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of course, he remembers the fathers (whose father had the mustache…whose father was
dead…”). Zuckerman is aware of the swelling of nostalgia among the aged, but he asks:
“am I completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance
Florence could not have a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s
pickle barrels?” (42)
In the remembered neighborhood, smallness grows large in both affection and
influence. These large men in reviewing their childhood smallness acknowledge the
power and authority of their fathers. But of course the old neighborhood is now gone,
replaced by urban renewal and new migration. These men are, of course, partly
responsible for their demise. They after all rejected the lives of their fathers. Instead,
other fathers are blamed—“city fathers” who scared “merchants to death” (their actual
fathers) with their plans for parkways and malls and other children as well--children with
“murder weapons” and murder in their hearts--not the children themselves.
It is the presence of the daughters however that leads most directly in each case to
the ruin of the fathers. The source of the uncontrollable hatred of these daughters for their
fathers has a strong incestual component. Levov himself recognizes that Merry’s fury is
related to an incident that occurred when she was eleven. Frustrated by a severe stutter,
Merry seeks reassurance from her father . “Precociously playing the grown-up girl, “ she
says to her father, “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-kiss umummumother,” and Levov,
“sun drunk himself, voluptously fatigued from rolling all morning with her in the heavy
surf,” notices that her shoulder-strap has slipped, baring “the red bee bite that was her
nipple” (89-90). The father tells her to fix the strap, the daughter is further embarrassed
and the father leans over and kisses her “stammering mouth with the passion that she had
Convention