Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma In My Family

I remember mom saying she was never close to her mother. I also know her father was essentially gone for the first four years of her life, fighting for his German homeland in World War I. This brings me to thinking about my mother’s attachment patterns as I continue to sort out my own. Why was it I never felt bonded with my mother?

Upon reflection, she was not bonded with her own mother and with her father it was such an insecure attachment that it explains her overcompensating dependence on my father and my brother he took over our father’s role after his death. This is perhaps at least part of her very deeply “mixed” feelings about me which unfortunately, along with my brother’s whispering, was played out by removing me from her final will. This hurtful act set me wondering about her all the more.

My mother left Germany when she was 22, in 1936. Against her parents’ will, she got on a boat, vomited the whole two weeks on the ocean, and arrived in New York City on a Saturday. There she was met by her very religiously observant Jewish uncle. He had walked from 96^th Street to Pier 5 on the far West Side way downtown. After Mom arrived, they left her luggage until Monday and walked all the way back.

She met my father on New Year’s Eve at the Empire Hotel at a dance for Jewish refugees. They were married two months later. My father was 14 years older than her and also had come to New York in 1936. However, he was more grounded because of his personality, and in addition, he had two brothers and his parents here, as well as a business to save from bankruptcy in the Depression.

The German war against Jews, which grew into the Holocaust in World War II, is the reason for so much in our lives. There was, in my deeply and broadly relational family, a sense of having

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landed. With all the disruption and all the losses and all the survival, having landed in America seemed to mean as much.

There was a fierce determination to continue being a village like the one in Bohemia in which this clan had grown up. Further, that determination was imbued with a commitment to humor and laughter. A kind of continuity of the good nature dad and the others all had shared as young boys, there was a prankish side that brought smiles! These were the Jewish boys of the town of 8,000 in the countryside of Sudetenland, just 30 miles from the German border.

I grew up with those who survived. When I went back to Tachau in 2002 with 32 extended Jewish family members, we found no Jews left. None! All that remains is in the seemly invisible Jewish graveyard. It is impossible to see or find unless you know exactly which bushes alongside the road are the entry point. We met with the mayor and were treated like royalty with our pictures on the front page of the local newspaper. We left a tree to be planted and a plaque that read: “In memory of the Jewish citizens of Tachov who perished in the Holocaust (1938–1945). The spirit of their Tachov lives on in us, their surviving generations. Dedicated June, 2002.” How could I not carry this history around?

For us, the German assault on Jews was the reason for displacement, the reason for fear as in the consistent dreams from which my mother woke up screaming night after night, believing she was being chased; for a sensitivity, like a covered over but ready to burst blister for a sensitivity that being Jewish means vulnerability to the worst kind of scapegoating, and it could just show up any time. Being “out there” has, for Jews, an inborn sense of danger connected to it.

I’ve come a long way in the journey of being part of this particular transitional generation, the bi-cultural girl in my high school class, the wife of someone who shared the same history, in the professional world at age 41 in the field of psychoanalysis, learning to speak my truth as never before within the precious context of deeper understanding and great compassion of my colleagues, supervisors, and friends.

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At my current stage of adulthood, I am feeling less personally vulnerable, but I worry for the world and for the Jews all over our world, hoping the trauma will die with my generation and our children will be free.

After all, as we read in the Passover story, we Jews needed 40 years in the desert upon our flight from Egypt. We needed two generations to be able to feel free enough from the experience of slavery to experience freedom more fully. For me personally the transmission of trauma, whether spoken or unspoken, exists. The underlying grief exists. The will to go on quite remarkably also exists.

Given my earlier thoughts about attachment, I imagine the extraordinary losses all at once. Separation from homeland, mother tongue, parents, family, school mates, neighborhoods, houses, the comfort food of childhood, and almost everything of origin. This is a pyramid of losses of almost everything familiar.

Thus I carry the trauma of the Holocaust with me as I go more and more deeply into American culture, as my children and grandchildren carry on.

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