To this day I don’t know much more than any educated reader could have learned from reading Walter Duranty in The New York Times. Duranty was one of my brother Manny’s dearest friends and as close to being a communist sympathizer as you could get without actually joining the party and carrying a card.

In those days, the socialist movement was far less homogeneous than it later became. It encompassed not only Marxists and Russian revolutionaries, but anarchists, Quakers, pacifists, and god knows what else. But the whole world had its eyes on what was happening in Russia those days. Lenin had usurped the leadership of the revolution, taken Russia out of the war with Germany and the Central Powers, and begun rebuilding the country from top to bottom.

The people who moved in my father’s circles in those days were not necessarily radicals. They were political activists like Norman Thomas and Bert Wolfe and Bill Foster, intellectuals like Scott Nearing and Jane Addams, or bureaucrats like Boris Reinstein, a socialist party organizer who later became one of Lenin’s principal advisers. More often than not, they were the movers and shakers of New York society, people with intellectual aspirations who were caught up in the antiwar movement that gave the socialist movement its momentum.

I was just out of high school when Madame Onegin died on my father’s examining table, and though I certainly knew that manslaughter was a more serious charge than disturbing the peace or illegal assembly, I must have decided Pop’s problems were his business, not mine, and proceeded to ignore them. Once they indicted him, Pop folded his practice in the Bronx, and we all moved into a huge eighth floor apartment in the Ansonia Hotel on upper Broadway in Manhattan, and for a year or so, whenever I came home from school, that was my base for exploring the city—with my old high school friends initially and more and more with the new friends I began making down in the Village.

I was away at Lafayette during Pop’s trial, and I had no inclination to come sit in some dingy courtroom downtown in a show of family solidarity the way Manny did. It’s not that I didn’t care. I just never believed they would ever convict him. Pop knew everybody who mattered in New York, in everything from the medical association to the Chamber of Commerce, and he had never hesitated to use his influence to get what he wanted.

And then, when they found him guilty, I didn’t waste much emotional energy on what was happening to him. I had never seen that much of him anyway, and they said he’d be out in less than three years; that was nowhere near as long as the five years I had spent farmed out in Westchester County when I was a kid.

At Lafayette, nobody had ever heard of the notorious John Faust, murderer, abortionist, flaming-eyed revolutionary and probably wouldn’t have cared much if they had. So I focused my attention on college and what I was going to do with my life. I never even gave a thought to the economic repercussions of his going to jail, how we were going to live, who was going to keep the family going, and I was right not to worry. Somehow the money was there.

Sixty years later, it seems to me rather ironic that the son of one of America’s most notorious radicals should be going to a liberal arts college in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a class institution we would have called it then, an elitist one I suppose these days, and Lafayette was just over the mountains from the great steel mills of Bethlehem, which were the focus of my father’s outrage for as long as I could remember.

Pop’s mother and father had come here from Russia when he was two and wound up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his father got a job selling insurance. He sold it the rest of his life. But Pop was meant for other things. At fifteen or sixteen, he went to work for a local iron foundry, the Bullard Co., a stocky, barrel-chested young man with a trace of his parents’ Russian still on his breath. Working at Bullard changed his life. Pop started organizing the Bullard workers to get them a better deal but he didn’t get very far. This was around the time of the great Homestead steel strike, when the local militias mowed down the workers like dogs, and Pop would have taken his men out in a sympathy strike but most of the men wouldn’t go. My father always knew he was going to escape from the mill, but most of his coworkers did not, so he got nowhere. The people who worked in the mill put in fourteen hours a day, sometimes more, seven days a week, and got paid what was barely a living wage, not much more than the $1 a week Pop gave each of us as an allowance all during high school. But there I was twenty years later, going to Lafayette, having a hell of a time and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.

I’m all for everybody’s getting the best deal out of life that he can, but I feel now—I have no idea what I felt then—that most of us make do with the lives life has dealt us. If you’re born poor, you manage to salvage at least a modicum of joy out of your life, just as you do if you’re born rich, and there’s nothing that says you’re going to stay that way forever. I’m not sure most people felt that in Europe and Russia but I think that’s what most of the people felt in those days in the United States.

This is not a counsel to complacency. It is a recognition that life in itself is a precious gift and most of us find ways of exploiting the miracle, and we’re often a lot better off accepting our condition than goading ourselves to discontent with everything. Pop wouldn’t have agreed with that, and neither would my half-brother Eddie. I saw more than my share of the unhappiness Pop and Eddie provoked by forcing people to brood on their misery.

Eddie and Pop, after all, had other objectives in mind. I don’t think that they were ever really interested in bettering people’s lot.