father cursed and worked on a note to slip under his door, I looked into a half-open door in the hall and saw an open elevator shaft. As I looked down, curious, my father grabbed me and threw me against the wall—it was one of the two times he ever touched me violently. We didn’t talk much as we took the subway back to the Bronx. The magazine went bankrupt overnight. The next month my father had a heart attack that nearly killed him.
We never saw Dave again, but the police tracked him down. It turned out he had a mistress on Park Avenue, another in Miami, and a gambling addiction. He had emptied the magazine’s account, but when they found him there was little left, and nothing for us. My father said the whole story was such a garment center cliché (that was how I learned the meaning of the word cliché), he just couldn’t believe his friend could do it to him. Several years later, out of the blue, Dave called again, with a new name—another garment center cliché—and a new proposition. I answered the phone, then put my mother on. She said he had ruined my father’s life once, and wasn’t that enough? Dave urged her to be a good sport.
My father gradually got his strength back, and my parents were now the “Betmar Tag and Label Company.” They lived in the garment center’s interstices as brokers or jobbers, middlemen between garment manufacturers and label-makers. This company had no capital; its only assets were my father’s aptitude for schmoozing and my mother’s for figuring things out. They knew their position was precarious, but they performed a real function, and they thought they had enough local knowledge to stay afloat. For a few years, it was a living. But in September 1955 my father had another heart attack, and from this one he died.
Who killed him? This question haunted me for years. “It’s the wrong question,” my first shrink said fifteen years later. “He had a bad heart. His system wore out.” That was true; the army saw it and rejected him for service during World War Two. But I couldn’t forget his last summer, when all at once he lost several big accounts. The managers and purchasing agents were all his old friends: They had played stickball on Suffolk Street, worked together and dealt with each other for years; these guys had drunk to his health at my bar mitzvah, just two years back. Now, all of a sudden, they wouldn’t return his calls. He had said he could tell he’d been outbid by somebody; he just wanted a chance to make a bid and to be told what was what. All this was explained to us at the funeral (a big funeral; he was well liked) and during shiva week just after. Our accounts, and dozens of others, had been grabbed by a Japanese syndicate, which was doing business both on a scale and in a style new to Seventh Avenue. The syndicate had made spectacular payoffs to its American contacts. (Of course they didn’t call them payoffs.) But it had imposed two conditions: It must not be identified, and there must be no counter-bidding. We pressed his friends: Why couldn’t you tell Daddy—even tell him there was something you couldn’t tell him? They all said they hadn’t wanted to make him feel bad. Crocodile tears, I thought, yet I could see their tears were real. Much later, I thought that here was one of the first waves of the global market that Dad foresaw and understood. I think he could have lived with that better than he could live with his old friends not calling him back.
My mother carried the company on briefly, but her heart wasn’t in it. She folded it and went to work as a bookkeeper. Together, one night in the summer of 1956, near the end of our year of mourning, my mother, my sister, and I threw enormous reams of paper from the lost accounts down our incinerator in the Bronx. But my mother held on to the manila folders that they had used for those accounts. (“We can still get plenty of use out of them,” she said.) Forty years later, I’m still using those folders, containers of long-vanished entities—Puritan Sportswear, Fountain Modes, Girl Talk, Youngland—where are they now? Does it mean that, in some way, I’ve stayed in my father’s business? (Happy Loman, at the very end of Death of a Salesman: “I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket!”) What racket? What business? My wife defined the relationship in a way I like: I’ve gone into my father’s unfinished business.
“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.” Another line from Death of a Salesman.1 It was my father’s favorite play. My parents saw Salesman at least twice on stage, starring Lee J. Cobb, and again in film form starring Fredric March. It became a primary source of material in the endless affectionate and ironic repartee they carried on till he died. I didn’t know that till I got to see the movie, just a few months before his death; then all at once the meaning of years of banter became clear. I joined in the crosstalk, tried it at the dinner table, and got all smiles, though the lines were tragic, and were about to become more tragic still. One hot day in the summer of 1955 he came home drained from the garment center and said, “They don’t know me any more.” I said, “Dad … Willy Loman?” He was happy that I knew he was quoting, but he also wanted me to know it was not only a quote but the truth. I got him a beer, which I knew he liked in the summer heat; he hugged me and said it gave him peace to know I was going to be freer than he was, I was going to have a life of my own.
Soon after he died, scholarships and good luck propelled me to Columbia. There I could talk and read and write all night and then walk to the Hudson to see the sun at dawn. I felt like a prospector who had made a strike, discovering sources of fresh energy I never knew I had. And some of my teachers had even told me that living for ideas could be a way for me to make a living! I was happier than I had ever been, steeped in a life that really felt like my life. Then I realized this was exactly what my father had wanted for me. For the first time since his death, I started thinking about him. I thought about how he had struggled and lost, and my grief turned to rage. So they don’t know you? I thought. Let me at those bastards, I’ll get them for you. They don’t remember? I’ll remind them. But which bastards? Who were “they”? How could I get them? Where would I start? I made a date with Jacob Taubes, my beloved professor of religion. I said I wanted to talk about my father and Karl Marx.
Jacob and I sat in his office in Butler Library and talked and talked. He said that he sympathized with all radical desire, but revenge was a sterile form of fulfillment. Didn’t Nietzsche write the book on that? Hadn’t I read it in his class? He said that in the part of Europe where he came from (b. Vienna 1927), the politics of revenge had succeeded far beyond anything Americans could imagine. He told me a joke: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.” I had heard that joke before, maybe even from my father; it had gone round many times, for good reasons. But it was a dark joke and it hurt to laugh at it, because what followed seemed to be a total human impasse: The system is intolerable, and so is the only alternative to the system. Oy! So what then, I asked, we all put ourselves to sleep? No, no, said Jacob, he didn’t mean to immobilize me. In fact, there was this book he had meant to tell me about: Marx wrote it “when he was still a kid, before he became Karl Marx”; it was wild, and I would like it. The Columbia Bookstore (“those fools”) didn’t have it, but I could get it at Barnes & Noble downtown. The book had “been kept secret for a century”—that was Jacob’s primal romance, the secret book, the Kabbalah—but now at last it had been released.2 He said some people thought it offered “an alternative vision of how man should live.” Wouldn’t that be better than revenge? And I could get there on the subway.
So, one lovely Saturday in November, I took the 1 train downtown, turned south at the Flatiron Building, and headed down Fifth to Barnes & Noble. B&N then was far from its 1990s monopoly incarnation, “Barnes Ignoble,” scourge of small bookshops; it was only one store, just off Union Square, and it traced itself back to Abe Lincoln and Walt Whitman and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But before I could get there, I passed another place that I had always walked on by: the Four Continents Book Store, official distributor for all Soviet publications. Would my Marx be there? If it really was “really wild,” would the USSR be bringing it out? I remembered the Soviet tanks in Budapest, killing kids on the streets. Still, the USSR in 1959 was supposed to be opening up (“the Thaw, they called it), and there was a possibility. I had to see.
The Four Continents was like a rainforest inside, walls painted deep green, giant posters of bears, pines, icebergs
