LEONAR.D KR.lEGEL
69
He was a pious man in a nation where even piety had to absorb the
styles of Hollywood manhood. Think of Karl Malden playing the Catholic
priest in
011
The
Waf('~fr()lIf,
crying "Gimme a beer!" to show how regular
a Joe he is. Think of Orsoll Welles in the role of Father Maple thunder–
ing against the darkness in John Huston's film version of
J\lJoby
Dick.
Like
all American sons, my brother and I hungered for power and toughness.
But we learned that human nature is not necessarily the nature of those
American sons. Had it been his choice to make, our father would have
come down on the side of the language of obedience for us, too. We envied
his faith as well as his simplicity. Study. Learn. Pray. 13e a wise man, a sage.
With all the disappointment he must have felt in the triumph of America
that he witnessed in the two of us, did he ever sense how much his sons
would mourn that immigrant who fed us shame and love?
For immigrant fathers and American sons had such different ideas
about what made a man a man. We each carried the ambi tions of what we
hoped to achieve. We each felt obligated to the self that existed in the
mind's eye. Times challge-and obligations, like debts, change with them.
For our immigrant father, prayer had less to do with how man acknowl–
edged God than with how God chose to acknowledge man. He
navellen
into hope, gave himself over to it eagerly, wholeheartedly. For us, prayer
was another false note reverberating through his European wilderness,
chaining him to the past. What haunted us was the desire to be American
men . And we wanted more thall an immigrant father could provide in a
nation that belonged to the sons, not to the fathers.
Yet as my brother and I wedged ourselves between father and coun–
try, we understood that he was lost ill our America. The country simply
possessed a very differellt idea of what a man was supposed to be than his
own idea. His limited perspective on manhood was what we fled, as
America's sons have been doing since Cottoll Mather di scove red that the
true wilderness lay within the embattled heart. We staked our claim against
his immigrant ethos. 130th Abe and I fclt doubt about the paths we had
chosen . If our father's way was not better, he himself, we each sensed, was.
The incidents are small, the talents fleeting. To look at the America
that the immigrants' sons chose to pursue, one invariably begins with the
price demanded for their success. "This
IS
no country for old men," wrote
Yeats. He was not, of co urse, speaking of America but of what time invari–
ably does to bodies as well as to dreams. Yet even ifit was not his intention,
Yeats might have been speaking for the American sons who lingered in the
shadows of their immigrant fathers. Manhood as idea or image has little
enough to do with the myths we were all raised on. However boyish and
puerile those myths might be, one lllUSt say this in their favor: they spoke
of what legitimately could be asked of men in this coulltry.
