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The assignment in my college sophomore social psychology class in 1966 was to draw a diagram of our family tree. Circles for females; squares for males. Draw an x through those who are no longer living.
Father: crossed out. Aunts, uncles: crossed out. Great-uncles: crossed out. Four grandparents: crossed out. Great-grandparents, all crossed out. I had a great-aunt on my mother's side and cousins on both sides. But the only living relatives in my direct line were my mother and my brother.
At the time, I did not take this history seriously.
Now I know that, unconsciously, it meant everything — transgenerational transmission of loss and early death.
The generational background that I'm aware of started in the 1870s. My father's father, Jacob, was born in Ukraine in the Pale of Settlement in 1870. He lived within official restrictions on where Jews could settle. Pale is rooted in the Latin word palus, or stake, creating a boundary for a fencedin region. The villages in this designated area were subjected to violent Russian pogroms in the early 1880s.
As a teenager, Jacob emigrated to the United States, hoping for a better life that never developed. His business failed. He had a “nervous breakdown” and died at age 31 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My father was 2 years old. The account passed down was that my grandfather was in an “asylum.” His wife, Pauline, visited him with their four children in a horse and buggy to say she was moving to New Orleans. Distraught, Jacob ran after the carriage and was trampled by the horses. I don't know how much of this tale is true, because family shame erased his story. Pauline died at 52 in New Orleans in 1927, when my father was 27.
My mother's grandparents, Henri and Caroline, were French Jews who lived through the Franco-Prussian War. France lost the war in 1871, when Henri was 28. The family rationale for their emigration is that, as teachers in Alsace, they resented the German takeover of their language and teaching curricula. Th