Generations and Differences: Part 1

Some Reflections on my Past

Part 1

It is always hard to understand one's own children, as it is one's parents.  In the past, from what we can read in novels, autobiographies and historical works, most people did not make the effort and did not perceive any changes that they did not merely attribute to personalities.  Now we consider that with each generation or two, at the most, there come new cultures, and along with new technologies come differences in the way individuals relate to each other and to the world around them.  Probably this has always been true,  However, as I said, it was not something most people were aware of.

My father was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York and his parents were, as were virtually all the people around him, not just products of the nineteenth century, but of Europe rather than America, that is, they were immigrants, Jews from Eastern Europe.  As a boy my father lived through the Great War, the Depression, and then he fought in the Second World War: these were traumatic events, whether as a child he could grasp all the implications.  He also went to university, became a dentist and married my mother.    By the time that I came along in 1940, everything he had once known had changed drastically, and he would have been cognizant of how much he differed from his own parents and grandparents.  

My mother was born in 1917 also in Brooklyn, but her mother had grown up in Romania and her home was that of the Grand Rabbi in Dorohoi.  Her mother, my grandmother, had a nanny and was taught French and was destined to be a refined young lady, insofar as it was possible for a Jewish family in Eastern Europe to do—or imagine.  While she was on a world tour with a companion, there was a pogrom in Romania and her parents and other relatives were murdered; this was in 1909.  She had a few relatives in the New World, but she was cut off from what she half known and what she expected to become.  She married young, and saw her remaining family and that of her husband—my step-uncle as it were, was something of a sharpster—take advantage of her naïveté.  When her first husband died, leaving her with one child, a son, she also had nothing but her dreams of lost horizons, along with a sense of bitterness.  Her next husband the grandfather I knew, was a cloth-cutter from Hungary living in New York.  He was a widower with a son, my other step-uncle, and had one child by my grandmother, my own mother.  This happened during the First World War and at first my mother was raised in relative ease: she went to summer camps, had piano lessons, and hoped for a career in music as a concert pianist.  Then came the Great Depression.  Times were hard.  Nevertheless, because of my grandmother’s pretensions to some kind of aristocratic culture, my mother was protected from the worst hardships around her.

When my father and mother met, courted and then married in the late 1930s, there was a kind of clash of cultures: my father’s side were simple people, my grandfather working in the fruit and vegetable markets.  There was also a strong union influence in my paternal side, with an uncle one of the foudners of the ILGWU—the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union,  Thus uncle was wounded by Pinkerton Men (private security guards and detectives) shortly after the fatal fire in 1911 at the Triangle Building amongst the short-waist girls.

My mother’s family, or mostly my grandmother, tried to maintain upperclass appearances.  In 1936, just before my parents were wed, my mother’s mother was invited for tea with Queen Marie of Romania.  This seemed to confirm her high status, and it was something that rubbed the wrong way with my father’s parents and siblings. 

But my father also had his own dreams and aspirations.  He had wanted to be a physician, but could only afford to go to dental school, and after graduating and opening his practice, he felt an obligation to help his young brother get through dental school as well.,  As for his sister, she was a girl, and she went to a secretarial academy.  She justifiably always felt resentful of this lesser status, and I think she blamed my mother—or my mother’s parents—for the raw deal. 

I can see all these diverse influences crashing around inside of me.  Nevertheless, I grew up in a world different from either set of grandparents and their other relatives.  But that discussion must wait until the next portion of this essay, as must the way in which my own children have come to live lives very different from that I have known.