"Who wants to share what they brought in?" asks the teacher.
"I'd like to do an oral," he says.
"OK," she says. "You'd like to do oral storytelling? Would you like me to ask you questions?"
"Yes," he says. "I've got a subject. I'd like to talk about my father."
"Great," she says.
"My father got two PhDs in 18 months each," he says. "A very disciplined man."
"In what?" she asks.
"The first one in Rhetoric. The second one in New Testament Studies. Eschatology -- what will happen at the end of the world. They were both in religion."
"What is Rhetoric for religion?" she asks.
"He did his PhD in Rhetoric. He did his PhD thesis on the rhetoric of the Apostle Paul."
"So what did he tell you that he was studying?" she asks.
"He got his first PhD eight years before I was born," he says.
"But what did he tell you about them? The child?"
"He told me that he did it in 18 months and how the odds were against him and that was all the time that he had and that he got up at 4 every morning and wrote his thesis before going to class. He was a self-made man."
"Why do you think he was telling you that and not about the subject?"
"I read what he wrote for Rhetoric when I was 20. It wasn't groundbreaking. It was that he did it in 18 months that was extraordinary.
"I was going through a period where I was shucking away the way I was brought up and forging my own life.
"I've been going through my adult life trying to thrust him away. My first girlfriend said to me, the more you try to be different from him, the more you'll be like him."
"And are you?" asks the teacher.
"Yes," he says.
"So what does that mean?" asks the teacher.
"It's a curse and a blessing," he says.
"What's the blessing?"
"He's disciplined and I can be disciplined. He's well-read. He taught me about books."
"How did he teach you that?" she asks.
"He took me to the library and explained how it worked," he says.
"What did he tell you?"
"This was in Australia when I was about nine years old. He explained to me how the Dewey Decimal system worked for the library catalogue. When we came to America in 1977, when I was eleven, he took me to the college library and showed me how it worked. He pointed out the Christian Science Monitor and said that many people considered it the least biased newspaper."
"And why do you want to talk about him now?" she asks.
"My therapist recommended that I write about him," he says.
"Do you want to?" she asks.
Long pause.
"If I can find something to say," he says. "I feel like I have nothing to say about him. I'm not interested in writing about my father."
"And why do you think that is?" she asks.
He turns his hands into fists and starts punching himself. His face flushes and his whole demeanor changes. He repeats the question. "We're dead to each other. We don't communicate except through my stepmother. Maybe once or twice a year directly. I've made him feel like he's failed me and I know he did the best by me. He was always steady and reliable."
"Is your communication completely on an intellectual basis?"
"It was largely that during my late teens, early twenties. It's just minimal now. We love each other. We've gone separate paths."
"Have you talked about religion to him?"
"Not for years," he says. "That wouldn't go down well. He's a Christian minister and I became Jewish."
The class cracks up.
"So that's what you can write about," she says.
"When I was going through the conversion to Judaism process," he says, "I was still living with him. And I grew a beard and answered his phone shalom."
"And what joy did that bring you?" she asks.
"It brought me a lot of joy," he says.
"How do you think he heard it?" she asks. "It means peace, right?"
"It was a giant f--- you," he says.
"Do you think that was conveyed?" she asks.
"Yeah," he says. "I think that was conveyed."
"How much of your conversion has to do with him?" she asks.
"I think a substantial part," he says.
"You could've picked any religion though," she says. "Was that the worst one for him?"
"No," he says. "I didn't consciously do it."
"How did you tell him?" she asks.
"I was living with my parents at the time," he says, "because I was pretty sick with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was bedridden. I didn't tell him about the actual conversion process until it was finished."
"Why? Did you think he would talk you out of it?"
"No," he says. "They knew it was going on but it was one of those things you don't bring up. I was really sick and they knew it was helping keep me alive.
"I told him one night that I had finished my conversion to Judaism today. He calmly looked up from his book at the dinner table and said, 'They're certainly not like the Adventists, out there proselytizing.' He knew how hard they had discouraged me and pushed me away."
"So how did you take that?"
"I thought it was a really cool answer," he says. "He loses sleep worrying about my Heavenly salvation."
"Do you lose sleep over his?"
He laughs. "No."
"Do you think you are going to the same place?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Do you want him to know that?" she asks.
"I sure he knows that," he says, "if he knows anything about the Jewish religion, that it holds that all good people have a place in the world to come."
"Is he a good person?" she asks.
"Yes," he says, "he's a good person."
"What's your image in your head of him?" she asks, "and then we'll end. What portrait do you hold?"
"This pained smile," he says, "where he knows that nothing he will say will do any good and yet he has every reason to fear that I will not be in Heaven. He's looking at me with this pained smile."
"You have a lot to write about," she says. "If you want... Or you could also write about a character based on your father. Who are these two people? A Christian minister. And you're an Orthodox Jew. You didn't just go the easy Jew route. What are these two men and what are they saying to each other by the religious roads they chose? What is all unsaid and what would the rhetoric be?"
"Just imagine what dinner table conversation was like with a self-made man with a PhD in Rhetoric," he says.
"And I don't understand how you can be self-made with Rhetoric?" she says. "You can't make money on Rhetoric."
"No," he says. "He's a theologian and evangelist."
"What does that mean to your identity to say that your father is an evangelical?" she asks. "This would make a really interesting play."
"Could you elucidate?" he asks.
"No," she says. "What are your questions? We have two strong figures with built-in drama. Love, religion, acceptance, judgment. You're a preacher's kid. I'd love to hear what you remember from sitting there listening. What do these men say to each other in their heads?"
A class member asks: "When you sat in church as a kid, did you sit there hating it? Did you just go along with it? Did you ever feel like you didn't want to practice any religion?"
"Yeah," he says. "I had a few years where I was an atheistic communist. I am an extremist."
"You've been Orthodox for how long?" he's asked.
"Ten years," he says.
"Your whole demeanor changed," says the teacher. "The anger, the physicality. You started saying my father, my father, my father, and punching your hand. If you were an actor, that would be a great acting choice. Psychological changes."
"Your whole face changed," says a class member. "Everything changed. You turned red."
