I don’t know how many times we heard the story of how he had quit his job in the foundry, left his mother and father in Bridgeport, and went off to New York City to make his fortune. He got a job as a clerk in an apothecary shop on the Lower East Side, one of those places that in those days still had the great jars of colored water above the door, rows and rows of ornately-labeled bottles and boxes, drawers with brass handles and leeches swimming oilily in bottles atop the counter.

Pop used the money he made as a drug clerk to pay his way through Columbia. He lived in a hall room in a cold-water flat on Hester Street, ate practically nothing, and never spent any money on anything that wasn’t absolutely essential. He studied by candlelight well into the night, learning the mysteries of the human body and soul. He already had discovered those of the human heart. It was one of those epic stories that haunt, inspire, intimidate, and disgust you all your life, on a par with Abe Lincoln learning law by the light of a log fire in that cabin or Handel destroying his eyesight writing music in Bonn by candlelight. You still hear stories like that, but when you do the heroes are Chinese—Asians I guess people call them these days, we called them Chinks—and they’re going to end up on top in a way just as Pop did

My father was a remarkable man, and he played a powerful—I guess commanding—role in New York’s leftist politics in the years up until the end of the First World War. He represented the American Socialists in the meetings the international socialists held in Europe, and he held their attention in Geneva, Amsterdam, and Brussels as he did in New York. Though he never achieved much notoriety, he was one of the great ones of the socialist movement, on a par with Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg, Silone, and Lenin, and all of them recognized it, including Lenin himself.

If in many ways he seems a stranger to me it was due partly to the fact that for five years my brothers and I didn’t live with him and Mama Eva in that big house under the trees on Webster Avenue. In 1908, when I was six, he sent all three of us to stay with various friends and supporters in towns in the hinterlands. I wound up with the deLeons in Westchester County, Manny with the Mannesmanns in New Haven, and Eddie with the Nearings in Pennsylvania. We saw Pop and Mama Eva at party meetings and planning sessions, holidays and party caucuses, but they never troubled to write, not to us, though the deLeons heard from Pop fairly frequently on party matters and would always say that he’d asked about me.

I never understood why they sent us away. Pop told us at the time the neighborhood in the Bronx had deteriorated, and it wasn’t safe for us to live there anymore. But if so it had recovered enough so that five years later we were living at home again. The truth is I always thought Pop and Mama Eva were simply too much involved in their own lives to be bothered with us. Later on I sometimes thought they were trying to protect us from the ugliness their political commitments sometimes exposed them to.

But that was nothing beside what went on once we came home to live. It was in the middle of all the excitement over the Russian revolution—Lenin in Petersburg taking over the parliament, seizing control in Moscow, making peace with the Germans. However, I paid no more attention to it than I paid to anything else. Less.

The year after the war ended the whole country seemed to have gone crazy. Half of American industry went on strike, the radicals were about to launch a revolution, and the attorney general rounded up radicals and subversives and put them in jail. Five members of the New York Assembly were expelled for being socialist, though they had been elected for that reason, and a paymaster in Braintree, Massachusetts, was shot and killed, supposedly by a couple of anarchists named Sacco and Venzetti. That was one case I paid attention to.

So we were strangers to one another, my brothers and I and our parents. I wasn’t even a bystander in their lives, never mind a part of them. Eddie was so much older that I never got to know him, and Manny had just crossed the border to being an adult. As for Pop and Mama Eva, even when we were living at home, other people had always taken care of us, nurses, babysitters, governesses, servants you’d call them if you took a less ideological, more realistic view of the world.

But somehow, our separateness, our alienation, our estrangement from one another didn’t do anything to diminish our family feeling. Not just the family feeling my brothers and I had amongst ourselves—the us as opposed to them—but the feeling we had for Mom and Pop. We were the Fausts, so we were in some way the members of an elite, and in the circles in which my father moved we really were. Pop was America’s Lenin, and we were his children and even if we had no interest in his politics we never got over that. We were something special. We were the defenders of the disinherited of the earth, whatever they were, and we knew it.

I never really believed in that message or even understood what it was.