A Psychohistorian and His Father (article)

The three great influences on my life were the hospital, my father, and my mother. I was in and out of various hospitals from infancy to 13 years of age and the hospital dominated my consciousness. During my stays in the hospital for cancer treatments, I twice overheard physicians state that I would not live through the night and that my parents should be summoned. They were wrong about this and many other things as well. Thus, I often came to question authority, including

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my father. This paper will focus on my father, Bernard Shneidman, and his influence on my life as well as on certain decisions I have made as an historian.

My father was born in the shtetl (Jewish village) of Kalinovka in Ukraine in Tsarist Russia in 1895 or 1901. There was uncertainty as to the date of his birth and even his very name (Berl, Boris, Buzzik, Dov, or Bernard, depending upon who called and what language was used). He was the eldest son of Wulf (also Velvel or Zev) and Wulf’s second wife Rivka (also Reisel), both of whom were murdered by the Germans in June, 1942, with the aid of Ukrainian collaborators.

His father, my grandfather, was born in 1866 as one of at least four sons and one daughter. To confuse Tsarist military authorities, each of these brothers had a different last name. One was called “Shneiderman,” another “Shneidman,” and a third “Shnaiderman.” Familial confusion was heightened by the giving away within the family of a firstborn son to honor a pledge. My father grew up thinking this actual nephew was his brother and, even once he knew the real relationship, would like to tell the shocking tale of one of his brothers marrying his sister. My father and his brothers were Orthodox Jews who studied in Hebrew school. They were trained in the family occupations of watchmaking and the manufacturing of kvass (fermented fruit juice) and illegal vodka. Their father’s second wife was somehow related to Trotsky, a fact unknown to me until sometime in the 1960s.

My father, according to his version, joined the Red Army, became an officer, and served under Trotsky until Trotsky formed an alliance with the anti-Semitic anarchist Makhno. After this he went west where he had adventures before reaching Cherbourg in France where he took a boat for Newark, using Shneidman as his name. At about the same time, his nephew who was raised as his brother went to Palestine where he changed his name, adding to the confusion of who was who. Only after the creation of the State of Israel did my father and he find each other. Most of the family who stayed behind in Russia were murdered by the Germans in World War II.

My father went to New York where he got a job as a trolley conductor and went to night school to study pharmacy. In 1927 he married my mother, dropped out of school, and opened a laundry while doing some watch repairing on the side. My father had Yiddishkeit. He was not religious, but he loved Yiddish culture. Even after I had become literate in Yiddish, he would read Yiddish poems and stories to me.

But Bernard Shneidman never quite made it in the United States. He was a Marxist. Frequently there was not enough money in our home for clothes — for which my numerous hospitalizations for cancer treatments were blamed — but there was always enough money for books, magazines, and the right causes. I learned to read The Worker and Freiheit. However, my father insisted that to get the facts the New York Times or Herald-Tribune should be read as well. At least once a week a “fascist” paper like the Sun should be read. From the age of seven, I was involved in politics — collecting food for the Spanish Republic or organizing pickets around candy stores that sold Japanese goods after the 1937 Japanese attack on American and British ships in Chinese waters (the Panay Incident). My identification was with the underdog, the oppressed. One of the reviewers of my history of Aragon commented that I obviously did not like the feudal aristocracy; he was right. But I had no awareness that I had personalized my political reporting and assumed my father’s values while questioning his authority.

It took years of analysis to understand my father. Despite his bravado, he was a frightened man who was threatened by me and not only because of the constant drain of my hospitalizations. Almost from my earliest memories there was a power struggle. While he took a hidden pleasure in my academic progress, he had a vested interest in demonstrating my stupidity. Since I could never compete with the exploits of his childhood according to the stories he told us of his youth he was champion at everything, which I never quite believed the only area open to me was intellectual. If he quoted a source, I would check that source and read everything I could find that the source had written. To win in the power struggle, I would not only have to know the replies, but I would have to know his side of the position better than he did. In college, I became a debater and could win on either side of the proposition.

I have been criticized for over-footnoting. This is true. My scholarship is thorough but polemical. The text and footnotes are not only used to present and substantiate my position, but to

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cite and refute different views. However, I have no difficulty in altering a position when new evidence is presented or insights dawn. Whereas my father was rigid in defending a monochromatic solution, I became a champion for advancing a multifaceted, over-determined view.

Intellectually, I would have preferred becoming a historian of the origins of Russia. But that was impossible during the years I went to college because universities did not offer courses in early Russian history. In college I took Spanish which I liked because I had become interested in understanding Spain. For me, the origins of modern civilization were the Middles Ages. If you understood the origins you would understand the present because you would deal with the evolution from past to present. Somehow, my research led to a relatively unexplored area of Spanish history, the Kingdom of Aragon, which fascinated me. The chief city of that kingdom was Barcelona, and I knew about Barcelona from the Spanish Civil War. I spent my last two years in college writing term papers about Aragonese history. Since a PhD was a union card necessary to earn a living, reality determined that it would be in Aragonese history and not Russian history. My first published article, however, was on Russian history. My research was always on Russian or Spanish history and quite polemical. My analyst once commented that I was on too many barricades. He was right. I had to learn to be selective.

I was a Democrat and I am still an elected member of the County Committee. Quite early I became fascinated with the local Tammany Club which I joined and became an active speaker in both English and Yiddish. My father would have preferred the ALP (American Labor Party), but after the Hitler-Stalin Pact I had little use for anything political out of Moscow. In college and graduate school I took courses in political theory and constitutional law. Unconsciously, I was attempting to understand the difference between the democratic society in which I lived, which my father had embraced, and the imperial, capricious, system by which my father ruled. I liked Aristotle, hated Plato; liked [St.] Thomas, hated [St.] Augustine; liked Locke, hated Hobbes. I constantly preferred not only those theorists who supported an open, multifaceted society rather than the closed, monochromatic one, but also, those theorists and systems I could use to counter my father’s authoritarianism. I wanted to know the origins and development of government and law. I wanted stability, not whim. Constitutional government would not only abolish my father’s ukase (Tsarist Imperial Decree), but also protect a child against the monster hospital. Consciously, I became a liberal. I had no problem integrating Marx into my personal theory and consider Edward Bernstein, the democratic, reformist socialist, to be the legitimate version, while Lenin was the authoritarian revisionist who never understood Marx’s humanity.

Struggling with my father, I found I could win. That battle reinforced my battle with the hospital. Authorities did not have all the answers. I could chart my own course.

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