A great-uncle of mine survived Auschwitz. He had been a lawyer in Germany. After the war, he made his way to America and Brockton, Mass., where he took a job as a salesman in a shoe store. One day, the owner, seeing that his salesman had a good deal of education, offered him a higher position in the store. My great-uncle politely refused it. After Auschwitz, he was content to be a shoe salesman. He was content not to be noticed. He was content to be alive.
Why am I telling you this story? Because it comes from my family’s past, which makes it valuable, at least to me. And for that reason, my wife Ginny and I spent some time this past holiday season talking to our young adult grandchildren about the people who led to them, suggesting where they fit in the scheme of things — the gift of their past.
Included in our near and extended family are steamfitters, diplomats, mine workers, steel workers, investment bankers, fur trappers, railroad engineers, machinists (one of whom made valves for bombs during World War II), journalists, doctors, professors, cement levelers, a Wimbledon tennis player, an office secretary, painters, a kindergarten teacher, several lawyers — a cavalcade of jobs that allows one to feel kinship with all walks of life.
Even if we do not like what is happening in America today, hearing of the many occupations of a single family may have allowed our grandchildren to feel more understanding of turmoil, and of difference, thanks to the great roiling mixture that has defined our country from the start.
And hearing about such things, as opposed to reading about them in books, gives a breathing life to the facts, like listening to stories around a campfire. In an age when the study of the humanities is dying off, here is the past with a living voice.
I told our grandchildren of my mother, their great-grandmother, called Mollie because when she first came to school, she was told that Marta, her German name, was not American. I told them of my father holding down three jobs at once as he worked his way through medical school — as a hatcheck boy in a night club, managing a high school basketball team and selling hot dogs in the Polo Grounds. And by the way, what was the Polo Grounds? At least half our terms of reference were unknown to the kids. You mean the San Francisco Giants once played baseball in New York?
People famous to Ginny and me had to be introduced to our grandchildren. Doing volunteer clinical work, my father attended Billie Holiday in her last days. Deep into drugs, Holiday was extremely agitated, and a policeman wanted to cuff her to the hospital bed. My father protested, wanting Lady Day to die with the dignity she deserved. Who was Billie Holiday? I played “The Very Thought of You” on the piano for the kids, yearningly beautiful even in my poor rendering.
Ginny’s mother had polio when Ginny was a little girl. We had to tell our grandchildren what polio was, who Jonas Salk was. In the hospital, my mother-in-law refused to be put in an iron lung. What do you mean, iron lung?
And we talked about major moments in history, too. The McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, Vietnam. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The moon landing. Even when the kids knew something of what we were talking about, the fact that Ginny and I had lived these events gave them texture, sound and color.
Eagerly they wanted to know about Ginny and me as kids and as a couple (we’ve known each other since we were teenagers). Ginny and I, underage, drinking beer in Pete’s Tavern in New York, planning our futures. Ginny hoped to be a creative and devoted schoolteacher. I would become a great poet. It all came true, except for the poet part.
I explained that I wasn’t good enough to be a poet, but I did become a writer, and that, too, was due to one of our grandchildren’s ancestors. My mother’s father had been an artist in Berlin, but to support his family, he became a sign painter in the Bronx. Yes, there was a time when if a store needed a sign, someone had to paint it. He used to stop by our home on the way back from work. And he would sit at the end of my bed when I was four and tell me stories.
One evening Patta (my name for him) sat there and said nothing. “Patta, aren’t you going to tell me a story?” I asked. “No, Rog” — he pronounced it “Rotch” — “tonight, why don’t you tell me a story?” I explained that I didn’t know any story. “Well,” he said, “what did you do today?” So I told him about Mrs. Morris, one of the neighborhood mothers, taking a bunch of us kids to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. How we went swimming in the saltwater pool.
Patta was interested, so I thought I’d elaborate a bit, telling him about the red alligator who jumped in the pond and chased us, and how I swam for my life and ran up a hill to a cave where a polar bear was sitting, eating cotton candy. I looked at Patta, who was smiling. And I knew at once what it meant to hold someone’s attention with a story. Most of all, I saw what it meant for an adult to show encouraging kindness to a child, which Ginny and I tried to show our grandchildren as well, who are as close to us as history.
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon,” “The Boy Detective,” “Rules for Aging” and “More Rules for Aging,” coming in May.
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