Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  Occasionally the language misunderstandings could be funny as well. The check-out lady at the grocery store would always say, in a very smooth and routine way, every time I made a purchase, “Thanks a lot.” This sounded to me like “Thanksalad,” and I thought she was constantly asking me if I needed salad or why I wasn’t buying more of it. Finally I asked her about that, and when it was cleared up we both had a good laugh.

  The biggest boost in developing my language skills came from the classes that Julius, Jack, and I took in order to obtain our citizenship papers. Watching television also helped, though. I learned a lot of English from Milton Berle and Eddie Cantor—they were my home teachers!

  We all became United States citizens in 1954. Becoming citizens made us all feel much more accepted, more at home, in this country.

  JACK

  I kept telling Rochelle all through those years that someday I would start a business and that I would do really well at it. But I didn’t have the slightest idea what it would be. Still, I had the intuition that in the future something would happen.

  ROCHELLE

  For my part, I didn’t believe him at all. I used to tell him that we had no formal American education, no degrees. We had no capital. And when Jack would talk about his business, it would usually be with the idea that he would be selling something. And I couldn’t at all see him as a salesman. He was a quiet man, kind of shy, not a backslapper. He couldn’t even speak English that well. So I couldn’t imagine him approaching a stranger and making a sale.

  JACK

  Finally, in 1957, after almost eight years at the Golden Rule, I quit to start my own gift business. I am proud to say that I accomplished a great deal during my years at the Golden Rule. I received promotions regularly—every six to eight months—and eventually became the assistant vice president of operations for the entire store. I learned a great deal about American business, and the people I worked for there were exceptionally good to me—a new immigrant.

  Giving notice at a job where I was happy and accepted was a big decision. But I knew that it was the only way to have the future for my family that I wanted. In a way, living through the Holocaust helped give me the courage to make that decision. I could see that the worst that could happen was that my business would fail and I would have to find a new job. That didn’t scare me so much—I had already gone through far worse. But most of my fellow American workers thought that I was crazy to take such a chance. They had calm lives, comfortable homes. They were content.

  Before I left the Golden Rule, I decided that it would be appropriate to give notice personally to the president, Mr. Phillip Troy. I wanted to thank him personally for all that the company had done for me, and also to ask him for advice on how to start a business of my own. Mr. Troy wished me the best and assured me that I would succeed if I continued to work as hard as I had at the Golden Rule. He also gave me three key points of advice: (1) Always be fair and honest in dealings with customers; (2) Never make any promises that you cannot keep; and (3) Develop and maintain a top credit rating. I followed all three of those points through all the years to come.

  All of this sounds very smooth. But don’t misunderstand—it was far from easy for me to go off on my own. It’s just that I knew I had to try. Still, not long afterwards I ended up in the hospital with what we thought was a heart attack. The symptoms were severe squeezes in my chest area. It turned out that it was a nervous panic attack—and I’ve had many more of them in the years since.

  But the business developed. I named the company Rochelle’s, Inc. This name was not only a way of expressing my love for Rochelle. It also reflected the reality that she worked by my side and helped to build it year after year. Without Rochelle as a partner and an emotional support, I could never have succeeded.

  I got a start-up loan from an American friend and paid that friend back in full the very next year. Also, Uncle Herman helped me in obtaining some bank loans by co-signing my applications. I developed into a good salesman. I realized that there was no such thing as learning sales technique in a school classroom. You either had the talent or you didn’t. I worked hard because I knew I had a family to support—and the talent developed.

  ROCHELLE

  People liked him because he was a nice, friendly man.

  JACK

  For the first fifteen years of the business, we had both wholesale and retail operations. The retail end was always the lesser part. We started out with a little store in a poor location. Uncle Herman helped us with the rent, but things were terribly slow. Rochelle was running the retail store while I worked on the wholesale accounts in a small office and warehouse space. I would sometimes work from eight in the morning to three at night.

  But we were starting to see results. In 1957, we could afford to leave our apartment and to buy a house. It had a yard for the children to play in. It felt like a real home.

  ROCHELLE

  I felt awful about working in that store in those first years. Julius was helping by staying at home and watching the kids. But it was still terrible to be away from them. And we weren’t making much money. So I was away from my family and sometimes there was eight dollars in gross sales for the day—nothing! And at night I would come home and cook and clean.

  But we kept on. We had to. And finally, again with the help of Uncle Herman, we could afford a better location—the lobby of a major Minneapolis office building—and things got better.

  As a matter of fact, I became quite a popular figure amongst our customers. We had lots of regulars who would come in for cards and gifts for all the occasions in their lives. They would confide their marital troubles to me, even their secret affairs. I talked with everyone. I had a strong accent, but somehow they not only understood me, they trusted me as well.

  JACK

  In December 1974, my father Julius died at the age of ninety. He had lived with us for all the years we had been in America. We never once considered putting him in a nursing home. And during all that time, Julius not only helped to raise our children but acted as the bookkeeper for my business. He kept handwritten ledgers in a beautiful script and he was always accurate.

  The business grew to the point where I finally felt I had succeeded in making a good life for my family. We sold the retail store in 1973. But the wholesale continued—a line of imported gifts from around the world that I sold to stores all across America. I employed twelve travelling salespeople, as well as three employees who helped me run the large central warehouse in Minneapolis. Rochelle and I would personally fly to the Orient—Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, and other ports—to choose many of our gift lines. In order to better compete with other wholesalers, we also began to design our own giftware items and to arrange for their manufacture.

  Rochelle made friends for us wherever she went. And somehow, we managed to come up with items that would appeal to American customers. That was something I had a talent for. Uncle Herman and Aunt Rose were always proud of what Rochelle and I managed to achieve together.

  In 1991, I finally closed down the business and retired. I thought that I would miss it, that I would find too much time on my hands. But instead I am relieved to be rid of the worries.

  ROCHELLE

  Both Jack and I had come from well-to-do families, and we had both been reduced to garbage scroungers during the war. We knew how we wanted to live and what we wanted to give to our children. And we thought that we were smart enough, and our desire strong enough, so that we could do it.

  In the way that we raised our children, we were more lenient than most American parents we knew. To have children was a miracle for us. We didn’t let our parents down … their bloodline was living on. The Nazis had destroyed so many Jewish families, but some at least had survived!

  We didn’t keep our children on fixed allowances. We gave them as much money as we could—and we were proud that we could give so often. If they wanted to stay up until nine o’clock instead of eight o’clock, big deal! If they wanted to go to a mo
vie, let them go to a movie. There were no regular chores that had to be finished to earn privileges. Let them enjoy themselves and be happy.

  I remember that when I first came to this country, I would listen to the American women talk about their weddings and baby showers. They were always family occasions—all the family coming together. It made me so jealous, especially when I would see mothers and daughters together. I couldn’t stand to be in their company. I felt that they had everything that I was supposed to have but never could. Where was my mother, my father, my sisters?

  All the love that Jack and I had for our lost parents, our lost families, went into our children. At least our children would be normal, not deprived in the ways that we had been. Our kids wouldn’t dress any worse, live any worse than American kids. It would all even out with our kids.

  The years have passed. Cecilia graduated from the University of Minnesota, while Larry earned degrees from the University of Michigan and from Harvard Law School. We have been blessed now with three grandchildren, David, Danny, and Sarah. In America we have had a good life.

  JACK

  And so that is our story. We’ve told you what we can.

  Just one thing I want to be sure about. That people who read this should understand how much I love Rochelle.

  An Afterword on the “Second Generation”

  LAWRENCE SUTIN

  I have been asked by some readers of my parents’ story if I could add a few thoughts about being a child of Holocaust survivors. The issue of the “second generation” seems to evoke interest, particularly with respect to the nature of the psychological, moral, and spiritual legacies bequeathed by Holocaust survivors to their children.

  I shall try to address these legacies as best I can in my own case. But first I must make plain my abiding discomfort with the very terms “survivor” and “second generation.”

  There is a strong tendency, in writings on the Holocaust by historians, philosophers, psychologists, and other concerned observers, to speak of the Holocaust “survivor” as a single, generalizable category. These observers usually do take care to distinguish the different ways in which survival occurred and the different postwar adaptations made by survivors. But the impression persists that the Holocaust “survivor” is a type of humankind who can exemplify heroism, or tragedy, or trauma, or other.

  To a limited extent, I too can accept the “survivor” as a type. In my “Preface” I wrote: “Death in the Holocaust was omnipresent; the millions of Jews who died and the small living remnant are One, but for the accidents of fate.” It is fitting and honorable that the Holocaust be a subject for intensive historical inquiry. It is a ghastly but necessary task to lay out the facts of the Nazi genocide and the fates of those caught up within it. It is permissible to ask how those who survived managed to do so, given what they faced.

  Yet it is an obscene mode of inquiry to seek out—by way of character analysis—the alleged underlying reasons as to why some “survivors” lived while so many were butchered. It is obscene because it leads to the passing of shallow moral and psychological judgments on persons and circumstances that are beyond the ken of those who pretend (it is always a pretense by those who were not themselves present) to judge. It is further obscene because it implies that there was some sort of survival-of-the-fittest “Nazi justice” at work in the fate of those who lived and those who died. The reality was a systematic plan of mass murder that made all Jews in Europe—survivors included—its victims.

  It should also be realized that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish survivors have led anything but unitary lives. I have had the privilege of meeting many survivors over the years. They have not seemed anything “of a type” to me. Some of them loved life intensely, in spite of what they had experienced during the Holocaust. Some of them were plainly living out an enduring agony. Some wished to express their feelings and share their stories. Others would never broach the subject. I could list many further differences, but suffice it to say that they are human beings, that their lives have diverged from one another in ways that matter. In sum, the category of “survivor” only goes so far.

  Here, of course, lies the value of Holocaust narratives told by the survivors themselves. These narratives confirm that, within the maelstrom of death, the lives lost or spared were individual lives that cannot be encompassed by the horrific statistic of “six million.” It is through reading these narratives that we can comprehend—in a vital, albeit radically limited manner—what it might mean to be subject to the forces the Nazis unleashed. This effort at comprehension must lead us to ask pointedly unpleasant questions as to who we, as humans, really are and of what we are capable. It is ourselves, and not the survivors, whom we can most usefully subject to scrutiny.

  Just as there is no fixed category of “survivor,” so too there is no such thing as a unitary “second generation.” At least one basic division has suggested itself to commentators on the children of survivors—those whose parents spoke of what had happened, and those who did not. In my “Preface,” I allowed that I was grateful to be in the former category. I believe that it eased what would have been an omnipresent tension. But I do not wish to be seen as passing judgment upon those survivors who did not speak. Disclosure or silence by the parent (or parents) was a critical choice, no doubt, but I would not conclude that it was, in all or even most cases, determinative of the child’s life to come.

  Therefore I cannot write of Holocaust “survivors” and “children of survivors” (though at times I may betray the temptation), only of the relations between my parents and myself.

  Nor can I hope to satisfy those readers for whom survivors and their children are a tantalizing diagnostic puzzle. Acquaintances who know of my parents’ past sometimes ask what I think it “did” to me. Now and then they even offer prescriptive labels, such as “transferred trauma” and “survival syndrome.” If I question the meaning and aptness of these labels, I run the risk of being adjudged as “in denial.”

  It was hardly avoidable, then, that I do some reading of my own in the available psychological literature on the “second generation.” The necessity for such a literature—that is, the searing psychological struggles that too many children of survivors have undergone—is an agonizing one to consider. The Holocaust does not end with the lives of those who experienced it. I can testify to this. The responses of the children will differ, but a response there surely must be. The published studies display a greater methodological caution than is shown by the casual questioners in my life. Here is a representative quotation, which has the further merit of linking the pressures upon the “second generation” to a broader aspect of human existence:

  As anticipated, not all themes are present or dominant in each [second generation] case, yet there is a common base—a survival complex—that is transmitted to children. Most, if not all, developmental phases are tinged with issues of survival. Perhaps this complex is as universal to human nature as Freud thought the Oedipus complex to be. Thus, it may become a source of either strength or pathology.*

  Well, it certainly may. In my family, survival was not—is not—taken for granted. I did grow up hearing stories of hatred and murder. That hatred was directed not only at my parents, or at Jews of their generation, but against Jews of all times and places, against the fact of Jewish existence itself. Against me. Nazis and “neo-Nazis” (a marvelous term, this, implying that there has been some sort of progression in Nazi “thought,” as opposed to the reality of an ongoing cultlike adherence to ignorant hate) and their sympathizers want me dead to this day. I am quite safe in America for the time being. But if you suddenly transport the members of my family and myself to Germany, or Poland, or Russia, or Latvia, or Lithuania—to name only the most prominent modern day locales in which neo-Nazi movements and sentiments are in rousing good health—then suddenly we are at risk. To me, these are plain facts.

  As for the “survival complex” becoming “a source of either strength or pathology,”
that is true insofar as it goes, but the dichotomous structure is misleading. It may become a source of strength, and of fear, and of fury, and of anguish (“pathology”), and of many things more. My passion in working on this book was that the story of my parents would thereby survive—and that it give strength not only to myself, from my work on it, but also to my daughter, when someday she will read it with comprehension and wonder.

  I will go on now to some memories of growing up within my family. Hereafter the reader will have to apply his or her own diagnostic analyses to the bare bones of my account.

  My father and my mother were both acutely aware of what they had lived through. So was I. It was a pervasive fact of life in our home. My sister Cecilia, in a speech she delivered recently to her synagogue congregation, has accurately described the sense we both shared of growing up in a family decimated by death:

  When my friends visited their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, I would think of the relatives I never got to know—because they were brutally murdered in the prime of their lives. All the special relationships with my grandmothers, my aunts, my mother’s father—all of these had been stolen from me.

  As I got older, I would hear my friends’ parents look forward to school reunions, talk of old boyfriends and girlfriends, and the fun times they had in college. There was so much they hadn’t experienced. I often wished that I could share my own happy times with them, that I could somehow give them back the years of fun and freedom that they had provided for me.

  I am so grateful that my own sons, David and Danny, have grandparents, and that they have been spared the emptiness I felt at their age.