Selected Excerpts

My Brother Eli

Joseph Epstein
The Hudson Review

Never let it be said that my kid brother Eli failed to give me anything: he gave me five ex-sisters-in-law and seven (I think I have the number right) nephews and nieces, three of whom I met for the first time at his funeral. (My wife and I are childless.) At a memorial service I attended a few months afterward, a number of professors and writers and, yes, even the mayor of the city of Chicago talked about the struggles, sensitivity, and soulfulness of a man bearing Eli's name but who, tell you the truth, I wasn't able to recognize in any of these tributes.

My brother Eli is, make that was, the famous novelist, winner of all the literary prizes, national and international, a guy who scooped up most of the world's rewards (by which I mean money, women eager to sleep with him, praise from every quarter, international celebrity) without ever seeming particularly happy about any of them.

Eli took his life at the age of seventy-nine. You read about it, I'm sure. The official word was that he killed himself because he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but I'm not so sure something else wasn't behind my brother's putting a Beretta in his mouth and pulling the trigger. All the obituaries mentioned the Beretta, a nice detail that my brother himself would have appreciated. Eli always wore Borsolino hats; I wonder if he bought the Beretta in the same neighborhood in Rome where he bought his expensive hats, which, befitting the rake he became, he always wore at a rakish angle.

There were three of us: I was the firstborn, our sister Arlene came two years later, and then Eli (whose real name was Eliezer Schwartz) four years after that. Our old man worked for a man named Schinberg in the produce market on Fulton Street. An immigrant, unable to read English, he came to this country at sixteen from Bialystok, and, contrary to the standard American success story, never really made it. I don't think he ever felt at home here. He was stubborn, argumentative, a difficult character in almost every way, the old man. I call him "the old man" because I can't remember him young. He left for work at 3 a.m., took two different streetcars to Fulton Street, returned at 4 p.m., ate, and went to bed early. None of his children was sorry not to have seen more of him. He died at work, our father, outdoors, unloading cases of Texas apples from the back of a truck on a blustery February morning when he was forty-nine years old. Unlike the case with Eli, at the old man's funeral no one knew what to say on his behalf.

Our mother was the hero of the family. She was from Kiev. I don't ever remember her other than without makeup, gray hair pulled back in a bun. She worked a sixteen-hour day: cooking and washing and cleaning for her family, then after supper taking out her Singer sewing machine, which she set up on the kitchen table, doing piecework for Hart, Shaffner & Marx, the men's clothier, then on Franklin Street. In the few minutes she had for herself, she read novels in Yiddish. She died, worn-out, at fifty-four. Eli once told me that he thought our mother never loved him. I told him I didn't know when she would have found time, which wasn't the answer he wanted to hear.

    The six years' difference in Eli's and my age was enough to keep us from ever establishing any real closeness. And then we led such different lives. I went to work in high school for Ben Belinsky, the used auto-parts king, on Western Avenue, near Augusta Boulevard, and never left. I worked for a few years out in the yard, with the Polacks and the colored guys, and then Mr. Belinsky, who was childless, took a shine to me. He was tough but straight, no crap about him, and he gave me a sense of what was honorable conduct, even in a competitive business like auto parts. If you worked hard for him — and I did — he took care of you.