When Dylan Schaffer’s father called and asked his son to join him in a baking class at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, he was skeptical.
First of all, spending quality time together wasn’t the kind of thing they did. Second, his father was dying of cancer — Schaffer didn’t think he would last long enough to make it through the course. But if he did, the writer in Schaffer knew it would make for some interesting material.
Out of that thought process came the memoir “Life, Death & Bialys.”
The Oakland novelist and former criminal defense attorney — Bay Area residents may remember him as one of the lawyers who got Marjorie Knoll, of the infamous dog-mauling case, a manslaughter charge instead of murder — had a lot to forgive his father for.
When he was a toddler, his father walked out on him and his three siblings, leaving them with their mentally ill mother. At first his father took an apartment nearby. But when he was offered a teaching position at a university in South Carolina, he took it, becoming a sporadic presence in his children’s lives, at best.
As Schaffer tells it, his mother was a psychiatrist who was as sick as many of her patients, if not more so. She self-medicated with alcohol and prescription drugs, and made numerous suicide attempts. She succeeded in 1996, after Schaffer had graduated from college.
As a teenager growing up in New Rochelle, a heavily Jewish New York City suburb, Schaffer was quite aware that his household wasn’t like those of his friends.
“It became clear to me that other people’s families weren’t nuts,” he said. “I learned very early on to turn other people’s families into my own.”
But few of his mother’s abusive episodes are in the book, even though there were many; he wanted his father to be the focus. He only included bits about his mother at the behest of an editor, who explained that without them, there would be no context for his anger at his father.
For a man dying of cancer, Schaffer’s father had remarkable strength and stamina. They spent five sticky and dusty days learning about things like baking percentages and starters (father and son are both serious foodies, with Schaffer’s father always on the hunt for the best bialy). At night, they spoke about the past.
For the first time, Schaffer heard his father’s version of events around his departure. Of course, it differed greatly from his mother’s, who made herself out to be the victim. His father also apologized. He was plagued by guilt the rest of his life, he explained, but he felt he had no other choice.
Schaffer’s father died within the next year.
While he didn’t set out to write a self-help book, and “Life, Death & Bialys” is filled with anger and dark humor, Schaffer thinks of his story as a hopeful one.
“I forgave my father,” he said. “It was an amazing experience, maybe the most important experience of my life.”
It is a Jewish book in that at its core, it’s about forgiveness. Though non-observant, Schaffer met his Jewish doctor wife at a Shabbat dinner, and notes with irony that he will be the featured speaker at a New York synagogue on Yom Kippur. His avowedly secular father would laugh at the image of him putting on his suit and yarmulke, he said.
“Very simply put, forgiveness is something you do inside yourself,” Schaffer concluded. “It was a gift not to my father, but to myself, and it didn’t happen until frighteningly late in the process. All along I didn’t really feel like my father was forgivable, but I love him and I forgave him anyway. I wanted him to die in peace.”
“Life, Death & Bialys” by Dylan Schaffer (272 pages, Bloomsbury Publishing, $24.95).
Dylan Schaffer will read from his book 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 13 at Diesel Books, 5433 College Ave., Oakland; 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 19 at Cody’s Books, 2 Stockton St., S.F.; and 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21 at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.