Shedding and acquiring guilt with regard to the Holocaust and other historical and ordinary problems.
My mother, originally known as Manya Demba, later Mary, grew up in Czenstochowa, Poland, a cathedral town close to the German border and famous for the shrine of the Black Madonna. She in later years told me that Easter Sunday was when youths would raid the Jewish ghetto and beat up people. My mother worked at a handbag company, never having gone past the sixth grade, while her sister, later anglicized as “Rae”, was a nanny and so got extra food and clothing from her employer. But war was impending. They had been through the Munich Crisis. Polish troops had been mobilized and my mother remembered the hypnotic power of Hitler on the radio, which she could well enough understand because of her Yiddish. (She later said that English was difficult to learn because its letters did not easily convey the sounds and meanings of the language while Polish was transparent, its letters indicating what was said). My mother planned to immigrate to Palestine and was learning Hebrew and Jewish history in preparation for that when a rich relative who had prospered as a baker in America, much more so than his three brothers who had gone to America also as bakers a generation before, came to visit Czenstochowa, partly to provide money and also, I am inclined to think, to gloat a bit about his prosperity. He offered to sponsor the two young women, my mother and one of her sisters, Rae, to come to the United States by paying the fare and guaranteeing they would not be destitute, giving them food and housing, and so akin to the wards who populate nineteenth century English novels. The two girls decided to do that and departed on the luxury ship “Batory” in May of 1939, reportedly the last Polish ship to leave Poland before the war, my mother insisting in later years that boys took her dancing on the higher class decks while her sister was seasick. That was the most courageous thing the two sisters ever did, however many were the people who immigrated from Europe to America, never again to see the families from which they had departed. Most of her own relatives, including a number of sisters, were killed in the concentration camps after the war began.
My mother was living with her rich uncle Benjamin Wenglinsky when she met my father at a family gathering in his and his future wife’s uncle's home He was the son of one of the other four baker brothers who had come to the United States and my mother was the daughter of the one of the brothers who had stayed in Poland, and so they were first cousins, not an unheard of relation at the time to marry, but my own wife’s mother was appalled at the idea when she learned about it, wondering whether her grandchild would have three heads, which did not come to pass, whatever other abnormalities might have eventuated. My father had previously had a bad experience with an American born girl, perhaps because he was too shy, and so decided to marry an immigrant girl, perhaps thinking her more manageable. My mother thought she was wearing out her uncle’s welcome and so decided that it was wise to marry, telling me at perhaps too early an age, in my early teens, that she married my father for practical reasons and that coming to love him came later, and she thought that the usual course of events.
My mother had also told me too early, I think, that she had thought about aborting me because the young couple did not have a sound financial footing, but decided not to do so because of the shame and the risks. That makes me still leary of being cavalier about present day abortions, a fetus no more than a hangnail. Who mourns for the dead fetuses or the people like me whose abortions were narrowly averted? I may not have had a distinguished life, but I enjoyed having one and my children are glad I did. The decision to have publicly acceptable abortions unfolds over time, is part of history, even if it is also very personal. When I was much older, I went to an anti-abortion rally but found the people there very harsh sounding, very different from the practical minded people at civil rights marches or the ecstatic tone where some anti-war demonstrators, claiming that they were going to levitate the Pentagon. All of those demonstrators, however, were engaged in shedding their own guilt by accumulating the guilt of the other side. You were morally admirable to yourself and others by castigating the moral depravity of the other side. Neither the anti-abortion side could not get what the other side was getting at in that they were just killing babies nor could my then opposite side to which I later joined could not understand that they were just defending what they considered “reproductive health”. The same transfers of guilt also apply to great historical events like the Holocaust and to ordinary events in family and other social life.
My mother was rather revealing to me when I was young perhaps to say things she could not even disclose to her sister. My mother was candid in revealing just how calculating a person she was. But it is also possible that first American born children are subject to becoming involved in adult affairs. I was articulate and relatively informed and so took part with meetings of insurance agents and even a potential business partner on the terms of the partnership, my early teenhood chastised by my father’s partner for having even discussed the matter with me and I diplomatically having acquiesced that this was an odd conversation even though I was full of myself for engaging in adult matters.
My mother also told me at an early age, hurriedly adding that it was not my fault, that her health deteriorated when I was born. I had been a breech baby, which meant that the head of my fetal body was always up rather than down, and she was told by her doctor to ride a lot in cars to get the baby to tumble over while inside, but to no avail, and so the birth was long extended and she said never again though her doctor said another baby would be more routine. Soon after my birth she had a slipped disc as a result of dealing with laundry and spent the next twenty years dealing with that. She had body casts and chiropractic and it went away eventually but, for whatever reason, was not able to hold a job except to assist for a time at a mom-pop grocery store my father owned, and she was always getting a change in her high blood pressure medication to allay her feeling dizzy. When I was in college, the same doctor said to me of my mother that she was “constitutionally unfit.” In retrospect, what she needed were the mind altering drugs like Miltown and Valium just coming on to the market that might have lessened her anxieties. She regularly visited what she called a neurologist but that may have been a misnomer in that going to a psychiatrist was considered shameful. I am not sure he prescribed only high blood pressure medications.
Mary and Rae stayed close. After Rae married, she moved into my apartment building in the Bronx. I remember being carried back from Rae’ apartment on my father's shoulder, me half asleep, reclaiming me from Rae’s house, across the roof from one side of the building to the other, when my parents attended the weddings of my father’s younger sisters. There were no marriages on the side of the two sisters because we thought all of them exterminated. In fact, in 1946 and for a few years afterwards, there was a yearly commemorative dinner for the Jews who died who had come from Czestochowa. I would play under one of those dinner tables while the leadership of the dinner played what I later recognized as the British film of the liberation of a concentration camp, including footage of plows covering pits of corpses with lime so as to limit infection and stink. I remember one person running up to the screen and looking at one emaciated half dead corpse and saying that person was his nephew. I wondered whether he had not died even after liberation as many of them did. I noticed and remembered.
Actually, life for the young matrons in the central Bronx in the late Forties had it pretty good. The men would go by train to the garment district to be cutterts and sewing machine operators and come back having dealt with the guff of their employers, my father coming home when I was small from a bakery having worked all night and with rm fresh rye bread which still remains to me a great delicacy. He slept most of the day but was companionable afterwards until he left again for work. The women did a few hours housework in their apartments though I did some of the dusting in later years because of my mother’s bad back. Husbands bought their wives vacuum cleaners and other household appliances like self standing electric broilers and kitchen radios and pressure cookers. After that the wives would assemble on the benches in front of the park and opposite the apartment buildings to gossip while waiting for the children to walk home from school, which was three blocks away, and linger on the benches while the children played until it was time to get home and prepare dinner for the returning husbands. One woman thought that marriage was legal prostitution because women got their income from granting sex to their husbands but my mother thought that offensive because two spouses cooperated on the two different lives for their mutual harmony. I thought the women had the better of the deal: more leisure, control of the budget, and no bosses or work crises.
By the time I was ten, or even earlier, I would take long walks, wandering around Crotona Park. After all, I had walked back and forth to school since the first grade. There was Indian Lake, really just a pond with a few rented rowboats where Orthodox Jews on the High Holy Days shed the sins they had accumulated over the year by casting them onto the waters. Nearby were the bocce courts where elderly Italian men walked up and down the elongated sandy alleys to see how close the balls came close to one another. Adjourning were the handball courts where burly men stripped off to their sunburnt chests and arms to engage in what is a remarkably vigorous and aerobic game, and next to that were the tennis courts where in later years a neighbor in West End Avenue was surprised to know that I hadn’t known the name of his having been a local tennis star at the time. There was also a big public pool that my mother wouldn’t visit with me because she was afraid I would drown, which might have been the case, I barely passing the swimming test to graduate college. New York City or the New Deal or Robert Moses had done well to the Bronx working class and it was a canard to blame Moses for his Cross Bronx Expressway, built before I left, as having destroyed the thriving Jewish Central Bronx. People were leaving at that time to Coop City in the northeastern Bronx and to Westchester, people who had grown up there never to return there when they got older, and also because “the elements” were inching north from the South Bronx. I wrote up a paper whereby a Black woman bought our furniture when we left the apartment, part of an arrangement whereby the building superintendent also got money to allow the new tenant to get the lease.
Eventually, Rae and his husband Harry and their two children moved to Brooklyn to be close to his work as a postman who worked nights to sort mail being sent to the army overseas and to work with his brother as an electrician. Harry called his sister in law many nights to keep in touch, his work not very demanding and so he spent time reading mystery novels and calling her. Most Sundays we would ride in my father’s car to visit central Brooklyn for a long visit, not coming home until long past dark. In later years, Harry told me my mother was a little crazy but meant well. Harry, himself born on the Lower East Side, prided the fact that both families spoke English in the home while many families who came over after the war continued to speak Yiddish at home. Both families were therefore real Americans even though my mother had a distinct Bronx accent and Rae a Brooklyn one whereby she pronounced “oil” as “earl”. My wife, much later on, aware of the decided Bronx accent I never lost, sardonically would ask what exactly was my native tongue
In the mid 1950’s Rae became seriously depressed. Her oldest daughter Yvette, then a teenager who had been my buddy ever since we played together in the Bronx, remembered bringing her mother for shock therapy, which was a treatment for depression at the time, watching her closely as she recovered from a treatment, which meant recovering her memory, having forgotten the assault, and overcoming feeling dazed by the encounter. A psychologist friend tells me that psycho shock therapy, which meant that electricity was used to shock the brain, may have worked because it was so unpleasant that people figured out how to fake being sane so as not to have more treatments. Rae did get better but Yvette was told that Rae was suffering the stress of having lost so many relatives from the Holocaust, a version of what later was called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Barbara, Rae’s younger daughter, suggested just a few years ago that my mother had the same psychological problem, but that had never occurred to me because she never discussed the dead, and was a bit embarrassed by references to it. When as a teenager I asked my mother whether she wanted to take a trip to visit Poland, she offered only her usual mordant wit: “Why? Only to visit cemeteries?”
She had become a true American, never looking back, secure in America, none of the anguish that Philip Roth describes in “The Plot Against America”, where anti-semitic bands ravage a few cities in an imagined time when FDR was replaced by Charles Lindbergh for a term as President. I remember walking with her down the center of the Grand Concourse in commemoration of Israel Independence Day but years later she did not remember it. What she did do, later on, was call up the local Democratic Party in the upper Bronx, where she now lived, to ride her free of charge to vote on Election Day. That was the limit of her political involvement, just as limited as her religious participation. She never went to synagogue except for funerals and was excused from fasting because of her general medical condition and my father went to synagogue only on Yom Kippur for a few years and mostly just to do the right thing by bringing his son along.
Rae and Mary had different ways of becoming American. Rae went to Chinese restaurants while Mary remained mostly Kosher, and Mary went to the movies, insisting that Bette Davis movies weren’t about just women issues but about all variety of issues. True enough if you refer, for example, to “Dark Victory'', which is about facing death, although from a woman’s point of view that women will hide impending death from their menfolk, George Brent is always an ideal husband. Rae’s younger daughter Barbara became more American even though she had been born here because she tried out skiing when a teenager, so that meant becoming more cosmopolitan in that Jews didn’t do that. I did the same thing when I first tried a ham and cheese sandwich, slathering on the mustard to disguise the taste and texture of that forbidden food. Both Rae and Mary never learned to read English all that well. They could deal with tabloids and letters and advertisements from the supermarket but never read books and, as I say, were not much interested in politics.
I thought the PTSD explanation of my mother’s anxieties was a bit pat, offered simply as something that sounded plausible, the Holocaust at that time in cultural prominence just as a few decades later blacks and women took up the spotlight. After all, in the Fifties a daytime television cosmetician was asked by a guest to consider whether to camouflage or eliminate the tattooed numbers on their forearms that the Germans had applied to concentration camp inmates. That was akin to when Japanese women in the 1950 movie “Sayonara” considered altering their eyelids so that they were more acceptable to Western appearances. My mother’s anxieties seemed to me to be more deeply seated than past trauma, what had been described as a constitutional insufficiency, passed on to me in that I was regarded as “high strung”, a term still used by pediatricians, that would pass in me, the wives in the Catskills thought, when I got sex or became independent of my mother or just grew up.
In fact, there were a number of fads that afflicted women in that period of the Fiftie and probably just different ones today, medicine a lot like it is in Shaw’s “The Doctor's Dilemma” where half baked ideas like oxycontin are always being tried out. My mother had all her teeth removed and replaced at an early age with dentures because it was thought at the time to cure arthritis but perhaps also a cure for anxieties. She also got radioactive inserts as treatments for menstrual problems, the treatment du jour, that may have resulted in early menopause and may have contributed to her eventual demise in her early sixties from cervical cancer. But she religiously adhered to whatever the doctors said, my father thought a lot of money was being spent to deal with her nerves and I follow her practice of adhering to checkups and medications as prescribed now at 83 years old and forever earlier. That is the responsible thing to do.
In the Fifties, my parents and I visited with some wealthier relatives at a Catskills resort and crowed about my having been accepted at an Ivy League school. I told her afterwards that I was being embarrasses and wished she would stop. Her response was “Why not? That’s all I have.” Not exactly a “wire hangers” episode from “Mommy Dearest” but a heavy burden to place on me because what she said was true enough: I was her only jewel. I remained impressed both by her power over me and my need to live my own life.
Financial matters for the two sisters improved over time. My family moved to an apartment opposite Van Cortlandt Park and close to the Yonkers border so as to be closer to the grocery store my father now owned. A childhood friend of mine who stayed in the Bronx and went to City College as an engineer was jealous of their fancier digs though I didn’t think they were all that swell. Rae and Harry moved to a large apartment in Brooklyn and out of the Archie Bunker type houses they had originally lived in Brooklyn. I stayed there when there was a transit strike and so I couldn’t travel to Brooklyn College where I was a lecturer in sociology from the Upper West Side and Barbara, who was a freshman at Brooklyn at the time, was pleased to overhear that her classmates were impressed with me as a teacher. Harry was now quite proud of his two daughters becoming elementary school teachers when in earlier times he thought women only needed a business school education, myself excepted as going to college because I was so smart.
Matters between myself and my mother deteriorated when I got married although Rae always thought that the relationship was difficult, me ever at odds with my mother, back to childhood, me ungrateful for the love she lavished onto mer. My mother delicately pointed out that she had hoped to marry a girl who would go shopping with her at Alexander's department store on Fordham Road, but that was not to be. We had a fancy wedding despite my fiance wanting to elope but my mother was offended that the meal wasn’t kosher and not as glitzy as weddings she and my father had attended and had not put the names of my parents on the invitation. “Was she a nobody?”, she said, knowing the custom of invitations as only from the family of the bride was something appropriate only for “the Five Hundred”. Trivial things to hash out once again years later, a couple having nothing else left to argue about. I didn’t speak to her for a while when I began my own household but Rae called to ask me to call her and I did.
Children helped. My wife tried to avoid visiting her and sometimes my mother in law came along, understanding my mother's generation because she had grown up with one. My mother made hamburgers and chocolate pudding for my son who said it was as good as McDonalds, correctly assessing that as a great compliment. But I did not overcome my past and came home after these visits all out of sorts. And it didn’t end well. Yvette thought I was managing my mother’s illness well in that I would go up there and sleep on her couch to alleviate her anxieties but when she got worse I did not take her into my home and I waited for her to be carted off by an ambulance to a hospital where she died. I didn’t get off scot free. I couldn’t deal with her as just a pathetic old lady.