Forbidden Fruit & Lost Opportunities

My father warned me that I was too nice — and how I since learned that he was right

I grew up in a diverse lower middle class north suburban Chicago neighborhood. On our block lived emigres from around the world. My parents were Hungarian Jews, arriving here by way of Venezuela. Our next door neighbors were from India, and two doors down dwelled a West German family, their three kids first generation Americans, like me.

The Deutschlanders consisted of a stereotypically stalwart, hardworking, and taciturn machinist father, buxom blond stay-home mother, two brothers Jeff and Mark, and younger sister Jeanine. Jeff was about my age, and we became best friends, formative years spent doing everything from building snow forts in winter, to playing capture the flag in summer.

Jeff was a year older, physically bigger, and a dominant personality. The firstborn son of emigre parents, he ruled the roost among his siblings at home, and called the shots for the neighborhood kids, too. Not quite sure whom he was, Jeff tried to be everything to everyone. He did his best to be important, but often got on people’s nerves, especially other parents.

A Holocaust survivor with endless axes to grind, my father distrusted and competed with their whole clan, and felt Jeff was particularly suss. Our friendship annoyed him. Like snakes recognizing their kind from a distance and hissing as they get closer, my father and Jeff avoided each other when they could, and ignored each other when they couldn’t.

One of my father’s pet peeve’s, and fuel for his endless rants, was his perception that I was weak. Having failed to train me in his basement workshop, my ineptitude with woodworking was an embarrassment, and sure sign that I was a wimp. So Laszlo concluded that his silence and screams were necessary to man me up, equating abuse with mentorship.

Children aren’t born with innate experiences, have no frame of reference, and take everything for granted. Dad is dad, mom is mom, the family is the bedrock of security, values, and opinion. Like Sesame Street, the couple square blocks around our little yellow brick and aluminum siding house was my Universe, my most impactful school of life.

Laszlo knew that, too, and considered every interaction with the neighbors he distrusted a life lesson. And since I didn’t know any better, I clung to his every word, even if deep inside I sensed they were wrong, or at least not applicable to his loser son. The result was continuous fear that I always did the wrong thing, reinforced by his screams reminding me of that fact.

So when on a weekend afternoon I saw him in the kitchen eating a sour green apple and asked for not one but two, I should have anticipated the inevitable. After he washed them in the sink and handed them to me, he looked me in the eyes, and said: “I am giving these to you. Don’t give any to that snotty Nazi punk! You are too nice. You let everyone take advantage.”

Determined to keep both apples to myself, I ran into Jeff on the far end of the block. “Hey! Can I have one?” he asked. Instantly racked with guilt, yet compelled to share, I steered us behind a short wall separating two houses. “Let’s go back here so my dad can’t see us,” I said. “He doesn’t like when I give people things.” “How’s he gonna know?” smiled Jeff, taking an apple.

I forgot about the clandestine share until the second I walked back into our house. My father sat as he usually did, in his Archie Bunker chair in front of the TV. I felt his wrath before my confession made me hear it. “How did you know I gave him an apple?” I asked, confirming his omniscience. “You will never get anything in life,” he roared. “Because you give it all away!”

If I had the luxury of giving it all away at age eight, Laszlo had no choice but to have everything taken away by age sixteen. The Germans rolled into Budapest a week before his birthday, igniting a series of traumatic adventures culminating in ninety percent of his family and everyone he knew being killed, and an emigration to a foreign culture across the world.

Surviving thanks to his own grit, Laszlo strived to make my cushy American suburban life gritty, as if he were doing me a favor. The hardest knocks imaginable had been his school of life, and since I was born with a pewter spoon in my mouth, the least he could do was to try and toughen up his pathetic son who preferred reading to building things in his workshop.

Despite his best efforts to become my life coach from that cauldron of death, his own vulnerabilities and thereby his actual intentions gradually and inevitably became manifest. His ass kicked, he couldn’t stand to see me get a free ride, so sought excuses for kicking mine. I noticed similar patterns from his Holocaust surviving friends. They were all shitty fathers.

The paradox of him trying to “toughen me up” by tearing me down was infusing me with doubt instead of boosting my self-confidence. Stoked more by jealousy than integrity, his abuse was poorly disguised as guidance, and his life lessons were more like opportunistic moments to fuck me up. A fail, our disastrous relationship led only to estrangement.

Two decades gone, our father-son smoke has cleared, and with that comes renewed visibility and insights. Looking back at my own life, his intuition that I’m too nice, too giving, and too naive has proven correct. Rewinding the clock, I would have followed his advice, but only if delivered without the poison pill of his jealousy. After all, I just wanted to make him proud.