10/02/2020
Hermans Eulogy by his daughter:
I've been asked by several people who were at the funeral today to post the eulogy I wrote for my father. Here it is:
I’ve been trying to think of a way to talk about my father, this larger-than-life character. And I realized that one of the things I wanted to emphasize, in order to make the whole of his life consistent in my mind, was that he had many lives and that much of my relationship with him has been about trying to identify and claim the one consistent theme as he shed his various selves. There were many incarnations of my dad. At a very, very early age–younger than my daughter is now–he essentially got himself adopted into the childless households of two of the major artists at the Educational Alliance Art School. And so it was that a part of his development was about having grown up with members of the Algonquin round table–people like Dorothy Parker and Franklin Pierce Adams–in the ferment of the West Village in the mid and late 1940s. In 1948, he worked for voter integration in Virginia, alongside Henry Wallace, while Wallace was campaigning. One of his proudest moments was when Wallace and he stood side-by-side on stage and Wallace took his hand and held it up in solidarity. In his early 20s, he lived in a small community in Upstate New York, where he experienced a kind of picture-postcard Americana, and he found a way to both become the image of his surroundings as well as to make them his own by integrating himself into the social fabric of the community and helping anyone in need. The friendships made during that time were foundational in his understanding of himself as first-generation American. Back in the city, in the 1950s, he was at the epicenter of Beatnik culture. When he met my mother at a party at my maternal grandmother’s apartment in the West Village, he was actually on his way to Crete. He had become a huge fan of the writer Nikos Kazantzakis and he was planning to make a pilgrimage. He had become involved in all things Greek. He was studying Greek with an elderly priest and at one point, at a taverna in Astoria, he pointed to a cop sitting on a white horse and said what was roughly equivalent to, “Behold yonder blanched steed!” In his unbridled enthusiasm for learning, he had not realized that the priest was teaching him Church Greek.
Much of my life-of-the-mind has been about speaking with my father and the emotional connectivity of his respecting my mind, which is why intellectual life for me–for us–always meant emotional connection. It was when we were on the same page and when I felt most seen by him, and most whole. How many kids read Henry Miller under their father’s watchful eye at 11 or 12? He was the most progressive educator imaginable, while still remaining absolutely loyal to a vast body of classical literature, history, and philosophy. (He was reading War & Peace for the third time during quarantine.) He also had a brilliant scientific and mathematical mind, which I did not inherit. In 1968, while working as an investigative journalist for Space Aeronautics, he determined, based on measurements he was able to take while undercover, that our anti-ballistic missile system left us vulnerable for a full second. He was called to testify before Congress. It was no surprise that he turned out to be right, and that he also had no job waiting for him upon his return to New York. He spent the next several years working to support us by installing elevators in factories in Soho after hours and delivering refrigerators to walk up apartments (needless to say he had my baby brother and I in tow so that my mother could work at home on the Russian encyclopedia she proofread for two years). I still went to private school and I still had piano lessons.
My dad could do anything, fix anything, solve any problem. No request was ever too big. For good and for bad, time and worldly schedules did not exist for him. His energy was limitless. When he was around, everything was taken care of. This meant, however, that you had to relinquish control, to surrender. When he saw my mother for the first time, his impression was that she was in need of rescuing, and he pursued her to fix problems that I don’t think she even knew she had. Desperate to have children, he changed course and had a family and I was lucky enough to grow up in Greenwich Village in the 60s and the 70s in my father’s eccentric social world, peopled with characters of every imaginable stripe, state, age, and persuasion. In his 40s, my father found the synagogue on Charles Street that became the focus of his life for the rest of his life. He must have passed this shul a million times without ever stopping in. Why would he have? We were non-observant and unaffiliated, part of the progressive Zeitgeist of our environment. But on this particular day, he did stop in and then started attending services, and within very short order, there was a problem at the shul and it needed fixing or solving or rescuing, and my father decided to fix it and solve it and rescue it. And you know the rest of the story. Yet even in my father’s orthodoxy, there was a heterodoxy that expanded to include the legendary musical life of that shul, and the thousands and thousands of people over the years of–again–every imaginable stripe, who became a part of my father’s concentric social universe. So I want to honor all of my father’s selves here. And I want to understand this complex, amazing person as an energy, a life force, one that needed outward direction and a cause for which to go to battle, someone or something on whose behalf he could fight. When he didn’t have that cause, he was too much for himself, and when he was too much for himself, he would be too much for me. And so the condition of being his child meant that I necessarily had to share him with the world because the intensity of our bond would have been overwhelming for both of us. He needed an outlet for his genius, his heart, his soul-energy. The consistent line that ran through the many historical selves he inhabited was his drive, his caring for others, his restlessness and his fierce intellect. There is a version of myself that I could only be in his presence, in concert with him, whether we were alone or in front of other people, which was when it often became almost performative. It was our father-daughter act and it was intellectually engaged and actively dialectical. When I am engaged in this way, the way that grew in dialogue specifically with and for him, it is then that I feel I am my most authentic self. In many ways, this was also his most authentic self, because it encompassed the whole of him. It was our way of being with and for each other. And yet, my greatest joy, the most sublime time of my life, was when he and my daughter were together, when he had no need for an outlet. He loved me conditionally of necessity—it was truly the only way we could survive–but his love for her was an Absolute, in the cosmic sense of Absolute, where past, present, and future––being-all-at-once––become fused. And it is how I will best remember this remarkable man. I am so very proud to be his daughter.
