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253 17 a worker of the world When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence, and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. —JOHN STEINBECK, East of Eden THURSDAYS WITH OSCAR As the years passed, my Thursday afternoon visits with my father became a matter of routine. As we sat in the backyard amid his prized roses and buzzing sweat bees in the stifling humidity of a July afternoon, he nursed a glass of Canadian Club—so therapeutic for his emphysema— and wove colorful tales of his early life. He told me about his meeting with old General Wood, about the day he stared down swarthy gangsters who threatened to sabotage his construction sites unless he paid tribute to the Chicago syndicate. “I drove those damned dagos from my office, I did!” My instincts told me that the story was grounded in truth, but embellished by old-age vanity and the boastfulness that was, by far, his worst character trait. Between sips of CC watered down by melting ice cubes, he opened old wounds and belittled Helen and Emma. Yet, in a curious paradox that belied his resentments, he had rushed to my mother’s aid when she called around one time, begging him for money to pay for an extra month’s stay in the nursing home for my grandmother, who by then was incoherent and bedridden. Conflicted by guilt and anger, he wrote Helen a check, then grumbled about it for many weeks afterward. Again, it is the Swedish way. Assist thy neighbor, but never forgive the debt either. How hard I tried to winnow out fragments of vulnerability he cloaked in bragging. But the wall we had built between us could not be deconstructed . Not then, not ever. 254 a worker of the world THE SIN OF THE FATHERS As a young man, I silently condemned my father for his distance and lack of affection. I never came to terms with the deeply imbedded cultural roots of the old country that placed such a premium on taciturnity, industriousness , and restraint of emotion. It was the archetypical “Swedish way.” Playfulness, tenderness, and compassion were ruled out in favor of more practical considerations distilled into what Åke Daun described in his 1989 book Swedish Mentality (quoting Matyas Szabo) as the traditional and sacred belief that “the child’s will must be broken as soon as it shows itself. Harshness toward children was often explained and defended by citing the Bible.” In my own experience, biblical citations were substituted with the drab proletarian passages from History of the Russian Revolution—the gospel according to Leon Trotsky. Among the peasant Swedes of Kålle Lindberg’s generation, to exhibit tender mercies to children in their most impressionable years was seen as one of the terrible weaknesses of womanhood. And as much as we try to hear the words of adults who were emotionally or physically traumatized as children, there is the perfectly natural tendency to fail to comprehend a simple but unassailable axiom—that you can only give to another that which you have been given. That is what I have come to understand and accept in middle age, as I came to terms with the accumulated anger and silent hurt toward the man who made it so damned hard—well nigh impossible—to forgive for so long. My first book was published in 1978—the year after Emma died in a nursing home at age eighty-nine. My book was a baseball memoir, not particularly memorable, but a thin little volume about the joys and sorrows of growing up a White Sox fan in a neighborhood full of Cubs fans. I presented my father with the first copy just after it had rolled off the press. I rather expected a smile, a pat on the back, and a word of congratulations from him. I hoped he might actually express some fatherly pride in a son who had published a book before his twenty-fifth birthday. I was giddy with excitement and feeling very good about my achievement, as any firsttime author would be. With spirits soaring, I raced over to Skokie hoping to...

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