My Father the Catholic, Stereotypical Old Jewish Miser

Growing up the son of an attorney in a Catholic family in the western suburbs, you could pretty much guess I came from money and have never worked an honest day in my life. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Since I’ve been old enough to hold a rake I’ve been doing work around the house. I learned how to use riding lawn mower when I was eight and started working a Job the day I turned sixteen. Unlike my schoolmates out in Orono, my allowance depended on whether or not a lengthy list of chores was completed. I never had the newest toys like the other kids unless I had saved up my money to get it. Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t deprived as a child. We lived in a nice house (not as nice as my mother would have liked or as expensive as it could have been), but we all drove used cars we had fixed up ourselves to save money.

Every Sunday we would clip coupons from the ads in the paper to save fifty cents on this or dollar on that, sometimes things we did really need but were a good deal. He would also drive across town with several five-gallon gas cans to save a nickel or two per gallon. It drove my mother nuts, because she knew we had money to spend but my father just wouldn’t part with it. My mother is my father’s secretary and paralegal, so he controls her paychecks and sees her bills and bank statements. My parents would fight about money constantly. My mother’s complaints almost perfectly mirror those of Mala’s in MAUS and my father’s would be the same a Vladek’s. I remember gut wrenching fights when I was little that would reduce me to tears as I watched my parents marriage tear apart over money issues.

Through the years I’ve learned more about my father’s past. How he lost his father at a young age, and worked full time to put himself through law school and support his mother. I know now that having money is like a security blanket for him, and that is why even when he has plenty he would rather keep it than enjoy it. I find myself sharing some of his habits, clipping coupons, shopping around for good deals, and fixing things on my own rather than paying someone else to do it. I learned how to work hard to be successful, but not to flaunt my success. But I also bear the burden of feeling like I need to have money to feel safe secure and content with life and have already begun to feel some of the social ramifications