What my father gave me

Sometimes, I think my dad is nuts, says Joel Stein, but his belligerence had a purpose

Joel Stein's father with his grandson Laszlo
(Image credit: Courtesy Joel Stein)

MY FATHER HAS scars on his knuckles, one of which is permanently bent. This is not something you would think is easy to work into conversation. Yet I have been told many, many times how he got them: As a teenager in the Bronx, he took on the duty of protecting smaller Jews from large, anti-Semitic Italians. I figured, despite the physical evidence, that the number and severity of these fights — some of which involved knives — were exaggerated. It's not that my dad lies; it's that he never tells stories in which he doesn't come out looking really good. I am deeply suspicious of this, since I do not have any stories in which I come out looking even moderately good.

But he wasn't exaggerating. When my dad and I went to visit my 89-year-old grandmother, Mama Ann, in her condo in Fort Lauderdale, I asked her what my dad was like as a kid. "As soon as he learned to walk, he only walked one way," she said. When I asked Mama Ann what that meant, she explained that my dad was not conflict-avoidant: "Your father would walk up to kids and hit them. He'd get in trouble. Then he learned. He'd say, 'They hit me first.'" My father's aggression was so severe that — and this is back in the 1940s — his pediatrician recommended putting him on drugs to calm him. Which my grandmother had to talk my calm, patient grandfather out of doing. While Mama Ann told this story, my 70-year-old father kept interrupting her with: "You mess with me, I'm going to mess with you." I now believe there are a lot of knuckle-scarred 70-year-old Italians from the Bronx talking about the violent, racist Jew.

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