“His posture has improved so much,” my mother says of me. “He’s unrecognizable. His walk. It’s like he’s not my son!”

“On Rubenstein Street, I had my first love,” my father says. “Right over there.”

My father’s favorite saying to me: “Maybe after I die, you will come pee on my grave.” It is supposed to be sarcastic, but what he’s really saying is “Don’t let go.”

“Don’t mention the names of my relatives in the book you’re writing,” my father says. “I won’t.” “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew.”

This is the creed I have made for myself: Day Zero. A new start. Keep the rage in check. Try to decouple the rage from the humor. Laugh at things that are not sourced from pain. You are not them. He is not you. And each day, with or without my parents’ presence, my creed proves to be bullshit.

“I don’t have any friends,” my father says in response to the laughter from the dining room. “Your mother doesn’t allow them here.” The first part is certainly true. I am curious about the second. “Why not?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. He sighs. He sighs so much I think he inadvertently practices his own form of Kabbalistic meditation. “Well, God be

She is what I’ve been waiting for all my life. A chance to lower myself into complete abasement, a chance to beg for someone’s love over and over again, knowing I will never get it.

And then it occurs to me: If to my father I am an object of love-hate, both a best friend and an adversary, to my mother I am not even a person.

Twenty-two years later, a more recently arrived relative, a middle-aged man who is also the kindest of their lot, will throw my first novel on the floor and spit on it, perhaps out of ideological considerations. When I think of my relatives, I think of this kind of emotional village excess. To throw the book on the floor, fine. To spit on it, sure.