Staring the past in the face

On Monday, I turn 65, an age unimaginable to me when young. And I find the past and the future, my future, lurking all too close, all too fiercely, at hand. Sometimes these days, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror -- the bald head, the mustache that's gone silvery white, the bumps and discolorations of every sort -- I see my long-dead father staring back. Each time, it's a visceral shock, this vision of the past, developing like some snapshot, in my own face.

Thought of another way, however, that familiar face embedded in mine offers a considerable span of history. In one merged face, he and I cover a century of change, carnage and promise so unsettling that it too is almost impossible to take in.

The son of a poor immigrant who made good in America, my father was born in 1907. I have, on my wall, a photo of him, at perhaps age 2, his older sister, in a white dress, sitting beside him on a little bench, her arm proudly around him. A big white house and trees are behind them, part of what must be turn-of-the-century Flatbush in Brooklyn, where they grew up.

Perched on that seat, he looks tiny, fragile and like a porcelain doll, but nothing like the man I knew. There's not a hint of the angry bull of a father who raged through the 1950s, as likely to be unemployed and drinking as anything else. Nor can I see the prosperous salesman/businessman of the 1960s, nor the elderly gent (with a mustache like mine) with whom I spent so much time after his stroke in the late 1970s.

My father rarely spoke of his own life -- his parents, his childhood, the Depression or, above all, his experiences in World War II. Like many Americans, his urge was to leave the past behind, and he was typical as well of a generation that did not come home from the grimmest of wars with the idea that they were "the greatest."

He was 22 when the stock market crashed in 1929, employed by the Swift Meat Packing Co. He was in his mid-20s when the Nazis rose to power in Germany and our relatives (some of whom he would later help escape from Austria) began, as Jews, to feel the heat.

In December 1941, at the age of 34, soon after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the Army Air Corps and was sent to India as operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group, a glider outfit striking behind Japanese lines in Burma. I have a single photo of him in full uniform, just before departure, looking handsome, hesitant and uncharacteristically vulnerable.