My Uncle the Gangster

 Eric Konigsberg Meets Uncle Heshy in Blood Relation

File Under: Not-So-Recently Released Books You Might Have Missed But Should Think About Picking Up

Imagine this: you’re a 35-year-old Jew from Omaha who writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times. You receive a cryptic phone message revealing that you’re related to one of the most high-profile mobsters in American criminal history. In prison for more than 20 counts of murder and extortion, your 76-year-old great-uncle Harold has been behind bars all your life somewhere in upstate New York. Now, he wants to talk to you.

Welcome to the life of Eric Konigsberg, author of Blood Relation. After years of combing through government records and hundreds of hours of interviews, Konigsberg has attempted to explain how his Jewish family full of doctors and lawyers produced a notorious mafioso.

The book begins with a nostalgic telling of the Konigsberg family’s arrival in America in the late 19th century, a Jewish Horatio Alger tale of industrious labor and success that culminates in the family’s acceptance into upper-class society. All, that is, except Harold, the black sheep, a man with a volcanic temper and a certain inscrutable charm who is hell-bent on success of a different kind.

In a bid to become closer with a willing family member, Harold opens up to Eric about his past exploits. He tells Eric about his life in the mob and his peculiar Jewish observance: he says the Shema twice a day and eats kosher meals in prison. He talks about how he acted as an F.B.I. informant, helping to solve some long-open cases in New York and northern New Jersey. Eric interviews his own family members and others involved in his uncle’s various dealings to try to get to the bottom of Harold’s nature. What creates a man such as this?

We may never know. Though Konigsberg’s dutiful coverage of the subject demonstrates his obvious abilities as a journalist, the reader is never allowed to get to the bottom of any of the stories of which Blood Relation attempts to make sense. The morass of Harold’s past is as thick and tangled as the man’s own psychoses, lending the impression that the only tidy ending to the story could be Harold’s own demise.

If In Cold Blood is the paragon of this sort of real-life crime writing, what is required of the author is serious emotional investment with all those involved in the crime and the scene. However, Konigsberg hops from person to person and place to place. He notes early on that he has begun to distance himself from his uncle Harold. The distancing of self from subject is ultimately the undoing of the book. Although Konigsberg does a meticulous job of reporting the facts about his great uncle’s exploits, his writing never moves beyond reportage into gritty literature.

What makes Konigsberg a great reporter doesn’t necessarily make him a great storyteller. For all his prodigious research and obvious dedication to his subject, Blood Relation never takes off as “creative non-fiction.” Instead, the text reads like a series of articles in an ongoing investigation of family and criminal history whose conclusion is always just out of reach. Increasingly, as the book moves from one still-open case to another, Konigsberg resigns himself to the simple fact that there is no conclusion for this tale. What begins so promisingly as an interrogation of the social ascent of a Jewish American family becomes just so much fact-finding.

Konigsberg leaves his readers with the image of his grandmother dismissing her own brother-in-law as utterly lost. “How would you like to have Heshy buried in one of your plots?” Konigsberg’s aunt asks of his grandmother. Konigsberg’s grandmother “swatted the air dismissively.  I want to lie in peace and quiet,’ she said.” It is evident that there is no hope for resolution or redemption in Harold’s tragic life, but the lack of a resolution within the narrative abandons the reader as well. Lacking any sort of conclusion, the book simply drifts off into its own notes and acknowledgements.