Max told him and he was fired. At about the same time the Tsar wanted him as cannon fodder for the upcoming Russo-Japanese War. So Max skipped to America, where he learned to be a house painter, and sent for grandmother Anna and three-year-old Sam in 1905. Along the way he simplified the family name from Dolgopolski to Dolgoff.
Max was basically a kindly man, who accepted the world as it is and not as it should be. The true revolutionist of the family was Max’s brother, Tsudik, who remained behind. I’ll let Sam tell his story:
Through the many years spanning the 1905 Russian Revolution to my father’s death in 1945, we had no news about what happened to Tsudik and doubted strongly that he was still living. But (much later)… I was given a copy of the Russian Communist Jewish periodical Soviet Homeland which, to my great surprise, (contained) a photo and an obituary article about my uncle. It read, in part: “Tsudik Dolgopolski was born in the village of Haradok, not far from the Vitebsk. At 13 years of age he began work in a brush factory. In 1909 after many difficulties he became an elementary school teacher. In 1926, his novel Open Doors was published in which the great events of the October Revolution were graphically described. In 1928 his book On Soviet Land was published. Later, two volumes of memoirs, Beginnings and This Was Long Ago, appeared. Dolgopolski’s writing graphically
