Introduction

The sprawling narrative of five siblings, born in the 1940's, beginning on the day John Kennedy was shot and ending on 9/11. Between these two iconic dates, we follow the fortunes, love affairs, marriages, divorces, successes and failures of the Perls, an immigrant Polish-Jewish family, from the Lower East Side of New York, to Long Island and beyond.

The oldest, Jackie -- a charming, womanizing attorney -- drifts into politics with help from the Nassau County mob. His younger brother, Michael, a gambler and entrepreneur, makes and loses fortunes riding the ebb and flow of high-risk business decisions. Their sister, Elaine, marries young and raises two children before realizing that she wants more from life than being merely a wife and mother and embarking on a new life in her forties. Their sensitive and brilliant half-brother, Stephen, deals with the growing consciousness that he is gay in an era that was not gay friendly. Stephen goes to Vietnam as a medic, comes home, becomes a writer, and survives the AIDS epidemic of the eighties. The baby of the family, Bobbie, high-strung and rebellious, gets pregnant at Woodstock, moves to San Francisco as a single mother during the "Summer of Love," then winds up in Los Angeles as a highly-successful record producer.

In a larger sense this book is not merely the story of one family, but the story of most immigrant families - Jewish, Italian, Irish, African-American - as they enter the melting pot and emerge as a new generation, as well as the story of the tumultuous years of the second half of the twentieth century.

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Excerpt

I

Friday, November 22, 1963, 1:25 p.m. EST.

As Nathan Perl looked out over the cutting floor of J&J Frocks on 38th St., he thought about what his wife Lillian had said to him at breakfast. They were sitting at the aquamarine Formica bar of their kitchen in Garden City and watching television — a habit that he didn’t approve of but had given up complaining about, ever since he had bought the new 15-inch RCA color portable for the kitchen. What’s the point of having it, Lillian had argued, if we don’t use it?

The morning news showed Air Force 1 landing in Dallas. There was the still-young president emerging from the plane, his wife at his side, delivering that breezy wave and broad smile that had gotten him elected. Nathan looked up from his hot cereal and saw the pink Chanel wool suit, a suit, he knew, that had never been anywhere near Seventh Avenue. His professional eye admired the elegant lines of the garment. “I bet you she paid five hundred bucks for that suit.”

“She’s going to fry in that wool suit,” Lillian replied.

“Wool breathes.”

“Not in Texas. Poor woman’s going to shvitz.”

“She can afford to shvitz. She had plenty of money even before she married that son of a bootlegging Jew-hater.”

Six hours later, looking over the floor of the cutting room, Nathan belched up fumes from the pastrami sandwich he wasn’t supposed to be eating, on account of the pre-ulcerous condition that Herb Kornfeld had warned could develop into a full-fledged duodenal ulcer. And he shouldn’t have lunch at his desk. He should get out, take a walk, get some exercise and fresh air.

There wasn’t a lot of fresh air on 38th St. You’d get run over by a truck if you weren’t careful. Besides, the cutting floor was running slow. They were twenty minutes to a half-hour behind schedule. When Nathan had been working on the floor, cutting fabric, they had always made quota. If they didn’t, they’d heard it from the guys upstairs. There were no transistor radios blaring Spanish music and people running to the toilet every hour.

Nathan Perl hadn’t missed a day of work in his life. Since age 11, when he’d arrived in steerage class from Poland and gotten a job sewing curtains on Rivington Street, for $14 a week, which he took home to his uncle Meyer, who had sent the money back to Lodz to pay for the trip, he worked — six days a week, until he got a job as a cutter and the unions kept him out on Saturdays.

After working from eight in the morning to seven at night in the curtain shop, he’d had thirty minutes to grab a bowl of soup before heading off to East Side Evening High School, where he was learning English. So well, in fact, that his teacher encouraged him to go to college when he was older. But in 1935, people with college educations were selling apples on the street.

To keep the machines working, there were three separate lunch shifts, and now, at 1:30 p.m., only a third of the machines were idle. In the last row, near the exit, Hector, a short, dark PR who wore gold chains and flirted with the black women, was working over his machine with a cigarette dangling from his mouth — a clear fire hazard and a violation of the rules.

Nathan got up from his desk to go out and give him hell, and as he did, one of the other cutters turned the sound up on his radio. A voice was barking in machine-gun Spanish. Everyone on the floor stopped to listen. The cutting machines ground to a halt. It was deathly silent, except for the repetitive Spanish phrases coming from the transistor.

Alquien tiró al presidente.

Nathan went out onto the floor and shouted, “What the hell’s going on?”

Nobody answered him.

In “The Isle of Capri,” the beauty parlor on Queens Blvd., in Jackson Heights, where she commuted every day on the Long Island Railroad, Lillian Perl (née Hirsch), was doing the nails of Vicky Boni, the girlfriend of Giuseppe Boni, who owned the place. Vicky sported a 21 carat ring and tipped big.

“Did you see what she was wearing this morning?” Vicky took a sip of her Tab, and shook her head to emphasize what she said.

“Yeah. She’s going to die from the heat in that thing.”

“If she don’t die first from getting her heart stepped on by that son of a bitch, cheats on her every time she turns her back.”

“When does he have the time? You’d think running the country was a fulltime job.”

“He’s got people do that for him. Remember him and Marilyn?”

Vicky lowered her voice, as if what she was about to impart were an atomic secret. “He screwed her in the presidential limo. With her on top. It was on account of his back. He wears some sort of brace.”

“You know,” Lillian said, “Marilyn and I have the exact same birth date. June 1st, 1926.”

“Too bad she took those pills, huh?”

“Yeah,” Lillian said, recalling the numb feeling she’d had when she heard about the overdose the summer before last.

Maybe Marilyn’s life hadn’t been perfect, but whose was? You made the best of things. She had married Nathan, knowing full well that he was not Prince Charming. He was almost ten years older than her and had three small kids. But he made a living and he didn’t drink. And he had brains. He could speak Polish and Yiddish, as well as English.

Nathan’s problem was that he needed to be prodded to do things. It was she who had to convince him to buy the house in Garden City, right after the birth of Roberta, in 1950. If it had been up to him, they would have stayed in the apartment in Jackson Heights and had the kids double up in the bedrooms. They had scraped together the down-payment for the $19,900 wood frame house on Stratford Drive, which was now worth close to $30,000.

There was a beauty parlor in Westbury, ten minutes away, that was coming up for sale. The owner was moving to Florida and wanted to sell before the end of the year. If they got a second mortgage on their house, they could get the cash to make a quick offer and get the place cheap.

But they had to move fast, and Nathan didn’t like to move fast. He chewed everything over and over, the way he did his meat. Someone else was going to buy that place in Westbury soon if they didn’t make a move.

“I don’t know what he’s doing in Texas, anyway,” Vicky was saying. “No way they vote for him next year. Even with Lyndon on the ticket again.”

“That man gives me the creeps,” Lillian said, putting the emery board down and taking a cotton swab of astringent and beginning to dry the surface of the nails. “He’s got these big ears, and big hands. I bet you he’s a groper…”

“Who knows with men? Joey come home the other night smelling from ten dollar Shalimar…”

And that was the last thing Lillian heard Vicky Boni say before the shriek came from Karen D’Abbruzzi, the cashier and Joey’s cousin, who had picked up the phone and listened as someone told her the news from Dallas.

“They shot him! They shot Kennedy!” The chubby, overly made-up girl screamed.

Lillian felt Vicky’s hand close around her own in a death grip, and heard the woman whisper, “Holy mother of God…”

Jacob “Jackie” Perl was running late. These days he was always running late. His life was complicated enough without having to take an unscheduled trip back to Brooklyn to see someone he didn’t want to see. But there was no talking down Carmine, who said that he had to see at least two hundred of what Jackie owed him before three that afternoon.

If only that asshole Y.A. Tittle hadn’t decided to run out the clock against the Eagles last Sunday instead of kicking a field goal and covering the spread. The bald little prick didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t his $450 on the line.

The shark operated out of a bar and grill in Hempstead, and charged 28% a week. The needle on the 1951 Ford Falcon was twitching around the E mark. He’d have to stop for gas in Brooklyn. He was juggling a lot of balls, and keeping them all in the air at the same time was getting harder. He needed to get by till January, when he’d be finished with Torts and on to Contracts, which was a lot easier, and he was promised a raise.

When he’d been offered the job as Larry Porter’s administrative assistant, Jackie had jumped at it, even though he was going to law school at night. The veteran Nassau County Clerk knew a lot of people in Long Island politics, people whom it would be useful for Jackie Perl to know, and one of Jackie’s many tasks at the county clerk’s office was making sure these people were happy.

What this amounted to was messenger work involving sealed packages. Just what was in the packages and exactly what it was for, Jackie didn’t know. But after a year and three months studying law he knew enough to understand that he didn’t want to know how much and what for.

As Jackie crossed over the city line and approached Idlewild, he thought about his father, sitting in his little glassed-in office on 38th St., looking out over the cutting floor and knowing exactly what every cutter was doing at every moment. The man knew more about cutting fabric than those supervisors who had never worked on the floor. Nathan was proud of him, introducing him to the people at J&J Frocks as my son the lawyer, even though Jackie was two years and a bar exam away from practicing law. He wondered what his father would think if he knew that his son the lawyer was working during the day as a bag man for a Nassau County politician.

If Jackie made good time, he could stop off for a belt. He turned on the car radio. Fiddling with the dial, he landed on a radio soap. As he passed Howard Beach, the organ music stopped abruptly, and in its place, a faltering voice announced, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin…”

The Alpha Epsilon Pi house at Syracuse University, a three-story Greek Revival brick building, built in the nineteen-twenties by a wealthy Jewish alumnus, housed sixty undergraduates in small, double rooms, with dormer windows and built-in bunk beds. There was only one single room in the entire house, located off the kitchen in the basement. The room was hot in the summer and cold in the winter and smelled of cooking oil and ripe vegetables.

But Michael Perl had chosen that room, when no one else wanted it. The third-year business major had negotiated a reduced-rate rent from the fraternity, paying 60 per cent of the normal room charge. Michael got his board free by waiting on tables and cleaning up at dinner. While his fraternity brothers sat at the long tables, in jackets and ties, Michael brought the tureens of soup and platters of food out and kept the pitchers of iced tea full.

At the end of his freshman year in the dorm, he had joined the fraternity — the only Jewish fraternity on campus. Being around people with a lot more money than he had was a new experience for Michael Perl. With his immigrant father, he had grown up in an atmosphere of constant scrimping. Money always seemed to be the point — making it, saving it, not wasting it. Habits of thrift were foisted upon him. Turning lights off when he left a room, not letting the faucet run to wash the dishes, wearing his brother Jackie’s hand-me-downs.

Even now, with his father living in relative comfort in his own house on Long Island and working at a well-paying job, the children were constantly reminded that money didn’t grow on trees. Every time Michael returned to Syracuse, he had to place a person-to-person telephone call to himself at the house in Garden City so that his father would know he’d arrived safely.

The accumulated weight of all the precepts his father had drummed into him over the years had made Michael decide that he would make enough money so that he wouldn’t have to pass these habits on to his own children. He wanted his kids to place a long-distance phone call to him and pay for it.

Besides taking an extra-heavy course load, so that he could graduate in three and a half years, Michael had a number of business enterprises on the side. Through his father, he had made a deal with a garment manufacturer in the city to make A E Pi fraternity jackets, which he sold at a nice profit to his fraternity brothers. It worked well enough that he branched out and started doing business with Psi U and Delta Epsilon, and, eventually, his jackets were so in demand around campus that he subcontracted work to guys in other fraternities.

On this Friday in November, a week before Thanksgiving vacation, Michael was trying to clear the lunch dishes early so that he could get over to Psi U and deliver the jackets that had arrived from the city yesterday.

His fraternity brothers were in a rowdy mood. There was a keg party scheduled at the house that Saturday night, and the prospect of getting laid was in the air. The brothers lounged around the tables bragging about all the sex they were going to get.

Michael filtered it out. Most of it was bullshit. The more you talked about it, the less you got. He had a girlfriend, Naomi Berks, whom he had met last spring and with whom he’d been going steady ever since. They’d been doing it pretty regularly in his room beside the kitchen, but he didn’t have to talk about it. It was nobody else’s business.

He was taking Naomi home for Thanksgiving next week. She was from Shaker Heights and had never been to New York City. His sister Elaine had volunteered to share her room. On the phone, his father had asked, Mickey, is this the one?

It was a little early for that. Michael was not even 21 yet, and Naomi was a year younger. Still, he could see it working out. She was smart, hard-working and nicely put together. When he brought her to the frat parties he could see the guys checking her out.

In the kitchen, he hefted the heavy tub onto the counter, where Delroy, the hired black dishwasher, worked.

“Them boys don’t never stop eating, do they?”

“They’re growing boys, Delroy.”

“Yeah, well they can grow this.” And he took one of his hands out of the tub and cupped his genitals. As he said that, he raised the volume on the radio, an FM jazz music station out of Ithaca. A funky sax solo came out of the Westinghouse portable over the sink.

“Gerry Mulligan.”

“He’s pretty cool.”

“For a white boy…”

Then two things happened at once. From the dining room he heard someone shout, “Mickey. More rice pudding.”

And, closer to him but harder to hear, Michael heard the Mulligan riff stop, replaced by the smooth, jazz-soaked voice of the DJ saying, as if what he was about to announce hadn’t really happened, “I’m afraid I have some awful news…”

Their house was less than a mile from campus, a half-hour walk through elm-lined streets, but Elaine Perl didn’t come home for lunch, as her father had wanted her to do. Why do you want to eat that chazzerei they give you in the cafeteria when you could have a nice hot meal at home?

Elaine wasn’t interested in sitting though her morning classes with the aroma of salami wafting up from under her seat, and so she spent her pocket money in the vending machines outside the university cafeteria and, in good weather, sat outside and fed the squirrels what she didn’t finish.

The weather was grey and cold, snow just around the corner, on this particular Friday in late November. She sat, in her three-year-old winter jacket, outside at an empty table, preferring it to the lunchroom’s mingled smell of Mr. Clean and mayonnaise. Elaine nibbled around the edges of her sandwich and thought about Thanksgiving vacation next week. Her brother Mickey was bringing his girlfriend from Syracuse down with him.

She was curious to meet Naomi, who was from Ohio. Did they even have Jews in Ohio? The people she knew from the Midwest at Adelphi were blond, blue-eyed types — very, as her father would say, goyish looking.

Elaine couldn’t understand her father’s obsession with being a Jew. He rarely went to synagogue, except during the high holy days, and used to work on Saturdays when he was sewing curtains on the lower eastside. But Nathan Perl gave money to Israel and to the B’nai Brith and could tell you exactly who was Jewish and who wasn’t on Stratford Drive.

He had gotten out of Poland years before the holocaust. His older brother had survived the Warsaw ghetto by joining the underground and then emigrated to Israel, where he taught math in high school and sent them a card every Jewish New Year showing sun-tanned young people working on a Kibbutz.

Nathan talked about visiting his brother Yidl in Israel but never went. I’ll go next year — when I have the time. The brothers hadn’t seen each other for thirty-five years, and, outside of the New Year’s card, and a few strained telephone conversations after the war, they’d had no contact.

Nathan’s uncle Meyer, a feisty little tailor who still lived on the lower eastside, was the only one in the family who was in the least way religious. He went to a rundown little shul near his shop. He would be coming for Thanksgiving, taking the Long Island railroad with his bag full of dried apricots, which he distributed to his great nieces and nephews as if they were gold ingots.

Elaine had wanted to go out of town to college, as Michael had, but her father insisted that there was no reason to waste good money when there was an excellent college right there in Garden City. Adelphia had a reputable education program. Afterward, she could get a job teaching school. A very honorable profession, Nathan pronounced. And with terrific benefits. She’d have a pension plan in less than 40 years. She’d have nothing to worry about.

Nathan had it all laid out in his mind. His own life had been unpredictable enough that she wondered how he could see her life in such straight lines. If he hadn’t left Poland in 1928, at age eleven, he would have been swept up in the events of the 1930’s and 40’s and probably wouldn’t have survived. In which case, he wouldn’t have met Ida Rabinowitz, and Elaine wouldn’t have been born.

Elaine’s memories of Ida were blurry. Of the three kids born before Nathan remarried, Jackie was the only one with any real recollection of their mother. He remembered her taking him to school for the first day and holding his hand so tightly that it hurt. He remembered her at the stove, cooking and singing sad Yiddish songs that he didn’t understand.

In spite of the vagueness of these memories, or maybe because of it, Elaine wanted to know more about her mother. She couldn’t get much out of her father. Ida was a good woman. They could cure what she had today. But he never got more specific.

Her parents had spent the first six months of their marriage living with Uncle Meyer above his tailor shop on Rivington Street, before they had gotten their own place in Brooklyn, where Elaine had been born. The apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone on Chester Street, in Brownsville.

She could remember mornings on Chester Street, her father getting up early to go to work, the smell of the Wheatina he made for the whole family, even in hot weather. She would lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, because if her father knew she was awake, he’d make her get up. Bed is for sleeping.

Elaine broke off pieces of her sandwich and watched the squirrels fight over the crumbs. The door to the cafeteria opened, and a girl she knew from her psych class, a Negro named Felicia Evans, exited, tears running down her cheeks. She was walking aimlessly, as if she didn’t know where she was going, moving erratically between the outdoor tables. She sat down on an empty bench and put her head in her hands.

Elaine went over to her, bent down and asked, softly, “What’s wrong?”

But all Felicia Evans could do was shake her head.

Then more students came out of the cafeteria with stunned looks. The squirrels stopped eating.

Steven Perl sat in a locked stall, on a closed toilet lid, in the Boys room on the third floor of Garden City High, skipping lunch. Though only fifteen, he was already in his third year, having, as a “Special Progress” student, skipped a year by completing his seventh, eighth and ninth grades in two years. Though his father had been proud of his being chosen for the program — my Stevie’s a regular Einstein — Steven himself wasn’t entirely sure it had been a good thing.

For one thing, he was younger than just about everyone in the junior class. And shorter. The girls treated him like their kid brother. His classmates referred to him as a grind. The truth was that he didn’t spend a lot of time on his homework, and yet still managed to get good grades, especially in English, where his teachers said he had extraordinary verbal skills.

For a kid with “extraordinary verbal skills,” Steven didn’t talk a lot. He had few friends and no social life. Don’t worry — he’ll blossom, Nathan continued to assure everyone, but it didn’t look like Steven Perl was blossoming — certainly not during lunch period, when he chose to sit alone in the Boys room instead of joining his classmates in the cafeteria.

He wasn’t looking forward to Thanksgiving next week. His half-brothers were coming, as was his great Uncle Meyer, who always pinched his cheek till it hurt. It was the same thing every year. Nathan would tell everyone how thankful they should be because they didn’t eat meals like this in Poland when he was a boy. After dessert, which was always a pecan pie that Lillian bought at the Safeway — she wasn’t allowed to bake because of Ida’ s sacred memory — they would loosen their belts and go into the den to watch football.

To Steven, celebrating Thanksgiving was a sham. It was an American holiday, and they weren’t a real American family. They were Jews, and either they should act like Jews and go to synagogue and celebrate the holidays, or they should stop calling themselves Jews. When he had turned thirteen, Steven had asked his father why he wasn’t having a bar mitzvah, and Nathan had said it was a big expense that they didn’t need right now.

The door to the Boys Room opened. Someone came in and went directly to the stall next to Steven’s and lit a cigarette. Then the door opened again, and two more boys entered and lit cigarettes. One said, “That’s why I’d never go to Texas.”

The other kid asked, “So what’s going to happen now?”

“We get fucking Johnson.”

Washington Irving Junior High School was on the north side of Jericho Turnpike, too far to walk but not quite far enough to justify the thirty-five cents for the bus that ran along Roosevelt to Denton. So Nathan dropped his youngest daughter Roberta at school every morning at 7:45, almost an hour before she had to be there, then drove to the Long Island Railroad station for his trip into Manhattan.

Having to get up at the crack of dawn so that her father could drive her to school made Bobbie tired all day long.. She yawned her way though first-period Geometry, which, even when she wasn’t tired, she hated. What was the point of spending time proving stuff you already knew?

Now when the weather was getting colder, she wished she was in California, surfing with the Beach Boys. Just get on a Greyhound and go across country and knock on Brian Wilson’s door and say, “Hi. I’m Bobbie Perl. From Long Island.“

There was a boy in her home room who looked a little like Brian Wilson — curly blond hair and a goofy smile. Danny Prince. Definitely not Jewish. Her father would have a conniption if she went out with him. He’d have a conniption if she went out with anybody.

She had to be home by eleven-thirty on Saturday nights. Not even midnight, which was most thirteen-year-old kids’ curfew. At eleven-thirty on the dot, her father would ring the doorbell and barge right in like he owned the place. Once she forgot to smudge off her lipstick, and he had a fit.

At lunch she always sat at the same table, in the corner, with her best friends, Harriet Kutcher and Susan Braunstein. The three girls traded sandwiches and talked about movies or boys. They were all in love with Paul Newman. Bobbie had seen “Exodus” three times.

The girls surveyed the lunchroom while they ate their sandwiches. There was a table across from them full of nerdy boys blowing milk bubbles into their nose and punching each other in the arm. Bobbie looked away disdainfully.

“God, I hate Phillip Hacker. He’s in my home room, and he sits behind me making fart jokes.”

“You know who’s cute?” Susan Braunstein said. “Norman Schecter.”

“Yech. He’s always blowing his nose.”

“It’s allergies.”

“What’s he’s allergic to? School?”

They two other girls laughed. Bobbie made people laugh. It made her feel good. One of her teachers told her parents on Open School Night that she was the class clown. Bobbie likes to entertain us, she said, and Bobbie wasn’t entirely sure it was a compliment.

“You going away for Thanksgiving?”

“No. We never do,” Bobbie said, thinking about next Thursday and seeing her two older half-brothers, Jackie and Michael. Mickey was bringing his girlfriend from Ohio to dinner. Bobbie had seen a photo of her and thought she was very pretty — serious looking, with dark hair, like Natalie Wood.

Susan Braunstein was still talking about Norman Schecter, when a voice came over the Public Address system. It was Mr. Hurwitz, the Assistant Principal.

“All students report to their home room. Immediately.”

He repeated the announcement three times, as kids got up, leaving their unfinished lunches. Why couldn’t they have a fire drill during Geometry?

Bobbie trudged into her home room, along with her girlfriends, and took her seat. Behind her, Phillip Hacker said, “I bet it’s an air raid drill.”

They hadn’t had one of those since Bobbie was in the fourth grade. Somebody had decided the Russians weren’t going to bomb them anymore. Standing in front of her desk, hers arms folded and looking serious, was Mrs. Hemmerlink, the science teacher. She was a little prune-faced woman with bad skin. She looked weird, like she wasn’t feeling well.

As soon as all the kids were seated at their desk, she took a deep breath and said, “Boys and girls, I’m afraid there’s some bad news.”

What kind of bad news, Bobbie thought, couldn’t wait until after lunch?

She found out.

For a long moment nobody said a word. The boys looked down at their desks, and the girls looked at one another, on the verge of tears. Then Phillip Hacker raised his hand and asked, “Does that mean we get to go home early?” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. Do you feel that the book captures the experiences of most immigrant American families? Or just Jewish American families? Or none?
2. Does the author use the title “An American Family” ironically?
3. Which of the five siblings’ stories did you find most involving?
4. Do you feel that the author captures the zeitgeist of the second half of the twentieth century?
5. Does the book feel autobiographical to you?
6. Did you suspect the surprise at the end of the book regarding 9/11?
7. Were you disappointed in the ending?
8. What would you do to make the story more interesting?
9. Did you relate to the family, even if you are not Jewish or did not grow up in New York?
10. Would you recommend this book to other reading groups?
11. If you’ve read other titles that this author has published, does this book feel different in tone and substance?

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