Scheherazade – II — My Father

My father’s desire to leave an inheritance to his sons was a torment of Greek proportions. He was a book editor by profession, first in academic presses at the University of Chicago and Cambridge University and later for various trade publishing houses in Manhattan.

But the non-fiction publishing for which he was so intellectually suited was a poor match for the scale of his financial ambitions. He was no more likely to make his fortune through the modest library of ideas he was shepherding into existence than find a book worth reading in the hard treasure of Ali Baba’s cave. As a result, his professional life was punctuated by destructive and wasting entrepreneurial fevers – fevers that wreaked havoc on his psyche and his family and disturbed the larger trajectory of his otherwise competent and honorable career. The Sirens had him, and my father was swept back and forth across their cruel promontory, crying “open sesame” into mouthfuls of seawater.

In the late 1960’s Barry Ralph Natha…