Apple Family Values

...When little Sam requires a playmate to catch the toy cars he sends flying down a track in the hallway, Rocky is the one who gets down on the floor...

...Then he returns to the kitchen to bake cookies with his greatgrandchildren, even though he had always prided himself on being a cake man...

...The heyday of their rooming together, however, comes when Rocky, at age 93, after the death of Max's father and then his own wife, is invited to join his grandson in Ann Arbor...

...Day by day," writes Apple, "I knew how fortunate I was to have Rocky so old and still so able...

...You want cookies,'" he had always said, '"go ask Betty Crocker, not me.'" "Shtark zich...

...His blue eyes showed no hint of tiredness...

...For Rocky, Roommates is Max Apple's Kaddish...

...When I ran I sometimes jogged to a silent rhythm, a kind of prayer, not addressed to a namable being, but a wish that came literally from my pounding heart and my quick breath...

...The Max Apple who emerges here confirms the impression many already have of him from his fiction as warmhearted, witty, likable, and tolerantly appreciative of the skewed and eccentric...

...It is so out of joint with our television-celebrated, Hollywood-promoted, magazine-vaunted culture of generational conflict, teenage independence, single-mother liberation, and geriatric horror that in a perverse but triumphant way it seems destined to provide a rigorously encouraging vision of how generative and salvational families can be...

...Rocky's heroic dedication to family was requited with tenderness by his grandson in life...

...What could have been more strengthening, more sustaining to the grandson than the unconditional love he received from this grandfather...

...I always wanted you to get married...

...I'm glad you're getting married,' he said...

...As Max, utterly bereft and on edge, tries to cope with this catastrophe and the radical upheaval that ensues in the life of the family, Rocky takes over the management of the household, especially the care of the children...

...I bought her that radio,' Rocky said...

...She comes to Houston to take Debby back to the family home in Michigan in the wild belief that she will restore her to health...

...The old man, who had been sleeping, greets her in his long underwear...

...Good,' Rocky said...

...But in 1982, at the age of 106, Rocky's strength deserted him at last...

...Her father will hear about this, and so will her teachers,'" the principal says as Rocky sets off with Jessica...

...He is their champion, exquisitely attuned to their needs...

...He steps forward bearing a glass of ginger ale, "his version of medicine...

...was the lifelong lesson Rocky had taught Max...

...His life embodied, in a sense, the rare attainment of the American ideal of committed individualism within the context of binding family loyalties...

...He was too busy to die...

...Strengthen yourself...

...I want you to get married...

...The couple, along with Rocky and his daughter, Bashy, Max's widowed mother, move down to Houston, where Max will teach English at Rice University...

...Still, once Max and Debby are married, Rocky accepts her with all the intense loyalty that he bestows on family...

...In the land of Washington and Lincoln," Apple writes of Rocky's burial in Houston, "on a patch of grass not even visible from the highway, I prayed, thinking of another great American, my little Rocky...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara," "Master of the Return " and, forthcoming from Pantheon, "The Jewish War" THIS FAMILY MEMOIR bursts onto the American literary scene incongruously...

...He had snow white hair and was five feet tall, and weighed 110 pounds...

...I got married, your father got married??that's the way it should be...

...for us, reared as we have been for so long on the dissolution of family values, it is nothing less than a blessing...

...Ger out from here,' he said...

...He would not have resisted the tears streaming down my cheeks...

...Now eat.'" Their felicitous arrangement is disrupted, inevitably, by a woman, Debby, whom Max brings to the apartment one night in 1968...

...Then, in a ritual no less sacred because no prayer preceded it, he grabbed the back of my neck, pulled me closer, and kissed me...

...Rocky is the one who knows what to do...

...The two of them stand together at the table to bless the candles and wine, and the challah that Rocky has baked: "He waited for me to tell him how good the bread tasted...

...In that dark hour, Max is overcome...

...He refuses to budge even when Max, in his bridegroom's suit, kneels by the window in the dirt and begs him to come out...

...The old man pretends to be incapable of understanding how Max's studying on the couch for preliminary exams constitutes real work: "When he came back from his walk he went to the kitchen and grumbled loud enough for me to hear, 'Lazy good-for-nothing.'" Max tenderly bathes his grandfather every Friday afternoon in preparation for the Sabbath...

...He knew that as well as I did, and he stayed in the basement, keeping his feelings and himself hidden" The author must have been in his late 20s at that point, and since he offers no account of Rocky's behavior on previous occasions when he might have been involved with a woman, we cannot know if the old man reacted this way whenever an outsider threatened to disrupt their household...

...I knew that if I could get my hands on him, the contact of the flesh would do what words couldn't...

...Rocky, "who had seemed as if he had one foot in the grave at 102, bounced back into action...

...Rocky, in any case, insists it is this particular woman he opposes...

...Finally, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to sabotage the entire relationship, he holes up in the cellar of the family's Grand Rapids house right before the wedding...

...One of the roommates of the title is the narrator, Max Apple, author of the highly-regarded novels The Propheteers and Zip and the collection of stories called The Oranging of America...

...The other is his grandfather, "Rocky" (a sharply apt nickname, a variation of Yerachmiel, devised by his coworkers at the American Bakery) Herman (a name affixed to him by the usual suspect, the immigration clerk) Goodstein...

...It is in Ann Arbor that this odd couple resides together in fractious love...

...At the time of his death he was, as Jessica pointed out, "more than half as old as America...

...I stood up to face what was the whole truth??my life without Debby...

...I prayed for him, for more strength and a painless end...

...I made him wait a few seconds until I approved...

...The old man remains adamant in his disapproval of Max's choice, threatening to move out on several occasions...

...Then, when Rocky is 103, Debby is suddenly struck with a rapidly progressive case of multiple sclerosis...

...When Jessica??a precocious baseball fan, who grows increasingly withdrawn as her mother's condition deteriorates??listens to the World Series in class in violation of the school policy and her radio is confiscated, Rocky marches the five blocks into the principal's office and demands its return...

...I've got the receipt to prove it.'" He grabs the radio from the principal's desk...

...Only not her.'" Since there is nothing about Debby that the reader or anyone else in Max's family could object to, given the tragedy that later befalls this marriage, one cannot help wondering if Rocky, endowed as he was with uncanny instincts regarding the well-being and interests of those he held dearest, sensed somehow what profound pain lay ahead for his beloved Max...

...The two become roommates when, at the age of seven, Max quite spontaneously moves into Rocky's bedroom in their extended family's home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while carrying out his allotted role of settling one of the disagreements??this time a rather prolonged one??between the old man and his wife...

...I'll tell all the people I know, too.'" In the end Debby's mother, a kind of female Rocky who is as zealously devoted to her own as he is to his, refuses to allow her unresponsive, dying daughter to be placed in a nursing home...

...He attacked...

...Two children, Jessica and Sam, follow, and though Rocky is slowing down considerably, he takes on a significant portion of the baby-sitting as Debby struggles, during the '70s, in those heady early years of feminism, to find self-fulfillment...

...What is striking about the conflict between the grandfather and grandson over Debby is how it contrasts with every other battle they have??in which Rocky, out of his fierce love and his inability to witness Max's suffering, ultimately yields...

...Rocky, for his part, is a crusty old Orthodox Jew, difficult and combative, entirely disdainful of authority, but ferociously devoted to his own...

...Now, in writing this loving, funny, heartrending book, he not only strengthens himself, as Rocky urged him to do, he strengthens us as well...

...Good Shabbes,' he said...

...There the pair settles into an off-campus apartment as Max pursues a graduate degree in English literature at the University of Michigan...