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Alfred Glixman, January 26 1921—December 24 2011
My grandfather has died. He was the last of my grandparents remaining; he was the last native Yiddish-speaker of my family. He was born in Brooklyn, the younger son of immigrants from two different countries that were sometimes one in those days, so skinny that his worried mother poured cream down him and he stayed a rail-thin, faun-eared kid with eyes so bad, he didn't know until his first pair of glasses that trees had branches, let alone leaves. When he was eight, he chalked certain statements on the sidewalk across the street from his parents' store on Broadway and Hooper; lightning did not strike: he became an atheist. As a teenager, briefly, he boxed flyweight. I don't know how he did it. Without his glasses, he got a reputation for rudeness when he walked blithely past well-known faces he couldn't make out, freshness when he stared too intently at the strangers he passed. I don't remember what he studied in college, but one of his first dates years later sang out "Freddie!" on a street corner in Boston and they wound up at the same Jewish book club. In 1943, he was working toward a PhD in psychology at the University of Iowa. My grandmother was in the same program. They eloped three months later.
(His eyesight kept him out of the war, which he wanted to join. His father was the freethinker of the family, come over from the textile business in Łódź after a turn in the Tsar's army; of the five remaining Gliksmans, one ended in Tel Aviv, another in Miami, and the rest with their families in Auschwitz and Chełmno. I was in high school before I knew this last fact.)
He ended up a teacher, doing most of his research at Menninger's in Topeka and the University of Oklahoma at Norman. My mother was born in Oakland, her brother in Oxford, Mississippi, where the students would come round the new professor's office hours to see if he really had horns. (Eventually one of them explained: my grandfather was the first Jew on campus. They were disappointed, he thought, that he just had slightly curly, reddish-dark hair. His eyes were hazel-green.) My aunt was born in New Jersey, but the family stayed mostly away from the East Coast until sometime in the 1970's, when my grandparents moved into their first house in Portland, Maine. Before then were stories like the graduation at OU where my grandfather, bored out of his mind with sitting in the front row of his department through interminable speeches, started dissecting a baseball with a pocketknife during the ceremonies. It was one of the wartime kind, with a rubber center. The rubber had decayed. When the knife split through the last layer of string, the insides catapulted goopily all over my grandfather, not to mention the two professors to either side of him in their spotless academic black. He was not asked to attend graduation again. This was by him a success.
I start writing about him and I write about my grandmother. She was ABD, the boxes and boxes of her dissertation still somewhere in our attic—what she did most seriously as an adult was art. Mostly sculpture, mostly welding. Some of her best pieces were big abstracts, though the most striking are spare armatures of iron and beaded solder, black as things half-burnt or half-born, her most devastating a single starved hand, wrenched back at the wrist: the Holocaust. She drew portraits in charcoal, pastels, pen-and-ink. My grandfather was the photographer. His boxes and boxes are negatives and slides. The basement of their house on Pleasant Street was half full of acetylene torches and her workbench, then his darkroom and studio; I associate a particular autumnal zigzag of carpet with the smell of developer and wet red light. For some reason the slideshow I remember most vividly was their trip to Israel either shortly before or shortly after I was born: there were pictures of pomegranates in Jerusalem, their skins a crisp blood-lacquer, the parchment-colored comb of broken, pooling seeds, my first images of the fruit. They traveled extensively, especially after he retired. My grandmother was warned not to eat lutefisk in Norway because of her silver fillings. From Westminster Synagogue in London, they brought back a sefer Torah for the congregation in Topeka and my grandfather took the photograph that became the cover of A Mayse-Bikhl. My grandmother had a gift for languages as well as accents—from the time she was sixteen until she left for graduate school, she acted with the Cherry Lane Theatre—while my grandfather never sounded like anything but seltzer-straight Brooklyn Jew, so in Italy she was asked by a bemused and well-meaning waiter, "Just tell me what a nice Italian girl like you sees in an American like him?" He went grief-crazy when she died, fourteen years ago: sold the house, threw out too many books and clothes and paintings. I remember him standing in the kitchen, quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay. He had to finish whispering, he was crying so hard.
His was not a fast dying. I have to remember it's Saturday: the last two and a half days have been deathwatch. Long before the end, his face was the cold sunken wax I had thought was mostly figurative; around five in the morning, I realized I could see clearly the skull in the skin. It will not be my strongest memory of him, although right now it is the sharpest. I've been stuck since yesterday evening with a picture of him right after he had cataract surgery, when I was twelve and he had to wear watertight goggles in order to take me to the beach; he never got in the water, unlike my grandmother who used to lift me up into the waves before I got bigger and her hips got worse, but he stood there in the upstairs hall, on the heel-worn bearskin rug with a giant full-color poster for the famous restoration of Abel Gance's Napoléon angled on the wall behind him, seventy-something in swim trunks and chunky truck-tire goggles like the optometry of H.R. Giger—probably he would rather have been remembered in his distinguished nerd mode, with his cardigans and heavy black-framed glasses and the Phillips turntable I heard all my first records on, that's memory for you. He was only ever an inch taller than I am now, but I didn't notice for years.
I am leaving out all sorts of things. Ninety years is a long time and I wasn't there for most of them. I know some of the stupid fights he had; I know some of the things that hurt him; I wanted more of some stories that are gone now, absolutely no one ever will tell me how a thing was. So much of him was my grandmother, and her the same. At least he saw me publish, and sing in an opera, and speak Yiddish to him, a bisl. He loved the movies. The first one he could remember seeing was The Patent Leather Kid (1927) with Richard Barthelmess, I believe at the Broadway Theater. He had a terrible crush on Margo because of Winterset (1936) and Lost Horizon (1937). She left the valley, he told me, years before I ever saw the film, and the next time they turned back to look at her, she was old.
(His eyesight kept him out of the war, which he wanted to join. His father was the freethinker of the family, come over from the textile business in Łódź after a turn in the Tsar's army; of the five remaining Gliksmans, one ended in Tel Aviv, another in Miami, and the rest with their families in Auschwitz and Chełmno. I was in high school before I knew this last fact.)
He ended up a teacher, doing most of his research at Menninger's in Topeka and the University of Oklahoma at Norman. My mother was born in Oakland, her brother in Oxford, Mississippi, where the students would come round the new professor's office hours to see if he really had horns. (Eventually one of them explained: my grandfather was the first Jew on campus. They were disappointed, he thought, that he just had slightly curly, reddish-dark hair. His eyes were hazel-green.) My aunt was born in New Jersey, but the family stayed mostly away from the East Coast until sometime in the 1970's, when my grandparents moved into their first house in Portland, Maine. Before then were stories like the graduation at OU where my grandfather, bored out of his mind with sitting in the front row of his department through interminable speeches, started dissecting a baseball with a pocketknife during the ceremonies. It was one of the wartime kind, with a rubber center. The rubber had decayed. When the knife split through the last layer of string, the insides catapulted goopily all over my grandfather, not to mention the two professors to either side of him in their spotless academic black. He was not asked to attend graduation again. This was by him a success.
I start writing about him and I write about my grandmother. She was ABD, the boxes and boxes of her dissertation still somewhere in our attic—what she did most seriously as an adult was art. Mostly sculpture, mostly welding. Some of her best pieces were big abstracts, though the most striking are spare armatures of iron and beaded solder, black as things half-burnt or half-born, her most devastating a single starved hand, wrenched back at the wrist: the Holocaust. She drew portraits in charcoal, pastels, pen-and-ink. My grandfather was the photographer. His boxes and boxes are negatives and slides. The basement of their house on Pleasant Street was half full of acetylene torches and her workbench, then his darkroom and studio; I associate a particular autumnal zigzag of carpet with the smell of developer and wet red light. For some reason the slideshow I remember most vividly was their trip to Israel either shortly before or shortly after I was born: there were pictures of pomegranates in Jerusalem, their skins a crisp blood-lacquer, the parchment-colored comb of broken, pooling seeds, my first images of the fruit. They traveled extensively, especially after he retired. My grandmother was warned not to eat lutefisk in Norway because of her silver fillings. From Westminster Synagogue in London, they brought back a sefer Torah for the congregation in Topeka and my grandfather took the photograph that became the cover of A Mayse-Bikhl. My grandmother had a gift for languages as well as accents—from the time she was sixteen until she left for graduate school, she acted with the Cherry Lane Theatre—while my grandfather never sounded like anything but seltzer-straight Brooklyn Jew, so in Italy she was asked by a bemused and well-meaning waiter, "Just tell me what a nice Italian girl like you sees in an American like him?" He went grief-crazy when she died, fourteen years ago: sold the house, threw out too many books and clothes and paintings. I remember him standing in the kitchen, quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay. He had to finish whispering, he was crying so hard.
His was not a fast dying. I have to remember it's Saturday: the last two and a half days have been deathwatch. Long before the end, his face was the cold sunken wax I had thought was mostly figurative; around five in the morning, I realized I could see clearly the skull in the skin. It will not be my strongest memory of him, although right now it is the sharpest. I've been stuck since yesterday evening with a picture of him right after he had cataract surgery, when I was twelve and he had to wear watertight goggles in order to take me to the beach; he never got in the water, unlike my grandmother who used to lift me up into the waves before I got bigger and her hips got worse, but he stood there in the upstairs hall, on the heel-worn bearskin rug with a giant full-color poster for the famous restoration of Abel Gance's Napoléon angled on the wall behind him, seventy-something in swim trunks and chunky truck-tire goggles like the optometry of H.R. Giger—probably he would rather have been remembered in his distinguished nerd mode, with his cardigans and heavy black-framed glasses and the Phillips turntable I heard all my first records on, that's memory for you. He was only ever an inch taller than I am now, but I didn't notice for years.
I am leaving out all sorts of things. Ninety years is a long time and I wasn't there for most of them. I know some of the stupid fights he had; I know some of the things that hurt him; I wanted more of some stories that are gone now, absolutely no one ever will tell me how a thing was. So much of him was my grandmother, and her the same. At least he saw me publish, and sing in an opera, and speak Yiddish to him, a bisl. He loved the movies. The first one he could remember seeing was The Patent Leather Kid (1927) with Richard Barthelmess, I believe at the Broadway Theater. He had a terrible crush on Margo because of Winterset (1936) and Lost Horizon (1937). She left the valley, he told me, years before I ever saw the film, and the next time they turned back to look at her, she was old.
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Your memories of him are marvelous.
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I shall say Kaddish for him. And then get back to translating Yiddish, which I imagine he would like.
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A full life is the only blessing we can hope for. I'm sorry, but you have good memories.
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My year candle is burning even now for my mother; I will add my prayers for him.
His memory for a blessing.
*hugs*
Nine
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I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm glad you had the chance to know him so well as you did. It's wonderful that he got to see you published, and singing, and that you were able to speak Yiddish to him, even a little.
Thank you for sharing a few of your memories. *hugs*
ETA: I hope it won't offend if I light a candle for him tonight.
where the students would come round the new professor's office hours to see if he really had horns
My father once told me that the people in certain Alabama towns where his high school team went to play football apparently also believed that Catholics had horns.
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A fine man. Respects to you all.
- A
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Many hugs.
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*hugs*
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Thank you for writing about him. I'm glad to know a little of him.
On a very minor note, your grandfather's experience with the old baseball just cleared up a mystery for me:
It was one of the wartime kind, with a rubber center. The rubber had decayed.
Once I heard an urban legend that if you cut open a golf ball, it contained goop that would act like powerful acid and dissolve everything around it, like stone, wood, dirt, the skin on your fingers, your shoes... I bet that legend arose because of decaying old rubber-centered balls like the one your grandfather opened.
How thin grew the light...
Πως λιγνεψε το φως πανω στη στεγη και στα δεντρα!
Γιαννης Ριτσος
We can attempt to live as fully as your zayde did.
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Sweet Sonya - Kaddish and red wine for Alfred. Life is a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. With deepest sympathy ...
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Thank you for the wonderful stories.
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