24 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
PERSONAL HISTORY
WHO WILL FIGHT WITH ME?
Recovering from a happy childhood can take a long time.
BY RIVKAGALCHEN
R
ecovering from a happy childhood
can take a long time. It’s not often
that I’m suspected of having had
one. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma,
a daughter of immigrants. When I
showed up at college and caught sight
of other childhoods, I did pause and
think: Why didn’t we grow our own
tomatoes? Why did I watch so many
episodes of “I Dream of Jeannie”? Who
is Hermes? What is lacrosse? Was my
childhood a dud? An American self-
inspection was set in motion. Having
lived for more than forty-five years, I
finally understand how happy my child-
hood was.
One might assume that my mother
is to blame for this happiness, but I
think my father has the stronger por-
tion to answer for, though I only had
the chance to know him for seventeen
years before he died unexpectedly. He
was an extoller of childhood, generally.
I recall his saying to me once that the
first eighteen years of life are the most
meaningful and eventful, and that the
years after that, even considered all to-
gether, can’t really compare.
The odd corollary was that he spoke
very rarely of his own childhood. Maybe
he didn’t want to brag. Even if he had
told me more, I most likely wouldn’t
have listened properly or understood
much, because, like many children, I
spent my childhood not really under-
standing who my parents were or what
they were like. Though I collected clues.
Century plants sometimes bloom after
a decade, sometimes after two or three
decades. I saw one in bloom recently,
when my eight-year-old daughter
pointed it out to me. I’m forty-six now,
and much that my father used to say
and embody has, after years of dor-
mancy, begun to reveal itself in flower.
G
rowing up, I considered my father
to be intelligent and incapable.
Intelligent, because he had things to
say about the Bosporus and the straits
of Dardanelles. Incapable, because he
ate ice cream from the container with
a fork, and also he never sliced cheese,
or used a knife in any way—instead,
he tore things, like a caveman. Inter-
estingly, he once observed that he didn’t
think he would have lasted long as a
caveman. This was apropos of nothing
I could follow. He often seemed to as-
sume that others were aware of the
unspoken thoughts in his head which
preceded speech. Maybe because his
hearing was poor. He sat about two
feet away from the television, with the
volume on high. He also wore thick
bifocal glasses. (In the seventies and
early eighties, he wore tinted thick bi-
focal glasses.) The reason he wouldn’t
have lasted long as a caveman, he said,
was that his vision and his hearing
meant that he would have been a poor
hunter. “Either I would have died early
on or maybe I would never have been
born at all,” he said. The insight made
him wistful.
If I had met my father as a stranger,
I would have guessed him to be Sibe-
rian, or maybe Mongolian. He was more
than six feet tall. His head was large and
wide. His eyes seemed small behind his
glasses. His wrists were delicate. I could
encircle them, even with my child hands.
His hair was silky, black, and wavy. He
and my mother argued regularly about
cutting his hair: she wanted to cut it; he
wanted it to stay as it was. He was heavy
the whole time I knew him, but he didn’t
seem heavy to me. He seemed correctly
sized. When he placed his hand atop
my head, I felt safe, but also slightly
squashed. He once asked me to punch
his abdomen and tell him if it was mus-
cular or soft. That was my only encoun-
ter with any vanity in him.
It would have been difficult for him
if he had been vain, because he didn’t
buy any of his own clothes, or really
anything, not even postage stamps.
The author, on the right, with her brother and her father, in 1976. Whenever there were clearance sales COURTESY THE AUTHOR
