The Lit Club themes during the war years reflected the curiosity of our former members and their desire to help one another understand the wider world and our place within it. Theme titles then were “1942–1943 World Scene: Intimate Portraits of the Little People of the World” and “Half the World Knows Not How the Other Half Lives” with presentations on books about India, the Congo, Russia, Canada (!) and the Middle East, amongst others, and in 1944–1945 members responded to Woodrow Wilson's well-known statement in The New Freedom: “Only free people can prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interests of their own.” Many explored the West's place in far off countries, expressing their interest with a rich assortment of literary choices.
“Born into a World at War.” What were the conversations like at those long-ago Lit Club meetings, as members reflected on their own times? How will future members of the Lit Club look back on our times with the same prescience that we have now for that time? Oh, how I wish I knew how this all will end.
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Gita's dining room table set for lunch. L to R: Christine, Carla, Diana, Frances, Carol, Constance |
Christine's Minutes On February 7, 2024, ten members of the Literature club gathered in Gita’s sun-filled solarium, as if in a treehouse with views of the river and the Palisades. Gita had prepared an elegant Valentine themed non-lunch that featured charcuterie, beet hummus, raspberries surround a heart shaped chevre, and of course, given Gita’s lovely European flair, white wine was served. President Constance rang the bell at 1 PM sharp. The minutes were read and accepted. The treasury still contains $170. Members recommended a few books: Less, by Sean Andrew Greer, Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray.
Constance announced that the nominating committee will consist of Carla, Frances and Christine, and that they will present a slate for the offices of president and vice-president at the Annual Meeting in March.
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A lovely harbinger of Valentine's Day: Gita's arrangement of raspberries and Brie |
The first essay we read from was called “War Babies,” by Maria Fleming. The author was born in 1943 into a working-class family in Providence, Rhode Island. When the father went off to war, Maria and her mother returned to her maternal family in Cleveland. There the young girl felt safe, in a matriarchal world, with a multitude of mothers. Her father’s return from the war was traumatic. He was traumatized by the war itself, by his sense of shame for what he perceived as his cowardice and fear. Like so many others, he repressed the memories, and was never able to fulfill his long-held hope to become a history teacher. Between the parents there opened up a “gulf of the unspoken war.”
We next read from Helena (Holly) Worthen’s essay “XXOO.” Because her father was a master at a private boarding school, Helen grew up both privileged and subservient. Her father was radically changed by the war: he returned as a pacifist, disillusioned by American ideals not lived up to; he was often loud and unpredictable and angry. He found a return to his old job depressing, as he could not fulfill his newfound ideas. The writer said that she eventually came to an understanding of her father, but that was mostly after his death.
“The Worm in the Apple” by John Dundas, the son of a British admiral and an American, niece of a diplomat. Dundas wrote that all his family described his father, before the war, as funny, capable, energetic, thoughtful and bright—a wonderful father to his three older sisters. Dundas’s father returned in 1945, a diminished man, who needed spinal surgery; he was not the same beloved father his sisters adored. The family moved to the US in 1949, and Dundas’s father died in 1951, when John was only 9.
Ursula Oppens’ parents left Hungary in 1938. Most of the family who stayed behind perished at Auschwitz. Of her mother’s 52 cousins, only 19 remained after the war. In her essay, “Silence,” Ursula Oppens explains how numerous family members helped Ursula’s parents when they came to America, but Ursula’s mother took a strong dislike to them. This meant that young Ursula grew up with even less family than she had remaining in Hungary. Her father attributed her mother’s antipathy to survivor’s guilt. They never spoke about what had happened in Hungary, either among themselves or to other family members. There was a sense that it was impossible to speak of one’s family without evoking their terrible ends.
In 1998, Ursula went with her mother back to Hungary, for her aunt’s 80th birthday. That was the first time the siblings ever spoke of their parents’ deaths.
In “Dissolving Repression: A Half-Century Report,” Howard Gardner wrote of his German Jewish parents leaving Germany in 1938, and settling in Pennsylvania, with a close extended family, whose adults all spoke German among themselves. But they did not speak of the Holocaust. In 1954, when Howard was eleven, he learned for the first time of two aunts who were liberated “as skeletons.” Influenced by various Harvard professors of German Jewish backgrounds, Howard studied the social sciences and psychology. Initially, his studies allowed him to maintain distance from his feelings and memories, but over time he affirmed the need to preserve memories. One of his many books was the very popular and important, Multiple Intelligences.
Eva Botstein was born in 1944, to Polish Jewish parents doing graduate studies in Zurich. When the war began, the Botstein’s remained in Switzerland, and all three children were born there. In Poland, their families went into hiding, or were killed. Eva’s maternal grandmother and an uncle managed to leave Poland after the war, coming first to Zurich and then to Mexico. With help from their relatives and others, Eva’s family got visa for the US in 1949. In “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” Eva speaks of a lifelong gratitude for the help they received. She was raised to believe in the importance of education—especially a Harvard education—and the need to find a useful career. For her, the legacy of the Holocaust was the need to make correct moral choices, to be reassured that one would not have been, nor ever be, complicit with evil. Eva Botstein grew up to become a pediatric cardiologist.
Finally, we met Carol’s dear friend, Christine Tanz. In “Hiding in the Open,” she writes of her Polish Jewish parents marrying in 1939, for the first of 4 times. In 1940, all Jews were ordered into the Cracow ghetto. Initially, Christine’s parents moved there, thinking it might be a safe haven. When it became clear this was not true, they bravely (?) rashly (?) left the ghetto and went by train to Warsaw. They always traveled separately, because, while certain characteristics and features, such as blond hair, blue eyes, and their language skills, convinced the couple they could escape capture, they felt they could manage better singly than coupled. Hence, every time they moved, they took on different names, and then had to marry again with their new names. In several stories, we learned of Christine’s father uncanny— and justified—confidence that he could elude the Germans; to this end he even suffered through an operation to reverse his circumcision. But once Christine’s mother was pregnant, they realized they could not stay in Warsaw. On the pretense of taking a vacation, they crossed the Vistula and rented a room; from there they could see the smoke of the Warsaw Insurrection in 1944. When she went into labor, Christine’s parents walked across the No Man’s Land, and Christine was born in a Russian military hospital. On Yom Kippur. After the war, the family went to Gdansk, then to France in 1948, and in 1951, they came to the states, ending up in Chicago, where Christine and Carol became great friends. Carol remembers the close family, and the enduring humor and resilience of Christine’s father. In her essay, Christine wrote of “the privilege to live an ordinary life.” She became a psycholinguist and studied language acquisition, and now lives in Tucson and makes public art.
Carol’s own experience, as a young child during the war, was different in many ways. Her father was a doctor, who worked at first in Texas, and was then sent to Japan. He did not see the battlefield. Meanwhile, Carol and her mother lived with her father’s parents, who surrounded her with love and attention. She does not remember her father’s homecoming in 1946, when she was 2. She remained close to her grandparents for the rest of their lives.
Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner
Recording Secretary“
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