Free Associations

Madeleine Albright’s Jewish Family: Repressed Memories or Suppression?

This Catholic-turned-Episcopalian recently reported receiving a terrific jolt, obviously a major surprise, when she was confronted with “fairly compelling” evidence in the Washington Post that two of her grandparents were taken from their homes in Czechoslovakia to Nazi camps during the Holocaust. As Jews, they, and a third grandparent, were killed. Albright’s nomination as Secretary of State had brought with it a number of letters from Europe indicating her family’s Jewish roots. Nevertheless, throughout her life she insisted she had never considered herself other than Christian. Several Jewish residents of her Wellesley College dormitory, who became lifelong friends, stated they had never heard a hint that her family was anything but Catholic. One indicated that the diplomat was shocked and felt “battered” by the revelations.

When the story first broke, it appeared that her parents, Josef and Mandula Korbel, were secular Jews who converted to Catholicism to save themselves and their child from eliminationist German anti-Semitism. After all, it was the Nazi takeover of their country which prompted their fleeing to London when Marie Jana (she became “Madeleine” years later in a Swiss boarding school) was two years old in 1939. The little girl celebrated Christmas and Easter in what she reports was a family tradition. Her country changed from Czechoslovakia, to England, back to

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her homeland (after the war but before the Communist takeover in 1948), to Switzerland for school, and later to the USA. She gave the impression that the Catholic religion was a consistent part of her life despite all the changes of residence.

Before proceeding further it is important to set the scene regarding the climate of fear which was present in Europe in her formative years and which affected the decisions of her parents. The Korbels were Czech nationalists, proud of their democratic state created at the end of World War I, some 300 years after the war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing which spelled the end the previous independent Czech (Bohemian) state. As a diplomat, Josef Korbel was sensitive to the incredible threats to his country from Germany and Russia. Democratic Czechoslovakia was destroyed by Soviet Russia in 1948 only three years after Nazi Germany was defeated. The Korbels again had to flee abroad where the former diplomat published The Soviet Subversion of Czechoslovakia (1938-1948). He dedicated the book to the memory of his parents, but did not indicate they were killed in the Holocaust. It probably was clear to this family that Stalin, beginning with the purges of the 1930s, was, despite the Soviet laws against anti-Semitism, attacking many Jews and eventually killing them under the guise of “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Albright’s mother told a family friend that “to be Jewish was always to risk persecution.”

As the story developed, it became clear that Marie Jana’s conversion to Catholicism was in 1939 in the comparative safety of wartime London. As a two-year-old, little Marie Jana presumably did not have a conscious memory of the event, but would she have a recollection of being told about it by others? Did this first woman Secretary of State, the senior member of the cabinet, know about her family’s past? Did she, as some have suggested, consciously suppress knowledge of this Jewishness to advance herself? Or, did her parents do such a good job of creating a new past that she never had reason to doubt? Or, was she such a “good little girl” that she repressed knowledge that she was not supposed to know? Let us look at these possibilities more closely.

Suppression. Madeleine Korbel’s first memories are of air raid sirens in London. Because of the terrible things she knew happened to Jews, and without a sense of her own Jewish origins, it certainly could have been tempting for the girl to identify with her parents’ denial of their past. It was hard enough as a terribly serious young immigrant in England and then in the States — being a Jew would have been even harder. In America, Jews still faced powerful social restrictions, employment barriers in many fields, and significant entrance hurdles when applying to college. Jewishness was a definite barrier to success in many fields of endeavor — most definitely diplomacy. Even in Clinton’s second-term Cabinet, which has two avowed Jews, Robert Rubin (Treasury) and Dan Glickman (Agriculture), and a Christian Secretary of Defense (William Cohen) whose father was Jewish, it is most unlikely that someone viewed as a Jew would be able to emulate Kissinger’s feat of becoming a Jewish Secretary of State. The old guard would have raised too many concerns among Arab nations. Though at certain junctions of life Albright had powerful reasons to suppress her past, thus far I have seen no firm evidence that she consciously did this, though she has hardly lived up to her ego ideal of “I tell it like it is” on this particular issue.

A perfect parental cover up. Parents may think they have done a perfect job of creating a new past, but inevitably the past comes back to haunt them. Parents can not totally control friends, relatives, and what people say on the street. They inevitably fail to totally control the environment and usually blurt things out in front of the child themselves as part of the denial of the child’s level of understanding. Setting up family rules of secrecy helps to limit the child’s questions, but not curiosity. As a historian and psychohistorian who developed my research skills partly to uncover family secrets, I wonder if Madeleine’s college ambition of journalism was aimed at honing the skills of getting at the facts of her family’s hidden past? Whatever her initial motivation, upon marrying the heir to a newspaper, she was told it would not look right if she worked for her husband’s paper or its competitors. As a good wife, she did what she was told and forgot about journalism, which is a further indication she was a “good girl.”

Repression. I suspect that she just repressed knowledge she was not supposed to know in the same way she “absolutely did not see divorce coming after 23 years” of marriage. In this view she was so scared, being taken from country

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to country in dangerous times, that she found it safest to identify completely with her parents’ wishes even if it meant repressing what she heard or saw. I am reminded of a very bright, accomplished professional woman in her late forties, who struggled in treatment for nine years to escape her family’s code of silence. Her goals accomplished, she left analysis. Some years later, she was jolted into considering a return to treatment when she realized that she had unconsciously “denied” what she had heard in a family context because it violated the rule of silence she had so proudly thought she had escaped for all time. Albright, much like this woman, seems to have the capacity of putting inconvenient facts “out of mind.” But the past does come back to haunt one and I eagerly read the paper each morning to see if there are any new revelations.

Though I do not know the characteristic coping mechanisms (psychodynamics) of Madeleine Albright, I am impressed by her capacity for growth and her ability to adjust to difficult situations. As a woman diplomat fighting to be heard, and reacting, I presume, to anger generated by her husband’s abandonment, she learned to speak loudly and forcefully in the world of men and she advises other women to do the same. I feel compassion for a refugee child from Central Europe grown to a woman who feels battered by issues affecting her very identity.

I also worry about Albright’s judgment as Secretary of State partly because she is so focused on the need, above all else, to avoid another Munich. This was the kind of thinking that resulted in the Vietnam War! To prove the USA is strong, she may be too quick to commit American forces and is definitely too eager to expand NATO to the East, including the land of her birth, the Czech Republic. These are dangerous, and probably unnecessary, steps in the post Cold War era. Albright believes America must “marry force to diplomacy” to achieve our aims. I hope she emphasizes diplomacy rather than force. As a woman, and perhaps even as the grandchild of Jews, she will be tested even more than our Secretaries of State are normally tested.

Hidden Jews

I wonder if Josef and Mandula Korbel ever had the impulse to become “hidden Jews”? Or, are Jews who go underground (sometimes for generations) to practice their religion only a phenomenon of periods such as that of the Spanish Inquisition? I am tempted to argue that in all likelihood the ability to emigrate or easily assimilate in our age, which is normally available, precludes this response to persecution. But then I think of the millions of Christians in Communist China who suffer severely for their faith, and suspect that there are numerous “hidden Christians.” The issue of hidden believers came to mind because of the publication in February of the late Raphael Patai’s Jadid al-Islam: The Jewish “New Muslims” of Meshhed (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, 352 pages, ISBN 0-8143-2652-8 $39.95).

Professor Patai recounts the trauma faced by the Persian Jews of the Islamic holy city of Meshed in 1839, when 36 were murdered and the survivors were forced to convert to Islam. Though the fury of the Allahdad, as the event was labeled, seemingly destroyed a century-old Jewish community, part of it survived by going underground. Outwardly, its members were good Islamic adherents, but at home they were secret Jews. In arranged marriages, their daughters were engaged within the community as early as four years of age to avert proposals by genuine Muslims. The community held together until after World War II when most dispersed to larger Iranian cities, Israel, and overseas.

You may recollect that last September in these pages (Vol. 3, No. 2, page 67) we had the sad responsibility of writing an obituary of Professor Patai. Among his other books available from Wayne State University Press are The Jewish Mind (1996 version), The Jews of Hungary (1996), The Hebrew Goddess (1990), and The Myth of the Jewish Race (with Jennifer Patai, 1989). I wonder if Madeleine Albright will be tempted to read some of these volumes, at some future date, when she has the time to ponder her hidden heritage.

Psychohistory Online

A history colleague mentioned that a great bibliographic aid, one that could save me trips to Barnes & Noble bookstores and the library, is <http://www.amazon.com> on the World Wide Web. “It’s as good as Books In Print and accessible from your home computer,” Tom Heed declared. I typed in “psychohistory” and it recorded 67 books (“hits” in the language of computer jargon also known as “cyberspeak”). Many of the titles are thought-provoking psychohistorical works, such as Bruce Mazlish, The Leader, the Lead, and the Psyche and Peter

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Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History. There are classics such as Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans; Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History; Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory; Saul Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis; and Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach. Helpful books such as Peter Gay, Freud for Historians; Henry Lawton, The Psychohistorian’s Handbook; and William McKinley Runyan (ed.), Psychology and Historical Interpretation are also included. There are even old books attacking psychohistory along with new books such as Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture; Daniel Dervin, Enactments (see review on page 118); and Avner Falk, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews. Sixty-seven “hits” isn’t bad, even if there are several attacks and some duplications.

Yesterday, I reached into the mail pile awaiting my return from a trip and came up with a pleasant note from a senior colleague. Yet I had to take exception to his lamenting the sad state of psychohistory in the U.S.A. While we are far from achieving our full potential, our achievements, current creativity, and scholarly books are not to be slighted. Online, on the stacks, and at numerous meetings, there is lots of good psychohistory. If the productivity of Forum members is any indication, there’s an abundance of psychohistory coming into print, and much of it is first rate.

Paul Tsongas, Political Courage, and Presidential Health

I was saddened by the January 18 death, from liver problems related to cancer treatment and pneumonia, of former Senator Paul E. Tsongas. As with my brother’s death in 1987 (some 17 years after his lung malignancy was diagnosed), it was the effects of the 14 years of treatment rather than the cancer itself which ultimately took Tsongas’ life. In response to this loss, the White House made the following statement: “Paul Tsongas was a great American. He cared deeply about his beloved state of Massachusetts and about our country and its future. In a life devoted to public service,” it declared, “he set an unparalleled example of integrity, candor, and commitment.”

It should be remembered that Tsongas had beaten Clinton in the vital New Hampshire Democratic primary as well as in Democratic primaries in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Utah, declaring the Arkansan to be another one of the “Santa Clauses” seeking to buy the voters’ favor with unrealistic, fairy-book promises. Our President, or someone in his name, obviously was able to rise above the residue of this political strife and say the right thing at the Senator’s death.

An obituary reminded me of Tsongas’ having said after the November, 1992 election, “I would love to be standing here today as President-elect. The fact is a lot of people who should have run for President didn’t. There was a medical problem with gonads, not lymph nodes.” The lack of political courage the man from Massachusetts was referring to involved more than qualified candidates’ not running for President. He was troubled by the failure of those who did run to tackle the tough issues for fear of voter rejection. This son of an immigrant Greek business family confronted the economic issues paving the way for the main issue of Ross Perot’s much better financed Presidential campaign.

Tsongas, who had felt the “obligations of survival,” had had to abruptly terminate his campaign because of a lack of money rather than directly because of the health issue. Indirectly, the health issue was an important factor in his mind because he did not want to saddle his wife and young daughters with debt since his future earning power was in doubt.

When I met Paul Tsongas in person he seemed very much as he had on television: direct, intelligent, and with a hint of humor. When I called his home or he called mine, I felt it was like talking to a friendly next door neighbor or relative. There was a relaxed, down-to-earth quality which I found most inviting. He seemed to say what he meant and mean what he said to an unusual degree for a politician of national stature. When I spoke with his wife Nicki, who realized I was delving into issues of childhood and personality that might be used to hurt his political career, she said to me in a factual manner, “He’s much too open,” and then passed the telephone to him. He seemed bemused, but not inhibited, when I indicated I would be publishing in The Journal of Psychohistory, and hopefully, for the op-ed page of the New York Times. As Tsongas suspected, the Journal was more receptive than the Times.

At my 1992 IPA presentation which was based on my article, “Character, Cancer, and Economic Regeneration in the 1992 Presidential

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Campaign of Senator Paul E. Tsongas,” Stanley Rosenman, a New York City psychologist/ psychoanalyst, raised the issue of the ethicalness of a cancer patient running for President. He argued that it was unethical to run for an office if you might not have the health to serve out your term. This was certainly on my mind, and I do not know if on that basis I would have voted for Tsongas in November. It certainly brought to the forefront the issue of the health of Presidential candidates and the response of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and Tsongas’ doctors to questions regarding his health during the campaign. Lawrence K. Altman, MD, medical reporter for the New York Times, implied a conscious cover-up. This, in my opinion, was not the case, partly because the information regarding his health was already in the public domain.

I am always interested in the process of collective amnesia by which the public and media ignore documented facts about Presidential candidates (and others) and then, suddenly awaken to the facts, instantly claiming a cover-up. I do not think it is sufficient to blame this infuriating tendency on sloppy reporting. (Though I do get frustrated with reporters who, like so many of my students, don’t seem to know the difference between a press release and an objective fact.)

As I gazed at some of the final pictures of Paul Tsongas, shorn of his hair and looking terrible, I was aware of a sadness. I also thought about the flash of pleasure people sometimes express at the death of a politician. There is, to use a German word, schadenfreude (pleasure at the displeasure of others) involved in these cases. I suspect that it is based mostly on a sense of getting the politicians back for their lies, misjudgments, and lack of political courage.

There are enormous difficulties when a President is incapacitated by illness or an assassin’s attack, or is clearly dying. Russia is currently facing this psychological bad dream, though in the recent elections they preferred an incapacitated Yeltsin to his healthy opponents. The USA has lived through this nightmare on numerous occasions, for example, during the Presidencies of William Henry Harrison, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and, most especially, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. People’s fantasies about a dying President breed paranoia, of which there is already too much.

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