Bloomsday

My dad wasn't one for sentimental Jewishery and he passed almost his entire life avoiding any contact with manifestaions of the culture he had so specifically left behind. It wasn't that he was in any way ashamed or embarassed by his roots, he wasn't. And, despite being born before the holocaust and being old enough to watch it transpire, he didn't seem to have any fear of exposing his jewishness. He did work for his entire career in a Fleet Street that wasn't particularly friendly to jews and where it was worth keeping your head down, but then most of his colleagues were also jewish, so it was hardly a secret. I think he was just uninterested in most facets of his culture, no doubt regarding them as prosaic and mundane. He would call on a regular basis for gefilte fish from my mother. She swore she had made it once for him and he'd not even bothered to eat it.
He took me to Blooms on the Whitechapel Road, I remember it well, a pilgrimage to the heart of jewish dining. It must have been sometime in the late eighties I would guess, I don't have any real memory of when or why, how we came to be in the east end at the same time. He would have been retired by then with no reason to travel to London, whereas I had moved to the city and was making my way through art college. Come, let's eat at Blooms, he would have said. It's a great Jewish institution. He would have liked the idea of it more than the reality. When I was younger and I visited him at his office, he would offer to take me for any lunch I wanted, but we invariably ended up at Mr Natural, a faux Californian burger joint under the now long dismantled Holborn Viaduct at the bottom of Fleet Street.
Blooms has been gone for fourteen years now. I remember when it closed down: I had a fancy for a while to somehow steal the huge neon sign that stood above the entrance canopy. Of course I didn't in much the same way that I didn't follow through on any of the grandiose plans that I no doubt outlined to my dad during our lunch that day. I can't remember any of it, just that it was a dull and lugubrious place and the waiters were slow ('the rudest in London', it was said). My dad talked about the food he remembered. He never really talked about his youth and he didn't explain how he came to leave all that behind.
Now the premises are a Burger King, non kosher I presume, and the last of jewish Brick Lane is rapidly being expunged. The jews left a long time ago but buildings and businesses take longer to remove.

Dad in London

Dad in London on Flickr

I've never been certain of when this picture was taken and as time passes it becomes less rather than more certain. I can't ask dad anymore and the stories that mum and others tell get more and more contradictory.

In one version it's the day mum and dad met. In another it's the day they went out on their first date. Either way the time difference between the two events (first meeting and first date) can't have been very great.

I remember being told that dad couldn't remember which Tube station they'd agreed to meet at for that first date so he ran from one to the other until he found mum. She was probably late, so the fact that she wasn't at one station wouldn't have ruled it out as being where they were meant to meet. Had dad figured that out about mum already? I think the stations had similar names or variations of the same name but I can't think where that would be now. Maybe it was the exits for different lines of the same name, like Paddington?

If it's true that the picture's from the time of their first meetings then it would be 1956 at the earliest as that's the year they got married on 1 October. That would mean dad was 25. What was I doing then?

How I was born

This is the story of how I came to be born. Of course, with my father in his pomp, it had to encompass drama, a foreign country and newspapers. My dad moved to France on a one
year contract to modernise a Parisian rag and during that stay I was
born. They booked a doctor and a clinic, but when the day came it
seems the doctor had gone off on holiday. The replacement was nowhere to
be found. A heatwave was in full swing. Finally a place is found and
the labour goes ahead. My father was a newspaper man, how could such a story not be in the press.


I was a miracle baby. They'd already adopted my sister after
being told no babies could ever be made, but it came to pass that
technology moved on and a fix was found. He told me this story many
times, proud to have created such a memorable event. I was the first
born, and wasn't even supposed to happen.
Dad is not there for the birth, this is Paris, 1961, but he turns up the next morning to visit mother and baby.
"Where is our baby?" he asked.
"I don't know," says my mother, plaintively. He rings the bell and a nurse appears.
"Nurse," he commands. "We would like to see our baby."
A few minutes later another nurse ("she couldn't have been more than fourteen, tiny") appears at the door holding a baby. She holds him up and the parents study it for a while. They smile. "Very nice, thank you," they say. She disappears again with the baby.
Years later I find this photo, the presentation of the lamb.

Portrait of my Father

Portrait of my Father: Jonathan Lethem | Granta 104: Fathers

The picture floats. Someone took it in the Seventies, but the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of the Depression. (He probably tried to give it to me at some point.) The beard’s trim narrows the time frame slightly, that rakish full-goatee. So often in later years he wouldn’t have bothered to shave his jaw to shape it. Put this in the early Seventies. Somehow it floated into my collection of paper trinkets, ferried off to college, then to California for a decade. The only copy. By the time I showed it to my father, last week, he hadn’t seen the photograph for thirty-odd years. He couldn’t be sure of the photographer, guessing at three friends with comically overlapping names – Bobby Ramirez, Bob Brooks, Geoff Brooks. (I remember all three of them, beloved rascals from my parents’ hippie posse.) He settled at last on Geoff Brooks. The picture was never framed, nor mounted in an album, just shifted from file cabinet to cardboard box to file cabinet all this time. A scrap of Scotch tape on the left corner reminds me I had it taped up over a desk in Berkeley. In a family that, after my mother’s death, scattered itself and its memorabilia to far corners of the planet, and reassembles now sporadically and sloppily, the picture’s a survivor. But I’ve lived with it for thirty years, gazed into its eyes as often, strange to say, as I have my father’s living eyes.

And it shows Richard Lethem as I dream him, my idol. His Midwestern kindness, prairie-gazer’s soul, but come to the city, donning the beatnik garb, become the painter and poet and political activist he made himself, a man of the city. When I first knew my parents they were, paradoxically, just the two most exciting adults on the scene, part of a pantheon of artists and activists and students staying up late around the dinner table and often crashing afterwards in the extra rooms of the house. My parents were both the two I had the best access to and the coolest to know, the hub of the wheel. I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys. The picture shows my dad meeting the eyes of a member of his gang, both of them feeling their oats, knowing they were the leading edge of the world. I wanted him to look at me that way. He often did.

My Dad's Stamp Collection

My dad had a stamp collection. I knew that from when I was little. I used to climb into the huge G-plan wardrobe in their bedroom and leaf through it. I collected stamps myself, but this was a glory in comparison, full of animals and countries that I'd never heard of, moon landings and huge beautiful stamps in their own mini sheets.
I have no idea what role this collection played in dad's life, if collection is even the right word for it. It consists of one album filled with colourful stamps in small sets, lots of animals and flora and fauna, but there are other subjects dotted throughout. It doesn't make much sense and to my adult eyes it looks a bit like an album that someone else has put together to appeal to a lazy collector. I'm probably wrong though. Dad's little brother, Reg, collected butterflies and arranged them in cases - this stamp album is similar.
Alongside this strange album was a big bundle of loose bits and pieces. This to me was always the glory of the collection. Unsorted and unmounted, it seemed to just be the accumulation of someone who could see the beauty and historic value of these stamps, but who never had any interest in doing anything with them. It's clear that as a journalist, dad had access to various sources of stamps and picked them up over the years. The moon landing is much represented: these were the stamps that I fell in love with as a child. But a lot of other stuff found it's way in over the years. The launch of a nuclear powered ship, there's a stamp for that. Independence for the Seychelles, issue a stamp. Postal strike? Fleet St cartoonists design stamps for colleagues who set up their own postal service. Marius collects them.
Then, years ago, he gave the collection to my baby son. A typical act of generosity from him, but also the action of someone who really has no interest whatsoever in the subject any more. Luckily, neither has my son, so I've appropriated the lot for the time being. If he ever takes up stamps, it's his. Until then I no longer have to climb into a cupboard to leaf through this.

Dreaming of Dad

On the last night of my recent family holiday, after a clear sunny day, a huge thunderstorm developed which deluged our tent with water. Throughout the night thunder and lightening crashed around us as I braced myself for emergency evacuation if and when the river we were camping by broke its banks.
During this night I had a long and complex dream that revolved around the wedding party of a couple whose best man I was almost thirty years ago.
It turned out that my father wasn't actually dead. My mother had noticed his arm moving, that was all it took, and he was back with us. Even in the dream I knew this was implausible (we cremated him, I remember doing it), but I went along with it because he was there, large as life, the same as ever. We went to this wedding party which took place partly at a fairground. Dad was not impressed. 'Why are we here?' he asked petulantly, exactly as he would have in life. He didn't really know the couple, so why would he be expected to attend? I looked at him. His trousers were slightly too short, he was dressed as he was in life. The dream went on for hours, or so it seemed.
When I woke up I had to pack the tent in driving rain. There was no time to consider the reason or point of this dream, but it has made me vaguely wish I could have him back for a day or so sometimes.

Last Email

Miss you all.  Wish I was with you. Dad.
Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:01 PM

Funny thing about email, you can look back at it. It doesn't go away. I introduced my dad the the internet right at the start. Even then he thought it was too much for him, but he was a user for fifteen years. After I put him on the internet I wrote a column for .net magazine titled 'Don't put your father on the net, Mrs Worthington'. As he got older his communications became more intermittent, but he kept on emailing friends and family till the end.
In an idle moment I looked back to see what was the last email he sent me. A strange experience, because I could so easily imagine that he was about to send me another one (and also because my brother had used his account a bit to email me, and I had to discount those).
So this was his last email, sent four months before he died, in response to an email from me on holiday. Sweet and to the point.