My dad was an IRS tax man

By Charles E. Kraus

When tax filing deadlines arrive, people think about many things. Last-minute appointments with their accountants, concern that they might have exaggerated their exaggerations just a little too much. Maybe they are wondering whether it will be possible to space out the payments. I think about my dad. He was an IRS agent.

Father went to work for the Internal Revenue Service in 1931.

Many years later, he happened to be issued a license plate with an alphanumeric sequence beginning "HH." His wife said it stood for Honest Harold. He was honest, more or less. That is the impression I gathered from the stories he told about his life as a tax man.

Dad kept a shelf of code binders in the den. Unlike my school binders, his were more substantial. Inches wide. Dignified, or at least very official looking. Fitted with hardware designed to withstand abuse. Snapping the rings shut after replacing pages of out-of-date regulations required agile fingering. The rings slammed into place instantaneously.  When I was about 10 years old, my father pointed to the binders and playfully explained, "Using those, I can prove or disprove anything."

His beat was corporate compliance. But that did not discourage relatives from stopping by for an annual early April dinner served with tax preparation for anyone who just happened to bring along the appropriate forms and a shoebox of financial history.

After the meal, aunts and uncles sat around the table organizing and reorganizing documents. They whispered to one another in tones appropriate for a doctor's waiting room. As Dad completed a return and delivered the verdict, the rest of us could hear responses from his den office, which occupied the other side of the wall. Sounds of relief, regret or occasional disbelief. Protests, even accusations. Harold didn't understand, they would say. He was unfamiliar with personal tax law, they would protest. Pleas for a little more flexibility – after all, an uncle pointed out, this was family.

One year – taxes completed, as Mom served cake and coffee, I wandered into my room for a moment and found that same uncle seated at the desk erasing numbers Dad had entered on his tax papers.

A shame if something happened ...

Dad didn't talk all that much about his work. I recall two stories.

My father and his team had been set to report tax fraud allegedly committed by a famous crooner, someone known for his talent and his underworld connections. Moments before the charges were to be brought, "word came down" that the investigation was closing. Done. Through. Gone. 

Each time he spoke about the incident, or about the accused perpetrator, my father turned purple with rage. I wasn't allowed to purchase or play records by the singer. If a radio or television station happened to feature the guy, we adjusted the dial, tuning to a program that offered a more congenial, law-abiding entertainer.

How could that happen? I asked. How could a case just shut down?

Dad didn't offer details. Instead, he told a companion story.

Another agent was working on an equally explosive investigation. One Saturday morning, the guy’s home phone rang. A pleasant-sounding stranger said hello. The stranger wanted the agent to be aware that he knew where the agent lived. He knew the route the agent's son took to school, the park the agent's daughter visited when she headed to the playground. She was 7. He was 10. Nice kids.

That's all he said. Perhaps it was enough.

Every once in a while, I wondered if a caller knew where I parked my bicycle when I visited the library.

------

Charles E. Kraus is the author of "Baffled Again .. and Again," a collection of more than 100 of his newspaper essays.

I'm Jewish, older than Israel and more confused than ever

 

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/05/im-jewish-older-than-israel-and-more-confused-than-ever-opinion.html

Newark Star Ledger

Opinion

May 24, 2021

I'm Jewish, older than Israel and more confused than ever | Opinion

Star-Ledger Guest Columnist

By Charles E. Kraus

I am two years older than Israel. Have never been there, but evidently, as a Sunday School student, purchased tiny stamps containing pictures of leaves and pasted them onto olive tree illustrations. My nickels and dimes were sent to the new State of Israel, where they helped fund the planting of actual trees. Thus, we, American Jewish children of the 1950s, assisted in providing shade and bounty in what we were informed would otherwise remain barren desert. I pictured the Sahara.

It took me many years to realize that being Jewish didn’t automatically require me to support the Israeli government. Initially, doing so felt like a given. Then, the given became a burden. I’m wondering if gentiles can truly understand this tension.

From time to time during the early 1950s, my mother and I traveled from New York City to Baltimore where we’d stay in Aunt Fanny’s gigantic American Craftsman house. The porch wrapped around the place. The yard was bigger than a park. For a kid raised in a cramped Bronx dwelling, this was an expansive, two-story palace. The best part was Fanny’s basement. It was a wonderland filled with every prop and costume a child could need if he wished to spend the afternoon pretending endless scenarios. I experimented with canes and hats and dinner jackets. With tools and gadgets. Dozens of each stacked and piled so high the cargo overflowed onto the staircase.

Fanny was not holding a garage sale. The inventory was destined for Israel where it would help refugees begin new lives.

My formative years were nominatively integrated. New York’s public thoroughfares offered a rather nonchalant mixing of all the ethnic, religious, philosophical, economic and aesthetic approaches. But away from the Commons, people tended to live with and among their own. Little Italy, Chinatown, Germantown, Harlem, the Lower Eastside, Greenwich Village, the Park Avenue elites, the Bowery.

Because the city was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, it was somewhat chauvinistically said that everyone who lived there was a little bit Jewish. Meaning somewhat influenced by Jewish sensibilities. Secular sensibilities.

Secular was the key to my upbringing. Formalized religion was not used as a prescription for life’s challenges. Not in my family. Our rituals were — liberal attitudes, an approach to life that prided itself in sobriety, industry, education, knowledge, language, science, the arts — these tinged with a dash of humor and a strong sense of irony, all fueled by Jewish cooking and a certain pride in Israel.

Later, long after the Suez Crisis, after our elder’s silence was broken and we children were informed about the camps, after the book and movie, Exodus, and the sense of pride my Jewish generation took in the outcome of the six-day war, my allegiance to Israel was tested.

There had been indifference to Jews fleeing the Nazis. There had been a holocaust. The formation of a homeland where the diaspora could collectively grieve then focus on building a brighter future. This was not a utopian fantasy. Israel was a practical but problematic response to traumatic events.

After World War Two, maps were redrawn in Africa, Europe, the Far East and the Middle East.

The 1947 partitioning of Palestine was not some isolated event, but rather part of a reconfiguring of power and peoples designed to stabilize the world. That said, most of these ‘adjustments’ involved repositioning lines on maps, not uprooting populations. The Palestinian situation was dramatically different. The act of seizing land and relocating people was an outrage.

Over the years, I’ve come to feel sympathy for both Jews and Palestinians. Israel could have, should have, done much more to help its non-Jewish citizens thrive, and its neighbors respect both its might and compassion; if not out of altruism, then at least out of self-interest.

Houses were demolished. Settlements grew, encroaching on more and more disputed land. Netanyahu remains, his approach to leadership encouraging the hard and hardened right. Here in America, it has become more and more difficult for me to defend Israel. Or even to explain it.

--------

Charles E. Kraus is the author of four books, including “You’ll Never Work Again In Teaneck, NJ” and ”Baffled and Baffled Again.”