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Eulogy for Arthur Liebersohn: For my cousin and older brother –
a speech I never expected to write. 4 March 2012
Some of you have said to me at
one time or another that Arthur and I were like brothers, and it’s one of the
kindest and truest things that you could say. I would just add that Arthur
was like an older brother to me. Early memory of this: One
time I was upset with him, I think because he had just clobbered me at Monopoly,
and to calm me down he offered to teach me how to cheat at poker. Older
brotherly love knows no greater offer.
What I want to talk about today, though, is
some of the things that made him what he was. The first one is the paint
store that his father David (or Homer) and my father Myer owned and ran together
at
1014 Seventh Street
in
Washington
. It was the place where all the ethnic neighborhoods of the city jostled
together, black, southern white, Chinese, Italian (gone except for AV’s
Italian Restaurant) and Jewish -- gone except for the small store owners like
our fathers. Arthur’s father was a handsome man with a fine gentlemanly
side, and my father had a master’s degree from Penn, but they felt at home in
the paint store, and they expected us to feel at home there too.
It wasn’t just any paint
store. Arthur and I would take gallon cans of white paint that our fathers
had bought for cheap, mix in colors, add the label “Myer’s Supreme,” call
it Hawaiian Pink or Mountain Green, and put it out front for $2.50 a gallon or
whatever the going price was.
Sometimes
our customers were suburban ladies, but most of the business came from one of
the strangest and crustiest group of characters you’ll ever meet: painters,
contractors, apartment house owners, men with spattered hands who smelled like
sweat.
One time a few years ago,
Arthur said to me, “You know, the paint store was the only thing that saved
us.” Of course, I knew just what he meant. It saved us from the
suburbs. It saved us from the fifties. It saved us from the bland
and homogeneous world that you see in nostalgia dramas like Mad Men.
Washington
was a segregated city in the 1950s and early 1960s, but at the paint store we
worked alongside George and Leonard, the two African-American men who worked
there, and we knew the lovely neighborhood grandmas and the painters who were
regulars in the store.
It
didn’t make us perfect; but from the time we were little, it was enough
to break the bubble of Chevy Chase and
Silver Spring
.
That was one side of
Arthur. You had to know him better to see another side: he read books,
always, going way back. He read 1984 first and I followed. We
thrilled together over Catcher in the Rye and he read on to Frannie and
Zooey. That was in junior high. In high school I discovered Proust
and gave Swann’s Way to Arthur, who read it too. A special
favorite was The Great Gatsby: Jay Gatsby’s grandeur entertained us and
moved us. And that brings us back to Arthur’s moral qualities. Gatsby
is a story about social pretension and the inner hollowness of the privileged.
That was the conclusion Arthur came to about them as well. It could
have been different. He was a smart dresser in high school, he was always
funny, he had physical courage, and lots of girls were interested. But all
the dating and partying was just high spirits; Arthur never bought into the game
of the pretentious classes. He had, we had, the paint store to remind us
that there was another and actually a more interesting world out there.
One final word. Arthur
never stopped being my older brother. One time when thanks to Dorothee we
were living in
Princeton
for six months, he came up and said, “Where do you hide all of the poor
people around here?” Best comment I’ve ever heard on the place. I
always turned to Arthur for advice and it was always good. One time after
I asked him what to do about a bureaucratic tiff, he said, “Don’t be a
victim!” – best advice ever, I’ve tried to take it to heart. At this
moment, which I never dreamed I’d experience, I still can’t believe that he
won’t be there to guide me as he did for almost sixty years.
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