In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord;
in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked
’twixt son and father.
—King Lear

Mein lieber Sohn,

I just found your ranting “Letter to His Father” hidden in your mother’s drawer.  Too bad you didn’t have the guts to give it to me yourself.  Instead you used her as a feeble go-between.  You always hid behind her to protect yourself against me.  But she was afraid to bring the evil tidings.  Your letter was meant to wound me and it did.  I’m a man of iron but it left a hole in my heart.  I’m sick, absolutely sick of getting a bad rap.  I feel like a beast led to kosher slaughter.

I am dictating my defense to my clever chief clerk and asking him to correct my rough style and grammar.  I shouldn’t want my smarty pants (Klughosen) son to be ashamed of me.  I see through your lawyer-like tricks and your legal Prozess.  First you find me guilty, then you condemn me.  No mercy.  You blame me for things I never thought or felt or did.  You’re selfish and can only see things from your own point of view.  It’s time to defend myself and launch a counter-attack against the piss-head, prick and turd that I brought into the world.

You have but two subjects, yourself and me, and I’m thoroughly sick of both of them.  You’re like the man in your story “The Judgment.” (See, I’ve been reading your work.)  The father explodes with anger when the timid son announces his engagement.  He drives the weakling to suicide by drowning in the Moldau.  Kindly remember that our elegant Charles Bridge was designed for crossing, not leaping.  If you take the plunge into that fast-flowing river, don’t expect me to save you.  I once dived in and plucked you out of the water when you nearly drowned during a swimming lesson.  Kvetching and blaming me doesn’t justify your own pathetic fear and weakness.  You admit that “a mute, glum, dry, doomed son is unbearable.”  True.  Try for a change to be a Mensch and take responsibility for your own faults.  With your scourging laments we don’t need Yom Kippur.

The men in our family leaped forward in two generations from village butcher to city merchant to professional lawyer.  I made myself from nothing (“Yeah,” I can hear you moan, “like a Golem”).  I worked hard all my life so you would have no worries about krona, so you could live comfortably and do as you please.  By sacrificing everything for you I nourished a viper in my nest and a son who hates me.  You say you suffered by hearing about my suffering.  You covered your ears and turned away.  But I was the one who really suffered.  We all had to sleep in one room and were glad to get a few potatoes to eat.  I was dressed in rags and had open sores on my legs.  As a child I had to push a cart on muddy roads from village to village, trying to sell my cheap goods.  Even then, I always loved and respected my poor father.  You refused to follow Jewish traditions and ignored God’s sacred commandment: “Honor thy Father.”  You never gave me a grandson to carry on the family name.

Are rumors true that you had a bastard son who died when he was six?  Just as well.  You don’t know how to bring up children.  You would have been a terrible father.  I have my wife and daughters, my business and card games, my plentiful food and drink.  What do you have?  Nothing.  You just wallow in fear and misery and get no pleasure out of life.

I despise your literary pretensions.  Nobody can find copies of your meager books.  I look in the bookstore window and see displayed the works of your high and mighty friends, Max Brod and Franz Werfel.  But no stories of my precious Franzchen.  I hear about your degrading characters–your ape, dog, mouse and mole.  They show you have no sympathy for ordinary human beings.  Your words disappear into the air; my velvet, silk and satin are real.  But I didn’t, like most fathers, force you into my thriving business.  Instead, I educated you so you could despise me.  You were ashamed of what you called my vulgar materialism and compared me to the crude slobs in the pictures of George Grosz.

I didn’t feel your success diminished my own achievement.  I had to hide my pride in your brilliance and my disappointment in your character.  You wanted to be independent, but wouldn’t leave home.  You want to leave?  So leave.  But don’t say you can’t leave.  You never stop complaining and remain a heavy burden on the family.  You were nauseated by seeing my bedcovers turned down by the maid.  If that’s how you feel about the marriage bed, you should have your head examined by the great Professor-Doktor Freud in Vienna.

You say I am not a good Jew.  But I hate your clever clever description of the opening of the sacred Ark of the Covenant.  You are pleased to compare it to “shooting galleries where a cupboard door would open in the same way whenever one hit a bull’s eye.”  God sees everything, especially blasphemy, and you’ll burn in Gehenna for this.

In a famous episode in your “Letter” you confess that you kept whimpering at night for water.  Not because you were thirsty, but to amuse yourself and be annoying, to get some attention and keep us awake.  You must have expected your indulgent mother to rush in with a glass of water.  After several strong threats failed to shut you up, my patience was exhausted.  Most fathers would have given their child a smart slap.  Instead, I took you out of bed, carried you onto the balcony, slammed the door so you couldn’t come in to bother me and left you outside in your nightshirt.  You admit that there was no other way to get peace and quiet.

You complain that I did you terrible inner harm and lamented, “even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come for almost no reason at all”–though there was a very good reason—“and that meant I was a mere nothing [solches Nichts] for him.”  Your conclusion is not convincing.  I carried you outside—“there was no other way”—to close your screaming little mouth.  I did not turn you into nothing.  And who are you, the shrunken existentialist, to turn me into God and turn yourself into nothing?  Genug!

You also got into a hysterical fit about my healthy eating habits.  You disliked the way I devour everything fast, hot and in greedy mouthfuls.  You were disgusted when, a busy man in the bosom of my family, I used mealtimes to sharpen pencils, cut my fingernails and clean my ears with a toothpick.  From now on, to avoid offending your sensitive nerve endings, I’ll confine the toothpick to the table and the earpick to the toilet.  I must say, in self-defense, that I despise your crankish vegetarianism, your endless chewing and slobbering the food.  These vegetable juices have turned you into a puny specimen.  All bone and no flesh.

You even criticize my strengths.  As we undressed in our little bathing hut you were intimidated by my physical presence.  If you felt skinny, weak and slight, and I was tall, strong and broad, it was not my fault.  God made me that way.  You want I should be a nebbish?  Better, if you feel so bad, to follow the biblical rule: “You shall not uncover the nakedness of thy father.”  You were alarmed by the size of my sexual organ compared to your tiny Putz.  But my cock did sterling service by shooting four children into life.

You saw marriage, in your sickly state, as an escape or a trap, as destiny or as disease.  I introduced you to the finest whores in Prague, to prepare you for respectable women.  But you felt those filthy ladies sullied your precious purity.  They were no worse, believe me, than that Czech shiksa Milena.  You wanted to marry her even though she would pollute our whole family.  No better was Felice, that Berlin bimbo, she of the bulging eyes and glittering gold teeth.  A real vampire who’d suck out your blood.  You used her friend Grete Bloch to make contact with Felice and then fell for her instead.  (Is she the one who had your bastard?)  In the same way, you exploited your mother as a flat-footed messenger to me.

You were almost happy when the blood gushed out of your lungs during your hemorrhage.  You thought it would never stop. Tuberculosis finally freed you from Felice, from fear of marriage and from slaving at the law.  I urged you to jilt the fair Felice and saved you from the next predator.  I warned you that Julie put on a fancy blouse to show off her bubs (available in my shop: blouse, not bubs).  These seductive Prague girls know just how to tempt you.  But right away, post-haste, you wanted that marry that slut.

You seem to think, mein lieber Sohn, that life and art are separate.  Let me tell you, for your own sake.  They should be joined, not divided, to make a healthy existence.  I suppose you hoped that we’d be like characters in a childish fable.  That we’d have a joyful reconciliation.  You’d be the kneeling Prodigal Son, me the doting father handing out the blessing.  Don’t deceive yourself.  I renounce you.  I curse the day you were born.  In our unequal and unending struggle I was bound to win—for your own good.  Even if everything you said is true—and it isn’t–I made you a writer.  It was the only thing you ever wanted to be.  And I gave you the essential stuff to write about.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  He’s recently published Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016,  Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy in 2018.