FICTION
NORA EISENBERG
The Domestic Front
My brother, Nick, was born nine months after our father went off
to war, I nine months after he returned. Again and again, as children,
we'd review these facts of our conceptions, amazed that there'd ever
been a time, or two , when our parents stopped their fighting. For our
father stormed back from Europe and into our lives still spoiling for bat–
tle. Nick says he remembers him marching in uniform up and down the
front foyer, calling out commands. [ don't remember that - just his eyes
widening, his nostrils flaring, his voice rising to a crazy pitch, like a
Kabuki actor. Just our terror as he slapped and slammed, chasing us
around our Bronx apartment - the on ly, or closest, enemy he had left.
Before the war, our father had tried to join the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade to fight Franco, but being only fourteen, was sent home with a
pile of petitions to get signed. A couple of years before Pearl Harbor, he
enlisted in the Army, eager for the inevitable conflict and his chance, at
last, to fight fascism. He almost died twice, once at the beachhead at
Casablanca, once in the hills above Naples. By the time we knew him,
after so many years of causes and war, he was totally unfit for peace - his
body and mind still mobilized for battle, both physical and moral.
"Petit bourgeois brats," he'd scream as he pursued us, his voice quiv–
ering with rage and righteousness. Drawing on the political rhetoric that
had, no doubt, seen him through great battles, he'd ye ll how he'd de–
feated the Nazi monster on ly to be rewarded with us - "midget
lumpens," "declassed debris of late-stage capitalism," " little bourgeois
shits."
Our offenses, had our father been blessed back then with any mo–
ments of calm and reflection, would have seemed, even to him, pretty
puny and probably funny. But shell-shocked into a state of steady agita–
tion, he saw them as critical signs of a moral decay which cou ld crumble
civilization as we knew it, or could have known it, in the better, fairer
