My mother carried the company on briefly, but her heart wasn’t in it. She folded it and went to work as a bookkeeper. Together, one night in the summer of 1956, near the end of our year of mourning, my mother, my sister, and I threw enormous reams of paper from the lost accounts down our incinerator in the Bronx. But my mother held on to the manila folders that they had used for those accounts. (“We can still get plenty of use out of them,” she said.) Forty years later, I’m still using those folders, containers of long-vanished entities—Puritan Sportswear, Fountain Modes, Girl Talk, Youngland—where are they now? Does it mean that, in some way, I’ve stayed in my father’s business? (Happy Loman, at the very end of Death of a Salesman: “I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket!”) What racket? What business? My wife defined the relationship in a way I like: I’ve gone into my father’s unfinished business.
“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.” Another line from Death of a Salesman.1 It was my father’s favorite play. My parents saw Salesman at least twice on stage, starring Lee J. Cobb, and again in film form starring Fredric March. It became a primary source of material in the endless affectionate and ironic repartee they carried on till he died. I didn’t know that till I got to see the movie, just a few months before his death; then all at once the meaning of years of banter became clear. I joined in the crosstalk, tried it at the dinner table, and got all smiles, though the lines were tragic, and were about to become more tragic still. One hot day in the summer of 1955 he came home drained from the garment center and said, “They don’t know me any more.” I said, “Dad … Willy Loman?” He was happy that I knew he was quoting, but he also wanted me to know it was not only a quote but the truth. I got him a beer, which I knew he liked in the summer heat; he hugged me and said it gave him peace to know I was going to be freer than he was, I was going to have a life of my own.
Soon after he died, scholarships and good luck propelled me to Columbia. There I could talk and read and write all night and then walk to the Hudson to see the sun at dawn. I felt like a prospector who had made a strike, discovering sources of fresh energy I never knew I had. And some of my teachers had even told me that living for ideas could be a way for me to make a living! I was happier than I had ever been, steeped in a life that really felt like my life. Then I realized this was exactly what my father had wanted for me. For the first time since his death, I started thinking about him. I thought about how he had struggled and lost, and my grief turned to rage. So they don’t know you? I thought. Let me at those bastards, I’ll get them for you. They don’t remember? I’ll remind them. But which bastards? Who were “they”? How could I get them? Where would I start? I made a date with Jacob Taubes, my beloved professor of religion. I said I wanted to talk about my father and Karl Marx.
Jacob and I sat in his office in Butler Library and talked and talked. He said that he sympathized with all radical desire, but revenge was a sterile form of fulfillment. Didn’t Nietzsche write the book on that? Hadn’t I read it in his class? He said that in the part of Europe where he came from (b. Vienna 1927), the politics of revenge had succeeded far beyond anything Americans could imagine. He told me a joke: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.” I had heard that joke before, maybe even from my father; it had gone round many times, for good reasons. But it was a dark joke and it hurt to laugh at it, because what followed seemed to be a total human impasse: The system is intolerable, and so is the only alternative to the system. Oy! So what then, I asked, we all put ourselves to sleep? No, no, said Jacob, he didn’t mean to immobilize me. In fact, there was this book he had meant to tell me about: Marx wrote it “when he was still a kid, before he became Karl Marx”; it was wild, and I would like it. The Columbia Bookstore (“those fools”) didn’t have it, but I could get it at Barnes & Noble downtown. The book had “been kept secret for a century”—that was Jacob’s primal romance, the secret book, the Kabbalah—but now at last it had been released.2 He said some people thought it offered “an alternative vision of how man should live.” Wouldn’t that be better than revenge? And I could get there on the subway.
So, one lovely Saturday in November, I took the 1 train downtown, turned south at the Flatiron Building, and headed down Fifth to Barnes & Noble. B&N then was far from its 1990s monopoly incarnation, “Barnes Ignoble,” scourge of small bookshops; it was only one store, just off Union Square, and it traced itself back to Abe Lincoln and Walt Whitman and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But before I could get there, I passed another place that I had always walked on by: the Four Continents Book Store, official distributor for all Soviet publications. Would my Marx be there? If it really was “really wild,” would the USSR be bringing it out? I remembered the Soviet tanks in Budapest, killing kids on the streets. Still, the USSR in 1959 was supposed to be opening up (“the Thaw, they called it), and there was a possibility. I had to see.
The Four Continents was like a rainforest inside, walls painted deep green, giant posters of bears, pines, icebergs and icebreakers, shelves stretching back toward a vast horizon, lighting that evoked a tree cover more than a modern room. My first thought was, how can anyone read in this light? (In retrospect, I realize it resembled the lighting in certain 1950s furniture stores and romantic comedies. It was the light scheme in the bachelor flat where the hero brought home Doris Day.) The staff knew just what book I wanted: Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan, and published in 1956 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. It was a collection of three youthful notebooks, divided into short essays. The titles didn’t seem to emanate from Marx himself; they appeared to be provided by twentieth-century editors in Moscow or Berlin. It was midnight blue, nice and compact, a perfect fit for a side pocket in a 1950s sports jacket. I opened it at random, here, there, somewhere else—and suddenly I was in a sweat, melting, shedding clothes and tears, flashing hot and cold. I rushed to the front: “I’ve got to have this book!” The white-haired clerk was calm. “Fifty cents, please.” When I expressed amazement, he said, “We”—I guess he meant the USSR—“don’t publish books for profit.” He said the Manuscripts had become one of their bestsellers, though he himself couldn’t see why, since Lenin was so much clearer.
Right there my adventure began. I realized I was carrying more than thirty dollars, mostly wages from the college library; it was probably as much as I’d ever carried in my life. I felt another flash. “Fifty cents? So for ten bucks I can get twenty?” The clerk said that, after sales taxes, twenty copies would cost about $11. I ran back to the rear, grabbed the books, and said, “You’ve just solved my Hanukkah problem.” As I schlepped the books on the subway up to the Bronx (Four Continents tied them up in a nice parcel), I felt I was walking on air. For the next several days I walked around with a stack of books, thrilled to be giving them away to all the people in my life: my mother and sister, my girlfriend, her parents, several old and new friends, a couple of my teachers, the man from the stationery store, a union leader (the past summer, I’d worked for District 65), a doctor, a rabbi. I’d never given so many gifts before (and never did again). Nobody