Telling my parents' stories, in portrait and in landscape, Part Two

A Second Telling, In Landscape

After my classes had heard the first telling of my family’s stories, I suggested that I wanted to tell the stories again.  Only this time, I want to make clear how much of the outcome was due to the intervention in my family’s lives of other people.  The first time the stories were told in “portrait.”  Now I want to tell them in “landscape.”

There were the Russian soldiers who stopped Josef and Rosa as they fled Odessa, and who exhibited sufficient humanity to be charmed by three-year-old Alex’s bravura.  Yes, they robbed my family, but they let them live.  So many other fleeing Jews were not so “well treated.” 

My grandmother Rosa was staying with gentile friends in Warsaw, waiting for my father to come get her.  Those friends were risking their lives housing a Jew, as were the Polish farmer and his wife who took my feverish father in and cared for him and lied to the soldiers for him.  If any of them had been found out, they would have been killed, summarily.  They and their entire families
When my father and grandparents made it to Lithuania, they were welcomed into a community of Jewish refugees funded largely by the Joint Distribution Committee, an international coordinating body of Jewish philanthropy.  Jews from around the world and throughout recent decades had given money that “the Joint” might be able to help my father and his parents.  

Zwartendijk and Sugihara

The Curacao visa came by way of Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania.  Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official whom many consider “the Japanese Schindler,” had asked his superiors in Japan for permission to help the Jews.  They refused.  But he did it anyway.  He saved as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews by granting them the “paper” with which to travel across the Soviet Union to possible freedom.

I had long suspected that my father was someone that was helped by Sugihara.  Many years ago, on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., while entering the names of my great uncles Adam, Henrik, and Leon Szwarcman into the database of Holocaust victims and Solomon Szwarcman’s name into the list of survivors, I casually asked the man at the desk if he knew how I could find a list of names of those who got Sugihara’s visas.  “Well, we have the list right here,” he said. 

He handed me the twenty or so pages bound unceremoniously in a black cardboard folder.  There I found the names: Josef Szwarcman, Aleksandr Szwarcman and Golda Szwarcman.  He made copies for me, and I walked with eyes brimming with tears towards the quiet “Hall of Remembrance.”  I sat and wept uncontrollably, for more than 20 minutes, holding the photocopied pages, sobbing over them.

Sugihara appears to have been a man of character.  He was part of the consular team representing Japan in Manchukuo (at the time my mother was growing up in Harbin), and ended up in Europe because he asked to be reassigned, in response to the atrocities he witnessed during that occupation.  He had nothing to gain by helping the Jews of Eastern Europe, and reportedly his career suffered when the truth came out. 

This man, who couldn’t have anticipated my existence, was in every way responsible for it.  He had sufficient moral imagination to care for “the other,” these Jewish farmers, oddly clothed, marching with their scrolls, praying in their dead language.  Tribal people from the American West or Sub-Saharan Africa might have been more foreign to him, but even they might fit better with Japanese feudal mythology.

And yet, as different as they might be, he cared about them.  One estimate is that there are 40,000 descendants of the Jews that Sugihara cared about.  And all of my father’s story and mine, all of the successes of the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now the great-great-grandchildren of Josef and Rosa, are made possible because of that caring, because of Chiune Sugihara’s moral imagination.

Shanghai’s Jews

When my father got to Shanghai, he and his parents were given food and shelter by the Jews who were already there.  At the end of the 19th Century, hundreds of Jews, mostly from Iraq, seeking business opportunities, ended up in Shanghai and prospered.  They were of a different branch of the religion and a very different social class than their co-religionists from Eastern Europe and might have looked down their noses on their apparently ignorant, mostly rural cousins. 

Instead, they donated money and goods and time to assure that the newly arrived had a chance to start fresh.  Also helping with the relocation was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.  Decades of contributions to HIAS by anonymous Jews were now used to feed, clothe and shelter my father and his parents.

And there was the Henkin family, who were willing to overlook the brashness and over-confidence of this young man and who offered him a job and a career as a salesman.  It was Mr. Henkin who advised my father to take hair-nets, not currency.  (I have always suspected that he might have been the source of the $700, too.)  

A lifelong community

My mother had similar encounters with helping communities.  She fled Siberia for the unknown in Harbin.  She arrived as a toddler, but on the first day of class, she was adopted by her desk mate, Luba Patent, Luba’s loud brother Joe and their friends Vera and Nura.  All members of Harbin’s resident Jewish population, they took in this little hick shiksa and made her part of their extended family.  She became a sister, a full-fledged member of their community.  I grew up with the children of these friends as my cousins.  Friendships that were made when my mother was four lasted for almost 80 years across two continents, until only death ended them.

America

In the “ambient” American mythology, Alex and Tamara and Eric and Alice would cross the Pacific and arrive penniless, knowing no one, but, spirited and plucky and talented, would persevere from hard work alone.  In fact, without trying to take anything away from my parents’ talents or pluckiness, I know that, when they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by representatives of HIAS and by “the Joint.” Both organizations made sure that they had a place to stay, food to eat, clothing and medicine for their children, a sense of security.  Someone from the Joint found two possible jobs for my father, one in Seattle and one in Houston. 

And aren’t these provisions, available to my parents without request,  the birthrights we ought to promise to every human being: shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, safety, work?

Once my father was established as a salesman, his customers became a community, too.  They looked forward to his visits, opened their homes to him, invited him to their children’s weddings.  One child of a former customer visited my elderly father in a suburb of Chicago, 2,000 miles away from this son’s home, because “Alec” was an important part of their “family.” 

Of course, much of my father’s success was due to his knowledge of his products, his understanding of his customer’s business and his ability to communicate this to them.  But thinking he was successful on individual achievement alone is to ignore the community of good will and caring in which his work was embedded.

Communities for Eric and Alice

I could go on.  My brother benefitted from the insight and good management at NCR, who looked past his lack of education and saw the talent in him.  He married into a warm and loving clan that took and still takes very seriously the notion of “family.”  If anyone ever wanted to find a group to capture in a documentary on the role of family in the stability and prosperity of its members, Janie’s family would be the perfect focus. 

My loud and “foreign” parents were always welcomed with warmth and grace by Jane’s parents.  When Jane’s mother insisted on staying at the family farm in Minnesota, in spite of her blindness and the lack of any family members near by, the entire family, children and grand-children, scattered across the western half of the country, re-arranged their lives so that there was always some one who could stay at the farm with Mrs. Wiggert. 

My sister, so deserving of help, got the assistance she needed, because generations of people who had contributed to Brown University made possible a fully paid scholarship for the education of this quiet, talented immigrant girl from 3,000 miles away.   And those same funds paid for the fledgling computers from which she found her profession.

Communities for me and my children

My children, too, benefitted from the thousands of alumni of their elite colleges whose contributions helped us afford their tuition.  I could name, as could you, a dozen teachers and mentors who paid special attention to my development.  There is a legion of friends, mentors, teachers, communities that are, in part, responsible for my success and that of my brother and sister and our children and grandchildren.

As I have hinted above, I imagine that working closely with my father could, at times, be a bit thorny.  But Ray and Jeanette Wachter, the owners of the business for whom he worked for 25 years, supported him and his work.  And his family.  It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I learned that it was the Wachters who actually sent me to law school.  Every semester when the tuition bill came due, my father found a bonus waiting in his paycheck.  They never let me know that they did this; they never made themselves available for my thanks.  They died before I knew.  But my schooling, my career, are made possible by, are built upon their decency and caring.  Upon their moral imagination.

We, all of us, stand on the shoulders of historical and geographical communities.  Yes, our success is ours.  But it is also, always, an expression of the caring of these communities in which we are inevitably embedded.  When we only tell our stories in portrait, we miss this contribution.

By telling family stories twice, once in portrait and once in landscape, we can all regain contact with the moral imagination of those communities in which we are embedded.  After all, to the unnamed and unknown people who helped my parents survive and whose compassion is responsible for my existence, I am “the truly other.”  But for the moral imagination of generations of caring people, none of us would prosper. 

We should all tell our family's stories.  Twice.  Maybe your stories are not quite as dramatic as my father's and mother's, but the same thing will happen.  You will connect with the people and the communities that were the foundations upon which your family succeeded.

In a way, my father was right.  The American Dream isn’t a myth.  It is the illusion of solely individual achievement that is the fairy tale.  We have been telling the myth solely as portraiture, while ignoring the landscape.  Of late, Americans seem to have forgotten that there is no success without community, that embeddedness in community is our common and universal experience, that when someone fails, it is quite likely, in part, a failure of his or her community, and that we forget this basic truth at our peril, for people who don’t understand the debt they owe to community are bound to neglect it.