The Fix: A Father's Secrets, A Daughter's Search

By Sharon Leder

“This remarkable book reminds us that even in the times of highest despair, we mustn't allow ourselves the comfort of being passive. " - AddictionBlog.org

Who is Josef Katz? The fun-loving, harmonica-playing dad Sara loves so much? Or the monster who abuses Sara's mother and locks himself in the bathroom, unable to beat his addiction?

Eight-year-old Sara Katz huddles under the covers, listening to her parents' muffled arguments and fighting the sleep that inevitably brings her bad dreams—dreams of her terrifying Shadow Father, a heroin addict.

Is my daddy not a good father? Is it my job to fix him?

As Josef's sickness worsens, young Sara is torn apart by her family's need to keep its “shame” a secret from its Jewish community in Brooklyn. Sara finds herself drawn to the liberation movements of the 1960s while feeling trapped in the darkness of her father's addiction and, ultimately, his untimely death.

Will Sara ever learn the truth about how her father became addicted and why he couldn't get well? How will she find her own identity if her family can't embrace its truth? And if Sara reveals her father's secret, will she find freedom—or destroy her family?

The author's proceeds from The Fix will benefit The Fix Fund, which was established to battle the addiction epidemic in the Cape Cod area.

“I read The Fix cover to cover and wept. I wept as the father of three wonderful daughters. I wept for the young man my older daughter is engaged to marry—a heroin addict in recovery. I wept as a Jew. I wept as a man and a husband. I wept as a politician who knows that between the cold statistics and policy debates about opiate addiction lie millions of personal tragedies about the devastating impact that this crisis is having on individuals, families, and our communities.... This is a remarkable book that touches us with despair while inspiring us to action.” - Dan Wolf, Massachusetts State Senator

• Language: English
• Publisher: KiCam Projects, LLC
• Release date: Feb 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997722260

Sharon Leder

Dr. Sharon Leder is Professor Emerita of English, Women's Studies and Jewish Studies at SUNY-Nassau Community College. She is author of The Fix: A Father's Secrets, A Daughter's Search, Silver Winner Benjamin Franklin IBPA Award, Best New Voice in Fiction (2018), co-editor with Milton Teichman of Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, nominated for the National Jewish Book Award (1994), and author or editor of fiction and books on: women writers, literature of the Holocaust, women in academia, and family dynamics. Founder of Creative Outlets: Finding Your Voice Through Arts at Cape Cod Museum of Art.

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www.KiCamProjects.com

Contents

Preface … ix

Prologue | 1963 … xi

— THE SHADOW FATHER —

Chapter One | 1955 … 3

Chapter Two … 17

Chapter Three | 1956 … 28

Chapter Four | 1957 … 37

Chapter Five … 51

Chapter Six … 58

Chapter Seven … 67

Chapter Eight | 1957—1958 … 73

Chapter Nine | 1959 … 82

Chapter Ten … 90

Chapter Eleven | 1959—1961 … 102

Chapter Twelve | 1961—1963 … 115

Chapter Thirteen | 1963 … 126

— THE LOST FATHER —

Chapter Fourteen | 1963 … 139

Chapter Fifteen | 1964 … 156

Chapter Sixteen … 171

Chapter Seventeen … 186

Chapter Eighteen … 194

Chapter Nineteen | 1965 … 199

Epilogue | 2016 … 217

Acknowledgments … 225

Preface

In 2001 I moved to beautiful Cape Cod, where I completed my novel about addiction in the Katz family, a fictional name I used to camouflage my own family. I find it ironic that since then, this scenic coastal location has become one of the heroin capitals for opiate-related crime. I am also deeply saddened that the rate of heroin overdose in Massachusetts is double the national average. A heroin epidemic now ravages our country, just as one did following World War II, when my own father died of a heroin overdose.

On the evening of December 17, 2015, I attended the preview of filmmaker Steven Okazaki’s HBO documentary, Heroin: Cape Cod USA. On the screen, I watched eight young adults lay bare their lives as addicts before the camera. The wonderland of sea, sky, and sand that drew me to the Cape to write is the very same place these young men and women became addicted. Initially many of them had access to overprescribed painkillers like Vicodin and oxycodone. But the skyrocketing price of these medications sent the fledgling addicts to the streets of Cape Cod or to nearby Plymouth and Boston for the cheaper heroin now readily available—cheaper ever since Mexican cartels lost the marijuana market in the United States when cannabis was legalized. When the screening ended, four of the eight young stars of the film had the courage to speak to the audience in person as part of a panel. We learned that two of the eight had died from overdoses after the film was shot: a young single mother of an infant and a toddler, and a tough-talking young woman who would rather sell her body than steal from anyone to support her habit. We observed a moment of silence in their honor and mourned their loss.

The panel, consisting of the four young addict-survivors, the filmmaker, local and state politicians, and a member of a parent support group, stressed the need for better programs in the schools for early intervention, insurance coverage for longer rehabilitation treatments, and political solutions to counteract the overprescription of painkillers.

One of them said, Nothing will change unless the public sees the problem.

Another added, We’re great kids who fell into this thing. It can happen to anyone.

When the panel turned to the audience for comments, I was moved to speak because my father didn’t have the opportunity to live in these times of greater awareness. I wanted these brave young people to know what a great step they were taking to share their stories publicly. I stepped in line behind the microphone, and told what happened to me in the 1950s and ’60s, when heroin addicts like my father had to suffer in secret because the shame went so deep and the stigma could not be shaken.

The Fix is my family’s story.

Prologue | 1963

Sara thought of sending a condolence note to Jackie Kennedy. But where should she begin? She was just a sixteen-year-old girl writing to the wife of the president who was murdered. She turned to a blank page in her notebook for Mr. Carney’s history class and searched for words.

How horrible you must feel, she began to write. At once she realized horrible was wrong. It was hard to find the words.

Mrs. Kennedy, Sara started again, I want you to know that my friends and I at Eastern District High School feel so sorry about the loss of our president, your husband. How sad little Caroline and John Jr. must feel without their father. Even sad was not right, she thought, and she changed it to sad beyond words.

Sad beyond words. That’s how Sara felt about her own father. He had abandoned her and her family several months ago. Thinking of her father, she couldn’t continue the message, and she snapped her notebook shut. Doesn’t Daddy realize how much we miss him?

R

Strains of The Ronettes’ Be My Baby filtered through her bedroom window and lured Sara to the street. She sneaked past the living room where her younger brother and sister, Robbie and Rachel, were glued to the TV screen watching To Tell the Truth. Helen, their mother, was dozing on the couch, weary from cooking and serving dinner after a day spent on the icy streets of downtown Brooklyn, where she knocked on doors for J.M. Fields Department Store and encouraged new customers to open charge accounts. No one heard Sara click the apartment door shut before racing down the stairs and onto Penn Street where boys in leather jackets, the ones her smart friends called rocky boys, listened to transistor radios and leaned against parked cars, smoking Marlboros and kissing tight-sweatered teenage girls. These boys were different from the girl-shy, brainy boys who sat in the honors section of Sara’s classes, the boys who argued politics and would sign her letter to Jackie Kennedy.

The girls on the street, the ones clinging to their boyfriends, their eyes darkened with liner and shadow, remembered Sara. They asked where she had been hiding and who she had been hanging out with. The boys coaxed her to smoke. Sara liked the freedom she felt being with this rocky crowd, but she wasn’t sure she belonged with them. She felt like a spy, an outsider.

The quiet in the apartment confused Sara when she returned. Most nights Robbie and Rachel kept their mother busy until ten. The buzz of the fluorescent lights under the cabinets drew Sara into the kitchen, where the clock above the refrigerator read 9 p.m.

Sara Katz! her mother’s voice rang out. Sara’s mother sat at the kitchen table, where she had been waiting, and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. Where did you go? You left without a word.

Sara turned to her mother. I just went out.

Where’s ‘out’?

In the street. She shuffled her foot on the linoleum.

The street? With the dropouts? Helen reached for a tissue in her apron pocket. I bet your friend Ruth Taylor wasn’t down there wasting her time. She listens to her mother. Mrs. Taylor knows that gang is no good. What’s gotten into you? You’re student vice president of your school. Don’t spoil everything you’ve worked hard for.

Sara looked down. She had violated their unwritten contract. On weeknights, if she stayed home after completing her homework, she’d be relieved of kitchen chores. That was their agreement. Helen said she wanted all her children around her in the evenings, now that their father was gone. Yet Sara hadn’t expected her mother to get so upset.

Glancing at the dinner dishes piled high on the drain board, Sara felt a twinge of guilt. I was just…going out for air. That’s all.

Sara dear, Helen said, looking bewildered, you know you shouldn’t be hanging out with that loose crowd. You don’t want your teachers losing confidence in you.

Sara found her voice. You think I’m still a child. But I’m not! I need my freedom. You seem to have no faith in me at all.

"I have great confidence in you, mamela," Helen said—using the Yiddish word for little mother—and I want you to do better, do more than I did. Helen wiped her brow and gave Sara a hug. Your talents I never had. My worst fear is to speak in front of an audience, my voice cracks so badly, but you give speeches at school and express yourself so well. Please don’t be distracted by boys the way I was. Forget those roughnecks in the street. Gently she touched Sara’s cheek. You never cared for them before.

Sara looked into her mother’s eyes. Ma, don’t worry. I won’t be distracted. She gazed at her parents’ sepia wedding photo on the kitchen desk: Helen’s long brown hair, heart-shaped face, hazel eyes, and full lips; Josef’s vibrant eyes, dark, wavy pompadour, and thin moustache. How perfect they looked! Like two movie stars, she thought. From 1941 until the end of the war in 1945, the gilt-framed photo sat in the window of Chester Studios on Bedford Avenue, her mother always boasted. Now forty-one, Helen kept her hair short; Josef, a year older, already had gone bald.

R

Her parents’ separation last April had startled Sara and made her restless. Because her father’s problem was becoming worse while he lived at home and the neighbors might learn about it, Sara’s grandparents had decided, against her mother’s wishes, that Josef should live with them in Queens and leave Helen and the children in Williamsburg, in the apartment building her grandparents owned. Grandma Hannah and Poppy Mo believed they were the only ones who could straighten out their wayward son. How they could fix him, Sara didn’t know. In the meantime, Sara promised her mother she would never talk about her father’s troubles to anyone, not even to her best friend, Ruth, whose family, Poppy said, were the only shvartzes, Negroes, to whom he’d ever rent an apartment. But it was the Jewish neighbors Grandma and Poppy wanted to hide Josef from. They didn’t want to expose their shandah, their shame, to the old-timers, who, like them, had fled pogroms in Russia and Poland. And they didn’t want the greenhorns to know anything about Josef’s problem either, greenhorns being the younger Orthodox families who had escaped Hitler from Hungary and Romania.

Though Poppy and Grandma had moved to Queens, Poppy still had almost daily contact with his former Jewish neighbors in Williamsburg because they had begged him to keep his butcher shop open, the one he and Grandma had run for more than two decades on Bedford Avenue. They were his loyal customers and wanted to continue to purchase their kosher meat and poultry only from him. And where else, they argued, could they find the delicacies Grandma prepared, like her spicy kishka, stuffed derma, and helzel, stuffed chicken neck?

When Grandma and Poppy saw firsthand how deeply sick Josef was, they accused Sara’s mother of causing their son’s problem, and they no longer invited Sara’s family to visit them in Queens. Sara couldn’t understand how the grandparents she had loved could possibly think her mother was responsible for her father’s illness. Her mother took their shunning greatly to heart. She couldn’t get over their rejection. She began to smoke constantly and developed a persistent cough that caused her embarrassment, especially when she was tense and tried to speak.

Every Sunday, Sara, Robbie, and Rachel saw their father when he visited their apartment. He would drive from Queens to Williamsburg, checking in first on Poppy’s butcher shop and then on his own business, Katz and Block Wholesale and Retail Kosher Meats, on nearby Lee Avenue. His trip was complete with his visit to his family on Penn Street. After seven months, he seemed to be getting better and was always smiling. But Sara wondered, Was he really getting better, or was he just pretending? He had fooled them in the past, again and again.

Each week he would arrive laden with gifts—kosher chicken and steak from Katz and Block; babka and rugelach baked by Grandma; and brightly colored caps, scarves, and shirts he purchased from the Lee Avenue shops near Katz and Block. He liked to entertain his children by playing sad, jazzy tunes on his harmonica. His blue eyes would glisten and roll, and his cheeks would puff and quiver. These moments were precious to Sara. They also seemed to revive her mother’s hopes that life could become normal again. Sara couldn’t grasp why, over the years, none of the procedures her father underwent had cured him. But now that he was living with his parents, he was going to a clinic in Harlem. He’s doing a lot of apologizing to Ma and us kids, Sara thought. Maybe he really is getting better, and I can finally have the heart-to-heart talk with him I’ve wanted to have for so long.

R

The morning after her mother’s admonitions, Sara, who was short for her age, had to stand on tiptoes to see herself in the bathroom mirror. She teased her brown hair into a high beehive and slipped on a new blouse, a gift from her father. How she missed him! She preened in the mirror, admiring the blouse, its sheer fabric and its color—her favorite, powder blue. It matched the gray-blue of her father’s eyes, and her eyes, too. Considering whether to wear a slip, she remembered the bold Italian girls on Penn Street and draped a navy scarf over her shoulders instead.

Sara thought about the talk she would give at the school assembly later that morning. As vice president of Eastern District’s General Organization, she would deliver remarks about the holiday fund drive. She planned to add a tribute to President Kennedy, whose assassination a few days ago had brought the nation to tears and moved her so deeply.

At school, walking down the hallway, Sara was gabbing with Ruth, who often spoke up at assemblies for the Negro students at Eastern District. Larry Roth, the G.O. president, was strolling with them when Mrs. Sherman intercepted the trio. The students referred to her as the Sherman tank.

Miss Katz! the hefty woman barked. Put your books down. Let me see what you’re wearing.

Sara nudged Larry to hold her books. He stood there with Ruth, both witnesses to Mrs. Sherman’s scrutiny of Sara. To Sara’s distress, the scarf slipped off her shoulders. No one’s delivering a talk for the G.O. dressed like that, Miss Katz.

Sara felt humiliated receiving a reprimand in front of her friends. She looked down at her blouse and averted her eyes from Mrs. Sherman’s dagger gaze. Sara couldn’t find words to answer. She realized she had taken a risk in wearing a see-through blouse, but she liked the way she looked in it, and her father had given it to her. Should she be blamed for her scarf falling off?

"Mr. Roth, you proceed to the auditorium, the Sherman tank fired. I want you to deliver the remarks for the fund drive. Miss Katz needs me to escort her to the principal’s office. She glanced at Ruth, appearing not to recognize her. Are you a friend of Sara’s?"

Yes, ma’am. Ruth’s large, dark eyes met Sara’s. I’m the representative for the Dignity Club, Mrs. Sherman.

Oh, of course, Mrs. Sherman said, looking at Ruth more carefully.

See you tomorrow, Larry mumbled, returning Sara’s books.

Don’t forget about President Kennedy, Sara said to him over her shoulder.

Sara was sent home for indecent exposure. Because her mother was still at work, Sara was left with her Aunt Annette, who lived around the corner from the Katzes. Annette phoned Robbie’s school and told them Robbie should take Rachel directly to her house in the afternoon—Sara wouldn’t be picking them up.

I don’t want to contradict anything your mother has to say, Annette said to Sara. After all, I don’t have a daughter, and your cousin Ben is only ten. Seemingly at a loss for what to do, she ushered Sara into her kitchen and looked nervously through her pantry. Finally, she offered Sara milk and cookies and said they’d wait for her mother.

When Helen got home and learned of Sara’s discharge from school, she told Robbie and Rachel to do their homework in the bedroom and led Sara into the kitchen. Why can’t I get through to you? She looked down at the blouse Sara’s father gave her and pointed her finger. I can see your…your…rosebuds. Don’t you realize you have to cover yourself up?

I’m not an Orthodox Jew, Ma! Why should I be ashamed of my breasts? Can’t you even say the word? Sara looked directly at her mother for an answer.

Sweetheart, her mother responded. All girls need to be modest. You don’t want to be considered a tramp.

I know the girls they call tramps, Sara replied. I feel sorry for them. They’re just girls who want to be loved.

What am I going to do with you? Her mother shook her head. The world may not be fair to those girls, but it’s a world we have to live in.

President Kennedy believed we could make the world different. He created the Peace Corps.

The president was such an unfortunate man, her mother said. "Nisht-ugadacht! We shouldn’t know from it! But you need to forget the world right now. Charity begins at home. How about bringing peace to your own family?"

But Daddy gave me the blouse.

Your father doesn’t always use good judgment.

He trusts me more than you do.

A silence settled between them. Steam hissed up from the radiator. There’s something else I’m worried about. Her mother began wheezing. Remember—I don’t want you telling your friends about your father’s situation. Her stern look drummed home her admonition. Even the appearance of wrongdoing can ruin his reputation. Don’t shame your family. Don’t say anything.

OK, Sara grumbled. I already told you I wouldn’t tell anyone anything.

R

Sunday arrived, and the children waited for their father’s visit. They expected to see him by three in the afternoon, but he was late. Huddled together sadly on the couch, they watched images on TV of the president’s assassination. The president and Jackie were in the backseat of the gunmetal gray convertible limousine. They saw Jackie climb out of her seat and onto the trunk of the car after the president got shot.

I loved the president, Sara said. Who would want to kill him?

Eight-year-old Rachel pointed to a man on the screen who was running on the downtown Dallas lawn beyond the motorcade. It’s him! The killer. That man! she shouted, trembling. Sara calmed her with a hug.

As evening fell, Robbie turned the channel to Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. He leaned his arm over his