Living and Dreaming the Traumatic History of My Parents: My Road to Psychohistory

The processing of transgenerational trauma is the most powerful force in my development as a human being. Born in Volgograd in the former Soviet Union, I grew up in Ukraine, in a nurturing, cultured, and very small family, not knowing why it was small until I had the courage to read my parents’ notes and journals, long after they passed away. Reading these notes was painful and therapeutic at the same time.

I was raised by two Jewish parents and only one set of grandparents. I always felt loved and nurtured by my father, inspired by my mother, filled with humility by my grandmother, and

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protected by my grandfather. My mind and soul had absorbed all the rich offerings of Russian culture, laced with people’s suffering and sorrow. I was lucky—I finished school at 16; went to medical school (overcoming the 1:100 quota limiting Jews); went into neurology (a profession that I have always been fascinated by and that I excel at); and married, having two beautiful children who I am so proud of.

Suddenly, we had to emigrate! Our exodus from the former Soviet Union started in early spring of 1989 as I was finishing my night shift in an academic hospital’s ER, in Moldavia, where we lived at the time (sent there by the Soviet government to pay for our free education). The Soviet Union was collapsing, and Moldavians were declaring their independence by calling “to drown Russians in the blood of Jews.” The scaffolding of our lives was crashing down. We had been taught that socialism was the best place to be: we were “equal!” Yes, equal in getting paid very little, in getting most essentials as under-the-table favors, in not having a choice to protect ourselves in any way, in not being allowed to express allegiance to any faith, etc. We were equal in our misery, but it was our collective misery, and we didn’t know better.

On that early spring morning, it felt like someone pressed a button in my solar plexus—it felt like pogroms were about to break out and that my children would have no future. Six months later, we left, stateless and moneyless—two adults and two children (three and four years old), with four suitcases of “stuff,” two kiddie backpacks with toys, and $360 in our pockets. Our first destination was Vienna, where representatives of Jewish organizations were meeting families like ours, surrounded by German-speaking police with huge dogs that were taller than our kids. It brought to mind Soviet movies about Nazi atrocities of WWII, including the Babi Yar massacre, Jewish ghettos, and the Nazi concentration camps. There were the same type of dogs, language, and unmarked train cars. Eighteen months later, after being in “camps” (places that we were assigned to live and where we had to be accounted for every evening) in Austria and Italy, doing any work that came our way, including scrubbing kitchens and toilets, we reached our destination: America, the “land of opportunities,” as my father who loved America so much would say. Everyone said we had great resilience to “overcome anything.” To tell the truth, I did not understand what they were talking about; we were living the American dream!

Twenty years later, my world was in crisis. My mom died

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due to a medical system malfunction, and my son was diagnosed with leukemia, a consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear system’s disaster. Did I identify myself too much with the systems I belonged to, the American healthcare (which was more about the business of medicine than the Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm”) and Soviet “power” that allowed me to become a physician? My mom’s words come to mind here: “Only in Soviet power the Jews could become doctors and engineers, and not only shoemakers and tailors.” (It was true—both of my parents became professionals in the post-war former Soviet Union; they were both highly regarded by their peers and the people they interacted with.)

From that time and on, I started to note dreams, with two main themes: one, endless rows of humming figures, not particularly threatening, marching toward me, even “transcending” me, the observer; and two, flashes of raging horses running and making weird noises.

For years, I had an unusual relationship with sleep, as I needed only about three hours of sleep a night to be able to function. This made me glad since it left more time for reading, friends, and volunteering. I had never remembered my dreams. So, when it was time to analyze my own dreams in psychoanalytic training, there was nothing to analyze, just the same humming marching figures and raging horses.

Then I read my parents’ notes; notes about things they never told me; notes that shocked me, leading to an “Aha!” moment: I finally understood my dreams! The notes revealed the following: both my mother’s and my father’s families were traumatized by the 20^th century’s anti-Semitic rage-filled acts of the Russian Tsar, Stalin, and Hitler!

My maternal grandmother was the most generous and kind person I’ve ever met, but she never smiled and never cried, and I always wondered why. I felt kinship and deep empathy toward her, and I brought her chocolates from kindergarten—everyone always gave me chocolates, which I stored in the pocket of my apron. Subsequently, I found out that my grandma had to watch three of her older brothers “quartered” in Petliura’s pogroms in Ukraine. (Petliura’s slogan was: “Kill the Jews, and save the Ukraine.”) My great uncles were killed for belonging to a group that wanted literacy and equality for Jewish youth. In 1940, one year before Hitler’s troops invaded, my grandma was sent to a Siberian gulag by the

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Stalinist regime for being a “Zionist sympathizer” because she kept the diary of her beloved brother, and someone told on her. After the war, she returned home with rheumatic fever, a broken spine, and severe joint disease.

My maternal grandfather, who was one of three elders of the small Jewish community (shtetl), barely survived the pogroms and was left with a broken and deformed spine and one blind eye. During the time when their town was transformed into a ghetto, he and his three children were hiding underground. My mom was six at that time. The only story she told me before she passed away was about her coming out to the surface under cover of dark night to collect potato peels and some water to feed her family. She was semi-cheerful when she talked about it: “You know, I had blue-green eyes and blond hair, and looked like a Ukrainian girl, so it was safe.” (Perhaps she always wanted me to feel safe, and this was her way.)

I never knew my paternal grandparents, as they both perished during WWII. My paternal grandfather, an engineer in Romania, after getting his family across the Dniester river when they were running, under fire, from the Nazi-occupied Romania to the USSR that had secured a non-invasion treaty with Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (little did they know it would not last), went back to help others and drowned. My father was only 12 years old at the time. My paternal grandmother died shortly after this from malaria, in Kazakhstan. She was buried in a collective grave somewhere there, and all the efforts of my dad to find her burial site were fruitless.

My father’s uncle, a physician from Czechoslovakia, was sent to Auschwitz with his young wife and one-year-old son during the Nazi occupation. He was a physician, and he survived, but his family did not. In 1945, after the war was finished, my dad’s uncle sent a seven page letter to my dad’s family, where he described all the horrors of Auschwitz. The most horrifying lines were about searching the camp for his family, and some older person explaining to him: “Look at those stars in the sky—your family is there now; they are safe.” It took a year for the letter to find my dad, and he responded, but it appears to have been too late—the uncle never replied. To his last days, my dad was looking for his uncle. He never told me the story. Was this his way to protect me from these horrors?

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Another “Aha!” moment came about when I read Dan Hurley’s 2013 article, “Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes” (Genetic Literacy Project). As I read it, my insides felt like they were sinking and my chest was splitting. Hurley reported that epigenetic transmission of trauma is like “molecular scars” adhering to our genes, not letting the genes be expressed naturally. The DNA remains the same, but our tendencies in responding to life events change; and this is carried into further generations. So, all people whose grandparents (who they may never have met) experienced the horrors of pogroms, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, massacres in Africa, child neglect and abuse, or absence of parents, have invisible molecular scars on their DNA. One of the fascinating things is that these scars determine not only the deficits in one’s developments, but also capacities for resilience.

Unfortunately, limitations of space do not allow for either the details of the science or for extensive immersion into the historical events of my family, with all the “why’s” of those events. Nevertheless, knowing this enlightened me. It allowed me to understand the answers to a lot of “why?” questions people ask me, such as: “Why do you love this country so much, with all its inequality and corruption?” “Why do you do so much non-profit work?” “Why are you so passionate about helping other people in a country where altruism is not popular?”

For me, America has truly been “the land of opportunities” that my father loved so much. Since arriving to New York in 1991, I passed the medical licensing exams, completed the neuro-residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the neuro-rehabilitation fellowship at NYU, and worked in the NYU’s Brain Injury Unit and the Multiple Sclerosis Center. Later, I was trained in psychoanalysis and earned two master’s degrees in science education and medical business administration. While reinventing myself after huge personal losses, I started the non-profit organization that helps the neurologically impaired and their families, building support teams around them and protecting them from the faults and blind spots of the medical system machine. My desire is not just to help and fix anymore, but to empower people and to be a part of the transformation of groups and society at large.

In psychohistory, I feel like a beginner. I devote much of my time to learning more and disseminating information: recording conferences to make psychohistorical knowledge available online, creating publishing companies (ORI Academic Press and Mind-

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Mend Publishing), and starting a peer reviewed online interdisciplinary journal (MindConsiliums). I work with the International Psychohistorical Association and the Psychohistory Forum to spread their message to mental health practitioners. As the administrator for and the faculty of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ORI), I am bringing psychoanalysts, social workers, and others to psychohistory. My dream now is to establish a transdisciplinary training program merging psychohistory and psychoanalysis.

Friends and family tell me that I cannot save the world. They ask why I do work that is not seen and usually not acknowledged, why I publish other people’s work, but not my own. They want to know what the secondary gains are from my sleepless nights, which include helping people who often cannot even pay me for my work. I wonder to what extent transgenerational trauma has “programmed me” to be driven to learn and heal others. But my ultimate goal is to bring neurobiology and psychoanalysis together at psychohistory conferences. This is worth sacrificing sleep to achieve.

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