These obsessive images. That’s not what I want to write down at all, although perhaps it’s significant that after this fight, and Paul’s suspension from school as a result, was when I started serious lifting. I resolved not to have to depend on him to stick up for me, and further, I supposed that if I became a moose I could avoid fights. Little did I know.

In any case, after Uncle Vanya I made a terrific ass of myself by more or less staying in character perpetually, wearing an antique brocade vest I found in a junk shop, speaking with a slight accent, pretending to have to reach for an English word, mumbling in what I imagined sounded like Russian. I became somewhat more popular, as amusing lunatics sometimes do, and I began to get invitations to high-end parties thrown by the popular Jewish girls. The next play we did was Romeo and Juliet and I was Mercutio. The fit with him was much better than with Telegin, for to fill the harmless air with witty nonsense, strike antic poses, and absurdly die seems glorious to the young; nor is it o’er taxing to speak, like this, in rich and flowing iambs, till all about you wish you dead. For the teenaged boy playing Mercutio the hard part is to speak the dirty stuff without cracking up, all that business about pricks in act I, scene iv, for example, may be even harder than doing a convincing job as Romeo. As for Juliet…you know, speaking as an IP lawyer, I would say that Shakespeare’s famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thing for him they didn’t have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but-and contemporaries picked this up as well-there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage. Such a coup is the end of act II, scene ii. This is the famous balcony scene, and I don’t mean the front part that everyone quotes but the depiction of a love-mad child at the end. An adult playing it-Claire Bloom perhaps-can’t help but seem absurd, but a sixteen-year-old can make it live, especially if one is in love with the girl, as I was, and I recall very distinctly the moment when, as I watched the divine Miss Gottleib draw out the long goodbye, I thought to myself this is the life for me, this is my destiny, to open my being to genius, to be possessed, to be free of my miserable self.

This was my junior year in high school, a year that marked the beginning of the long twilight of the mob in New York. In that era, before the code of silence collapsed with Mr. Valachi, the best way to put a big-shot Italian away was to get him for tax violations, and my dad was therefore right in the crosshairs. As usual, they had him on numerous charges and were putting on the pressure to make him testify against his employers. Had they taken time to consult his family they would not have thus confused him with someone lacking moxie. All during the fall of that year, while we rehearsed R &J, Dad was on trial in federal court for the southern district of New York. While we had never been what you could call a happy household, this period was especially grim.

Let me here touch briefly upon the family drama. Izzy and Ermentrude continued as they had begun, at gunpoint (at least metaphorically), although I believe they believed they were in love, this defined as the continued attempt to bend the beloved to one’s own will. Here is the tableau that sticks in my mind. It is evening. We boys are prepubescent, perhaps I am eight, Paul is ten, the girl is six. We have dutifully done our homework and had it inspected by Obersturmbannführer-Mutti. The air is redolent with heavy Teutonic cookery. This is still the time of alles in ordnung, before the discovery of That Whore, his mistress, after which our mom more or less gave up on life for a while. We are perhaps watching a small-screen colorless television, perhaps arguing over which channel to watch. Growing tension as six o’clock comes and goes. Will he appear? Will he be in a good mood or not? Six-thirty, and Mutti is banging pots and slamming drawers, and muttering in German. We listen for the clink of bottle on glass. Seven o’clock. A smell of burning, of expensive proteins going dry, of vegetables steaming into inedible slush. We are ravenous, but none dares to enter the kitchen.

Seven-fifteen and the door opens. Our hearts sink when we see his face. No little gifties for the kids tonight, no hearty hi-ho Silvers for the boys, no snatchings up of the little girl and whirlings-around. No, tonight we go straight to the table, and the ruined dinner is flung thumping and clattering on the board, and my father says I’m not gonna eat this shit, and then they get into it, back and forth, in English and then demotic German, in which, even if we can’t follow the exact meaning, the violence is perfectly apparent, and then the platters and cutlery start flying, and Miriam ducks under the table and I follow, holding her little weeping head to my chest. Paul stays upright in his chair, and I can see him from my position below, face white, white too the knuckles of the fist that clutches his table knife. The fight grows in volume, ending usually with “fucking Nazi” from him and “Jew pig” from her and then he slugs her one and leaves. Slam! And we come out again and she makes us sit up straight and finish every scrap of the inedible food while she tells us about how it was to actually starve in poor Germany, after zeh war, and zo we must finish everyting. This isn’t why we choke it down, though; it’s because what else can we do for her?

But during the trial we didn’t do that anymore; now silence reigned. Mutti slapped warmed-up canned goods on the table and retreated into her bedroom, from which the sounds of the German classics emerged, Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner. She started drinking more, and when she got her load on, the volume went up. Dad might kick the door down then and smash records, or he might just leave and not return for days. Paul also was rarely home. After graduating (barely) from high school he had taken to hanging out with his gang, who had also graduated (as we were shortly to learn) from petty theft to armed robbery.

That left me to cope with the household and with my sister, Miriam, then fourteen. Miri had already developed the remarkable face she would carry into adulthood, a face whose angled planes acted like those on a stealth bomber to allow undetectable penetration deep into the heart of enemy territory, in this case, the male sex. I made no attempt to actually control her, knowing it would be futile, but I could at least ensure that she had meals and clean garments, and between me and Paulie we were successful (I believe) in discouraging the attentions of guys over thirty. One morning, just before Thanksgiving of that year, Dad did not show up in court, nor did he return home. Naturally we feared the worst, that his mob pals had lost faith in his silence (since it was fairly clear by then that he was going to go down for the top counts of the indictment unless he did a deal) and had acted to forestall this. I recall thinking of him stuffed into a weighted oil drum or resting under the asphalt of a highway and trying to feel sad, and failing.

But he hadn’t been whacked. After a period of some weeks, the papers reported that he’d been sighted in Tel Aviv. He had skipped bail and followed his mentor, Meyer Lansky, into comfortable exile. Not a card for us, not a call. Later I heard he’d changed his name to something more Hebraic, as encouraged by the Israeli government, although I suppose there are Mishkins enough in that nation. This was all before media frenzy became the rule, and so we only had a couple of reporters come by our house, and Paulie and some of his friends beat the shit out of them, smashing cameras, etc. This was when you could beat the shit out of the press without having it captured on videotape, which made for a more civilized press, in my opinion. Since Dad had put our house and his immovable assets up to make his colossal bail, and he’d skipped with all the cash on hand, we were left essentially destitute. After a decent interval the bailiffs came and took Dad’s Caddy and served us with eviction papers.