“No, not really,” she says.
* * *
—
After more than a month of intensive research, I realize I’ve fallen into the genealogist’s paradox: I’m so obsessed with my ancestors that I’m neglecting my immediate family. While I’ve been shut up in my office interviewing relatives and searching ancestry websites, Simon has been handling homework and family dinners.
He’s irritated about this and dubious about my amateur sleuthing. He says families are prone to aggrandize their own stories and to leave out the unpleasant bits.
“In every family some eighty-three-year-old is wheeled out to tell a series of misremembered facts and lies,” he says one night, as we’re getting into bed. “And one day even this is completely misremembered.” (He assures me this isn’t true of his own ancestors, who were Lithuanian intellectuals.)
If what I’m discovering is the aggrandized version of my family tree, I’m not sure I’d want to know the real version. The further back I go, the more low status and unglamorous we get. I’d thought that at least we were tailors back in Russia. But Don says my great-great-grandfather was a “tinkerer.”
“He would travel out during the week to villages, and fix people’s pots and pans, and come back to the city,” Don said. (He knows this because, as a child, he lived with the tinkerer’s daughter.)
I don’t discover any Nobel Prize winners among my living relatives, either. Many of my cousins work as modern-day tinkerers, repairing office computers across the eastern United States.
Fortunately, I learn that Simon’s family was barely more illustrious than mine. One of his cousins tells me that most of the men in his paternal line weren’t scholars, they were timber merchants.
I do find one relative whom I can identify with: my maternal great-grandfather, Benjamin, who arrived in New York in 1906, age nineteen. (Rose, his wife and first cousin, came on her own soon afterward.) My mother’s cousins say that Benjamin was a cosmopolitan who viewed his adopted country as a great adventure. “He was a curious man and he wanted to be American. Learning about things was a way to practice that,” Don tells me. He mentions that Benjamin read the New York Times daily, and that he carried around a pocket notebook to jot down observations, aphorisms and jokes.
This last detail floors me. I carry a notebook everywhere, too, to write down observations about France. Benjamin is only responsible for an eighth of my DNA, but hearing this makes me feel like there’s earth under my feet; I sense a direct line from his notebooks to my own.
And Benjamin enjoyed being a foreigner. He spoke lots of languages—my grandmother said he was fluent in Russian as well as Yiddish. Once Benjamin got to America, he and Rose could have stayed near relatives in New York. But like me, he wanted to establish himself someplace entirely new, and so he ended up in South Carolina.
Unlike me, however, Benjamin emigrated because he had to. And underneath his increasingly prosperous American life, he worried about the people he’d left behind. Don says that, throughout the 1920s, Benjamin was in touch with his family back in Russia. I suspect that he would have gladly brought them all to America. I figure out that those sepia pictures were of Benjamin’s and Rose’s siblings. A note on the back, from his sister Rachel, says “Look and remember,” repeatedly, as if she knows she’ll probably never see him again.
Benjamin was at least sporadically in touch with his family in the 1930s, too. But my grandmother said that when they mailed those care packages to relatives in Russia before the war, he would say: “We’re sending this. We hope it gets there. But we’ll never know.”
The last of the sepia pictures is dated January 27, 1938, in Minsk. In it, three attractive middle-aged women gaze pensively into the camera, probably in front of a backdrop at a photographer’s studio. Russian writing on the back says that they’re Benjamin’s and Rose’s sisters. The women probably had husbands and children, too.
Benjamin and Rose had four children by then, and had constructed an American cocoon for themselves. In a letter to my grandmother in 1936, when she was a student at the University of Richmond, Benjamin wrote: “All we want for you is to mix with the most intelligent class of young folks of your age and to enjoy College life and to get a broad view of life in general.” In a P.S. he added, “Your pajamas will be shipped Monday.” In my family, clothes were forever mixed with love.
Soon afterward, Esther met my grandfather Albert. Albert would later tell me that his own Russian immigrant parents weren’t very expressive. In a 1938 letter to Esther, he marvels at how positive and joyful her parents, Benjamin and Rose, are. This seems to be part of Esther’s allure. “You should be very proud of having such wonderful parents, so friendly, so natural, so full of fun, why, they act as if they are still in love as much as ever,” he wrote.
When Esther and Albert got married in South Carolina in March of 1939, the Columbia Record named Esther its “bride-elect of the month.” It reported on her many bridal showers and on the string sextet that played at her wedding reception. In the group wedding photograph I have, Esther is wearing a fitted dress (“white imported marquisette with lace insertion”), and she’s beaming with joy. She and my grandfather—who’s as tall and handsome as a Hollywood heartthrob—would soon take a honeymoon cruise to Cuba, then move into an art deco apartment on Miami Beach.
Benjamin is smiling in the wedding photograph, too, but I sense that there’s worry in his eyes. It had probably been a while since he’d heard from anyone back in Russia. Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia a few weeks earlier. It would invade Poland six months later. Minsk lay just east of the Polish border.
About a year after my grandmother’s wedding, Benjamin died suddenly at home. A death certificate cites his cause of death as “coronary thrombosis.” But I learn that wasn’t the family story, not even for my grandmother.
“My mother always said the Nazis broke his heart; he was unable to cope with that inhumanity,” Don tells me. “My mother and your grandmother didn’t agree on a lot of things, but they certainly agreed on that.”
* * *
—
It’s probably better that Benjamin didn’t live to read about what happened next. In June 1941, German forces occupied Minsk. In July, they forced about 100,000 Jews into a ghetto on the edge of the city. Between August 1941 and July 1942, they murdered most of the ghetto’s inhabitants.
When I go back to the Ellis Island website and try another spelling of my great-grandmother Rose’s name, I finally get a match. She would later tell her daughter—my grandmother—that she came from “the Minsk region.” But when she arrived in New York Harbor, perhaps with those silver candlesticks bundled in a Belorussian shawl, she told a clerk that she came from someplace much more specific: Krasnoluki. It says so right on the ship’s docket.
The Jews of Krasnoluki weren’t brought to the Minsk ghetto. According to records from Yad Vashem, on March 6, 1942, German soldiers and Belorussians gathered some 275 of them in a building, then forced them to walk to the quarry of a brick factory. This group probably included parents, children and old people. Anyone who couldn’t walk to the quarry was murdered on the way. Once the remaining group arrived at the quarry, the German soldiers—aided by Belorussians—shot all of them to death. Local residents then buried them.
It was, in other words, a human slaughter like the one that took place at the concert hall near my home in Paris, though on a larger scale.
When I send out another message to relatives explaining all this, I no longer expect anyone to reply. Over the months I’ve been researching our ancestry, I’ve seen that some of these revelations are significant to exactly one person: me. And being a grown-up means that, all by myself, I can absorb facts and make them matter. Even as an audience of one, I’m enough.
The more I learn about my family’s history, the more sympathy I have for the good-news cocoon that I grew up in. Why mention Krasnoluki
, a place where teenage girls were snatched by men on horses, and families were walked to the edge of town and shot? What’s to be done about it? Why not focus on wedding dresses and cruise ships, and enjoy the cocoon while you can? Why not just say you came from “greater Minsk”? Everyone but me was coping just fine, without knowing the details.
My grandmother was one of the most cheerful people I knew, and also—I realize now—one of the most grateful. She was always saying how lucky she was. I don’t think she was silently ruminating on all those lost relatives. But she kept their pictures on a shelf in her closet. And she understood, her whole life, that there was a parallel, unlucky world that one could fall into. It had swallowed up her aunts and their families. Esther’s positivity wasn’t naive; it was an act of will against that fate.
My mother was born in October 1941, around the peak of the extermination in Minsk. Eventually the backstory—the very existence of our murdered relatives—disappeared. What my mother inherited was an urgent need to keep things positive, and a sense that to do otherwise is dangerous. She learned that you must never discuss the thing itself, or even go close to it. It’s best to stay on the surface and keep bad news at bay, because something terrible is lurking underneath.
And then I was born. And I couldn’t understand why we weren’t talking about anything. My grandmother always told me that she was sure I’d write a book one day. Perhaps she was hoping that it would be this one.
Now that I know our family’s history, I’d like to have a physical trace of it. When Barry calls to tell me another story about his father, I work up the nerve to ask him for the candlesticks. I tell him that it would be very meaningful for me to have objects that my great-grandmother carried with her from Krasnoluki more than a hundred years ago.
Barry goes quiet on the phone. In that silence, I realize that I’ll probably never get them. “You’ve planted the seed,” he says. “I’ll let you know.”
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
Your retired parents Skype you in the middle of your workday, hoping to have a long chat.
You no longer blame them for your flaws.
There are certain family members you don’t speak to anymore—not because you’re angry with them, but because you’ve realized that you simply don’t like them.
There’s now just one generation that’s supposed to die before you do.
That generation is your parents.
You realize that no one cares whether you feel like a grown-up. Merely by staying on the escalator this long, you’ve become one.
25
how to stay married
I’M EXCITED TO TELL SIMON everything I’ve discovered about my ancestors and my family. I’ve finally cracked my personal code.
But he’s not interested. He doesn’t sleep much these days, so he wants to wind down in the evenings. When I begin my explanation before bed, he interrupts. “No new topics after ten p.m.,” he says.
It used to be worse. At a wedding reception years ago, an older British gentleman found me sulking in a corner and explained that Simon and I were in the throes of a GES—a Ghastly Emotional Scene. We don’t have GESs anymore. By your forties, these epic clashes seem tiring and pointless. You and your partner know your ritual arguments so well, you can get through them in a tenth of the time.
And yet, in your forties there’s another problem: none of your partner’s original flaws have been fixed. Your arguments are shorter, but you’re astonished and irritated to see that you’re still having the same ones. So I’m surprised when, over lunch one day, my French friend Claire tells me that her husband doesn’t have any flaws.
This is odd. I know Claire’s husband a little bit, and could easily list five or six things that are wrong with him. And Claire isn’t exactly a wallflower: she’s one of the most opinionated people I know.
But another friend who’s having lunch with us says a French boyfriend used to tell her something similar. “He’d say, ‘I love you for your faults.’”
I’m intrigued, but cautious. There’s plenty of divorce in France. While that boyfriend may have loved my friend’s faults, their relationship fizzled anyway. But maybe there’s still a lesson here. Is there something in the French approach to coupledom that could help Simon and me?
* * *
—
I was raised with the modern American idea of the self-expressive marriage. This is relatively new. Up until the 1850s, most Americans got married in order to fulfill their most basic needs. Together, you and your spouse could grow food and keep intruders away, say researchers led by the psychologist Eli Finkel.
Industrialization changed this. Once people didn’t need to sew their own clothes and churn their own butter, they could also marry for “sentimental” reasons like love, passion and a sense of belonging.
The “self-expressive era” began in the mid-1960s, and we’re still in it, Finkel writes. We still choose partners for love and belonging, and to share the rent, but we also expect them to help fulfill our need for personal growth, self-esteem and “mutual insight.”
When I got married, I took this personal-growth model for granted. (Though my strategy was to marry someone who was already self-actualized, then to spend years badgering him for advice.) The French anthropologist Raymonde Carroll writes that Americans view their spouses as a kind of in-house therapist and pep squad, who must “encourage me to surpass myself and support me in my efforts.” Likewise, “I must encourage him in his wildest undertakings, even if I am the only one to do so, if the undertaking will make him happy.”
And an American couple is a social unit. They expect to be invited out as a pair and not spend much time apart voluntarily. In the American context, Carroll writes, “Not inviting my partner is a refusal, a rejection, of me.”
When this works, it’s terrific. The best “self-expressive” marriages are even more fulfilling than marriages in the previous era, Finkel writes. But to mutually self-actualize you must spend lots of focused time together. Thanks largely to longer working hours and the demands of intensive parenting, Americans spend far less time alone with their spouses than they used to. And during this alone time, they’re more stressed and distracted by screens.
The self-improvement model isn’t very forgiving. If your partner isn’t helping you self-actualize, you’re within your rights to leave him. A Californian once told me, not very tearfully, that she was divorcing her husband because “I’m just not my best self with him.” Her friends and family found this reasoning perfectly valid.
* * *
—
I assume that everyone wants to be in a self-actualizing relationship. But when I describe this idea to my French friends, they think it’s bizarre.
“In terms of self-development I depend on myself,” says Delphine, a scientist with two teenage sons.
Delphine loves her husband and says she’s fulfilled, but they aren’t involved in each other’s work or social lives. When we meet for coffee early one evening, she’s about to meet another friend to see a play. She does that often, since her husband doesn’t like the theater.
“It’s almost as if we have parallel lives, in terms of interest and self-development,” she tells me. “I don’t talk to him a lot about what I do, or what I like, and he doesn’t, either, because he’s very intense about his work, and I’m not that interested in what he’s doing.”
The pair don’t even share many friends. “We share daily life more than interests,” she says. “It’s funny to tell you that. But I think we like it that way.”
Delphine does want to self-actualize. She has many plans and projects, and an ambitious career. But like other middle-class French people I speak to, she doesn’t assume that her partner will play a big role in all this. Personal growth is her own objective, not the main function of her marriage. And she’s skeptical of c
ouples who do practically everything together, noting, “They are an entity in themselves, and you feel a bit excluded.”
So what do French couples look to each other for? Instead of being engines of each other’s self-actualization, they see a couple as two puzzle pieces that either fit together or don’t. And to know whether you fit with someone, you need to know yourself and the other person with great precision.
In general, French explanations of why relationships fail seem to rely less on moral judgments like “he was a jerk” and more on specific descriptions of exactly why the two peoples’ characters clashed.
Practically every French female celebrity of a certain age seems to have an ex-husband from an early marriage whom she gradually realized didn’t correspond to her. “I needed to find a man with a feminine side who made my own feminine side resonate,” the talk-show host Alessandra Sublet explained.
To know what corresponds to you and what doesn’t, you must understand your partner’s qualities in great detail. Indeed, the French approach to coupledom is similar to the French approach to parenting. Just as you’re supposed to observe your baby carefully, to get to know his habits and preferences, you’re expected to observe your partner assiduously. Much like the dermatologist Irwin Braverman suggested, you keep looking at someone until you see more and more in him.
In French, people are usually described as having both qualités—good qualities—and also défauts—flaws. But it’s assumed that these two are closely linked. Your défauts are the flip side of your qualités. There’s always the risk, or the possibility, that one will morph into the other.
Delphine says her husband’s principal flaw is that he’s a rêveur—a dreamer (Simon would probably call him a fantasist). It frustrates her that she’s the one who files their taxes, pays their bills and handles the household’s other administrative tasks.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 19
