My Father’s Volkswagen and Our Family’s Journey
As a teenager, I used to go with my father, Rubie Spector, on weekends to work at his store, the Glen Oaks Deli, in Queens. The commute from Long Island was thirty minutes, which in those days seemed enormous. In 1963 he needed a new car and declared that he would never buy a Volkswagen. Hitler had promoted that car and overseen its production, after all. But then my dad decided that if Israel could accept reparations from Germany, why shouldn’t he buy a car that was reliable and economical, and that fit his budget. The VW was tiny and rickety as it bounced along the highways. When he drove through a puddle on the Northern State, my father would say, “Quick, Steve, raise your feet.” I did, before realizing it was a joke.
I enjoyed those trips. But aside from them I didn’t get to see my father much. My sister and I used to complain that our parents didn’t give us enough guidance or instruction to prepare us for life. But now, as I consider their own childhoods, I understand.
My dad was a gentle man whom life treated harshly. He couldn’t catch a break, except for the love he gave and received. And that was a lot.
His grandfather was a rabbi in Kiev who sent his children to New York when they left revolutionary documents in public places. Then my dad’s father died at thirty-eight. My father was ten. They were an immigrant family from Kiev living in Brooklyn during the Depression, and there was no one to help. My grandmother, Katie, suddenly a young widow, had to work long hours in a grocery store to support five kids. She had little time or patience for parenting. My dad’s only memory of her mothering was that she threw a pot at their heads when they misbehaved. So he didn’t know how to be a parent. On top of that, he had a learning disability that made it hard for him to process what his teachers were saying. So he became the learned rabbi’s grandchild who dropped out of high school. That couldn’t have been easy on his self-esteem.
Still, he was funny and likeable and smart, and that impressed my mother, Annie. She was a farmer’s daughter in a New Jersey town where he had been sent to check out a potential wife for his widowed grandfather. He didn’t succeed in that mission, but he did find my mom.
My mother’s father had been drafted into the Czar’s army as a young man, and one night an antisemite in his unit had fired a rifle near his ear. The blast left my grandfather deaf for life. He got on a boat to New York, married, and, like many Jewish immigrants at the time, scratched out a meager living as a chicken farmer. He had four kids, but his deafness kept him from talking much with his family.
So neither of my parents had the benefit of a father’s protection, or of healthy models of parenting. But somehow they had a lot of love to give. They eloped on Valentine’s Day and they loved each other all of their lives.
When I came along they needed a model for parenting, rather than launching a pot at my head. Like millions of other American parents, they turned to Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. It came out in 1946, the year I was born. His advice that parents should trust their instincts and give their kids common-sense care revolutionized child-rearing in America.
At that time, most Americans spanked their children. It was (and still is) especially common among religious parents who followed the biblical advice to teach your son wisdom by beating him. But my parents never hit me. In retrospect, I owed it to Dr. Spock, and to my father’s natural gentleness, and to his fear of letting that go.
Like his mother, my dad worked long hours as a grocer. He used his humor to make a little joke with each customer, but standing behind the counter all day kicked off headaches and backaches from an old army injury. He never complained, at least not in front of us.
When I was fifteen and my mother was forty, she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. The surgeon at Sloan-Kettering advised us to enjoy the few weeks we had left with her. I can only imagine my father’s fear: How would we live? Who would take care of my ten-year-old sister and me? In those days, doctors advised families not to tell the cancer victim what was wrong. Keeping that secret from her was one of the hardest things on my father.
Miraculously, the cancer went into remission and never came back. She lived another forty-one years. But the worry and fear took a toll on my father’s health: he had a heart attack, then a stroke. They moved to Florida and, though my mother devoted herself to keeping him alive, a second heart attack killed him at sixty-two.
Now I’m a retired grandfather living on Long Island. I look back over the generations and see how much I owe to my dad’s tenacity, love, and dedication to his family. My older son, Dan, has shown the same resilience that his grandfather did. My younger son, Dave, never knew his grandfather. But I see my dad in his patience and care as he lovingly raises his daughter. Like my father, he is a gentle man.
I’m grateful to my dad. And on this Father’s Day I wish I could tell him that.
