The Great Good Thing Read Online Free PDF

Fatherland.
    That—the Austrian line—was on her mother’s side. Mom’s mother was a very impressive figure apparently, a real hard case. Escaped from Europe with her younger siblings hidden in a haycart, as I recall the tale—escaped not from government oppression, either, but from an evil stepmother who abused and beat her. She was only thirteen years old. She came to America where she grew up to become a radical socialist, a feminist, and an atheist. She divorced her first husband and left their son in his custody. She became a chiropodist, a rare professional woman. She was said to have once performed a do-it-yourself abortion by flinging herself down a flight of stairs. So yeah, a hard case, no doubt about it.
    Mom’s big sister, my aunt, was a gifted scholar. That won their mother’s affection. But my mom was a different matter entirely. Mom’s mother dismissed her as a girly flibbertigibbet. “She had no time for me,” Mom would say. “But my father liked me because I was pretty.”
    She was pretty too. In her youth, she looked something like those movie stars she admired so much. So whatever parental affection my mother got, it came from her father, who liked a girly flibbertigibbet just fine. Gammy, we boys called him. I knew him only as an old man and can barely remember him. But in his heyday, he was apparently quite dashing and a bit of a rascal. Whenever she got in trouble in school, my mother said, Gammy would come and charm the female teacher and all would be forgiven. He was handsome, big, and athletic. He put himself through college on a basketball scholarship. I’ve seen his photograph in a book about Jewish American athletes. It was very rare stuff for a Jew of his time.
    He became a lawyer but was caught up in one of the reformist sweeps of late-1920s New York City. He was disbarred when he failed to show up in court to face charges of ambulance chasing. He had given a business card to the parents of a boy who’d been in a bicycle accident, something like that. His disgrace was a great source of pain and shame to my mother. She never even told us about it until the old man died, and then she only told my older brother and me. He and I were teenagers then. We thought it was amusing and cool to have a criminal in the family. It suited our roguish sense of ourselves. But it had clearly been traumatic for Mom. After his disbarment, Gammy was employed only sporadically and my mother’s family was often broke. Throughout the Great Depression, they were forced to move from place to place whenever they couldn’t come up with the rent. They bounced around New York first, and later through Baltimore and its suburbs.
    And each time they moved, so my mother told us—and told us proudly too!—before they moved, her father would scan the local phone books to make sure there were no Jewish names near their new location. Gammy didn’t want to live in a neighborhood with other Jews.
    I don’t think he was in denial about who or what he was. A family legend says he once attended a Labor Day parade in Manhattan where a cadre of Hassids were marching along with the rest. Hassids—those are the Orthodox Jews who dress in black and leave their beards and sidelocks unshaven. A couple of thugs on the sidelines started jeering the Jews. Gammy grabbed the punks by their collars, one in each of his big, b-baller hands. He lifted them off their feet, drew their faces close to his, and said through gritted teeth, “Your Lord looked like that, you know.” Then he set them down again, silenced.
    But he was . . . an ardent assimilationist, I guess you could say. An immigrant, he was proud he had no trace of a greenhorn accent. Proud of his smooth, non-Jewish-seeming features. Proud to have nothing to do with his religion. Proud to go where other Jews could not. When my father arrived to pick up my mother for their first date, he was appalled to find her family living in a house outside of Baltimore across the street