Remembering Dad

Dad told me he didn’t want to be remembered only with ALS, so compromised and dependent at the end of his life. He thought I might write a book about our lives with ALS.

Writing this book, it has been difficult to recall anything other than the monster disease: Dad’s courage facing it, his infuriating stubbornness and surprising sweetness responding to it, our difficulty helping him, the fear and worry with ALS, the relentless and merciless advance of the disease, and the suffering. But in this new book I’ve told the full story of Dad’s life as a child of immigrants, an ambitious young man making his way in Chicago and into American life in the 1930s and 1940s, in postwar West Side neighborhoods and Skokie, at work and in families and communities. I’ve told the ALS story too, as part of Dad’s life and part of my life too.

The dedication page of my first book, Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical.

This time, in My Father’s ALS, I’ve used Dad’s names: Sam Kann and Sammy Kann. This new book does not repeat the mistake on the dedication page of my first book, where I referred to him only as “Dad,” not by his name Sam Kann. That was our final clash, one that I still regret, but we both moved past it before he died.

I like to think Dad would have approved this history of him and me in My Father’s ALS.