IN HERSCHEL'S WAKE

After the unexpected death of his often-absentee father, Wohl examines the complexities and acrimony that marked their relationship in this debut memoir.

“The date was April 20,” Wohl writes. “Universal pot-smoking day, Hitler’s birthday, and from that moment on, also the day my dad died.” In 2008, the author was 40 years old and lying in his bed in Los Angeles when he received an email from a woman identifying herself as Natasha, telling him that Herschel Wohl had passed. His father had been residing in an inn on the remote Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius for the past few years. The islanders knew him as Dr. Joe, and only the author and Herschel’s last long-term girlfriend, Marcy, knew why the aging hippie had been living under an assumed name. Wohl was 4 years old when his parents separated; he and his older sister, Anais, lived with their mother in New Jersey but made weekend visits to Herschel’s fifth-floor walk-up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they spent evenings watching their father work on what he promised would be the next great American novel. When Wohl was 15, Herschel and his second wife had a son, Toby; at the time of Herschel’s death, the author hadn’t seen his half-brother for two decades. The three siblings came from different corners of the country to Sint Eustatius to bury their father and confront their own demons. Over the course of this memoir, Wohl expertly integrates the backstory of his relationship with his father into an account of the extraordinarily chaotic events that he and his siblings navigated as they scrambled to honor their atheistic dad’s final request for “a proper Jewish burial.” The work is engagingly edgy, employing an unusual combination of unresolved anger, poignancy, and witty sarcasm. The opening pages create an indelible image of a complicated parent who inspired both angst and fealty, as Wohl remembers standing nervously behind a curtain at his bar mitzvah waiting to read his passage of the Torah, and his father handing him a gift: an envelope containing “three chubby marijuana joints.”

A tender, clever, and engrossing remembrance.