Toward the Shores of Understanding
HABERMAN, CLYDE
Toward the Shores of Understanding Lost in America: A Journey with My Father By Sherwin B. Nuland Knopf. 224 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York "Times" columnist Sons are...
...By every account I would hear in later years, my father was never the same after the pervasive pall of his son's death descended on him...
...In the process he was somehow led back to his father, by then dead for a dozen years...
...Years later, in 1947, Harvey and Sherwin Nudelman followed...
...How the relationship transformed itself is not explained with full clarity...
...But he had an intensely personal motivation too, and it was overwhelming...
...So was an unwillingness-in sharp contrast to modern immigrants-to cling even a bit to the old country...
...What he had once deemed his fondest wish was beyond his grasp...
...Enough already...
...Maishele's departure was the climactic stroke of misfortune, the ultimate signal to abandon whatever small pursuit of the American dream he had attempted...
...Even his physical infirmities, once so humiliating for the son, turn out to have an explanation, a surprising one that is best left unspoken here...
...His clothes were stained from food that dropped between fork and mouth...
...On the down slope of life, he seems to be seeking expiation for his sins of misunderstanding before it is too late...
...But their reticence was not at all unusual for that time...
...But tenderness lurks behind his pained eyes as well as rage...
...It was a short trip, but for Meyer it was painful and tiring...
...who ever wished that his father showed an ounce more grace and wordliness...
...who ever suffered the fury of paternal temper in full storm...
...But they are no longer all that defines the man...
...Meyer's first child, a boy named Maishele, died at the age of three from bronchial pneumonia...
...It was this posture," Nuland says, "that I assumed during the worst of my illness...
...When Maishele died, something of Daddy went into the grave with him," Nuland writes...
...Those were days when a blatantly Jewish name led to doors being slammed in faces...
...Have mercy...
...Hospital psychiatrists were prepared to perform a lobotomy until a young resident persuaded them to try electroshock therapy instead...
...From very early in childhood," Nuland writes, "I had seen him as inept, unworldly and ill-informed...
...That does not minimize the significance of his voyage, told here in prose that is unsparing and often eloquent His recollections have to be compelling to anyone who ever was ashamed of his father, even for a moment...
...This was the intuitive sense I had about him, even as a child too young to put formed thoughts or words to it...
...He had begun to make peace with the past, with memory and with himself...
...Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York "Times" columnist Sons are born to distance themselves from their fathers...
...But nothing compared to the black hole that swallowed him some 30 years ago...
...Though a failure in his adoptive land, he gains redemption through his children's successes...
...In the end, Meyer Nudelman's failings are no less obvious than ever...
...One almost wants to resort to some Yiddish of his own: Genugshoyn...
...Anyone with an iota of compassion would have responded to the anguished emotion in those moist deep brown eyes," Nuland says, "but not Meyer's own son...
...But assigning resolutely AngloSaxon names to the children was common in immigrant Jewish families...
...There were many cruel blows for the family...
...The boy helped his hobbled, bent-over father navigate the icy Bronx streets...
...FROM EARLY ON, Meyer Nudelman was an angry man...
...Its core, though, is the turbulent relationship between father and son...
...This slender book offers interesting glimpses of life in an overcrowded Bronx apartment back in the 1930s and '40s...
...Hob rachmones, he said in Yiddish...
...Meyer was reduced to begging...
...If there is a flaw, it is a certain repetitiveness in Nuland's recitation of his being humiliated by this inelegant and inept man...
...How Nudelman morphed into Nuland needs to be told...
...we're going home...
...Forget it, he said unfeelingly...
...the smell of urine clung to him...
...Meyer's shortcomings endured...
...A second son, Harvey, was disabled in his teens by rheumatic fever...
...It makes much of the father's behavior comprehensible, although Meyer himself, throughout his years of pain, never had a clue what was really wrong...
...Nuland is unflinching even about his own failings...
...He himself petitioned the court to approve the name change in behalf of his sons, who were then under age...
...The son grew impatient...
...And Meyer, nebbish that he was, did more than simply agree to the separation...
...If I could get away from Nudelman, I could getaway from Meyer," he says...
...So it is startling that he begins his remembrance with a low point of his life, the early 1970s, when he was hospitalized with severe depression...
...Harvey and Sherwin might seem like odd names for an immigrant family that hung on to the mammeloshen, or mother tongue, as Yiddish speakers called their language...
...Besides, they had the one link to the past that mattered: Judaism...
...It worked...
...This one commands that, within the family, no sin committed against one another is beyond redemption...
...And he possessed a frightening temper, shockingly fierce and easily ignited, capable of reducing his son to a quiver as surely as a lightning bolt...
...Daddy's opinions and suggestions were not worthy of consideration because I was certain that he did not understand how the world works...
...Volcanic in temper and terrifying in his autocratic control, he had always seemed to me to maintain his authority by the explosive force of his unpredictable and predictable anger, rather than through any wisdom he possessed or respect he had earned...
...In one painful story, from 1945, when he was 15, he agreed to take Meyer to the movies, a rare treat for the old man...
...He walked hunched over and with an uncertain gait, the result of a puzzling neurological disease...
...The man seemed unable to do anything right...
...Nuland's journey comes late...
...Nuland-a surgeon, medical historian and professor at the Yale School of Medicine-will be familiar to many readers, perhaps for his best-known work, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, which won the 1994 National Book Award...
...He did it by staying true to another universal law governing fathers and sons...
...In America, Meyer Nudelman was a man with no past," says Nuland, amazed now that neither he nor Harvey ever asked their father questions about life in Russia...
...All the same, he reached it...
...I was not proud of the course I was embarking upon," Nuland admits...
...His English, fractured and laced with Yiddish, made him sound forever as if he were just off the boat from his native Russia...
...More important, he no longer wanted to be...
...Sherwin, the third son, had his own brush with death at age three when diphtheria struck...
...He could not have been more aptly named...
...It has taken me overly long to reach this stage of the journey," Nuland says somewhat ruefully...
...He came to America as a teenager in 1907...
...Neither is the search for a bridge across it...
...That's a universal law, and Sherwin B. Nuland was not one to violate it...
...He would never be free of his father...
...Then again, Nuland argues, Jews often "forsook their family names without pangs of conscience, because their heritage dwelt in other things...
...Everything about Meyer Nudelman embarrassed his youngest son, Sherwin...
...Although Nuland, ever critical, felt that his father practiced it more by rote than with genuine spirituality...
...One reason was their desire to make it in America...
...As for the son, he came to terms with a basic fact...
...But they were softened and made bearable-by the passage of time, by the love he clearly felt for his son, by his pride in a Nudelman finding his way in America, even if he now called himself Nuland...
...It is a journey that can never be completed," Nuland says...
...I am trying to find the truth of my father, and in the process to find the part of my self that I have never understood...
...Nudelman, in Yiddish, means Needle Man...
...Actually, Harvey was Hershel and Sherwin was Shepsel...
...The canyon separating fathers and sons is never defined by ethnicity or limited by geography...
...In time, Meyer married a fellow immigrant from Russia, Vitsche Lutsky...
...He is now in his 70s, and his father has been dead for more than four decades...
...It took shape in the 1950s, when Nuland was studying medicine at Yale...
...With Meyer, it was hard to figure out where Yiddish ended and English began, so thick was his accent...
...Then, with the theater's marquee in sight, he realized he had already seen the film...
...After stumbling in business, he took a series of jobs in New York's garment district, where he operated a sewing machine...
...He is, by any reasonable measure, an American success story...
...For many Jews, this sort of opportunistic name change amounts to betrayal...
...But this is more than a story about a particular Jewish family in a particular corner of a particular borough of New York, the Bronx...
...The poignancy will no doubt be felt more keenly by readers from immigrant families that struggled to make a future for themselves in America...
...A doctor cousin had paved the way by adopting the more American-sounding name...
...This memoir, as one may guess from the subtitle, is Nuland's odyssey across a sea of resentment toward the shores of understanding...
...In business he was a flop, and as a family man, not much better...
...There is a Vesuvian temper, yes...
...He had bouts of depression as a teenager, and in more recent years as well...
...The boy could not take his father seriously...
...She would die young, when Sherwin was only 12...
...Over time, his bodily functions rebelled...
...The change was not complete, not by a long shot...
...He seemed eternally lost, not only in America but also in life...
...But that shortcoming pales in the face of the brutal honesty at work here...
...He even developed the old man's hunched gait...
...But it was to no avail...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
