Arts is dertainment
On The Bookshelf

The Father-and-Son Game

Henry Dunow has perfect pitch when it
comes to unraveling the mysteries offatherhood.

BILL CARROLL
Special to the Jewish News

ewish author Henry Dunow
celebrates Father's Day like
most American fathers —
being honored •1 his family
while honoring the memory of his
own father.
This year will be no different, except
that he has just written a book about
his happy life as a modern dad and his
not-so-happy life as the son of an old-
fashioned father.
Both are discussed with humor and
pathos in The Way Home: Scenes From
a Season, Lessons From a Lifetime
(Broadway Books; $22.95).
It's a moving story about fathers and
sons and baseball — the tale of a man
trying to understand what it means to
be a father even as he is coming to
terms with what it meant to be a son.
Last year, Dunow, 48, a New York

IT

right direction to run
literary agent repre-
bases.
senting 40 to 50
"The book took
national authors, vol-
The Way Home
me by surprise,"
unteered to coach
Dunow admits. "I
Little League in an
really didn't plan to
effort to bond with his
write it. That wasn't
son, Max, 7.
on my mind when I
Dunow didn't know
took on the team,
what he was getting
but
I started and it
into; he'd never played
just came along. I
Little League as a kid,
realize my team was
and, though an avid
not very unusual by
sports fan as an adult,
Little League stan-
he hardly considered
dards, but I wanted
himself a jock.
to tell their story —
He bumbles his way
and my story"
through the scruffy
Using many
fields of New York's
Yiddish expressions, Dunow weaves
Riverside Park, playing coach, cheer-
back and forth between the game-day
leader, father and friend to the
antics of his team and the details of
Galaxies, a ragtag team of first-
his own life. He tells stories of postwar
graders. Many of them are discover-
Yiddish New York, humorous anec-
ing baseball for the first time, and
dotes about his own "athletic" past,
one even needs to be pointed in the

A Dad-And-Daughter Connection

Leonard Fein chronicles the sudden death of his 30-year-old daughter,
and shares the hard-earned wisdom that emerges in the face of loss and grief

MORTON I. TEICHER
Special to the Jewish News

B

oston-based Leon.ird Fein is
a distinguished columnist,
lecturer and social activist.
He is the founder of
Moment magazine, Mazon: A Jewish
Response to Hunger and the National
Coalition of Jewish Literacy. He is the
author of Where Are We? The Inner Life
of America's Jews and Israel: Politics and
People.
His latest work, Against the Dying of
the Light (Jewish Lights; $19.95) is a
haunting book, one that may break
your heart.
In eloquent and elegal :, but pierc-

Dr. Morton. I. Teicher is the founding

6/15

2001

78

dean of the Wurzweiler School of Social
Work, Yeshiva University and dean emer-
itus, School of Social Work, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

this kind of tragedy.
ing prose, Fein
Just a few months
expresses his
earlier, he delivered
anguished response to
the eulogy at the
the sudden death of
funeral of his 34-year
Nomi, his 30-year-old
old niece, Bena,
daughter.
daughter of Fein's
On Jan. 29, 1996,
brother, Rashi, and
Nomi had a heart
his wife, Ruth. The
attack and died. She
two young cousins,
left behind her hus-
Nomi
and Bena, were
band, David; her_16-
buried
side by side.
month-old daughter,
Against
the Dying of
Liat; her parents; and
A Father's Journey through Loss
is
written in
the
Light
her two sisters.
the form of a journal,
Each of them
alternating between
grieved and mourned
the author's memories
but, surely, there is
of his daughter Nomi,
special agony and suf-
and
his
experience
of mourning, of
fering for the parents who bury a son
living
this
nightmare.
or a daughter. In this instance, Fein
Fein is candid and emotional; his
and Nomi's mother, Zelda, couldn't
voice is poetic, sometimes prophetlike,
comfort each other; they had been
as he struggles along a winding path/
divorced for 22 years.
from despair to healing.
Fein wasn't a complete stranger to

the challenges of growing up in the
shadow of a charismatic father and his
own venture into parenthood.
Dunow's father, Moishe
Dluznowsky, was a Yiddish writer who
fled Hitler's Europe just ahead of the
Holocaust. He stayed home at his
typewriter while his wife, Bertha,
taught school.
A first-time father in his late 40s,
"he wasn't your typical `Hey-son-
let's-have-a-catch' type of '50s dad,"
says Dunow. "He would have consid-
ered that to be narishkeit (foolish-
ness)."
Dunow writes: "It's a common fan-
tasy for a boy to want to be like his
father ... it wasn't one of mine. As
much as I loved my father, who was a
tender and loving man, I don't
remember ever thinking, 'I want to be
like him when I grow up.'
"I wanted to be tall. I wanted to
have a regular job ... to be a young,
handsome dad, to speak without an
accent, and to play baseball, where no
one has a past and all that matters is
whether you're out or safe."
Dunow recognizes just how much
his own father, who died almost 25
years ago, remains a vivid presence in
his life. As he strives to be a better dad

In an interview, he explains that
writing the book was a great comfort,
and, in fact, he misses the process of
writing it. "Nomi was standing next to
me as I wrote," he says.
This is a book that's likely to be
passed on and recommended among
people who have faced similar horrific
events, who may find comfort in the
fact that Fein has been there, that he
felt what they are feeling and expresses
it so well. They're all part of a circle
they'd rather not belong to.
. Readers come to know Nomi as the
mother of a baby, a wife, a young sis-
ter, a young woman who takes her
Judaism seriously and a friend — she's
the kind of woman many would
describe as their best friend.
Fein includes excerpts of condolence
notes, and also some letters the father
and daughter exchanged in what seems
to be a close relationship grounded in
mutual admiration and friendship.
Fein recognizes that the book is not so
much Nomi's story but his story of her.
Following the first 30 days after her
burial, Fein writes: "No, I do not cry
all the time. I laugh and I work, and in
the morning, it is sometimes as much
as 30 minutes before I remember that I
have awakened to a life without Nomi.