My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
One thing that's happened to me is I've been around a long time and I've played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I'm suddenly starting to play people's father.
That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke.
When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.
My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.
In the last 17 years of his working life, my father was finally rewarded with having landed a great job as first, a maintenance engineer, and then a senior locksmith with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
My father was predisposed to drunken rages. I would hide under the bed. My sister and I were talking just the other day about the terror a drunken man in a rage can create in a child.
My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house.
My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.
When I was a child of six or seven my father would show me the chapter in the prophet Isaiah where the name Immanuel is found; more than once he spoke to me of the faith he put in me.
