
To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Your life, perhaps?
Dr. Theodore J. Ammon was the thesis advisor the department assigned to me at the beginning of the second year of my five-year PhD program in History at an Ivy League university. He was short, round, had jowls that fell over the sides of his shirt collars, and a double chin that covered the knots in his ties. He always wore a jacket and tie, even in the hottest weather. He was a lifelong bachelor.
I will try to tell this you about Ammon in a way that would both please and honor him. People who knew him will understand immediately why I feel that my remembrance requires complete honesty, about him and about me, because complete honesty is what he offered everyone in his world, whether they wanted it or not. He is still very much alive to me in many ways.
Questions weren’t needed to get Ammon going. He would launch into his orations spontaneously. He didn’t need a classroom of students for an audience. An audience of one was more than sufficient for him, and you knew, after he got started on any aspect of American, European, or ancient history, that you were his captive and you would not be freed until he chose to free you, which might not be anytime soon. It seemed to me at those times that he had escaped into some kind of deep and private reverie – the kind you sometimes see virtuoso musicians experience when they become entranced by the music they’re making.
Sometimes I wondered whether he also held forth on historical topics while he was lying in bed, or shaving, or soaking in his bathtub, or eating his meals. I think he probably did, because – as I’ll explain momentarily – I think he had within him an imaginary, secret audience of six extremely important individuals who were always ready to listen to him, and if you were one of his listeners – in a classroom, his office, or anywhere else – you were incidental: you were simply eavesdropping on what he was trying to put across to that tiny but extremely special six-person audience deep within his interior.
I also think he needed that imaginary audience for companionship, to fight off his loneliness. I didn’t arrive at that conclusion until shortly before Ammon died, and at the end of this tribute you can decide whether you think I’m right about that.
In my first three years with Ammon I was not always fond of him. Very few people in the History Department were. But the university loved him because he was an extremely prolific and highly respected author whose books won prestigious awards and exemplified the kind of world-class scholarship the university wanted to be known for.
“You can’t begin to understand American history without studying the births of its towns,” Ammon once said to me in his office during my first year as his advisee, when I always recorded what he said, both because I knew it massaged his ego to be recorded and because I knew that by extracting key phrases and sentences from his orations, and by repeating them back to him on a regular basis, I’d win his confidence, stay on his good side, and hopefully get him to be my advocate when the time came for me to take my oral exams in front of my doctoral committee, which would include Ammon and four other faculty members. I’ll give you the rest of Ammon’s recorded comment here, to acquaint you with his passion for history...
“Were they river towns? Coastal towns? Were they towns created by people in surrounding farm communities, who needed a grain elevator, a jail, a tavern, a bakery, and a bank? Which of those areas relied on the horrendous evils of the transatlantic slave trade, and slave labor, which served, for almost 250 years, as economic jet fuel in all the territories that engaged in it. Look at what was planted, cultivated, harvested in the areas around the farming towns in early America, and the extent to which slaves were used to do the work that sustained, or made extremely wealthy, those farmers and plantation owners. Only then will you begin to feel history as well as study it. That is what you must do. You must feel history before you can understand it.
“You must imagine your way into being one of those farmers, slaveowners, slaves, fishermen, hunters, trappers, miners, or tradespeople.
“Look at the connections that 19th century America made between its towns and cities, via its rivers, canals, railroads, and maritime shipping capabilities, and you’re looking at the body of an adolescent expanding into mighty muscularity, height, and, one might say, brutality. Which of those coastal and inland towns and cities owed their existences to the railroad, or nearby plantations, or military installations, or mines, or grain elevators, or sawmills, or foundries, or any of several other kinds of undertakings that drew people to those places? The genocides against indigenous peoples paralleled white people’s greed for arable land, pelts, meat, gold, and silver, and its obsessive placement of military installations in the regions it decided to steal from those peoples. Look at America today, in which innumerable planes, ships, trains, and trucks move goods easily from their sources to their consumers, and you can see why so many of the country’s old river and railroad towns have become pathetic, self-pitying examples of Americans’ dilapidata.”
That was Ammon for you – a person who would invent a word like “dilapidata” and then congratulate himself for doing that with a self-satisfied smile at whoever had heard him say it – including, I think, those six secret audience members who sat together somewhere within his mind.
Listening to some of those old recordings reminds me of how seldom I spoke.
Ammons authored books on slavery in the U.S., and he told me that the hardest thing about writing them was managing his hatred for the subject. Those books won prestigious awards from literary and historical organizations, so I knew I had to avoid any thesis topic that dealt with slavery, for fear of the fault-finding, from Ammon, that could delay his approval of my doctoral dissertation.
I wrote my dissertation on how the city of Cleveland’s economic development in the first four decades of the 19th century relied on its opportunistic uses of its frontage on Lake Erie, and on its uses of the Cuyahoga River, which separates the city’s east and west sides. For the first three of my four years of one-on-one doctoral advisory sessions with Ammon I felt that he used me as a kind of intellectual punching bag. In my fourth year as his advisee he mellowed, and I realized that up until then he couldn’t help himself: he felt that he would dishonor his profession if he accepted mediocrity from someone who aspired to join its ranks. History, to him, was like religion is to religious zealots. It deserved fanatical dedication, sacrifices, and devotion to finding truths within realities that no longer existed. I think that at the beginning of that fourth year he conceded that I was never going to achieve stardom as a historian, but I had progressed in many ways, so he let up on me.
But why did Ammon choose me as the first person to whom he revealed the terrifying news that he, at the age of sixty-three, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer? Did he believe, from seeing me record so many of my meetings with him, that I worshipped him? Did he look at me as if I were the son he never had? When he told me this news I felt ashamed of myself for ever having resented how tough he’d been on me.
He received his diagnosis less than four months after my five-person doctoral committee agreed to grant me my PhD. At that time I was living with two other graduate students in a three-bedroom apartment on the second floor of what had once been a boarding house, during The Great Depression, and I was trying to find a teaching job. I needed Ammon’s recommendations to land one that would enable me to live reasonably comfortably while beginning to pay off my enormous academic debt. When Ammon called me and asked me to come see him in his office, I was clueless as to why he wanted to meet with me.
He cried, shortly after I sat down in the chair next to his desk, when he told me he didn’t expect to live more than another nine months, and said I was the person he had decided to tell first. He asked me to keep it a secret. I cried too, and what I’m sure he took to be my empathy was, at least in part, crying caused by my pity for the loneliness of this person whose world was so barren of friends that he chose me as the person to confide in.
He said he was scared. “The cancer invaded me with such stealth that I didn’t know it had taken up occupancy inside me,” he said. “I have no precedent in my life that can help me to prepare for my forthcoming personal apocalypse. If my parents were alive, I think they might know how to advise me, but they died when I was still in my twenties.
“Will I have no warning when the end is imminent?” he said. “I want a warning.” He wiped tears from his cheeks with his chubby fingers. I didn’t ask him why he wanted a warning. Perhaps a person has to be in his situation to understand that.
In the months that followed he often apologized for what he said was his need for my company, and he told me that he found our conversations “important” and “sustaining.” Unlike me, he was not at all a selfish man. He asked nothing of anyone other than his students and advisees, which he did out of a sense of duty to his profession. He was simply a very lonely man, and he appreciated my company.
***
Ammon lasted a little more than ten months from the date of his diagnosis. About two and a half months before he died a surgeon performed some kind of operation on him, and I visited him in the hospital. He asked if he could hold my hand, and I said “Of course.” For him I think that holding hands while being immersed in great sadness constituted an act of extreme intimacy. We cried. A month or so later the pain began.
On a gray, cold, rainy day in October, in response to Ammon’s invitation, I visited him in his hundred-year-old bungalow, which was less than a five-minute walk from the building in which he’d had his office for over thirty-five years. He had never invited me to his home before. I was surprised to see a mezuzah on the right side of his front door’s doorframe, less than a third the way from the top. I did not know, until then, that he was Jewish. Had he tried to conceal that fact? He, however, knew that I was born into a secular Jewish family.
I pressed the doorbell button, waited for almost a minute, and when the door opened Ammon stood there in baby blue pajamas under a thick, dark blue, knee-length terrycloth robe whose belt he had knotted over his stomach. Except for when I visited him in the hospital, I had never seen him without a jacket and tie on, and when I saw him look so childlike, in that robe, within that doorframe, I felt the urge to cry.
He apologized for being in his pajamas, but said he assumed I’d understand. I felt flattered by his willingness to be seen that way by me, and I felt undeserving of such intimacy.
He led me from the small foyer into the home’s parlor and invited me to sit down. The room was poorly lit. The wall on the side nearest the foyer was covered with bookshelves, and the room had the cozy, not-unpleasant aroma of old hardbound books. On the wall opposite the foyer, between two windows whose heavy, floor-length draperies were closed, were six eight-inch by ten-inch very old portrait photos in ornate gilded frames. The three on top were of a man between two women, and the three on the bottom were also of a man with a woman to either side of him. The woman at the top right was breathtakingly beautiful. The photos were black-and-whites, but the ones in the top row looked much older than the ones in the bottom row, and they had been touched-up with color here and there, as had been done with photos of my own family members up until the 1920s. That beautiful woman I instantly fell in love with had had her eyes touched up with blue. Ammon, too, had blue eyes. Those photos, I now tell you belatedly, are at the heart of this commemoration.
I go on about the room because it seemed to me that it might have been Ammon’s sanctum sanctorum, and it felt to me like a great honor to have been invited into it. There were round white antimacassars, made of stiff crochet-work and containing elaborate patterns, on the fat arms of the dark gray overstuffed davenport I sat down in. The soft upholstered furniture around me – dark gray wing chairs to my left and right, with rectangular white antimacassars over their tops, and, across from me, a davenport that matched the one I was sitting in, with the same white antimacassars on its arms – all looked to be at least seventy-five years old, but in remarkably good condition. In front of my shins was an oval coffee table whose top was an inch-thick slab of black marble with white and gray veins in it, which looked to me like wisps of smoke. It was a room that seemed to put me in an apartment somewhere in Europe in the 18th or 19th centuries.
After I sat down Ammon said he was going to go and get tea for us.
I looked around in the dim light, which Ammon had made no attempt to brighten by turning on either of the two floor lamps, next to the wing chairs, and as I observed how little use his furniture seemed to have received I wondered how long it had been since Ammon had last received company in this room. Years? Decades? Ever? Pity washed over me. I looked again at the beautiful woman above me and to my right.
A minute or two later Ammon returned to the room with an engraved silver tray, and on it were a silver teapot, two spoons, and very delicate-looking floral-patterned teacups, saucers, a small cream pitcher, and a sugar bowl. He placed the tray on the black marble coffee table, offered to pour, and did so. What struck me, as he poured my tea, was the fact that for however long I had been with him up to this point, our presence together had been dominated by silence, which was the opposite of what I was used to from our years of interactions. He had spoken only three short sentences to me. I was disarmed by that. Where was this headed?
We sipped our tea. Ammon asked me how my job search was going. He said he would write another letter of recommendation – a tailored one, to fit its addressee – to a university whose recently posted job opening seemed right for me. I asked him how he felt, physically. He responded with a shrug as he sipped his tea. His attention then drifted. He put his teacup on its saucer, on the coffee table, and looked up at the six pictures. I looked at them too. I said to him that I’d be hard-pressed to name a woman I found as beautiful as the one at the top right.
“My great aunt,” Ammon said. “That’s my paternal grandfather in the middle, and my paternal grandmother on the left. That great aunt was their daughter.”
From the apparent ages of the grandfather and grandmother – they looked to be in their early forties – I wondered whether the photos were taken before they became Ammon’s grandparents.
“The bottom three,” Ammon said, “from the left to the right, are my mother, my father, and my sister, who died by her own hand when she was in college. It was shortly after I received my doctorate. My father informed me in a phone call.”
I sat perfectly still. The look on his face cannot be described. He had returned to the moment he received that call from his father.
He stared at his cup of tea on the coffee table for a while.
“Between 1945 and 1951,” he said, “roughly 92,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi Europe came to the U.S. Only Israel accepted more. My mother and father were among those 92,000.”
I didn’t dare ask about his grandparents and his great aunt. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.
“I hate the nouns, all of them, in all languages, that are ambitiously and arrogantly used to reduce into words the unnameable combination of horrors that took from this world my grandparents and great aunt, along with six million others, and left my mother and father irreversibly damaged. Irreversibly. And they passed on some of their mental and emotional and spiritual pathologies to my sister and me. My sister’s death was as much a result of Nazism as the deaths of my father’s parents and aunt were. Who has the right to speak or write the clean, pretty little words that are used to sum up, neatly and obscenely, what happened to six million individuals, and that are accompanied, in dictionaries, by a pretty, bloodless, sterile, and brief definitions? What kind of arrogance gives anyone the right to speak or write such cruelly reductive words?”
I couldn’t speak. I knew that he didn’t expect me to.
“How did my grandparents and my great aunt, who never married, face their suffering and their impending doom? The answer to that question might help me face mine. What was it like for my grandparents to give their son to people who promised to get him out of the country, and then for them not to know, as they worked as slaves for the Nazis, until they were gassed and incinerated, whether they had sent my father to safety, or to his death? I want to ask them how they faced the final hours of their lives. I stand in front of their pictures sometimes and look into their faces, and I am unable to imagine what their final moments might have been like, even as I face my own.”
We sipped our tea. I understood, in that moment, how he had motivated himself to try to feel what it was like to be a slave as he wrote his books on different aspects of slavery during its 246-year presence in the territory that became the United States.
The brief silence between us, after that revelation, was a relief to me. I am not religious, but a part of me prayed that Ammon felt glad that he had shared his feelings with me, and that I would somehow, someday, find a way to honor him and his family. I’m trying to do that here.
Ammon picked up his cup of tea, and the saucer. He sipped his tea. I sipped mine.
“The profound irony isn’t lost on me,” Ammon said, “that I hate, and have never spoken, any of those extraordinarily reductive words, out of my respect for all the millions of victims, and yet I am a man whose life has been made of words. Spoken and written words. Hundreds of millions of them. In a few months, or maybe weeks, all that will be left of me will be my words, in the articles and books I authored. I find no consolation in that.” He shook his head, and put his cup and saucer on the coffee table.
We went on to talk about other things, and then he looked up at the photos again.
“I can’t cry anymore,” he said. “I should, but I can’t.”
When he said that, I thought he was referring to his own situation. I was wrong.
“I gave my family members enough of my tears,” he said. “Who will cry for me?”
“I will,” I said.
You mean that?
“I do.”
He got up off the davenport and stepped around the coffee table. I stood up and we embraced, while crying. I later wondered when he had last been hugged by anyone.
***
During that visit with Ammon he told me that his lawyer would carry out the liquidation of his estate, but he wanted me to have the framed photos of his family members, and he told me what he wanted me to do with them. I took them down from the wall and placed them in a box he handed to me.
A few weeks later I went and saw Ammon in the hospital, three days before he died. He was heavily medicated, but he was able to smile when I lied to him and said that one of his recommendations had landed me a job. A lie seemed like such a small thing when it also constituted a gift to someone in his situation.
His funeral took place according to Jewish tradition, the day after he died. In accordance with Jewish law, members of Ammon’s congregation washed his body, dressed it in a burial shroud, placed it in a pine coffin, and stayed with the coffin from the time it was nailed closed until the burial.
A rabbi conducted the funeral service at a funeral home. It lasted about twenty minutes, and was attended by the university’s Provost, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, six faculty members from our department, three graduate students, and ten people who I understood to be members of Ammon’s synagogue. As I looked around I sensed that perhaps I was the only person there whom Ammon would have considered a friend.
I was the only one from the university who attended the graveside ceremony, and with me, along with the rabbi, were the ten people from Ammon’s synagogue.
A few weeks later I removed the six photos from their frames, and placed them in a photo album I had bought for them.
Six months after Ammon died, I was hired to teach History at a mid-level university where I suspect I will remain for the rest of my career.
On the anniversary of Ammon’s death, and in accordance with his request of me, I contacted a rabbi at a synagogue near my home, told him about Ammon’s family, and explained that Ammon wanted the Mourner’s Kaddish to be recited by a rabbi while the rabbi, in the presence of at least ten other adult Jews, placed the photos in a fire, in the order Ammon had specified. The rabbi agreed to do it, and I canceled on him a week before the agreed date, which was to have been on the anniversary of Ammon’s sister’s birthday. I couldn’t go through with it. Shame on me. But my feelings toward Ammon had melted into a kind of love for him, and such finality, in the form of an incineration I would have to witness, was something my cowardice prevented me from facing. I felt that those photos kept me attached to my moments of intimacy with Ammon in his office, in the hospital, and in his home. When he was alive, did those photos keep him attached to his moments of intimacy with his parents and his sister, after they had left him? I’m absolutely convinced that they did, and that for that reason Ammon would forgive me for my procrastination.
I will someday carry out Ammon’s wishes. I’m just not ready to do it yet.
Selfishly, I put the photo of Ammon’s beautiful great aunt back in its frame and hung it in my study at home. Then, in part because she looked so lonely there, I put the photo of Ammon’s sister back in its frame and hung it below her great aunt. But the two of them then looked lonely and out of place, so I put the other four photos back in their frames and hung the six of them in the positions, relative to one another, that they had occupied on the wall of Ammon’s parlor. They will remain on the wall of my study until I carry out Ammon’s wishes, which I will do sometime before I die. I have no photos of Ammon, but I have all eleven of his books on a shelf directly to the right of the pictures of his family members. That keeps them united for the time being. I think of that wall as a shrine.
I once calculated that Ammon’s eleven books contained approximately two million words. Given how much time he spent on revising and abridging his manuscripts, he had to have written at least five times that many words in the many drafts that led to those books being published.
How many times did Ammon tell me, “You must feel history before you can understand it,” and “You must imagine your way into being” the people whose lives you write about?
His books and articles are his survivors. So too are his former students and advisees, like me. How much feeling, and imagining, did the writing of all those millions of words require? Enough to make a life, I would say. I say that as someone who, like Ammon, has remained a bachelor. I am middle-aged now. I can’t explain why I took so long to write this.
At the beginning of this remembrance, I wrote that I thought Ammon had within him an audience of six extremely important individuals. Now you know who those six individuals are. He loved his parents and his sister. He was his family’s only survivor. He wanted to make those six people proud of him. No one could have done more to accomplish that goal. They were in on all of it. Now I see them, and Ammon, as being in on everything I do for my students and advisees. Did they ever really die?
And can you blame me for not yet following through on Ammon’s request of me? Can you?