800 Words: Dreams from My Mother (Parts 3 and 4)

Every family has its black sheep. Sometimes the moniker is deserved, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes that designation is self-appointed, sometimes it’s a shared sentiment. Sometimes the sheep is only black in relative terms, sometimes the contrast to the white sheep is truly, depressingly clear. Sometimes it’s preventable, sometimes it’s stupid, sometimes it’s inevitable, sometimes becoming one is the right thing to do.

A family is, by its definition, an affirmation of order. And within every family dwells levels of chaos which those who don’t live within their family cannot fathom. Nevertheless, by continuing to live as a family, all the members within it swear to one another a solemn vow that they will navigate life’s most turbulent rapids together.

But no child has a choice of whether or not to agree to such a vow, their oath is taken simply by being born. No child asks to be born into it’s family. And therefore, if the family is a responsible one, it is inevitably expected that the children will renew the vow they were conscripted into making as babies. After a childhood and adolescence worth of care from parents, it is expected of the children that they will administer the same level of care and responsibility to their own children, and if necessary, to their parents and siblings as well.

It’s not an unreasonable request. But what if this newly minted adult is unwilling to fulfill this pay-it-forward obligation, or what if the parents discover that he or she’s simply incapable of doing so?

Inevitably, when the time comes to renew their vow of family alliance in adulthood, there is a sense of deep betrayal and heartbreak if the newly mature child does not elect to remain part of the family. Sometimes the children escape passively by moving away or not returning phonecalls and emails... or letters in a time not so long ago; sometimes the children actively refuse to speak to their parents. In any of these cases, the sense of betrayal which most parents feel at such a decision is overwhelming. Indeed, the potential volatility in the battle for independence between parents and children can be so explosive there’s often scarcely less sense of betrayal if matured children want to remain part of the family while rejecting the fundamental tenets of their upbringing - or even some of the tenets while upholding others.

Every disagreement between parent and child is a war of attrition that - assuming the child outlives the parent - inevitably ends in the triumph of the child; who then goes on to lose his own war of attrition with his children. Every responsible parent is a custodian of his and her children’s burdens until the child proves himself ready to assume them. But how children decide to assume those burdens is entirely up to them.

….

The circumstances under which my parents met in 1969 are kind of hilariously morbid. They met each other while sitting at the same table at a ceremonial dinner at Baltimore Hebrew University honoring worldwide venerated Holocaust survivor and writer Ellie Wiesel. I like to picture their initial spark of love flowing as Ellie Wiesel was reading some particularly grim and dry passage about the work detail in Auschwitz.

It couldn’t have been too long before my father realized that he’d found a rare girl who had an enormous amount in common with him. They both spoke Yiddish and Hebrew (and French, and German...), were both tremendously interested in politics and history and literature and music and movies, could laugh at the same jokes, and had a serious (though not too serious) commitment to preserving Judaism for the future.

And yet, as in all relationships, there were clear night-and-day differences between them. Dad was the first generation of his family raised American, and maintained (maintains) an immigrant’s skepticism about the customs of the old world. In the sixty-five years since his family left Poland, he’s refused to make a return visit to Bransk or Bialystok or any other part of the country which birthed him in an era during which it killed so many other Jewish babies - including his sister. And yet, sixty-five years later, he still sees America (perhaps rightly) as most first-generation immigrants do: a morally weak, spoiled nation, obsessed with selfishness and consumerism, spending beyond its means, and driven insane both by privilege and in reaction to other people’s privileges. He came to America at the age of one, and at age sixty-six still looks at America with immigrant eyes. His younger brother Gerald (a pseudonym), was born a year after the Ticoczki’s (Tucker’s) arrival in America, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a child of immigrants who embraces an American identity more easily. Gerald is chief of medicine at one of Baltimore’s best hospitals, suavely projecting the consummate professional image with an easy manner which only those truly comfortable in their own skin can manage. He’s now sixty-four, and been happily married for forty-three years and already has four grandchildren. He has two twin sons who’ve become successful lawyers and a third son who’s a journalist for the Associated Press, all of whom seem happily married themselves. America was built for people like Gerald. Dad is, intentionally, anything but suave, and, like his father, has done about as well as any greenhorn immigrant could in a country he never understood. Gerald is routinely cited as one of Baltimore’s best doctors, whereas Dad tried to make it as an academic, but quickly learned that academia held little promise of a decent career, and abandoned it to take over the family business. Gerald married his college sweetheart who went on to have a distinguished medical career in her own right, whereas Mom was tremendously unhappy in her government job and abandoned it at the first opportunity to become a stay-at-home full-time Mom. Gerald sent his children to general private schooling, whereas Mom and Dad sent us to parochial Jewish schools and raised us all to speak Hebrew (and me to speak Yiddish... quite badly). It seems likely at the moment that all three of us children will inherit his rather nebulous business interests as a career. None of us are married yet, and at least two of us didn’t do very well in school and seem to have difficulty getting to the long-term relationship flagpole. For some lucky families, America became very nearly a paradise. For the majority, it’s a country just like any other.

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800 Words: Dreams from My Mother Part II

When my father would introduce his father-in-law he would invariably say “This is my father-in-law, Morris Witow. He killed millions.” Or so he claims…

For twenty-seven years, my grandfather was an engineer for the United States Department of Defense. During World War II, he was on the team that built the Smart Bomb, and apparently made a discovery that led to its successful invention. After spending World War II at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, my grandmother wanted to live nearer to her parents. As a result, my grandfather lived in Silver Spring during the week so he could work at the Pentagon, and would return to Baltimore on weekends to the house where my mother lived with her mother, younger brother, her Bubbie and Zaydie and her great aunt (Tante) Miriam.

It is said of Zaydie Witow that he was the perfect gentleman except when three issues came up: Richard Nixon, Chicken Chow Mein, and Liberals. I’ll deal with chicken chow mein in another post, but according to my father, the moment somebody said the L-word, this meek and mild man grew red with the beastliness of a wild animal, his fury unable to be assuaged until somebody reminded him that Richard Nixon was still president. My father also claims that when he first started dating my mother, there was a picture of President Nixon in every room of her parents' house, whereas in his parents’ house, there were pictures of Nixon on the toilet paper.

Zaydie’s father, Henry Witow, was a Socialist. He was an intellectual with red hair and a fiery temper in whose apartment you had to be careful not to trip over piles of books (sounds familiar…). When the factory he worked for offered him a job as a foreman, he turned it down on principle.  He apparently got into a long standing family feud with his Communist cousins about whether Stalin’s Soviet Union was the socialist utopia. He died in 1941 and did not live to see his two sons enlist in the army. My great-uncle Nathan served in the Navy for the war’s duration and apparently survived a sunken battleship, whereas Zaydie was called into the engineering corps after six months and never saw real action.

My Zaydie was always to the right of his father, but as a young man that meant that he was a New Deal Liberal. I don’t know precisely when or why it is that my grandfather decided to abandon New Deal Liberalism to become a member of neoconservatism’s charter generation. All I know is that it was sometime in the mid-50’s, and that during the McCarthy era, my grandmother was questioned because she was on a mailing list at a bookstore that was known to house Communist meetings, or employees, or something... My grandfather, hired by the federal government after he learned no private engineering firm would hire a Jew if they could help it, doubtless feared for his job’s security – perhaps doubly so in light of his father’s activities.

At the center of the story of my father’s family is money. At the center of the story of my mother’s family is politics. Both sides can accuse the other of rampant hypocrisy in their beliefs (and do). My father, like his father, has always voted resolutely Democrat, and for as long as I can remember has railed against a system of government that would allow the undeserving wealthy to claim rewards made possible by their hard-working employees. But as my mother likes to point out, he rails against the very system that allowed his businesses to prosper just as his father’s did before him. For years, his main source of income has been investments, on which there is a 14% capital gains tax, which means he pays half in taxes what he would pay if he made most of his money through income. For just as long in my memory, my mother and uncle, like their father before them, have always railed against the inefficiencies, corruption, and mendacity of government wastefulness at the expense of the taxpayer and the self-sufficient entrepreneur. And yet for seventy years, my mother’s family has made its career in government. My grandfather was defense department engineer, my mother used to be an economist for the State of Maryland, and my uncle is a State Department officer in the Foreign Service. For forty years, my Bubbie has lived like a queen on Zaydie’s pension – which has allowed her to take trips by the dozen to six of the world’s seven continents. Like my father, my mother’s family benefited enormously from the very system they claim to hate.

Is it simply hypocrisy in both cases? Or is there any deeper motive at play? I suppose that in both cases, the two sides of my family grew an understandable but unhappy contempt for the frustrations of their jobs – perhaps resentment at how undeserving colleagues benefited, or an exaggerated sense of the importance of the wrongs they saw every day at their jobs. The personal is always political, and like so many millions of people in America, both my parents seem to vote against their own interests. Every evil we see done will linger in our minds more than any five acts of good (that’s actually a statistic), and in the journey to self-improvement, it is very easy to get distracted by all of life’s impediments.

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800 Words: Dreams from My Mother Part I

September 11^th is the cause of all sorts of odd connotations for my family. Not only did grandfather die on September 11^th1985, but so did my aunt Debbie’s father on September 11^th, 2000. The two men were close friends dating back to their days as engineers at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio during World War II. My aunt Debbie had barely met my uncle Nochem in her life before work transferred her to Baltimore. She needed friends in the city, and her parents got in touch with my grandparents – and thus was a match made. The significance of 9/11 in our family goes down to the minute as well: my grandfather died at 2:48 AM, two years later (though on October 7th) at 2:48 PM, my brother Jordan and my Zaydie’s Hebrew namesake (Yitzhak Moshe) was born.

It’s stock and trade to recite where you were when you first heard about 9/11, rather like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor were for earlier generations. In each case, there’s something quite kitschy about such memories - as though remembering the mundanity of that morning marks the insignificance and invulnerability of our lives before the awful day. We were no more vulnerable after 9/11 than we were before. The difference is that after 9/11 we finally knew how vulnerable we were. But then again, my moralizing about the sanctimony that this day inspires has a selfish tint too.

The truth of where I was on 9/11 could not be more ignoble. I could sleep late on Tuesdays, and since my phone kept ringing that morning for my Japanese roommate, and not realizing why Nabuo’s parents kept calling, I took the phone off the hook. I only woke up when Nabuo came back to the room. Not realizing the significance of what happened – my first thought was “Alright! No classes!” It was only when I saw TV footage in my friends’ room that I realized it was a terrorist attack. In the room with us was a girl I’d never seen before – cute, funny, pneumatic, and very flirtatious. The chemistry was instant, and we went together to the top floor of Letts Hall, found some large chairs to stand on, and from that vantage point could see the smoke of the pentagon. By 1:30 that afternoon, we were making out in the 5^th floor Lounge of Anderson Hall as other people were watching CNN on TV. It was awesome.

The selfishness of my behavior on that most auspicious day is perhaps definitive of the selfishness that has always defined my life – neglecting studies, abandoning projects, spurning advice, wasting money like water, avoiding hard work, and too often, avoiding employment. I can only imagine what Zaydie Witow would make of me today - let alone what my other, far more indimidating Zaydie would have made. But it’s quite often said by Bubbie Witow that the death of her husband from colon cancer was a cataclysm from which our family never recovered. I can’t say she was wrong: Zaydie left me without a potentially more patient guide for my dozens of learning difficulties, he left Bubbie without a guide for how to connect to grandchildren she found less sympathetic than precociously intellectual me, he left Dad without a patient guide for how to negotiate fatherhood’s challenges, he left my uncle Nochem without his sage business advice just as he was striking out on his own as a businessman, he left Mom to negotiate our family’s volatile dynamics alone as the sole peacemaker, and he left his other five grandchildren without memories of their grandfather. Zaydie Witow lived to be nearly seventy, but in the twenty-seven years since his death, it is clear that all of our lives are worse for the fact that he was not part of them.  

Morris Witow, by all accounts I’ve ever heard, was something resembling a saint. No one who ever met him had an unkind word to say. He was kind to everyone, he was always helpful, he was brilliantly intelligent, he was handy with every possible tool, and he was unhesitantly generous as a community leader. The saintliness of my Zaydie was passed on to many members of my family, it can just as easily be seen in my mother, and scarcely less in my Uncle Nochem, or in my brother Jordan, or in Nochem’s two daughters. It was in no way passed on to me.

I am a volatile cocktail comprised in equal parts of my father and maternal grandmother. From both I inherited a relentless intellectual curiosity and passion for living life to its fullest potential. But from my father I also inherited an insatiable contrarian streak, a pathological need for attention, a dark view of human nature, a poisonous temper, and an utterly divided self that never reconciled the bifurcated loyalties of our upbringings. From Bubbie Witow I also inherited a perpetual disorganization, an inability to forgive slights, an inability to relate to people different from us, and a tendency to point fingers at others before pointing at ourselves. All three of us have led lives defined at least as much by our wounds as by our hopes. But all three of us were amazingly lucky to have found family saints who accepted and loved us as much for our weaknesses as for our strengths, perhaps more. The fact that all three of us found acceptance within a family with which we could never have provided ourselves gave our lives a lease to enjoy them which we'd have never found without our family.  

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