it was enough for him to make something (rather than everything) of himself and to do so without wrecking the lives around him. My father was born to contend but also to protect, and to inflict damage on an enemy didn’t make his spirits soar as it did his older brother’s (not to mention all the rest of the brutal entrepreneurial machers). There were the bosses and there were the bossed, and the bosses usually were bosses for a reason—and in business for themselves for a reason, whether the business was construction or produce or the rabbinate or the rackets. It was the best they could come up
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