Silence and Wondering
SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH
SHMA.COM
Each month over the
course of this year, a
guest columnist reflects
on the midrash of Avram
destroying the idols in
his father’s shop. We’ve
asked our writers to
think about the idols
they must still transcend
to “get to Canaan.”
Father’s Idols
A YEARLONG
CONVERSATION
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It has been almost five years since my fa- ther last spoke to me. He is no doubt hurt and disappointed by what I’ve written
about my childhood spent in a small Trotskyist
organization known as “the party.” “It is an
attack on the working class,” he would prob-
ably say. He is still a leading member of the
Socialist Workers Party, after all, living in
Brooklyn — just a subway ride away from me
— and participating in that never-ending pro-
cession of meetings, conferences, and sales of
the Militant newspaper, whose masthead
reads: “A socialist newsweekly published in
the interests of working people.”
Notwithstanding my father’s charm and wit
and generosity in picking up the check at din-
ner, his disappearance from my life has not
been such a great loss. I’m happily married and
residing in Manhattan in a beautiful apartment
that I own, despite having been taught as a
child to loathe private property. No, the real
loss occurred when my father abandoned my
mother and me when I was nine months old.
“Mahmoud went off to fight for a world social-
ist revolution,” she would often say by way of
explanation. And because this world socialist
revolution was imminent, indeed was about to
His presence remains, though. Even now when I read the
newspaper, I will find myself wondering as a matter of reflex
what would be his opinion…And then, I do what I can to
think independently, which, I suppose, is one of the lessons
of that timeless tale of the boy who swung the axe.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the
author of When Skateboards
Will Be Free: A Memoir (The
Dial Press, 2009).
occur at any moment, my mother sacrificed almost everything for the party — of which she
also was a member — including lots of her
time, some of her money, and all of her passion. Most importantly, she maintained a
chronic and debilitating worship of my father,
which prevented her from ever being able to
move on and find someone else. I was doomed,
therefore, to a life of fatherlessness. I was also
doomed to a home in which my father’s absence was as great as his presence.
One summer afternoon when I was four
years old, my mother took me to a performance
of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I was so affected
by what I saw that for many weeks afterward I
would greet my mother upon her return home
from her unhappy job as a secretary and de-
mand that we go at once to my bedroom so we
could reenact the story. Reclining with exhaus-
tion on my bed, my mother would gamely take
on every role in the drama, including the cow,
the harp, the giant, and, of course, the widow,
which is to say, herself. I was only Jack, pul-
sating with a spectrum of emotions, each one of
them in the extreme, as I scampered around the
bedroom enduring poverty, banishment, terror,
and that final glorious moment when I would
descend the beanstalk just steps ahead of the
giant and scream for my mother to hand me the
axe, which she did without a second to lose,
managing to be both giant and mother at once,
crying out “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” and “Hurry, Jack!
Hurry!” And in my mind, I would swing that
imaginary axe and down would come the
beanstalk with the giant landing dead in the
grass and the harp and goose in my mother’s
arms, meaning that my mother and I would
now live happily ever after. That is, until the
next day, when I would accost her once more at
the front door of our apartment and lead her by
the hand into my bedroom.
