Memories and Their Meaning: Legacies of Love and Loss (article)

In a faded photograph, a woman donning a print dress and French braids stands defiantly on a rocky shore, her rounded chin jutting out as she squints into the camera. She is enroute from a destroyed past in Poland to a new life in pre-state Israel. The year is 1946, and the woman in the photograph bears a striking resemblance to a nearby picture taken more than half a century later of another young girl with unruly bangs and the same rounded chin that also sits on the living room mantle.

They are survivor grandmother and her granddaughter, who are prompted to understand the chilling but significant part of their family’s past that was shaped by the Holocaust years, together with the researcher/clinician, who is daughter to one and mother of the other.

What follows is an attempt to reconstitute a co-created reimagining of history to understand the pathways through which traumatic experiences are communicated and to highlight the powerful personal and professional potential of such a project. Moreover, the mutative engagement by the generations to recount and reconstruct the family saga, alongside recent visits to related historical sites and archival holdings in Poland, Germany, Italy, and Israel, offered a chance to report and refine the data collected so far alongside qualitative interviews and comparison data from other testimonies. In particular, as the third generation young woman in this family portrait is now 21 years of age, an entry point for this endeavor encompassed the motifs and the meaning attached to them during the developmental milestones of young and emerging adulthood, from the ages of 18 to 39.

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In a series of interviews with my mother, Frieda Kliger, I have been prompted to rethink the life-changing experiences that my parents encountered during this time period (for my mother, that would be between 1939 to 1960), as well as to compare these with my own pivotal decisions during this era in my life, pondering new ways to think about these potent and meaningful years, including the changing relationship with my parents, my family of origin, and my own growing nuclear family.

The year 1939 is seared in my memory as the year that the war began. In my household, we never called it anything but “the war” (di milkhome, in Yiddish) or “di fintstere milkhome” (the dark or miserable war). That same year marked my mother’s graduation from high school and her entry into the period of emerging adulthood at the age of 18. The overlap of those two events, both the normative and the traumatic occurrences, meant that young adulthood was rapidly superseded by emergency and by externally man dated measures that caused my mother to face who she was and make decisions more rapidly and urgently than at the pace she might have otherwise preferred.

The years between 1939, when she turned 18, and the end of World War II in 1945, were marked by horrific disruption, the death of her loved ones, and the destruction of her world. Steps she took to complete some measure of post-high school training in the years after World War II in the hopes of gaining certification as a teacher were never fully implemented. Financial pressures necessitated finding employment in New York’s garment industry after the family relocated to America in 1958. Frieda was 37 years old at the time and her husband, Roman (my father), whom she met and married in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons (DP) Camp on December 18, 1945, never offered to make accommodations in his own work schedule to allow Frieda to take night classes or supplementary courses.

Underlying the choices that my parents made during this period of my mother’s young adulthood, including their momentous decision to relocate their young family to America after spending 12 significant years in Israel from 1946 to 1958, there seems to have been a kind of intense and energetic push to prove their worthiness, validate their survival, and engage in what my mother calls

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“the struggle for life.” The few pictures that I have of my parents in those early years show a vigorous and hopeful pair, eager to move forward to the task of reconstructing their lives. They remained committed to each other in this way throughout the 62 years of their marriage, enduring years of struggle and sickness as well as many moments of joy and pleasure. However, getting access to the emotional tone of her relationship has been much more complicated. It includes going through the process of my own 21-year-old daughter, gathering information from her beloved grandmother.

My emerging and young adulthood experiences between the ages of 18 and 39 are still vivid in my mind as a series of encounters with life defining choices that culminated in the birth of my second child in December 1992. Beginning at age 18 when I was a college student, I recall embarking on an intense journey of self-discovery, choosing to have serious relationships with men very selectively, and then ultimately meeting and making a life with the man who is now my husband.

In addition to personal and relational considerations, I began to take myself seriously professionally, searching for a way to configure the complicated inheritance of silence and secrecy through my college major of sociology and in my first round of graduate studies. Thirty years later I would return to graduate school in clinical social work to finish that task with consequences that partly shaped my scholarly interest in identity and families, my engagement with the academic field of communication, and my entry into the clinical work of therapy.

The intergenerational transmission of trauma and resilience is one major pattern that emerges when considering the differences and similarities in the emerging and young adulthood experiences of my own personal developmental history and that of my parents’ generation. My parents were able to mobilize themselves throughout their long romance to embody both pleasure and its opposite, what Freud called the “life and death instincts.” A more recent treatise on the question of enduring love, a book called Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time (2003) by Stephen Mitchell, states that romantic commitments in love entail not a devotion to stasis but a dedication to process in the face of uncertainty.

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Mitchell beautifully captures this in a metaphor, the idea of how to sustain love over time, which he terms a “sandcastle for two.” Mitchell’s sandcastle is not “a permanent abode,” and it requires continual rebuilding. Who, if not two survivors like my parents, could appreciate the ways in which reality and fantasy coexist? My mother lost her entire family, created a new one through her marriage of despair (a term used to describe the postwar frenzy to mate) to my father, crossed the Alps to a pioneering new society in Israel, reckoned with her husband’s limitless love and his lingering illness which required constant attention, and succumbed to the pull of the far away land of America where her children were raised.

I am also drawn to the metaphor of sand, and the shifting relational winds of this period of emerging and young adulthood that brought me face to face with darkness and light, illness and vitality, independence and interdependence. Integrating this self-knowledge with my role as scholar and clinician in this reflection about my parents against the background of wartime tragedies, and in the ensuing conversations with my daughter who is now herself immersed in the developmental tasks of young adulthood, I feel I was successful in initiating a move away from mourning to the possibility of love. With that shift, I am better equipped to imagine an integration of this knowledge with my role as teacher and therapist, helping others reach for optimism and hope.

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