Bernard Axelrad Scholarship Fund

My father died May 25th, the day before Shavuoth. Even though he was half way past his 96th birthday, his death was shockingly sudden and unexpected. Despite his years, minus his right leg, and confined to a wheelchair for almost 12 years, he was a healthy man. He took no medication (or even vitamins) and had not been under a doctor's care for a dozen years. Without any prior warning his heart simply stopped, and almost a century of life came to an end.

His death has affected me much more than I could have envisioned. Since the prolonged heavy feelings I am experiencing have no particular rationale for me, I cannot explain it. Had my father died some 12 years earlier, before the terrible accident which left him an amputee, I would have had nothing good to say about him; but the later years made a difference.

In reality, I had two fathers.

For the first 85 years of his life, he was a grim, joyless individual who hardly ever smiled or exhibited any sense of humor. I was weaned on a steady diet of pessimistic commentary. My childhood memories of him were of his laments about his job and its low pay, the high rent he paid for the 4th floor tenement flat we lived in, and about everything in general.

There was no gaiety in my father's presence, and any light hearted banter between my mother and me would cease on his entry into the room. He and I had very little occasion for conversation as he appeared to be consumed by the mere task of living. In all my life I never received any direct word of praise from him. My accomplishments in school elicited no word of pleasure or approval from him. In fact, I'm not sure he was aware of any of my scholastic achievements. By his code, it was sacrilegious to be lighthearted and counterproductive to compliment one's child lest he cease to strive. In a way, I suppose this neglect fueled my desire to achieve more and more in order to obtain recognition from him.

There was not a carefree, frivolous moment passing between my father and me; any levity seemed banished from our home. Never did I glimpse a smile or detect a sense of humor.

In truth, he probably had little to be happy about. My father came to this country at 19, in 1907; and went to work immediately in a garment factory, making pants pockets. In those days factories were true sweatshops, with men hunched over their sewing machines and pay measured by their output in piecework. How well I remember the many Sundays when my father, with paper and pencil in hand, would inquire of me in Yiddish how much was 6 times nil and, a little later, how much was 4 times nil.

He had no formal education and couldn't fathom multiplying zero by any number would always give the same end result. He was computing how much he had earned in the prior week, making pockets, and trying to make sure that he wasn't cheated in his wages. I hasten to add that the pay was then usually less than $20 per week. In fact, during the entire 50-year period that my father worked in the garment industry, he never earned more than $3000 in any one year.

I suppose that living under those austere conditions was not conducive to joy and celebration. As a little boy growing up, I assumed responsibility at a very early age. I felt an obligation somehow to lighten the burden my father was carrying. It was to the few visits I made to the shop where he worked that I owed my motivation to go to college. They say that one picture is worth a 1000 words, and I can attest to that. Observing him bent over his work with the sweat pouring down his face during the humid summer months in that airless workplace was a powerful incentive for me to obtain an education as a means of escaping a similar fate.

While I understood that my father's lot was a hard one, I nonetheless missed having a father figure to look up to, to ask questions of, and have fun with on occasion. I cannot recall a single time during all my growing years when my father played with me or reached out to me with affection or complimented me. All family discussions emanating from my father always seemed to revolve around money and the lack of same. He walked back and forth from work, over a mile each way, to save the 5-cent bus fare. He scanned the streets he walked, on the lookout for stray coins. A penny thus found was treasured and talked about.

I grew up thinking that this was the way life had to be; but many years later when I began to talk in therapy sessions about life with father, I wept at how arid my life with him had been.

I was a dutiful son, but I can't say that I ever had any particular love for my father. What was there to love? On a rational basis, I could recognize why he was unsmiling, joyless and heavy hearted; but emotionally I was starved. Since he didn't abuse me physically, it was harder to be angry with him than if he had. While I didn't feel bereft at the time, I was surely a deprived child so far as any relationship with my father was concerned.

He never bought me a toy, a ball or glove, or even a piece of candy. The only thing I remember his buying me was my Bar Mitzvah suit, and that turned out to be a nightmare. The scars of that incident are with me to this very day.

In those days on Stanton Street, in the Lower East Side, there were numerous clothing stores competing with each other. We tramped from one to another for several hours, trying on numerous suits while my father compared prices and material at each location. Finally, after 3 hours of this preliminary reconnoitering, I tried on a suit that seemed to meet with my father's approval. Then came the battle.

The storekeeper asked $19, and my father, highly insulted by such highway robbery, turned on his heels wordlessly and walked away with me following dutifully along. Before we got to the door, the owner caught up with us and asked my father what he was willing to pay. My father said $10, and the storekeeper's face contorted in pain.

Within those parameters of $19 and $10 came 13 hours of haggling, interspersed with my father's complaints on how poorly the suit was made and the storekeeper's oath on the life of his wife that the cost of the suit to him was $16.

While all this was going on in Yiddish which I understood only too well, I squirmed in embarrassment and tried to make myself invisible. Finally, with both men worn out, the price of the suit was agreed upon at $13. After 6 hours of hunting and bargaining, we were finished and walking home.

My prior discomfiture was swept away by my elation at the money saved on the purchase. My father had won! When we walked into the house, I recounted to my mother how valiantly my father had gotten the price down from $19 to $13 and saved so much money. I was full of pride and enthusiasm, but it was then my father delivered his coupe de grace. He said that if he had bargained a little longer, he could have gotten it down to $12. With that statement, deflated all the joy I was feeling. The wear and tear of the 6-hour odyssey and the harrowing experiences I wanted to forget all came back again to bear heavily on my heart.

To this day I have trouble buying suits and do so only in set-price stores and never without remembering that childhood ordeal.

As I grew into young manhood and afterward, my relationship with my father was distant, if proper. I was outwardly dutiful and respectful to him, but there was very little good that I could or would say about him. In fact, I made a conscious effort to be his opposite so that he became my negative model. I was furious with myself on those occasions when I would lapse into behavior patterns similar to his.

Even as I reached my own middle years, I had not yet come to grips with my anger over the emotional sterility of my relationship with my father and the deprivation I endured. Then came the fateful and tragic automobile injury that cost my father his leg and resulted in an unbelievable transformation in him and in our relationship.

The best lay ahead.