David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“We never saw her. We had a little apartment on the west side of Humboldt Park, bordering the ghetto. She couldn’t leave a two-year-old and a five-year-old all alone, so she found an immigrant Irish lady who worked for room and board. My parent, from the age of two, was this Irish maid. We loved her. She was my mother. Then, when I was nine, my mother met a Hungarian man who had lost his wife and had one son, and she married him. It was a marriage of convenience. He couldn’t take care of his son by himself, and she didn’t have anybody. He was a really bitter, shriveled guy. So they got married and my mother left the sweatshop and appeared back on the scene, and they couldn’t afford the maid anymore. So they fired her. They fired my mother. I never forgave my mother for that.”
    The family moved from one apartment to another. They had protein one day a week. Freireich remembers being sent from store to store looking for a bottle of milk for four cents, because the normal price of five cents was more than the family could afford. He spent his days on the street. He stole. He wasn’t close to his sister. She was more disciplinarian than friend. He didn’t like his stepfather. In any case, the marriage didn’t last. He didn’t like his mother either. “Whatever mind she had was destroyed in the sweatshops,” he said. “She was an angry person. And when she married this ugly guy, who brought this person in—my half brother—who got half of everything I used to get, and then she fired my mother…” His voice trailed off.
    Freireich was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a white coat. Everything he was talking about was both long ago and—in another, more important sense—not long ago at all. “I can’t remember her ever hugging or kissing me or anything like that,” he said. “She never talked about my father. I have no idea whether he was nice to her or mean. I never heard a word. Do I ever think about what he might have been like? All the time. I have one picture.” Freireich turned in his chair and clicked on a file of pictures on his computer. Up came a grainy early-twentieth-century photograph of a man who, not surprisingly, looked a lot like Freireich himself. “That’s the only picture of him my mother ever had,” he said. The edges of the photo were uneven. It had been cropped from a much larger family photograph.
    I asked about the Irish maid who raised him. What was her name? He stopped short—a rare pause for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It will pop into my head, I’m sure.” He sat still for a moment and concentrated. “My sister would remember, my mother would remember. But they are no longer alive. I have no living relatives—just two cousins.” He paused again. “I want to call her Mary. And that may actually be her name. But my mother’s name was Mary. So I may be confusing it…”
    Freireich was eighty-four years old when we talked. But it would be a mistake to call this an age-related memory lapse. Jay Freireich does not have memory lapses. I interviewed him for the first time one spring and then again six months later, and again after that, and every time, he would recall dates and names and facts with clocklike precision, and if he went over the same ground as he had on some previous occasion, he would stop himself and say, “I know I said this to you before.” He could not retrieve the name of the woman who raised him because everything from those years was so painful that it had been pushed to the furthest recesses of his mind.

2.
    In the years leading up to the Second World War, the British government was worried. If, in the event of war, the German Air Force launched a major air offensive against London, the British military command believed that there was nothing they could do to stop it. Basil Liddell Hart, one of the foremost military theorists of the day, estimated that in the first week of any German attack, London could see a quarter of a million civilian deaths and injuries. Winston Churchill described London as “the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow, tied up to attract the beast of prey.” He predicted that the city would be so helpless in the face of attack that between three and four million Londoners would flee to the countryside. In 1937, on the eve of the war, the British military command issued a report with the direst prediction of all: a sustained German bombing attack would leave six