In order to untangle his father’s story, and his own,
Marco Roth had to fi nd the words to write a memoir that questioned his own memories
I NO LONGER KNOW when I learned the word ‘furtive’, or how I fi rst understood its meaning. Perhaps, from false etymology, I associated it with ‘fur’, mentally aligning the word with ‘muffl ed’ and conjuring visions of small, hunted mammals scurrying audibly but never visibly in woodland undergrowth. In this imaginative bestiary, ‘furtive’ was the harmless cousin to the more predatory ‘skulk’ and ‘lurk’, although it seems to me now that I must have learned the word as a more social-minded, less metaphorically inclined teenager. That’s probably
wrong, too, an error of association. Sure, much of what I did, then, I did furtively, nothing romantically clandestine, no special operations of seduction or discovery as I daily made my way from my parents’ Central Park West apartment to school and back, later and later with each passing year, as I added orchestra practice and theatre rehearsals to a growing list of approved activities. At home, there were tiptoed
violations of medicine cabinets which revealed nothing special in unmarked vials. As for many, my teenage years were a period of