'I bring you my family's story not as a eulogy -- but as witness to the often unacknowledged ways a family business changes one's life. Even if you try, asmy family did, to ignore it'
It shouldn't have been news. It should have been one of those revelations that come gradually, preempting any chance of surprise. But now, more than a decade after that humid June night, I can still remember the panic that gripped me, and how impossible it seemed that I could have been so easily blindsided.
Had my grandfather been alive, maybe I would have confronted him. Had he been dead more than half a week, maybe I could have forgiven him. But I was stuck someplace in the middle, still feeling his presence everywhere but not sure now -- in light of what I had just heard -- how I felt about that. I wanted him to be alive just so I could tell him to go away.
Until that moment his withering death had held few surprises. On the final day, the disease having run its course, he had taken to raising his arm. Later, on the way to the funeral, my father offered the interpretation that the gesture had been my grandfather's attempt to wave good-bye. I personally thought it was only another body twitch, just as his legs had earlier shaken uncontrollably. After seeing him that last time, I made my final routine stop to sob in the bathroom of the nursing home.
The night before he died, I couldn't sleep. Around 3 a.m., I left my bed and walked past the room the 11-year-old me had ceded to him when he moved in with us, about 10 years earlier. It had already been changed around from the way he'd kept it, but there remained one unsightly piece of furniture -- a heavy black bureau that nobody wanted to open. It was months before I finally poked around in it, feeling something akin to what Geraldo Rivera must have felt when he threw open Al Capone's armoire on national TV. Inside were little green stenographer's notebooks with newspaper articles lumpily glued to each page. There seemed no particular thematic agenda: education, crime, immigration, religion. Maybe, I thought, he'd intended to use some of the information for speeches.
But that seemed farfetched, given that he had been delivering roughly the same speech since I could remember. It always began with his family's 14-day journey, in steerage, from the Ukraine to Castle Island, in South Boston. His own father, a scribe, had died when my grandfather was just three. When the family arrived, my grandfather celebrated by devouring a banana -- which, much to his stomach's regret, he did not know enough to peel. He described his struggles as a paperboy, learning English from Boston's street signs and becoming editor-in-chief of a newspaper called Newsboy's World. Egged on by a teacher he claimed was 92 years old, he won a statewide essay contest that earned him a visit from Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald (JFK's maternal grandfather) and a $25 booty. "I never knew there was so much money in the United States mint," he always said.
By 19 he had completely shifted from delivering newspapers to writing for them. In 1915 he covered the horrible anti-Semitic lynching of Atlanta's Leo Frank, for a group of daily newspapers that often ran his picture above his dispatches. In 1916 Louis Brandeis, before taking his place on the Supreme Court, contacted my then-22-year-old grandfather about taking over a Boston weekly newspaper called the Jewish Advocate. Brandeis had plans for the current editor, and with my grandfather he devised a primitive version of -- not that anybody would have called it this, of course -- a leveraged buy-out, selling shares to community leaders to raise money. With no significant investment and nearly as little formal education, my grandfather, Alexander Brin, became an editor and a publisher. In Boston he became so well known that a restaurant named a dish after him. It was not a completely well-received gesture; some community members found it unforgivably insensitive that the platter included ham.
Over the years my grandfather spent more of his time in Florida, leaving operational control of the Advocate to his nephew and to his son-in-law, my father. But he was still formally the publisher when we got the 6 a.m. call that informed us of his death, on June 20, 1980.
A few days after his funeral, I arrived at a checkout counter to see a Jewish Advocate displayed in the spot normally reserved for an impulse buy like the National Enquirer. My grandfather's obituary was front-page news. Leaning jauntily on a walking stick, he appeared younger than the man I had known. He stared out at me while I collected my change.
As is Jewish custom, for days my parents' house was filled with people, offering memories and baked goods. Given that my grandfather had lived to be 87, few of his peers survived him. "My friends," he used to complain, "disappear like seltzer bubbles." Among the visitors was a seventysomething gent who seemed to take a great interest in me. I reeled off the acceptable highlights of my 20 or so years on earth: editor of my high school newspaper; news editor, managing editor, and -- as of that coming fall -- editor-in-chief of my college newspaper; small articles published in a real newspaper or two. He smiled appreciatively enough, but he seemed to be looking over my shoulder. I was still talking when he interrupted. What he said vastly increased my need for fresh air.
" Bernie," he shouted, catching my father's attention, " so this is the one who is being groomed?" He pointed at me.
My father, who was biting into something gooey, nodded. I excused myself.
Outside, I felt something ugly well up within me. Groomed? It sounded as though I were some breed of poodle. All of a sudden, nothing I had achieved was my own. There was a plan for my life. I had dumbly followed my grandfather and father into journalism. Next I was slated to become what they had been, the editor and publisher of a small weekly newspaper. I wasn't leading a life so much as slipping into one. How could I have been so stupid? I felt sick. And cursed.
