My Motivation: Patterns and Secrets of an Immigrant Family

Introduction

As I reflect back on my life I am struck by two things. First, how much I was shaped by my Eastern European immigrant parents and, second, how these normally honest people tried to hide things from their three children. Some examples will reveal the specific impact of my parents’ immigrant experience and their multicultural identity, while others reveal general issues of the human condition. In describing my past, at times I have opted to share the feeling tone of my childhood experiences.

I became a historian to discover my family secrets. When this did not reveal the truth I became a psychohistorian. My own analysis enabled me to probe more deeply and not become deterred, as I previously had, by my family’s code of silence and my father’s attempts to hide the truth from me. This freed me to look more clearly and compassionately at my parents. As a result I became closer to my loved ones and could get to the facts much more readily. The demise of Russian Communism and the death of my mother in 1959 and my father in 1987 have allowed me to speak and write much more openly about political aspects of my family’s history.

Identification With My Parents

In retrospect, I realize my interest in history and my choice to study the English Industrial Revolution were determined by my family’s experiences and my curiosity about them. I grew up in the family workshop and as a child I played among the machines, tools, and furs. Some of my hobbies are rooted in the surroundings in which I was raised. Today my garage walls are filled with the tools I collect, including a display from our fur shop. My joy in using tools is related to my being raised as a bookish kid with a mother who often told me I had “two left hands and two left legs” and that I would forget my head if it were not sewn on to my body.

As a young boy, while hoping to fulfill the American dream of becoming a baseball hero, I would find myself in right field in grade school, certain that I would drop the easy fly balls that came my way. When I got that sinking feeling in my stomach and dropped the ball, I simply thought I was a terrible athlete without realizing the degree to which I had identified with my father, who, amidst the chaos of his childhood in war-torn Europe and work as an adolescent in America, never learned to catch a ball. His embarrassing inability somehow seemed “un-American” so I kept it a secret from my playmates. My mother, Rose, said I did not have to worry about being a good athlete since it was my mind, not my body, I had to develop. She implied sports were for Gentiles, not the son of immigrant Jews. Playing baseball was a waste of time, but learning would

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be with you forever. She was in awe of people who were well educated while my father, Michael, delighted in pointing out their foibles.

The Eastern European Jewish tradition of denigrating physical labor influenced our family when something mechanical broke. Though an expert furrier, Dad was extremely hesitant whenever he or his sons had to use or repair something with which he was not thoroughly familiar. My older brother was quite adept and confident mechanically, but when he lifted up the hood of the car, dad became anxious and started yelling. My big brother sought to prove his mechanical competence by studying industrial engineering in college and I do large scale construction projects around my house.

In my sophomore year I quit college to allow myself to be drafted in the Army because I wanted to have a life as adventurous as my father’s. Like him, I wanted to struggle and to overcome adversity. In the same spirit, as befitted a son of radicals, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the condition of the working classes and did extensive research on radicalism in Europe and America. I went on to study the Russian Revolution, on which I now teach a course, because I wanted to know more about a monumental event that resulted in my father having to flee Europe as a political refugee at age fifteen.

As was common among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, my parents were political radicals in their youth. Despite his socialist leanings, my father wanted me to fulfill the Jewish immigrant’s dream and become a medical doctor. This was not only to achieve a high professional status and help people, but also because I would have “my own cash register.” He concluded from his own experience and from history that Jews have to have their independence since they might have to emigrate at a moment’s notice. This had also been the experience of a large number of his friends who fled from Hitler. I came closest to living out his dream by becoming a psychotherapist which gave me “my own cash register.”

My mother’s dream for me was to pursue knowledge and help people as a college professor. She loved knowledge and school, to which she had little access, and dreamed I would become a college professor. This professional choice was her deathbed wish for me and I have been a college professor for the last thirty years. The radicalism in my heritage helped lead me to a nonconformist academic path exploring the frontiers of psychohistory.

I was influenced by rescue efforts during and after World War II. My parents sponsored a Holocaust survivor’s immigration to America and they sent Care Packages of clothing and food to relatives in European displaced persons camps and Israel. I now teach about World War II as well as a separate course on the Holocaust.

My identification with them extended further; feeling as if I were a part of the working class, I taught at Temple University in the morning and drove a truck in the afternoon, moonlighted in a hosiery factory, cleaned offices in the evening, and stacked cases in warehouses to pay the rent, pediatrician, and food bills. In fact, I quit the job in the hosiery factory when I was made a supervisor because I felt the women workers were mistreated and I was uncomfortable as a “boss.”

Dad was the oldest of two boys and a girl. He fathered two boys and a girl in the same birth order: boy, girl, boy. All three of his children had two boys and a girl. Like my siblings I followed my parent’s prescripts and married a Jew. My father’s first American girlfriend was Irish and my second wife was born an O’Connell. All of my parents’ married grandchildren have wed non-Jews. Not surprisingly, my own three grand-children have an Irish surname.

As I look out the window at the water behind my home, I smile at the thought that my father was born near a river and built a “dream house” on the shore of a lake when I was thirteen years old. It was an unusual house in that it was quite modest looking on the roadside and, safely hidden from the public eye, expansive and beautiful on the lake side. He hired European-trained craftsmen and “overbuilt” it to last hundreds of years in the best European tradition. Dad’s experience in the chaos of European war and revolution, as well as a union organizer in New York City which was teeming with immigrants, led him to fear the envy of others. He saw people hurt or killed simply for having more than others. Consequently, he downplayed his success and at crucial moments in his business career backed away from opportunities that might have made him a rich man.

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My mother’s socialist background and identification with the hard life of her own mother led her to have trouble accepting the success that came from the fruits of her labor. For the first fifteen years of my career I followed in her footsteps and felt guilty when I bought a home or applied for tenure and a raise. In my own psychoanalysis, I learned I had to overcome guilt and fear whenever I wanted the normal things people desire and achieve. Early in my career, I also inclined to try to make myself indispensable at work as my mother had in our store. Based upon the ambivalence towards success I observed in my parents and had to overcome in myself, I learned to teach senior students how to overcome their internal obstacles to success. My joy in helping others is directly related to this character trait in my mother and father.

My parents told me not to learn the four European languages my father spoke. I took them literally and developed a mental block against speaking foreign languages which plagued me in college and graduate school. When they told me not to pay attention when they spoke about me in Yiddish, I was obedient to the letter rather than the spirit of the request. I understood their meaning while never learning more than a few words of Yiddish in my childhood and adolescence.

Family Secrets and Contradictions

My parents prided themselves on their honesty and encouraged this virtue in their children. They would return a lost wallet or note a billing error in their favor, yet they kept monumental secrets from their own children and people outside the family.

My father lied to me about his country of birth, telling me he was born in Lithuania rather than Poland. He lied about his age, being fifteen when he came alone to America rather than thirteen as he maintained. Dad told me I weighed three-and-one-half pounds at birth when I was in fact over five pounds according to the hospital records. Furthermore, he hid the fact he was not a citizen until he applied for his citizenship papers during the McCarthy era.

My mother died on March 5, 1959, never having told me or even hinted at any of the following: She was born and lived with the name Pichanic for the first fourteen years of her life. She assumed an alias, lied about her age, and spent some months in jail for organizing a Communist unemployment protest in Waterbury, Connecticut, during the Great Depression. She was a Communist Party organizer when she was jailed. (After her death my father said the newspapers called her “Red Rose” during her trial). Later she became disillusioned with Communism.

My straight-laced mother never told me she believed in “free love.” She lived together with my father before they married and as a young woman had love affairs in Minnesota before meeting Dad. All this was especially surprising since she told her kids to be chaste until marriage, and the chosen partner, she said, had to be Jewish. That she was not a citizen she told me only because I overheard her talking to Dad about it. Later she needed me to go to the post office to get resident alien cards every January to comply with the new legislation of the McCarthy era.

Our close relatives had many secrets as well. My father’s sister’s divorces were quite hush-hush as was his younger brother’s occupation as an illegal bookie. My maternal uncle and aunt were Communist Party organizers in Minnesota and California; during the McCarthy era the government attempted to deport them as subversive aliens. My father spoke of my mother’s family as if they were useless and freeloading idealists (the word “idealist” always came out of my father’s mouth as an insult), who were wasting their lives in pursuit of an impossible utopian society. (Yet, he wanted to see they had a good time when they visited and he would do nice things for them.) In fact, he shared more of their values than he was willing to admit to himself or the world.

Not only secrets but contradictions abounded within the family. My father was a successful capitalist who was proud of having been an organizer for the Communist-led furriers’ union. My mother was a proud business woman who refused to stay home as my father wanted, but did not drive a car or venture far away from home or the store. She was a capitalist who thought like a socialist, admonishing father not to sell coats for more than materials and labor. Though Dad told Mom to stay home and mind the kids as befitted a mother in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, he was helpless without her in their fur store since he could barely write English. He relied on her charm, skill, tact, and warmth with people to sell coats.

My mother endlessly said, “Do as I say, not as I do,” without seeming embarrassed by the

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contradiction in her maxim. She genuinely hated prejudice and told us to treat all people equally, at the same time harboring secret animosity towards Germans and German Jews, including her son-in-law’s family. My father hated prejudice as illustrated by the following story related to me by my maternal aunt. A Negro mugger attacked my father as he entered his house. He caught the man and called for help. When the intruder said he was an escapee from a Southern chain gang to which the police were sure to return him, Dad refused to press charges. In the same spirit of opposition to prejudice, he glowered at my brother, reprimanding him if he used the term black (which was then considered derogatory), but he would say shvarzah, which means black in Yiddish. Dad insisted it was a negative term only in English, not in Yiddish.

Dad felt it essential to identify peoples’ ethnic background, which I also enjoy doing. He passed on to me the belief that ethnicity often reveals a lot about an individual. To him you were Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Yankee, shvarzah, Jewish, or Gentile. Like my parents before me, I am a strong advocate of the rights of immigrants. Where others see new immigrants as potential competitors for jobs, or future welfare cheats, I incline to see them as willing workers ready to make America grow as my parents did.

My mother was in excellent health throughout her years of hard work and privation to build a life for her family. When she and Dad built her “dream house” alongside a lake and were ready to enjoy life more, she was stricken by Hodgkin’s disease from which she died four years later. As she lay dying in Grace New Haven Hospital, her doctors, rabbi, friends, children, and husband were crying, but she was calm, in control, and at peace after four years’ intense pain. Rose Pichanic Roast Elovitz died of a lethal injection prescribed by the doctor who was moved to tears by her courage. This final act, like so much else in her life, was a secret.

History, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncovering of My Family Secrets

As I state in the introduction, I became a historian to discover my family secrets. In graduate school I learned all sorts of research methods which I was unable to apply to what I most wanted to research, because there were too many internal obstacles to my proceeding. Also, my graduate school teachers seemed to have little respect for genealogy, family history, and biography — all of which were somehow denigrated as beneath “professional historians.” Rather than deciding the truth was not knowable, I became a psychohistorian in my search to uncover the truth. First I searched out the unconscious motivation of others and then I followed the Socratic dictum, “know thyself.”

Psychoanalysis enabled me to probe deeply and free myself from my own devotion to the family code of silence and from my guilt when I violated it. For example, I probed my own impulses to search the hospital records and other data and what fears kept me from taking action. Before an urban redevelopment project tore down “Michael’s Fur Shop” and the apartment over it in which we had lived, I talked my sister into going back to it with me. I tore down the boards covering the door and walked up the stairs into a small apartment that I had recollected as quite large (since I had been quite small!). We exchanged reminiscences and they varied. I also had to learn how to face Dad’s anger and outright obstructionism when he realized I was researching the family history. Knowing finally he could not stop me, he tried to send me in the wrong direction by saying Mother was arrested in Danbury, the scene of a famous hatters’ strike, rather than Waterbury. When I no longer feared his anger, his attempts at frightening or diverting me just seemed annoying as well as slightly bemusing — almost childlike.

It became clear to me that acknowledging and searching out the past was too painful for both my parents. To my mother it was a reminder of the pain of her jailing, her feelings of being (in my father’s words) “a patsy” for the Communist Party, and her embarrassment over her own radical family. To my father it was a reminder of his beloved grandfather and of his mother’s and sister’s failure ever to accept the reality that there was no return to the Poland destroyed by two world wars, Hitler, and Stalin. In 1981 when I brought him the copy of the Holocaust memorial book from his hometown, with its maps and many pictures, he quickly pushed it away saying I should give it to my aunt. I said, “No, Dad, once she has it she will never let it out of her hands. You have to look at it for several weeks before I give it to her.” Several weeks later his eyes, but not his mouth, told me it had special meaning to him. Knowing more about his past brought us closer

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together.

My family’s secrets were gradually revealed to me as I became ready to act independently of my father’s judgment and of my even more consistently critical “father within.” This freed me to keep asking questions and not to be put off by Dad’s obstructionism. I used the opportunities occasioned by births, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals to talk to the oldest members of the family to learn more about my loved ones’ pasts. Relatives responded positively to my curiosity because they accepted my genuine desire to reconstruct vital aspects of the lives of Michael and Rose. This was possible since I had been able to put aside most of my disappointment and anger at the lies told to me. Empathy was a central instrument I used to understand them and their decisions. My realization that I identified with so many of their values also made the process of studying them easier.

Patterns and Conclusions

Experiences, values, and traumas are passed between generations in a variety of ways. The dreams of poor immigrants, unfulfilled in their own lives, are often realized by their children and grandchildren. I will provide some examples in the areas of education, health, and ideology. The belief in learning and knowledge of my Hasidic great grandfather Jacob and my socialist grandfather Harry were transmitted to me through my parents. My mother glorified the education she wanted for me. My father was ambivalent about it since he associated education with the hated rabbis and he saw it mostly as a means to an end. By becoming a professor, therapist, and author I achieved some of their dreams. My youngest son, “the lawyer,” reflected a family tradition of public service when he left commercial law with a prestigious firm to fight for the rights of the disadvantaged for a fraction of his former salary.

Health is another area affected. There is a tendency to diabetes in my father’s family and cancer in my mother’s. But health is not just affected by heredity. In the open marketplace of a tiny Jewish village in Ukraine my grandmother ruined her bladder since she could not leave her stall to “relieve herself” (urinate) in the woods for fear of having her goods stolen. In identifying with her, my mother would wait until the absolute last moment to run to the bathroom, thus hurting her own bladder. Like her mother before her, she died young after having a life of great toil.

In my opinion, Mother’s health was also hurt by repressing and suppressing so much of her own life experience. The stress of holding in too much is not healthy. Dad could consciously try to suppress information, but a certain robust emotional openness ultimately doomed most of his attempts. However, at the end of his life he died of a broken heart stemming from the overwhelming grief he felt after his eldest son died of cancer and a grandson of AIDS at a time his vision was impaired by a disappointing cataract operation. At eighty-two years of age, he was disgusted with a world in which he had already lost his wife, two of his three children, and a grandson from a disease (AIDS) too dreadful to be even spoken about. He lost his will to live and stopped eating properly before the stroke occurred.

The political radicalism of my parents was directly related to the conditions of Jews in the Russian Empire in which they were born. Communism made some sense as an alternative to Tsarist absolutism, but not over time in the American context, especially because it became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. My parents were keenly aware of the poverty and inequalities of the immigrant neighborhoods, factories, and workshops of America in the 1920s and during the decade of the Great Depression. Radicalism was sometimes a vehicle for Americanization. To be an effective organizer my mother had to speak without an accent, so as not to be branded and written off as simply a “foreign troublemaker,” and to learn some U.S. history to be able to appeal to American ideals. Without even being citizens my parents were educated in American politics by their radical papers, public meetings, and unions. And they were not alone. For the eighteen years I lived in Connecticut’s third largest city of Bridgeport, there was a socialist mayor who was the son of a Scottish-born immigrant. This was an industrial city of immigrants and their children.

My parents’ success as capitalists is equally related to their Eastern European Jewish traditions. Jews, barred from agricultural work, were forced to live as craftsmen and middle men which prepared them to become capitalists when given half a chance. The traits of hard work, literacy, sobriety, and strong communal and family cooperation aided them in the struggle to get ahead in the teeming cities of urban America. Part of the appeal to immigrant Jews of the socialist critique of capitalism was that it was of the established

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capitalists who had achieved what they were only just beginning to dream. My parents’ experience as both socialists and capitalists is baffling to Americans who see a total opposition between these systems, but it was not at all unique. Many Jews found themselves in the same situation and, to their own satisfaction, rationalized the paradox.

Rose Pichanic Roast Elovitz and Michael David Elovitz were immigrant American success stories who raised three children to be proud, productive, and thoughtful Americans with a strong sense of social responsibility. However, their commitment to both Jewish socialist and capitalist traditions lead them to give some confusing messages to their children. Their memory is best served by lifting the burden of family secrets.

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