Joshua Jesse Selinkoff

Joshua Jesse Selinkoff

          Here’s some stuff — true and false — about my daddy. Joshua Jesse Selinkoff. People close to him called him Jess. You could tell people who didn’t know him well because they pronounced his name Jessie. The Joshua wasn’t in it at all. I think some people may have called him J.J., which is how he usually signed his name.

          He had a round face and head, bald with a fringe on the sides, and sported a closely-trimmed moustache in the style of the times — à la David Niven and that crowd — and wore glasses with round wire-rimmed lenses. He was a big man, about 178 cm (5'-10") and what people always referred to as Heavy-Set. When I was nine, shortly before he died, I couldn’t get my arms all the way around his waist to touch at the other side when I hugged him. Maybe I was little for my age, I don’t know, but he was concerned about his bulk. He set as a goal me being able to touch my hands to each other when hugging. Maybe he was waiting for me to get bigger. Anyway, when I got bigger it was too late.

          These hugs have left a permanently strong memory of the texture of the cotton ribbing of his white undershirts stretching to contain his bulk — and the powerful aroma of tobaccco.

          He liked to eat food high in animal fat, and lots of it. The ethnic diet of Russian-Empire Jews tends to run that way. Fatty beef brisket. Always cream cheese and sour cream. Buttermilk. And then the things he liked that weren’t in the ethnic tradition, such as stuffed pork chops, were also congealed death for people like him. He smoked devotedly. Nearly all the photos in old family albums show him with a cigarette in his hand. Unfiltered, of course. And the arteries to his heart clogged and clogged.

          He was a doctor. Not a flashy specialist or surgeon, but a small-town general practitioner with his office at the front of our big, old house on the main road in Elsmere, Delaware. He was pretty much on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I remember him going out most nights to make house calls, and at least once he told us the next day that it was an old woman afraid of being sick who just wanted someone to sit by the bed and hold her hand, and he seemed to accept without question that that was part of his job. Lots of times he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

          He also played viola in the symphony orchestra in Wilmington, the nearest city. As I recall, he liked Tchaikovsky and Beethoven — bombastic nineteenth-century stuff. For pop music he liked Bing Crosby and that whole stream of 40s schmaltz. He didn’t think highly of doctor dramas on TV.

          He painted oil paintings. They were actually pieces of art. I still have some on the walls of my house. I remember going to his art class with him once or twice. The smell of the paints and oils and such was good, but at seven or eight I couldn’t get into painting still-life. The art teacher was Ed Loper, an African-American artist of some repute despite racist resistance. I have one of his paintings hanging in my house — a large, dark cityscape with a woman carrying a baby past a man hoeing a garden in the foreground. He probably would have done better in the celebrity angle if he’d gone to Europe. He did pay me friendly attention, but then, as Jess’s kid I got friendly attention from lots of people. The pharmacies in Elsmere gave me free milk shakes.

          Daddy was also a member of the Elsmere Volunteer Fire Department. Naturally, as the only MD in Elsmere, he was the public health officer and on other boards and stuff. He wrote articles for medical journals. He and my mother had bridge parties with people whose names she could drop — the editor of the Wilmington Morning News, a Catholic monsignor, and various politicians. And sometimes, when I was lucky, he’d just joke around with me.

          Also, when he was home and not working, he’d sometimes try to stop my mother from psychologically abusing me when he caught her at it. They had a few roaring arguments about this. I sided with him.

          In January 2005, I received a letter from my Aunt Goldie, my mother’s sister, with a more adult view of my daddy: “Jesse was full of himself as a New York Doctor — sophisticated, educated, and above the common folk.” Well, maybe.

          When I was littler, maybe four or five, sometimes I would wander into his office and be cute, even if he was seeing patients. Then, once, when I was four or five, I cut my thumb with a can opener. I cut it opening a beer can. Sometimes, at barbecues or picnics or whatever, my daddy would let me have drinks of his beer, so I thought it was okay to help myself. The cleaner, who we called a maid, and who my mother called a schvartza — which is Yiddish for ‘blackie’ — was in charge of me at the time. She didn’t think a kid as little as I was should help himself to a Miller High Life at ten in the morning, but I had assured her with great confidence that my parents let me, and how was she to know what strange things went on in what must have seemed to her to have been a culture as exotic as ours?

          Anyway, I cut my thumb, and I assumed that when confronted with a medical problem such as that I should go to the nearest doctor. So I walked into my daddy’s office as he was consulting with a patient and announced that I had cut my thumb opening a beer can, and would he put a Band-Aid on it. After that, as I recall, both my visiting the office and my beer-drinking became much more limited.

          At about this time I also liked to sit in my daddy’s waiting room, which had been converted from our front porch, and read the comic books and Dr Suess books he kept out there, along with some Life and Look and Mechanix Illustrated magazines. My favourite Dr Seuss was Scrambled Eggs Super, or something like that (“Scrambled eggs super-de-dooper-de-blooper, special deluxe á la Peter D. Hooper”, is almost how it went for a refrain). I remember a few times junkies would come to the office begging for narcotics. This was back in the early fifties, before junkies had become a major menace. Then my mother or somebody would come and take me back into the house, and afterward my daddy would be in a sad mood.

          He was born in New York City in 1909. His parents, Joe and Ethel, were immigrant Jews from Kiev. Their distaste for Tsarism, illustrated by the family stories of pogroms, probably had a hand in their being staunch if discreet Communists. Joe, as far as I have heard, sold encyclopedias. Their family had been coppersmiths for generations. It was the family of both of them, as they were first cousins.

          That’s my excuse, what’s yours?

          As a pre-teen, Jesse’d had to wear his hair in a page-boy, which I have been told caused him to suffer considerable teasing at school. That and the violin lessons. I think his parents put him into what was then a stereotype nerd role: the precious little jewboy. I don’t think being a top student caused him much social grief back then, though. And, lucky for him, he was big. He played football. In his first year at the university, which he spent commuting from Brooklyn to Columbia, he played center, which is kind of like hooker in rugby, on the varsity football team.

          I have the impression that his parents were dominant, self-confident, argumentative types who had ideas about how their son was supposed to be, and, of course, like most 18 or 19-year-olds, Jesse felt stifled by his parents and needed to break free, at least partially. He moved to Washington, DC and over the next four years earned his Bachelor’s degree and his Doctor of Medicine degree at about the same time from the George Washington University. Since his parents were aggressive atheists as well as communists, he tried to learn about the Jewish religion and half-assedly tried out some of its traditions.

          He had an aunt and uncle who owned a resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City. They were Aunt Rose and Uncle Judah, and it was the White Rose Hotel. I can remember going there once or twice as a little kid. Relatives I didn’t know were all over the place. Their culture, which was almost stereotypically Brooklyn-Jewish, always seemed a bit foreign to me. I must have seemed like a little hick to them. Anyway, I understand that Rose and Judah’s openly nepotistic employment policy had given Jesse the opportunity to spend his summers during his student days working there as a waiter.

          Still staying away from New York City, he did his medical internship at a hospital in Wilmington. Delaware Hospital, I think it was called. It was during this time, if I remember the story correctly, that he met my mother. She was Lillian Weiner then. She lived in Wilmington. I remember in a cloudy sort of way a story about cousins of hers knowing cousins of his in Baltimore, and there it was. She had a pretty face and big tits. Jesse’s parents had in mind the daughter of a well-to-do professional family — this was early in the Great Depression and the money to set up a medical practice would be hard to come by — and didn't approve of the match. Their disapproval, of course, made her more attractive. Furthermore, Jesse’s grandmother, of whom he was particularly fond, is supposed to have taken him aside and advised him, in Yiddish, “Der gelt geht; der punum shteht” (“The money goes; the face stays”). That Lillian was a sociopathic narcissist had not been something that either of them had apparently yet noticed or paid heed to

          Wilmington is much smaller than Baltimore or DC, and puny compared to New York. It has always been overshadowed, in size at least, by the port and city of Philadelphia, about 50 kilometres further up the broad Delaware River. When I was growing up, Wilmington had somewhat more than a hundred thousand people (Philly had over two million). Jesse and Lillian settled there, then moved out to a picturesque crossroads called Hockessin in horse-and-mushroom growing country near the Delaware-Pennsylvania state line. Kennett Square, just across the line in Pennsylvania, claims to be the mushroom capital of the world. Baronial estates belonging to various DuPonts dot the countryside, and the nobs play polo at nearby Toughkenamon. The Pennsylvania Dutch country spreads out to the north and northwest.

          It was the Great Depression. Some of the country folk would pay for medical services with chickens and such-like. Lillian and her family didn’t get along with Jesse’s family. I grew up hearing family stories about enormous arguments.

          Once, as I heard it, Joe and Ethel Selinkoff came down to visit in Hockessin. This was in 1939, long before limited-access highways, so the drive took a long time; maybe they took the train to Wilmington and someone met them to drive out to Hockessin. Anyway, they got into a brouhaha with Jesse and Lillian and Lillian’s family over politics and attitudes. I think this one was at the Jewish New Year, just about the time when War began in Europe, and the Soviet Union (which Joe, Ethel, and Jesse’s sister Alice believed to be the Workers’ Paradise), made an agreement with Hitler to divide Poland, where Lillian’s family came from, and the Brooklyn Selinkoffs loyally backed Stalin as he and Hitler moved in. Joe and Ethel were told to pack up and go home.

          When the US got into the war, Jesse took a commission as an Army medical officer. I don’t know if he volunteered or if the Army conscripted him. They sent him to the Panama Canal Zone to be a Quarantine Officer. From the time I was little-little I knew that my daddy had been a doctor in the Army. From a fairly early age I knew that he’d been called a Quarantine Officer. It was only maybe 30 or 35 years after he died that I found out what that meant: a sexually-transmitted-disease inspector in the red-light districts near the US military bases protecting the canal.

          As far as I can tell, Panama was good for Jesse and Lillian. The US ran a decent tropical-colonial outpost there. Access to the Commissary and the Officers’ Mess meant a privileged position in a world of wartime shortages. Lillian taught shorthand to Navy signalmen and really took to having a Jamaican maid. Jesse did amateur theatre. Still, I’ve heard that the Army, being what it is, irritated him. He is supposed to have had a tendency to insubordination, along the lines of, ‘I’m glad to doctor for you, but I’m not into playing toy soldier.’

          This is also where my brother and I were born, me just about eight-and-a-half months after Hiroshima. I’m not sure whether Jesse left the Army just before or just after I was born, but it was at about that time. Anyway, six weeks after I was born we got on a boat — me in cloth diapers — for Philadelphia, via Guatemala.

          And then it was life in Elsmere. It was a small town, but right next to Wilmington, with a shared town line at Canby Park, where sometimes my daddy took us sledding when it snowed. He did do daddy stuff when he could, what with all his renaissance-man activities, Lillian’s snobby social life, bananas-with-sour-cream-and-suger snacks, and unfiltered cigarettes.

          He was the one who conditioned me into being a sports moron. When we went to doctors’ picnics he went for the softball. We watched baseball together on our first-generation black-and-white TV. Sure we watched other sports, too, but baseball was special. He’d originally been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, having grown up in Brooklyn, but since Wilmington was part of the Philadelphia market, he had become a sophisticated and critical Philadelphia Phillies fan. He still had a thick Brooklyn accent, which meant, among other things, that he dropped his post-vocalic Rs. He loved to refer to Gil Hodges, who played for Brooklyn, as “Hodges of the Dodges.” He thought that was real cute and funny. He also knew a treasury of baseball statistics and such, and gave me books of baseball lore.

          He signed me up for Little League baseball, and came to watch if he had time. My lack of ability at baseball was a great disappointment for us both. I remember one time he showed up after the game started. I guess it was when I was eight, maybe nine. I struck out, as always. Three called strikes. It seemed to me the pitches were too high. I was out in right field, of course, where they always put the worst fielder because most kids hit it to left field, but that summer evening a ball was hit out my way. It was an easy high fly ball. My daddy was watching. I got under it okay, but I dropped it. It landed in my glove harder than I would have thought. Bent my finger back a bit. I used that as my excuse and claimed to be injured. Shit! Eight or nine years old and playing hardball. And I actually thought I should have been able to.

          Once when I was maybe six or seven I fell under the influence of the Classic Comics version of The Song of Hiawatha, and I decided to write my own Indian legend. I thought up a sort of a story, I suppose, centred primarily on the costumes the characters wore, as I remember. I went to the front of the house and found my daddy in his office doing some work outside office hours, and tried to talk him into writing my little fantasy on his typewriter while I dictated it to him, and he agreed. Only he wouldn’t type it exactly as I told it to him, probably because that would have been painfully dull. Instead, as we went along he kept spicing things up with his little jokes, such as giving the Native Americans dialogue in 1920s New-York-Jewish tough-guy slang — Bugsy Siegal stuff. In Hiawatha. I got frustrated and dropped the project rather quickly. Pity.

          I was about the same age when, exploring my parents’ bedroom when everybody else was downstairs, I found a curious object. It was a cylindrical piece of stained wood maybe 30 cm long with several rawhide leather thongs knotted at the ends attached to one end of it. Whichever parent it was who I asked about it told me that it was a cat o’ nine tails — something that pirates used to have. I thought that was odd because it only had five or six tails. After that I kept it with my toys for a while until it disappeared. I wonder now which of them used it on whom.

          I remember one time when my daddy came home from a medical conference or something, and he got into a big argument with my mommy. I imagine it was probably over him getting laid out of town. My mommy packed her bags and went to a hotel. I didn’t understnd, but I really didn’t mind. An hour or two later she came back. Just to get her toothbrush. She’d forgotten her toothbrush. Right. Daddy got us boys to beg mommy to stay, which I at least did reluctantly. She did.

          Every now and then Daddy would have one of his attacks, and spend a few days doing nothing but lounging in a chaise longue in the back yard. I got used to it.

          Then, when I was nine-and-a-half, my daddy died. I was writing a skit for my Cub Scout den, a news interview with a survivor of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, when Daddy came home with one of his attacks. It was November, so he stayed indoors, lying down on the daybed in the back room. Then my mother, who’d been scolding him about something, screamed, and phoned a doctor friend of Daddy’s. Waiting for him to come, I noticed that the electric sign in front announcing his practice wasn’t lighted up, and I flipped the switch, and then the other doctor’s car drew up at the curb. I noticed that it was a luxurious-looking Packard with an outside light on the side between the front and back doors.

          More doctors showed up, and an ambulance with a too-late oxygen tank. When the ambulance showed up I noticed that the sign in front still wasn’t illuminated. The bulb was burned out. He wasn’t going to need it, anyway.