Felix and Shirley Brawer circa 1942
There is an old saying that no child understands his parents until he has children of his own. This is complete bunk - no child ever understands his parents. You may have a brood that puts Old Mother Hubbard to shame and possess the combined wisdom of Freud, Dr. Spock and Oprah; your parents will still remain a mystery. It's best to forget comprehension and settle for appreciation mixed with gratitude for those who brought you into the world, no matter how screwy you turned out. It's in this spirit that I salute my father in advance of his and my phony Hallmark holiday a week from Sunday.
Felix Edward Brawer was born in Paterson, New Jersey on St. Patrick's Day of 1912. Every March 17, waggish cronies would refer to him as "Felix O'Brawer," yet another irony for this man of Latvian-Jewish descent whose mother named him "Felix" in honor of Mendelssohn. Da was profoundly tone-deaf.
My brother and I started calling him Da after hearing the expression in a South African Western. The title of the film is long forgotten, but the name stuck to my father for the rest of his life. My children would refer to him as Papa Da to differentiate him from their other grandfather.
He was the second of five children born to Abe and Lily Oberman Brawer and grew up surrounded by a huge extended family on both sides. Da claimed he had thirty first cousins, but even he had trouble remembering them all. This was an age when parents didn't hover over their children like social directors, but more or less shoved them out the door to fend for themselves. My father and his cousins learned to take care of themselves amid the harsh ethnic rivalries of Paterson, and they developed into a tough, if not criminal bunch. My father-in-law, who knew Da as a kid, claimed his own father wouldn't let him hang out with "those wild Brawer boys."
Idiot that I am, I never documented the stories he told about his early years. I'm sure some were apocryphal and most were enhanced in the telling, but all were the stuff of legend. Mark Twain himself might have written these tales if he'd been Jewish and had grown up in urban New Jersey instead of rural Missouri.
My father, like most Jewish boys then and since, attended Hebrew School for a couple of afternoons each week. Once, one of his gang was caught misbehaving, and the teacher made the mistake of striking the culprit in front of the class. The mistake wasn't the corporal punishment - that was an accepted practice of the day - but doing it with the victim's pals in attendance. Posterity doesn't reveal whether Da was the first to charge the teacher, but a full-scale brawl broke out, the only recorded riot of pre-Bar Mitzvah boys in the school's history.
Da had an ambivalent attitude towards the faith of his fathers. He was not a particularly religious man but always maintained a fierce pride in being a Jew. Years later when local kids scrawled Jewish stars and graffiti on our front walk, he refused my mother's pleas to erase them and defiantly left them there for days until embarrassed and chastened neighbors washed them off.
He was a gifted athlete, excelling at sand lot baseball and swimming in his youth and later, skiing, bowling, and golf. He maintained a life-long passion for the links that try as he might, he could not pass on to his sons. He played his last round three weeks before he died.
But it was fishing that gave him the most pleasure. As a young man, he and his friends would fly fish for salmon in Canada or go after tarpon in the Everglades. When my brother and I were old enough, he would take us striper fishing on a charter boat out of Provincetown. My most vivid memories have him standing triumphantly in the stern of the Flora K while Captain Gray unloaded our catch at the end of the day. Unfortunately, his victory was our hardship as it fell to my brother and me to gut the dozen or so fish we caught and could never give away. Since my mother hated the taste, they remained in our freezer for six months and were then thrown out.
Unlike his children who were beset with enough fears and neuroses to make Hamlet seem sunny and bold in comparison, Da was an outgoing and charismatic man who was always up for an adventure. At one time, he had a private pilot's license and would fly himself to business appointments up and down the East Coast. He claimed that he gave it up at my mother's request, but eventually confessed that surviving a flight through a thunderstorm in a Piper Cub convinced him to stop. He always respected the odds.
It was in his later years that I came to appreciate the true caliber of the man. During most of his life, my father 's domestic needs were taken care of by others. When he was in his early seventies, my mother, nine years younger, started to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Beset with heart and lung problems of his own, Da did everything within his power to grant her the care she needed and the dignity she deserved at home. On their fiftieth anniversary, he made a large party for her and their friends, celebrating their life together even as she was failing. It was only when his own health was in jeopardy that he agreed to move my mother into a facility nearby where he visited her every day until her death.
Da was diagnosed with lung cancer in the fall of 1997, which came as no surprise. He started smoking cigarettes in his teens and didn't stop until his sixties. It also didn't help that he was a textile manufacturer who worked in an environment filled with all kinds of floating fibers. Gambler that he was, he thought he had a shot to survive with surgery, but the disease had spread too extensively by then. When I gave him the bad news, he swore once, let out a deep breath, and accepted his fate with equanimity. On the morning of July 1, 1998, he called all his grandchildren to say goodbye and left this world in the late afternoon. He was eighty-six.
I often say that the world is a poorer place without men like Da, and I mean it in a sense beyond my own personal loss. Men of his time who went through the depression and World War II had a much different outlook on life than the self-absorbed generation that followed. Beyond the self-sacrifice expressed in Brokaw's Greatest Generation, there was an exuberant vitality in these men, a willingness to live life on its own terms, to overcome obstacles where they could, to laugh when they couldn't, and to accept the inevitable with grace.
Towards the end of his life, I would speak to Da every day, and each conversation would end with one of us saying, "my dime tomorrow." I would give every cent I own for one more call.
