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Calvin Trillin finds the humor in
fatherhood in "Family Man."
CURT SCHLEIER
Special to The Jewish News
T
he author Calvin Trillin had
an epiphany in Sunday
school.
As he recalls it: "I'd been
a pretty quiet child, but when we came
to the part in the Bible where it says, 'If
I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right
hand forget her cunning and let my
tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth,' I stood up and said, 'If I forget
thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand
forget her cunning,' with my right
hand laying there kind of helplessly.
And then I said, 'Wet my tongue
kweave to duh woof of my motif' I got
a big laugh, and I believe, kicked out of
the class.
"It was a big turning point, because
I realized what could happen," says
Trillin.
"If you got real lucky, you could get
kicked out of class and miss the rest of
the course."
A few years later, he formed a come-
dy act with a high school classmate in
his native Kansas City. "The other guy
did accents we thought were really first
rate," Trillin. remembers. "Later I real-
ized that no one in my high school had
ever heard a foreigner."
From these tiny seedlings has grown
a funny oak tree, dubbed by various
critics as "one of the wittiest writers of
our time," "a classic American
humorist" and "the closest thing to
Will Rogers since, uh, Will Rogers."
Though Trillin is probably best
known for his humor, published in the
New Yorker, the Nation, syndicated to
newspapers around the country and,
more recently, in Time magazine — he
is truly a Renaissance writer.
He is a poet who finds inspiration
everywhere, including presidential assis-
Curt Schleier is a New York-based
freelance writer.
tants. Who can forget what is perhaps
his best-known work, If You Knew
What Sununu.
He also is widely considered one of
the country's premiere journalists. His
reports from around the country for
the New Yorker
about anything and
everything from small-town murders to
the independence movement at a San
Juaii. University — under the generic
headline of "U.S. Journal" and
"American Chronicles" — are wonders
to behold.
Lyrical, seemingly effortlessly writ-
ten, they capture their subjects com-
pletely with camera-like clarity, dis-
patch and literary grace.
Over the last few years he's also
earned a substantial reputation as a
memoirist. Trillin has written about a
friend who committed suicide (the
best selling Remembering Denny) and
growing up in Kansas City (Messages
From My Father), and his latest book,
ruminations about family life, Family
Man (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; $20), can
only enhance and burnish that image.
Of course, writing a memoir is a lit-
tle easier if you have good source mate-
rial, if you come from good memoir
stock.
Trillin's people came from Eastern
Europe. He discovered that they were
among thousands of Eastern European
Jews who entered the U.S. through
Galveston rather than the traditional
port of entry, New York, a detour
financed by banker Jacob Schiff.
The binker was worried about the
image [these Jews] might create for the
German Jewish community of New
York, prompting Calvin to write an
article that asked the question: "Who is
Jacob Schiff to be embarrassed by
Uncle Ben Daynovsky?" Trillin
arranged to have it published timed
with Uncle Ben's 90th birthday. Uncle
Ben demurred at first. He didn't want
his name used, convinced the Russian
army was still after him.
—
-
The family settled in St. Joe, Mo.
Subsequently Trillin's father, Abe,
moved to Kansas City where, though
not really a businessman — his idea of
a good marketing gimmick was always
to wear a yellow tie — he and his fami-
ly prospered.
It was a home where Jewish tradi-
tion was respected — if not always
observed. "My father went to syna-
gogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur," Trillin recalls. "I don't think
he went any more than that. When his
mother died, he went for a year because
she was religious."
Trillin's father had decided that the
Jewish litany "only said five things —
like 'God is great' and 'There is only
one God' — and kept repeating them.
It was his view that God heard them
the first time, that God was not hard of
hearing."
The senior Trillin did join a
Conservative Kansas City temple as an
adult — "I don't think belonging to a
Reform temple was in his frame of ref-
erence," Trillin says — which is where
Calvin went to Hebrew school.
Though not observant himself,
Jewish themes and ref-
erences continue to
pop up prominently
in all his work. There
is, for example, his
famous piece about
the Levines, who
divorced because
they could not agree
on what kind of
seder to attend.
Last year, too, he
delivered the annual
Purimspiel (in
verse) at the Jewish
Museum's annual
masked ball.
Above: Family man Calvin Trillin with
his two daughters, circa 1977.
In his latest book, "Family Man," the
author of 'Messages From My Father"
begins his ruminations on family by stat-
ing the sum total of his child-rearing
advice: "73y to get one that doesn't spit
up. Otherwise, you're on your own."
Interestingly, "the two most interest-
ing adults I knew growing up," he
recalls, were the rabbi and cantor at his
synagogue. "The rabbi, Gershon Hadas,
was a wonderfully witty and learned
man.
"Gershon, as I came to realize in col-
lege, occasionally quoted KierkegaA rd
in his sermons, and if that sounded too
learned, he had Hadassah phrases to
make it go down a little easier."
Growing up in the Midwest in the
1950s was interesting but difficult. It
was, after all, a time when the schools
were still segregated.
"'Lincoln,' as in Lincoln H.S. or the
Lincoln Theater, was a code name for
`black.' In the same way, 'New York'
was a code name for 'Jew."'
New York, of course, was a revela-
tion back then, even for Jews.
"Whenever my mother went to New
York, she would come back amazed and
say, 'In New York, Jews do everything.'
What she meant was that she was aston-
ished to find Jewish cab drivers, Jewish
policemen and Jewish waiters.
"New York had a Jewish proletariat,
which Kansas City did not. I always
felt we were sort of the farm
club."
When Trillin went
away, first to Yale,
then to New York,
Atlanta and back to
New York, a whole
new world opened for
him. He returned
briefly to Kansas City
with his girlfriend,
Alice Stewart, and, yes,
the question came up.
No, Trillin told his
skeptical mother, "Alice
is not half-Jewish. Her
mother was Jewish, so
she's all Jewish.
"About a week later
my mother called me and
told me that Rabbi Hacins
had said I was right."
Alice and Calvin married, had two
wonderful girls, neither of whom had
any particular religious training,
though Calvin feels they both consider
themselves Jewish.
Their lack of formal training, Trillin
feels, is largely a function of where they
were brought up. In Kansas City, if you
were Jewish, you went to Hebrew
school and, if a boy, were bar mitzva-
hed. It was the equivalent of saying, 'Yes
I am a member of this community.'
"New York is so culturally Jewish,"
says Trillin, "that statement is not nec-
essary." ❑