David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

like that,” he said. “She never talked
about my father. I have no idea whether
he was nice to her or mean. I never
heard a word. Do I ever think about
what he might have been like? All the
time. I have one picture.” Freireich
turned in his chair and clicked on a file
of pictures on his computer. Up came a
grainy early-twentieth-century
photograph of a man who, not
surprisingly, looked a lot like Freireich
himself. “That’s the only picture of him
my mother ever had,” he said. The edges
of the photo were uneven. It had been
cropped from a much larger family
photograph.
I asked about the Irish maid who