Patrimonies: Essays on Generational Thinking

By George Kouvaros

Is a patrimony something we inherit or something we create? Does it mark the continuation of the past or its disappearance?

Combining elements of criticism, cultural history and memoir, Patrimonies addresses the questions: How do we take from and give back to those who came before? How have their actions and choices left their mark on us? The instigation for these questions is an awareness of precariousness—people, places and histories on the brink. This is what gives George Kouvaros's essays their sense of occasion and responsibility—to those who came before and those still to come. The outcome is a form of writing that is deeply moving and alert to the tension between survival and transformation, preservation and appropriation that defines the engagements with our forebears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Jul 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781743823590

Book preview

1

The Bouquet

I

They were the last couple standing: my father, still steady enough to rise from his seat without assistance; my mother, showing signs of recent health battles, but still looking younger than her years. The other couples in the reception room had resumed their seats, happy to applaud a marriage that had lasted this long. A marriage that had navigated the disappointments, slights and setbacks of starting again in a country that mixed its welcome with lingering suspicion. A marriage that, like many others at the time, was founded on the necessity of both parties taking a chance. They had made it. The marriage, I mean. But it had also made them. And now in this elegantly decorated reception room all the memories, large and small, that bound these two people had been lured out of their hiding places and were demanding their due. The object of their attention: the brightly coloured arrangement of flowers being handed to my mother by the young bride.

II

Those of us lucky enough to grow old with our parents enter into a particular type of complicity. We do not want anything from them. We do not want them to change or to show us something they haven’t already shown. The only thing we want is perhaps the hardest thing of all for them to provide: an affirmation of their own happiness. If this is out of the question, then we will settle for some indication that their life has been well lived, and that by attending to its passing we might draw guidance about how to face our own demise.

In the case of my own parents, this involved a scene that I have retained in my memory and embellished with a range of emotions drawn from our life together. The event was the wedding of my cousin’s youngest daughter. The ceremony was held in the same Greek Orthodox church in the suburbs of Newcastle that, over the years, has hosted the various weddings, baptisms, funerals and mnimosina that punctuate my family’s history. Each time I attend one of these events I see people whose faces are so closely associated with this modest brick structure that I doubt I would be able to recognise them anywhere else. Mingling among these faces are the faces of uncles, aunts and family friends once part of this community, but now residing only in my memory.

The reception took place on the ground floor of one of the hotels overlooking the city’s main beach. Seated at the table were my wife and daughter. Next to them, my two sisters and their children, my brother-in-law, as well as a first cousin from my father’s side. Immediately to our right and closer to where the bridal party was stretched along a row of tables were my mother and father. Sharing their table was the bride’s grandmother, my aunt, whose late husband sponsored our migration from Cyprus to Australia. The families of the bride and groom appeared to be evenly represented. The groom and his family were Maronites who lived in Sydney. The father was a mechanic and his son worked in IT. The warmth that pervaded the room had something to do with the fact that both the bride and groom were the children or grandchildren of migrants. We had gathered to celebrate their union as well as the achievements of those whose labour laid the foundations for this happy event.

The first hour or so was spent catching up with friends and family members, trying to confirm who was who, and putting names to faces that either bore a striking resemblance to someone else or had changed to the point of unrecognisability. From where I was sitting, I was able to do this while keeping one eye on the evening sky as it gradually darkened over the ocean. Having spent a good part of my childhood and adolescence working in the family shop, a stone’s throw from where we were seated, it felt as if I had returned to a place that was deeply familiar, a place that knew both who I was and who I had become, and, despite the changes that had occurred, was able to view these two people as not very different, after all.

Just after the first course had been cleared, the master of ceremonies returned to preside over an important part of the schedule: the tossing of the bride’s bouquet. The reason for bringing this forward, he explained, was to try something different. He began by asking all the married couples in the room to stand. He then asked couples that had been married less than five years to resume their seats. After they were seated, he asked those married less than ten years to sit. Then it was the turn of those married less than fifteen years … With each upping of the years, the number of people still standing diminished, until the only couple left was my father and mother: my father smiling in that contained manner familiar to everyone in his family, my mother more animated and clearly enjoying the attention.

Despite the toll taken by a lifetime of walking back and forth behind a shop counter, they had aged well. The illnesses and infirmities that have come to dominate their lives had yet to diminish their spirits. Watching them, I felt a mixture of pride and reassurance. They stood there as my parents and as representatives of so many others who hadn’t made it this far. But I also felt as if I was watching this scene from a point in the future. Look closely, a voice seemed to whisper. Remember this moment. You will have cause to look back on what it shows.

III

In his memoir Patrimony, the American author Philip Roth hears the same instruction. He describes watching his ailing father carefully manoeuvre his enfeebled body into the bathtub. Once this task has been accomplished, Roth takes a moment to observe the scene before him. ‘Weakly at first, then more vigorously, he began to flex his knees and I could see the muscles working in his thin shanks. I looked at his penis. I don’t believe I’d seen it since I was a small boy … I looked at it intently, as though for the very first time, and waited on the thoughts. But there weren’t any more, except my reminding myself to fix it in my memory for when he was dead. It might prevent him from becoming ethereally attenuated as the years went by… You must not forget anything.’ The devastation caused by the brain tumour that would eventually take his father’s life spurs the demand to remember the details of a body that had once seemed impervious to life’s ups and downs. Rendered vulnerable by illness, this enfeebled body must not only be looked at, but also remembered.

The difficulties associated with this task become apparent one afternoon, shortly after the biopsy that confirms the nature of the tumour pressing against his father’s brain. During lunch at the author’s home, his father rises from the table that has been set in the renovated summer room just off the kitchen and slowly makes his way up the stairs. When he fails to return, Roth decides to investigate. ‘I smelled the shit halfway up the stairs to the second floor,’ he recalls. ‘When I got to his bathroom, the door was ajar, and on the floor of the corridor outside the bathroom were his dungarees and his undershorts. Standing inside the bathroom door was my father, completely naked, just out of the shower and dripping wet … In a voice as forlorn as any I had ever heard, from him or anyone, he told me what it hadn’t been difficult to surmise. I beshat myself.’ The scale of the mess is overwhelming. ‘The bathroom looked as though some spiteful thug had left his calling card after having robbed the house … It’s like writing a book, I thought—I have no idea where to begin.’ The association between the task of cleaning up his father’s shit and the labour of writing is not metaphorical, he insists. The shit that his father had somehow managed to smear across every surface in the room in a valiant attempt to clean up his own mess is not a symbol of the patrimony he is endeavouring to memorialise. Rather, it is the patrimony itself—its most confronting, impossible-to-assimilate rendition.

Roth’s account of his father’s humiliation is shocking yet also deeply tender. His refusal to abide by the promise that he would keep this event private is a terrible betrayal. But it is also inextricably connected to his desire to understand the legacy of his father’s fiercely contested life—its characteristic stubbornness and determination to never turn away from the realities of living. ‘He taught me the vernacular,’ Roth recalls of his father. ‘He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.’

The book concludes with an account of a dream that came to the author shortly after his father’s death. In the dream, Herman Roth appears to his son dressed in a hooded white shroud. Just prior, the author had agonised over how to dress his father’s body: in a shroud, as in the Jewish practice that had been used when Herman’s own parents were buried, or in a suit, befitting his work history as a dedicated and successful New Jersey insurance man. In the dream, he is admonished for making the wrong choice. ‘I should have been dressed in a suit. You did the wrong thing.’ On waking, he realises that the rebuke was directed at the book that he had been writing during his father’s illness. More broadly, it encapsulates the ongoing struggle to understand his father’s legacy—what it demands of him. ‘The dream was telling me that, if not in my books or in my life, at least in my dreams I would live perennially as his little son, with the conscience of a little son, just as he would remain alive there not only as my father but as the father, sitting in judgment on whatever I do. You must not forget anything.’

IV

In an address given on the occasion of receiving the New Jersey Historical Society award for Patrimony, Roth returns to the matter of his father’s legacy. He describes his father’s history as the first-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who settled in Newark in the years between 1870 and 1910, a son who eventually fought his way up in the insurance business to become the manager of a mid-size New Jersey office, and who spent the best part of his life negotiating between the customs and traditions of his Yiddish-speaking parents and the demands of a fast-changing society. ‘Assimilation is too weak a word, conveying too many negative connotations of deference and submissiveness and muzzling and proposing a story insufficiently gritty to describe this process of negotiation as it was conducted by my father and his like.’ More apposite is the idea of ‘a two-way convergence, something like the extraction and exchange of energy that is metabolism, a vigorous interchange in which Jews discovered America and America discovered Jews, a valuable cross-fertilization that produced an amalgam of characteristics and traits’. The citizen formed by this process was far from flawless and contained many points of friction, he admits. But, at its best, the convergence gave birth to ‘a constructive mindset radiating vitality and intensity—a dense and lively matrix of feeling and response’.

Roth describes his father’s experience of negotiating between allegiances as ‘the quintessential American cultural battle that produces the classic family collisions’. But he also insists on those forces that made his father’s version of this battle distinctive: ‘The man or woman in the middle takes blows from both sides. First these children of the immigrant generation were made to feel inferior to the natives, ignorant in all sorts of social matters, graceless, crude, and worse, then they were made to feel obtuse and intellectually inferior to the children for whom they’d undergone their hardships. Yet how else to erase this gap but through the university?’ The attainment of university education helped to overcome the social stigmas experienced by the previous generation—and it created a break between the world as it was lived by the father and the world that became available to the son. ‘What began when my rabbinically trained grandfather went to work at the tail end of the nineteenth century in a Newark hat factory concluded when I received a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Chicago virtually smack in the middle of the twentieth. In three generations, in about sixty years, in really no time at all, we had done it—we were hardly anything like what we were when we got here.’

Patrimony is about the obligations and uncertainties that accompany this process. Just as the author must remind himself not merely to look at, but also to remember the distinctive features of his father’s ailing body, the book as a whole is engaged in an act of remembrance that is acutely conscious of its responsibilities as well as oversights. This awareness is evident in the dream in which he is admonished by his father for choosing the wrong burial dress. Even more clearly, it is at the heart of the injunction that appears more than once and functions as the book’s closing statement: ‘You must not forget anything.’ These words can be read in two ways: as an attempt to give the final word to his father and as the invocation of a labour that one can neither realise nor abjure.

V

Watching my parents standing together in the reception room, the elaborately constructed bouquet carefully held in two hands by my mother, I was reminded of a photograph taken sixty years earlier outside the village church where they had just been married. My mother is in her rented wedding dress with the veil pushed back over her shoulders. In her hands is a small bunch of light-coloured flowers, much less grand than the bouquet presented to her at the wedding reception. Standing beside her, his shoulder not quite touching hers, my father is wearing a dark woollen three-piece suit that he bought when he was living and working in England, a few years earlier. I know this because, for a time in my twenties, I incorporated the jacket into my own wardrobe. Though it is long since abandoned, I can still feel the weight of the thick material pressing on my shoulders. On my father’s head is one of the paired stefana that in the Greek Orthodox service symbolise the union of husband and wife. Unlike my mother, whose gaze is fixed on something to the left of frame, he is looking directly at the camera, the hint of a familiar smile on his lips.

Collection of the author

In my eyes at least, the story told in this photograph is of two young