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 Calvin Trillin's Warm Recollections Of His Father. By Mari Wadsworth
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that when prolific writer Calvin Trillin first published a memoir of his father in the pages of The New Yorker a few years ago, it reportedly drew more reader response than anything the author had ever written. And when published in hardcover in 1996 (by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), it became a national bestseller. It's recently hit the shelves in paperback. The assumption of writers and publishers (which comes first, who knows) seems always to err toward our fascination with being horrified rather than honored, as evidenced by the plethora of revenge books, like Kissed, which aim to expose parents as flawed, even deviant, beings that need to be knocked resolutely from their pedestals if we are to grow up and lead happy adult lives. (See Margaret Regan's review, above.) Surely, there's something to be gained from the public display of suffering...something, say, more exalted than discovering your own sorry life isn't nearly as sick and twisted as the latest addition to the bestseller list. We can only hope.
"It has always interested me," writes Trillin, "that he did not say, 'You must always be a mensch,' or 'The honor of this family demands that you be a mensch' but 'You might as well be a mensch,' as if he had given some consideration to the alternatives." A masterpiece of understatement, each chapter offers a gentle, honest glimpse into a man who, for all the impact he had on his family, made very little impact on the world...until now.
Calvin Trillin is a skilled interpreter, and much of this deceivingly
light-hearted personal memoir resonates with universal appeal.
It's not only an affecting homage to his own father, it's an inspired
account of fatherhood in general, and the importance of what we
say--because you never know what people are going to remember.
For example, had Abe Trillin known he might be remembered as the
man who asked every foreign language student he ever met for a
translation of the sentence, "The left-handed lizard climbed
up the eucalyptus tree and ate a persimmon," he might have
chosen his words more carefully. Fortunately for us, he didn't.
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RARER AND RARER, it seems, is parenthood recalled by children
as a subject of inspiration rather than affliction. Societal discourse
prattles on about the rising rate of divorce, the disappearance
of community, the isolation of the individual in a society in
which a liberal-minded person must have a knee-jerk reaction to
the phrase "family values."
But what a treat, and a relief, to sit down to Trillin's slim
volume of lightly edited remembrances of his Jewish, Midwestern
dad, a Russian immigrant who settled in Kansas City and became
a grocer primarily "so his children wouldn't have to."
A man who owned five stores though he didn't like being a grocer,
who got up at four in the morning, six days a week to go to the
city market for all his produce. "When people heard of his
schedule, they almost always said something to him like, 'Well,
I suppose you get used to it after a while, don't you?' He always
said, 'No.' " Chapter after chapter recounts with fond detail
the quirky phrases, stubborn pledges and wry humor which formed
the "code" Abe Trillin employed to pass along his message
to his son: a lifelong dialogue Trillin sums up in the oft-heard
fatherly observation, "You might as well be a mensch,"
(Yiddish for a person who always does the right thing in matters
large or small).
