Minna and her sisters

A curse usually credited to ancient Chinese wisdom is "may you live in interesting times". I often think that my father Peter must have pissed off some ancient sage big time because he was born into quite an interesting household. His mother was one of four sisters nee Steigman, Minna (his mother), Rose, Lilly, and Olga. Rose, the oldest, escaped -- first to Westchester, later to Florida. Having escaped the folie a quatre Rose was only an occasional presence in my father's (and later my) life, flying north each summer to unite the remaining three against a common enemy.

These three spent almost their entire lives living close to each other in Manhattan, the last 20 or so years in the same building in Chelsea, and in neighboring country houses in the least fashionable corner of Fairfield County. Grandma Minna was the second oldest, and the closest to sane of the sisters. By the time I came along, she was retired from a career as a high school biology teacher and spent her time attending cultural events, gardening, dropping hints of her many affairs, and cooking large quantities of something she referred to as "food", but which was not readily identfiable as such. She also made frequent reference to things she used to do, such as playing tennis and the piano, but which she no longer could do, for reasons that were never clear. She remained vibrant and physically active with no outward signs of infirmity into her 80s, yet never touched the Steinway baby grand piano that stood silent witness to her abandoned concert career throughout my childhood.

Each morning my grandpa Joe made the coffee, and Minna exclaimed upon her first sip "Joe, this coffee is terrible! It's like dishwater!" Joe would then reply "Oh for Gord's sake Minna, if it's so terrible make it yourself!" She never did. Breakfast was always followed by a long, vigorous walk, and, when in the country, marathon sessions of ping pong in the barn on Lilly's nearby property. The sisters all fancied themselves expert ping pongers, though in reality they were no match for any of the men.

Joe was a classic, crafty spin-meister. Lilly's husband Lou (Grudin), though riddled with emphysema and arthritis by the time I was old enough to face him at the table, was a vicious smasher. Dad, a varsity tennis player and highly proficient in all racquet sports, was on a plane so far above the rest that they refused to play him, denying his gifts and declaring him a cheater. The same fate befell me when I showed signs of following in my father's athletic footsteps.

Minna was highly competent in her family's specialties, namely, disputing anything one of her sisters said at Led Zepplin-esque decibel levels, maintaining decades old grievances, mispronouncing any name she encountered, and disparaging anyone not related to her by blood, notably Joe and Lou. When not en famille, Minna was generally cabable of surpressing her worst instincts, and communicating civilly. Having also had the experience of giving birth to and rearing a child, she was capable of degrees of affection, jollity, and empathy almost completely lacking in her two childless sisters, traits that also helped her maintain a handful of friendships and get along with her neighbors.

As Calliope was to Minna, Terpsichore was to Lilly, the youngest, craziest, and most flamboyant of the four. In childhood and early adolescence, my sister Liz (then known by another name, which is another story) was an avid ballet and modern dance student. Lilly would often demand impromptu performances from Liz. She would then critique her form, while regaling us with tales of dancing "the bolly" in her youth. Lilly, who was five feet tall, grotesquely steatopygous, wore Murray's space shoes, and suffered from all manner of malady real and imagined, would then commence a demonstration of the "correct" technique, which would end mid-twirl in some combination of sneezing and spasming of various body parts.

What Lilly lacked in her older sister's argumentative versatility, she made up for in volume, paranoia, deafness, and production of bodily fluids. Her particular specialty was making it clear to strangers that she had no children because uncle Lou forced her to have countless abortions, preferring to forestall procreation until he wrote the great American novel and became a man of independent means. In the 1920s and 30s, this might not have been an a bad idea, as Lou was a published poet and critic of some repute, a polymath, and a minor figure in the modernist literary world, who showed promise of becoming much more.

Lou's poetic masterpiece, "Dust on Spring Street" is included in some editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and was called one of the greatest poems in the English language by William Carlos Williams, with whom Lou carried on a sporadic friendship and correspondence. Lou was close friends with Maxwell Bodenheim and other figures in New York bohemia. He was also acquainted with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, about whom he would say nothing more than "Ptui, that anti-Semite son of a bitch," when I attempted to interview him as a source for a college literature paper. When his novel Inkly Darkling was finally published in 1954, this review seems to have put an end to his greater literary ambitions.

Olga, between Lilly and Minna in age, was to put it cruelly but honestly, a person of no worth to anyone in the family. She had been married briefly in her youth to a man denounced by her sisters as a conniving abuser. Family legend had it that he met Olga on a cruise, conned her into marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship, and then left her as soon as the papers came through. I think it more likely that he married Olga (who in youthful photographs possessed a petite, doll-like beauty) for love, but an extended dose of the Steigmans was enough to send him to Australia.

Olga spent the rest her days living first with her mother, and then alone, working as a secretary for the Amalgamated Bank, and growing increasingly deaf, abusive towards children, and foul smelling. Each holiday season and birthday, Liz and I would buy Olga fancy soaps, perfumes and powders in the hopes of rendering the experience of being yelled at, insulted, poked, and pinched agonizing only to the senses of touch and hearing. Olga died when I was about 15, and my father and I were tasked with disposing of her belongings. I found boxes upon boxes of unopened toiletries stashed behind the furniture in her bedroom.

It feels heartless to admit this, but almost nothing more than this can be said about her. Almost immediately after her death, Olga disappeared completely from the consciousness of her family. She was almost never talked about, never the subject of reminiscences fond or otherwise. This wasn't superstition. No one feared speaking ill or well of the dead. It was simply that Olga was so insignificant to her sisters, that they paid no mind to her absence. Liz and I, having never had any feelings other than revulsion arising from the way she yelled, insulted, grabbed, poked, and stank, were guiltily relieved, but nonetheless relieved that we would no longer be subjected to her presence.

The sisters were raised by their mother. Her, name was Sarah, but she was known to all only by the nickname "Suchi". She called herself Suchi, and was never referred to as Sarah by anyone except on official documents. Suchi, who died when I was about three, and whom I remember only vaguely as a malevolent apparition, was feared and loathed by all of her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. Suchi came to America from somewhere beyond the pale of settlement (either Moscow or Minsk, depending on the document and the storyteller) with her four daughters and her sister, Gussie Zuckerman, who became a concert pianist and composer and made a name for herself as Manna Zucca. According to Minna, once they all got to America, Suchi took up with a boarder they had taken in, and tossed her husband the Luftmensch Torah scholar to the curb. He was never seen again by the sisters, who learned years later that he had died homeless in another city (variously recounted as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle).

All other stories told about Suchi amplified the theme of her cruelty, manipulativeness, and divisiveness. She lived for a time with Minna, Joe, and my father when my father was very young, but was eventually sent to live with Olga after she accused Joe of molesting Dad. Even Minna, who rarely had a kind word to say to or about her husband, knew that such an accusation was preposterous. Joe, though not without some quirks, was a kind, gentle soul, completely incapable of anything approaching abuse of another human being.

Decades later, the subject of Suchi came up in conversation between my mother and Sophia, a Russian Jewish woman hired as a home health care aide to take care my father, who had become severely disabled following a stroke. As always happens among Ashkenazim, conversation turned to the names and geographic origins of our ancestors, and my mother described my father's monster of a grandmother. Sophia interrupted her.

"I'm sorry, Pat, what did you say her name was?"
"Suchi."
"Suchi? And She was from Russia? She spoke Russian?"
"Yes, yes. Mostly Yiddish, but Russian as well."
"Do you know what Suchi means in Russian?"

[It bears repeating at this point that Suchi was never called by her real name, called herself Suchi, and insisted that everyone else do so.]

"No, please tell me what Suchi means in Russian."
"It means 'bitch'."

Ah hah.

Liz and I experienced all the wonders of the Steigman clan at family gatherings, and during weekends and vacations in the country. We always had each other as refuge, day camp, friends, and activities as escape, and knowledge that we would eventually return to our parents as hope. Consequently, we were able to maintain a degree of detachment and amusement at the sisters' eccentricities, laugh at Lou's wordplay, and share conspiratorial asides with Joe, who kept his distance from the rest as much as he could.

Dad, on the other hand, had no such luxuries. He grew up in a cauldron of anger, argument, and erudition, and his personality reflected this. He possessed an absolutely astonishing mind. [My apologies for referring to him in the past tense in this context; he is still alive, but his mind is barely so.] By training he was an economist, but his intellect was restless and achieved heights of creativity in mathematics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, chess, go, and even children's literature. I have never met a fellow academic who didn't spontaneously and sincerely describe Dad as one of the most brilliant people of his or acquaintance. Yet he spent much of his career in a (albeit tenured) backwater, unable to convince more prestigious universities to hire him, and unable to complete what he viewed as his most important work. The social and emotional deficits instilled in him by the Steigmans left him unable to navigate institutions and collaborations. They also left him with a distorted capacity for mature romantic love, which played itself out in a troubled marriage and embarrassing affairs.

In surprising ways, though, he transcended his upbringing. He was as outgoing and spontaneous as the Steigmans were xenophobic. He was fascinated by new people, cultures, and experiences, and had a number of long lasting, deep friendships. He was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village cafe scene, particularly at the Figaro (which was once a boho outpost), where he was known as "Pete the Prof". He hung out in pool halls, and at basketball courts and tennis clubs. Consistent with his Upper West Side upbringing, he subscribed to the opera and the symphony, visited art museums and galleries at every opportunity, and called himself a socialist, but he also had an extensive collection of rock records, read science fiction voraciously, and listened to right wing talk radio in the car.

Above all, he was a wonderful father. He loved Liz and me as all parents love their children, but he also liked us as people, enjoyed our company at all stages of our development, and became our friend in adulthood. He was one of the dads in the neighborhood that all the kids like to play with when we were little, and was one of the "cool" parents when we were older, but he was also serious and responsible with our upbringing. He protected us from bullies, taught us to read write and do advanced math before we got to school, and was a stern taskmaster once we were there. As hard as he pushed us academically, he supported and "kvelled" at our experiences outside the classroom. He encouraged me to take the music I loved seriously and attended my gigs whenever he could. After one performance at a college dormitory, he walked up to me with a huge grin on his shaggy, bearded face and said "Now I know how Keith Richards' mother feels."

It is this side of my father that I hope has had the greatest impact on me. As my young son begins to emerge from babyhood and engage the world around him, I am often filled with sadness that he will never know his grandpa Pete, who would no doubt have surpassed himself in that role. At the same time I rejoice that I had the opportunity to know someone who was able to move past the curse of an "interesting" upbringing in some measure and achieve a state of fascination with the world around him. Alexander, may you live in fascinating times.