A consolidated working document for a multi-register writing project spanning four generations.
The following Obsidian notes form the raw material for this project.
| Generation | The Boy | The Father | The Pattern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Don Felipe’s house | Pepito (my father as a boy) | Don Felipe (my namesake) | Called a pendejito. Excluded. Bought off. Mother wanted a girl. Uses violence on those who can’t fight back. |
| My father’s house | Me | My father (Pepito, grown) | Sacrificed me to protect his ego. Never acknowledged harm. Was good to everyone else. |
| My house | Gil | Me | “I can’t believe I get to be your father.” |
Consistently left out of information, left out of the family narrative, late to my own father’s burial. Memory care. Beach weekend. The gatekeeping of who gets to know what.
The overtipping. The dark humor. The prepared eulogies never given. Shields, all of it.
Came but don’t know why. Expected nothing but also expected something. Understand his trauma but hold him accountable anyway.
No one at the funeral knew the father I knew. Processing alone, into recordings, into notes.
Mother says “I don’t remember.” Father never acknowledged. I don’t remember Holon. Edna is gone. Who gets to say what happened? What counts as evidence? What do you do when the witnesses deny, forget, or die?
“You seemed to think that being a parent gave you property rights over me.” The Akedah. The כבד. Honor your father and mother – but what if they don’t honor you? The commandment assumes a certain kind of parent. What happens when the assumption fails?
Not abuse instead of love. Abuse inside love. The slap comes because you were having a good conversation. The abandonment in the car is something she keeps telling you about, making it a family story while denying it was a big deal.
Three generations of cruelty. Then me. Then Gil. The question isn’t just “how did I survive this?” The question is “how did I not pass it on?”
Pepito is not a wounded boy who became cruel. Pepito IS the cruelty – from the start. My father as he always was: eager for attention, eager to avoid blame, asserting dominance. Spoiled, always gets away with it, uses violence on people who can’t or won’t fight back.
The Pepito stories are indictment through portraiture. They strip away the public face – the four rabbis, the free legal work, the “great man” – and write him as what he essentially was: a spoiled boy who never grew up.
Don Felipe calls him a pendejito – and he’s right.
The grim childhood (“don’t hit him” in Polish) doesn’t exonerate him. It’s just more of the same pattern, one generation back.
I carry Don Felipe’s name.
What I broke:
These aren’t competing projects. They’re four ways of approaching the same material.
| Register | Mode | Distance | Material |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holon | Mystery, fragment | Before memory – can’t access directly | HOLON 1962 |
| Pepito | Fable, mockery | Third person, past tense, sardonic | Pepito camping, PEPITO |
| The funeral / Anita | Raw, direct address | Present tense, unmediated | Funeral notes, note to anita, the last thing I heard my mother say to me |
| Gil | Tenderness, evidence | Intimate, casual, warm | Gil 2025, Gil & Clarke's Ceremony, Gil world-building |
What makes trauma memoir trite:
This material resists all three.
“Trying to make art out of pain because sense doesn’t work.”
The art doesn’t have to make sense. It has to be accurate – to the bitterness, the cold, the “and yet, and yet.”
The beauty is in the accuracy. The pity comes unbidden.
Stay in the not-knowing. Don’t explain. Don’t resolve. Don’t accuse. Just keep saying: this happened, and this happened, and she says she doesn’t remember, and he never acknowledged, and I was one year old in Holon, and something marked me, and I don’t know what, and Edna found a way out, and I’m still here, and I showed up to the funeral, and he was already in the ground.
The most radical sentence in the whole megillah, after everything else, is: “I can’t believe I get to be your father.”
Move backward in generations but forward in tenderness. Start with Pepito (mockery, fables, small cruelties). Then the father (the funeral, the diesel, the four rabbis). Then Anita (the letters, the slap, “I don’t remember”). Then Holon (the mystery, the before-language). End with Gil. Not as resolution. As evidence.
Fragments in sequence, not connected by narrative but by recurrence. The slap. The diesel. The “I don’t remember.” The Polish. The overtipping. Holon. Edna. The commandment. Let the reader feel the accumulation without explanation.
Write it as testimony. Not “this is my sad story” but “this is what I can establish.” Evidence, contradiction, gaps in the record. Not asking for pity. Asking for accuracy.
Instead of “this is what happened to me,” write “this is what I became.” Skip the events. Describe the shape they left.
The entire megillah told as Pepito stories. “Pepito’s father dies.” “Pepito goes to Texas.” “Pepito’s mother says she can say whatever she wants.”
| Artifact | What It Is | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| A chapbook | 20-30 pages. Poems + fragments. Pepito pieces, funeral poems, Anita letters. | 6-9 months |
| A pamphlet/zine | 8-12 pages. One register only. Just Pepito. Or just the funeral sequence. | 2-3 months |
| A long essay | 5,000-8,000 words. Braided memoir. Holon + funeral + Gil. | 3-4 months |
| The whole megillah | A book. All registers. | 18-24 months |
<working_plan>
March 2027: First yahrzeit. First draft complete.
One session per week. 90 minutes. Same time. In that session, do ONE of:
Find one person. Not a workshop. One person who receives a text once a week saying “done” or “not done.” No follow-up questions. No feedback unless asked. Just witness.
| By When | What |
|---|---|
| End of March 2026 | Decide the artifact (chapbook, essay, zine, or book) |
| Mid-April 2026 | Print/list all pieces. Do first stack/sequence. |
| Monthly | One new draft OR one substantial revision |
| March 2027 (yahrzeit) | Complete first draft |
| Summer 2027 | Revise. Get one outside reader. |
| Fall 2027 | Submit or self-publish or print for family |