I just gave a talk at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, at Loyola University, about this disparity between the rich and those that are getting by. What does this say about the American Dream? In order to provide some perspective, I asked that they listen to me tell my family’s stories. And, in fact, I asked them to listen to the stories, twice. Once in portrait, once in landscape.
The First Telling, In Portrait
Every semester, I try to show my students the limits of the common understanding of the American Dream. There isn’t nearly the upward mobility that the current mythology suggests, where anyone can rise to the top, and that each generation can always be better off than the one before it. As we have seen in the last two postings, we live in a society where the rich are unfathomably wealthy, and most of our families are struggling to just “get by.”
But try telling my father that the American Dream was a myth! As far as he was concerned, he and his family had lived the American Dream. They had first hand experience. They were living proof. They came to this country with two young children and $700 worth of hair-nets, and look what a success their family had become!
My father was born Aleksandr Szwarcman in Odessa, Russia, a month after the Czar abdicated in response to the Russian Revolution. His father, Josef Szwarcman, a well to do Polish accountant and businessman working for a Russian company, and a keen observer of his political environment, sensed that the family might do well to move back to Warsaw. He and his wife (Golda at birth, later Rosa) and their two children, 3 and 5 years old, returned to Poland by train. On the way, they were stopped and questioned by the Red Army. My Aunt Mura, the five year old, says that my father, the three year old, wagged his finger at the soldiers and indignantly stated to the soldiers, “You should not kill my father!” The soldiers responded with humor, and let them pass, after taking all of their valuables.
In spite of this loss, Papa grew up in Warsaw in comfort, with servants in a big house. The family was ethnically Jewish, and Josef hired an Orthodox tutor to help his son through a bar mitzvah, but religion was never a big part of their lives. As he became an adult, Papa didn’t have a profession; he was probably a bit of a dilettante.
But, as Hitler came to power in neighboring Germany, and as the Nuremberg laws were passed, my grandfather decided that things might get very bad for the Jews of Poland, and he quietly began liquidating the family’s assets. My Aunt Mura by this point had married and moved away, but my grandparents and my father were still in Warsaw when Hitler’s Blitzkrieg entered Poland on September 1, 1939.
September 1939
My father heard the news and immediately started walking east, out of town. (South was towards Czechoslovakia, which the Germans had invaded earlier. North was the Baltic Sea. East meant the Soviet Union and its notoriously anti-Semitic Red Army, but East was the only direction available.) On the road from Warsaw, my father came upon Josef, also walking east. Neither was accompanied by Rosa, who apparently was still in Warsaw. My father agreed to go back into the city to get her, in spite the Nazi occupation.
My father and my grandmother were both blond and blue-eyed, and could pass for Catholic Poles. Papa found Rosa at a neighbor’s house. He urged her to go with him immediately, but she insisted on going home and taking some of their belongings. That first attempt to flee didn’t work, and by the time they were able to set off again, conditions had deteriorated sufficiently that my father insisted that they leave their belongings and travel as quickly as possible.
Walking through the Polish countryside, my father noticed that he had a toothache. The tooth swelled, and it was clear that it was infected. By the time they stopped at a farmhouse for help, my father was feverish. The Polish farm family took them in.
The woman of the couple heated prunes in milk to boiling, and applied them directly onto my father’s gums. Although extraordinarily painful, this succeeded in drawing out the infection. As my father lay in bed, recovering, German soldiers knocked on the door, looking for fleeing Jews. The farm woman said that there were no Jews there, that they were free to look, but that they should be careful, since one of the cousins (pointing to my father) had typhus. The soldiers left in haste.
Papa and Rosa finally made it to Lithuania, where thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe had gathered. They were reunited with Josef. Josef’s brothers were less fortunate. Adam and Henrik were lost in the Holocaust. Leon was able to move to Paris, but when the Germans overran France, he, too, was engulfed by the Shoah. Solomon, the youngest, survived the camps and ultimately moved to the States. I met him only once, when I was a child. I vaguely remember an elderly man with no teeth and a blue tattoo on his forearm.
Pearl Harbor Day
Josef secured visas ostensibly to emigrate to Dutch-owned Curaçao, and transit visas to get there, through Japan. The only way to get out would be to travel by train across the entire Soviet Union. It took them until December of 1941 before they finally made it to Kobe, Japan. The exact date was December 8, 1941. Given the International Dateline, this is more remembered in the U.S. as December 7th, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. They were hoping to secure visas to come to the U.S., but the U.S. consulate was closed and the Japanese, now involved in a world war, were not accommodating. Their only choice was to fall back to Shanghai, China, an international city which required no “papers” to enter or leave. They became part of the Jewish Ghetto in Shanghai.
Permission to leave the Ghetto was tightly controlled by the Japanese who had invaded China. Curfews were rigidly kept. Papa told me a story about how he and a large group of friends had had to sneak back into the Ghetto one evening after curfew. Someone (probably Jewish) told the authorities. The Japanese reacted violently. They lined the violators against a wall and started executing them, one by one, left to right. My father was third from the end and, miraculously, the Japanese officer got tired of this sport and stopped the killing before he reached my father.
In Shanghai, Papa found a job and a profession. Always a friendly person, with a “gift for gab,” my father was hired by Mr. Henkin to work as a salesman at his department store, and Mr. Henkin taught him how to sell. Around the corner from the store was a little café, owned by Alexandra and Tamara Alexeyeva, mother and daughter. Papa said that Tamara thought he was cute, so always gave him free cream puffs when he came in. Tamara, my mother, denied ever doing this.
Tamarachka from Bodaibo
Mama was born in Bodaibo, Russia, a small mining town in Siberia, on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Her father was an Estonian Jewish businessman who had ended up in Siberia either because of a pogrom or because he was seeking business opportunities, both stories told by my mother.
My grandmother Alexandra was a poor Russian Orthodox seamstress of Byelorussian descent. When the Revolution heated up, it became unsafe to stay in Russia, and Tamara and Alexandra joined many émigrés in moving to Harbin, Manchuria.
Mama was four when she got to Harbin, just ready to begin school. She was a bright student, learning English and some French, ending up at graduation as the class valedictorian. She made life-long friends in Harbin. But when China was invaded by Japan and Manchuria became the Japanese protectorate of Manchukuo, it was again time to leave.
I never got the story straight about how they arrived in Shanghai (somehow with a stop at Tien Tsin, now Tianjin) nor how they could afford to own a restaurant, the “Malyenkiy (Little) Café.” At some point in the thirties, Tamara married Josef Sacher, an official of the German government and, perforce, a Nazi. In 1939 my brother, Eric Sacher, was born in Shanghai. A divorce followed, maybe because Joe Sacher wanted Eric to be a Hitler-jungen, and Tamara did not. Eric remembers our grandmother Alexandra, but she died sometime in the early forties of complications from hypertension.
Cream puffs or not, my parents met and married and, in August of 1946, had a little girl, my sister Alice. Right after the war, Josef and Rosa Szwarcman were able to emigrate to the U.S., moving to New York to live with my Aunt Mura and the remnants of Rosa’s family, most of whom had left Europe before the war.
Visas to the US
It wasn’t until 1947 that my family got visas to come to the U.S. Papa, the family story goes, spent the crossing chasing after 13 month old Alice, who had decided to learn to walk on the boat coming over.
They landed in San Francisco. Papa, who had become an excellent salesman in Shanghai, spoke no English, so other work had to be found. He was told of a job as a longshoreman in a place called Seattle. He moved there and then sent for the rest of the family after he was settled.
The Swartzman family (as they now spelled the name) was never destitute, but they started those early years in the new country with very little money. Papa loaded ships while he learned English (well enough that, years later, he routinely beat his college educated son at Scrabble).
Eric and Jane
My brother spent his teen years as the son of a working class family. He worked as a bagger at the Safeway, spent time fixing up his 1939 Pontiac, and didn’t think much about going to college. But, boy, could he take things apart and put them back together again, particularly if they were electronic. The basement was always stuffed with amplifiers and speakers in various stages of construction or repair. Eric fell in love with Jane, the first woman he ever dated. In order to be ready to ask her to marry him, he got a steady job right out of high school, repairing cash registers for the National Cash Register Company.
He was a quiet young man, shy, but reliable and clearly talented. The Company promoted him to supervisor. And, when, in the early sixties, the Company became NCR and was investing heavily in computers, Eric was tagged as someone worth training. They sent him and his young family to Dayton, Ohio, to train as a computer repairman. From Dayton he traveled around the country taking apart and putting back together that generation of mainframe computers. And they always worked better after he did.
More training and more promotions followed. Someone at NCR recognized the advantage of having testing equipment that could find where amongst the circuitry of a mainframe computer the problem most likely lay. Eric headed up that research project, and NCR and he have a number of patents to show for the innovations he and his team brought to the field. Leaving NCR, Eric founded his own company, the modestly named “Serendipity Systems,” to develop and capitalize on his ideas and expertise.
Through the ups and downs of the computer industry over the last 20 years, Eric’s expertise and talents have been rewarded. And the family of this working class kid from the “greaser” side of Seattle is well established in the upper middle class. A son and a daughter went to college, and another daughter has spent 30 years as a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur. Eric’s grandkids are in college and on their way up the economic ladder.
Alice and Bill
Alice was fairly young during the working class period of my parents’ early years. Papa had learned enough English to become a salesman again, and his natural talent and out-going personality carried him far. People simply liked him.
By the time Alice was in junior high school, Papa was employed as a successful salesman for a family-owned regional wholesaler of yardage goods. Papa would travel around the Pacific Northwest and later up to Alaska and down to California, telling customers what they should stock. That extraordinary self-assurance was sometimes irritating if you were his son or his co-worker, but it went over well with the customers, and they made money listening to him.
Alice, intelligent, thoughtful and extraordinarily hard-working, skipped a grade in elementary school, graduated from one of the largest high schools in the city as valedictorian, and was awarded a National Merit Scholarship, which she took with her to study at Pembroke College within Brown University. She was given a full scholarship. Not only the first person to go to college in her family, but to an Ivy League college at that!
The year she left for college, we moved out of rental property and into a one and half story bungalow that my parents managed to buy. Things were going well, and the family was solidly middle class
.
Alice was not sure what she wanted to do after college, but she knew that she enjoyed working with the computers at the school’s language lab, and she was very good at it. By her senior year, 1967, the computer industry was hot, and she decided to be part of it. She had her pick of job offers, but took one in San Francisco, working as a systems analyst for Bank of America.
Her boss, Bill, became her boyfriend and then her husband. They left Bank of America to start their own extremely successful computer consulting business, which they ran for 30 years. She and Bill have traveled the world many times over and have retired to a quiet life, living well off of their earlier success.
Papa is promoted to salesmanager
Papa was made salesmanager at the company, promoted by the owners, Ray and Jeanette Wachter, over their own sons. While he didn’t always get along with the sons, he “made a nice living.” Mama put aside her interest in further education and worked, first as a seamstress, her mother’s occupation, and then as a retail saleswoman. The family was crossing the border into the lower reaches of the upper-middle class.
Just before I entered high school, my parents bought a beautiful, newly built, four-bedroom, three bath home in one of the nicer areas of the city, with a balcony that Alex and Tamara spent hours on, gazing at their view of Lake Washington, and with doctors and lawyers and businesspeople as their neighbors.
In my teen years, we were able to afford a good life, never luxurious, but never wanting. There was no question that this last child of this immigrant family would go to college. No one doubted his ability to achieve his goal of going to law school. When I got into an elite and very expensive school, how to afford it was never discussed with me.
My family
Today, I am a professor teaching health systems management to undergraduates, an emeritus faculty member of a well-ranked school of public health, a former dean, partner in a law firm, and married to a woman with a Ph.D. My children have gone to elite “Northeastern” colleges and are launched towards successful careers in medicine, clinical psychology and social justice advocacy.
The 20th Century certainly threw a lot at my parents. My father was repeatedly threatened with death, but managed to survive on talent and charm and, of course, a bit of luck. My mother, with great intelligence and strong character, rose from Siberian peasantry to become the matriarch of a successful family. Their children are financially secure, with five college and post-graduate degrees and a handful of patents among them. Their grand-children are solidly upper-middle class, just two generations away from the boat.
My parents’ stories are the script of the American Dream. Come with nothing, but be talented and work hard, and the sky is the limit on how much you can achieve. This is the ambient mythology propagated in late 20th Century America. This country is the land of opportunity, and if you are the right individual, you can capitalize on that opportunity for your own and your family’s gain.
When I tell these stories to people, there is usually a strong emotional response. They feel my pride in my parents’ accomplishments, and they are pleased by a story with a happy ending. In addition, the stories, as told above, reinforce their own acceptance of the ambient mythology. They have been told and they believe that the difference between success and failure in 21st Century America is individual talent and individual hard work. My father believed that, too. Wasn’t he living proof?
But the data are compelling that this ambient myth is not accurate. How do we reconcile the data and the story?
By telling the story a second time. But this time, instead of focusing on the individuals involved, telling the story “in portrait,” we should emphasize all of the people, organizations and communities that made my families survival and success possible, telling the story this time “in landscape.”
No comments:
Post a Comment