Spuyten Duyvil
Review by Jonas Lamb
Bay-Area poet, playwright and translator Zack Rogow’s non-fiction debut playfully deploys an experimental form. Weaving together his father, Lee Rogow’s writings, imagined conversations between a grown man and the father he lost as a child, and other sources, Zack Rogow’s Hugging My Father’s Ghost innovates as much as it interrogates. Through these conversations it is clear that humor is an inherited trait and that preparations for conversations with the dead can take some time. Sixty nine years after the plane crash that killed his father, Rogow approaches the wreckage with caution and love.
In the opening chapter Rogow introduces his father through scene fragments portraying his parents living “the high life in New York in the 1950s” (1). The descriptions of their clothing style and the rhythms of the nightclubs where they spent their evenings dancing feel sensationalized and nostalgic, as if these are images and scenes Rogow has played over and over in his mind but perhaps questions their authenticity. Recounting his only memory of his father preparing “mish-mosh soup” in their West 78th street apartment, there’s an about face. Rogow speculates, “it’s possible that I don’t actually remember that scene with my father, that it was just narrated to me by my mother years later, that I constructed the images from my mom’s vivid descriptions” (11).
While Rogow took some comfort in these anecdotes about his father, he blocked out most of his grief admitting, “growing up, I tried not to think about my father, or even that I once had a father” (13). By the close of the opening chapter, the memoir shifts from casual reminiscence to vulnerable investigation. Rogow describes “the tenderness that fatherhood unlocked” in him as pivotal in making space in his heart for his own father.
Throughout the memoir, Rogow is at his best when describing the complicated emotional landscape and examining his contributions as a father: “The deepest contentment I’ve ever felt was reading children’s books to my kids with their shoulders pressing against mine on either side, till it almost hurt. Not euphoria, mind you —-that’s something different. Euphoria belongs more to romantic love. I’m talking about contentment. My children—they’re my three favorite people in the whole world!” (221)
Over the course of the memoir, father (Lee) and son (Zack) discuss their Jewish heritage and the ways in which Lee whitewashed much of his published fiction to satisfy the tastes of magazine editors and readers of the day. Lee’s short-stories depict the conservative culture of the 1950s but also signs of resistance and refusal. The idea of the happy housewife is challenged in “That Certain Flavor,” while Zack’s re-write (experiment) of “Better Late,” provides an opening for Lee and Zack to discuss strong women, divorce and late life dating.
Fire Island, New York circa 1950-60 comes alive through both Lee’s satire (“The Great Grocery Cartel”) and Zack’s vivid recollections of childhood summers as a shoe-less time, prowling beaches and boardwalks in packs with other kids, and doo-wop and Yankees games sailing through AM radio static.
Early conversations between Lee and Zack are light and quippy (at times schizophrenic), a demonstration of the importance of humor to both men. However, several conversations dig into family secrets, intimate expressions of parenting joy and repressed trauma. Rogow brings a poet’s emotional intelligence to the sequencing of the narrative. Readers will ride the rollercoaster with arms held high but also feel the ground vanish beneath. The heart of the memoir opens itself in chapter nine when Lee invites, “you haven’t really talked about what it was like…Growing up without me, without a father” (114). The conversation that unfolds is vulnerable, unexpected and reveals how Zack “made the best of the cards he (I) was dealt” (116).
While Rogow’s experimental collaging of sources effectively provides context for his father’s (and mother’s) life, the original typeface (or replicated) used to present these sources renders them nearly unreadable. All but a determined reader with perfect vision is likely to skip these and miss out on the heart of the book.
Rogow’s memoir, though intensely personal, will invite readers to imagine the conversations they might have with their own ghosts, to consider the questions most in need of asking and to prepare for the impact of their answers.
