“My Father Sits in the Dark” was originally published in the November 1934 issue of Story. It was collected in The Horse That Could Whistle “Dixie” and Other Stories (1939). It is currently most readily available in The Norton Book of American Short Stories (W. W. Norton).

Jerome Weidman had a long career as a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, reporter, and contributor to The New Yorker and other popular magazines. His early novel, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, was both a best seller and shocking for its time. There were other commercial successes. His book for the musical Fiorello! won a Pulitzer Prize. He was a working professional, a writing writer, with unashamedly commercial intentions. He once told me that his legal training—speed typing—was a major contribution to his career.

I didn't expect to discover that he has also written a miniature masterpiece in “My Father Sits in the Dark,” a very short story published first in The New Yorker. Jerome Weidman's known strengths as a writer were accurate dialogue, reminiscent of John O'Hara and Hemingway but with a New York Jewish accent, and the ability to depict upward-striving Jewish life in the familiar world of immigrants and their children.

This story—poetic, cadenced, unstructured, modest in length, carried by intense feeling without a moment of self-pity or inflation—was written early in his career.

It is merely a young man's account of spying on the older man who would be an utter stranger if he were not his father—that's all it is. The narrator watches; the old guy sits there alone, unaware. Neither utters any declaration of feeling. There is silence in the room, all around; silence envelops them. The father has no sense of the turbulence in the son's watching.

And the wonderment of connection between son and father, of love, lost opportunity, melancholy, the mystery of time passing and age—the arbitrariness of our souls on earth—is given something like a name. Of course there is no name and it cannot be named. And that's all and enough. As in William Saroyan's early story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” there is the sudden flare of something like genius.