My father, David — so fervent a nonbeliever that I often described him as a fundamentalist atheist — had no use for holidays of any religion. In one emblematic bit of heresy, he bought a small Christmas tree and decorated it with yarmulkes. As a loving critic of America, a dissident at heart, he resisted the performative patriotism of July 4 and Memorial Day. Dad threw some raucous New Year's Eve parties, it's true, and he carved the Thanksgiving turkey with a surgeon's finesse. But the only holiday he really cared deeply about was Father's Day. He loved few things more than gathering his children and grandchildren in his New Jersey backyard; the last time he was alive for it was 15 years ago. A few months ago, I came into possession of a file that the F.B.I. compiled about my father. As I wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, that file has given me a fresh appreciation of the dualities of his life: being both a committed leftist and a successful businessman, holding tightly to socialistic politics while resisting Communist dogma. And, in a sense, his approach to Father's Day illustrates the same kind of dialectic. Dad had grown up in an anarchist colony whose residents, including his parents, considered marriage a bourgeois relic. And yet his father, whom I am named after, also benefited from some very old-fashioned gender roles. While that Samuel Freedman was out trying to make revolution through his labor union and Yiddish-language newspaper, his wife and four children were left in a distant second place. My grandfather died in 1941, when my father was 20, and Dad was never able to recount to me a single memory of paternal tenderness. So my father set about constructing his own family to carry on the political radicalism of his upbringing, but complement it with a certain kind of social conservatism, and with a physical presence and emotional engagement absent from his own childhood. Even as Dad shared the New Left's criticism of the Vietnam War and support for civil rights, for instance, he rejected its embrace of recreational sex and drugs and its mockery of the nuclear family. One part of Dad took our family to see Charlie Chaplin's antifascist satire "The Great Dictator" the moment it was rereleased in the early 1970s. That part also urged me to skip Little League practice to join him for a civil rights march. Another part of Dad expected us children to do our chores (mowing the lawn and taking out the garbage, in my case) and to exhibit polite table manners (not my strongest suit as a kid). For my father, all those elements formed part of being what he called "a substantial human being." As with so many families, ours inevitably fell short of the values my father espoused, and he fell short of some of his own. But his effort to hold political dissidence and personal responsibility in hand together, even from his beach chair in our backyard on Father's Day, has been one of the most important parts of his legacy.
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Saturday, June 15, 2024
Opinion Today: My Father’s Day gift from the F.B.I.
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