[I wrote the following in response to discussion of this photo from my father’s side of a family history Facebook site created and managed by Jesse Nasta of Wesleyan University.]
JESSE’S NOTES: The Greenbergs (cousins to the Beckers). Lower East Side of New York, 1914.
Back row, left to right: Beckie (Greenberg) Yanowitz, her sister Helen (Greenberg) Nemetz, her sister Bertha Greenberg.
Front row, left to right: their brother Joe Greenberg, their brother Julius Greenberg, and Beckie’s husband, Louis Yanowitz.
At 79, my brain is bifurcated about my age: on one hand, cultural conditioning says I’m pretty damned old and should be getting decrepit and could die at any moment; on another hand, I don’t feel “old,” and with some exceptions, I don’t think I act “old.” And at some inexplicable level, I’ve never believed I’m going to die. Enhancing what I know is oxygen to me, I am driven to keep reading and writing and occasionally teaching, and once lockdown is over, return to tennis doubles.
Enough of that crapola.
Probably like others, I have had a lot of personal issues resulting from this history, but I have valued my father’s “memoir” and, in that spirit, have been sporadically adding to my own web site and blog to leave curious descendants some idea of who I was and how I was influenced by family history.
Why did I put “memoir” in quotes just now? When my father started it, my brilliant but repressed mother, Mae (died December, 2017 at 98), demanded he not write about anything during their life together. He mostly stuck to this, and so we have a seriously truncated version that cuts us off from Ed’s perspectives on his decades of adult life before underaking the memoir. He had always wanted to be a writer (as have I), but this is his only creation that has seen a version of publication.
Yes, Ed thought he had killed his mother (and he writes that a couple of aunts also blamed him), and neither I nor my mother thought he ever got over that. I think he was depressed throughout his life. (creeping dementia started setting in about age 75, and he died a shell of himself at 85). Enraged as a child by Lou’s treatment of Becky, Ed nonetheless reconciled with him when he started having kids (I was the first), claiming he was doing it for the children; I’m not convinced this was his main motive, but who knows? His elder brother, Hy, never forgave Lou.
Desperate, I believe, to redeem his background by raising a happy family, and becoming a father just four years after his mother died, Ed (from my adult perspective on what I identified only in my early 40s as physical abuse) screwed up badly. I won’t go into that here, but I mention it as honesty about any bias I may embed in these comments. Only in recent years, in my 70s, have I begun to have compassion for the destructive forces in Ed’s life. I fear that some of my own self-sabotage in life resulted from practicing what he sometimes silently modeled.
Like Heidi, I had never seen a photo of a young Louis until now, and I find you’d one fascinating. I try to connect this image with the grandfather I remember. By my teens and probably earlier, I knew about his betrayal of his family (and especially Becky), but he was always so unflinchingly kind to me that I could never feel angry towards him. He had re-married to a woman to whom he was probably faithful, and she, too, doted on me (and my siblings). I looked forward to leaving our South Jersey chicken farm and spending a couple of weeks with them in Brooklyn every summer.
While I recognize the oldish man (he died at 65—of liver complications from alcoholism, I think) in the stiff youth photographed here, I can no more synthesize the young and the old Louis than I can connect the Grandpa Lou I knew with family lore about his having been a vile adult at some point into his marriage. I have always believed those claims, but In the middle of that last sentence, my usually active critical-thinking self suddenly woke up from decades of unquestioning trust for those reports with no ability to confirm their accuracy.
Projecting myself into old photos of any kind has long been a habit of mine (often painful), and here, on the surface, Lou looks to me to be a young man with so much promise. I guess at that age Ed was, too, and despite his guilt and depression and relative failure—in my eyes—as a parent, he did make a lot of his life, like getting a college degree and becoming a teacher in his early 40s (alongside my mother at the same time—models of never-giving-up that have always influenced me).
My grandmother Rebecca (I have only called her “Becky” since Jesse started his search) died so young that the few photos I’ve seen don’t hit me as especially different. Nonetheless, I find this image intriguing, and I find myself trying to penetrate her mind and feelings, too—and her ignorance of what her life was soon to become. My mental image of her is uniquely of a frail, little woman on her hands and knees scrubbing stairways for money to support her children.
I previously knew about no one else in the photo, so that I read discussions about them with mild interest but no emotional connection. That, no doubt, is a weakness of mine from who-knows-what source.
When I was suspended/expelled from a South Jersey one-room schoolhouse near the end of 3rd grade (another story not unrelated to behavior probably driven by family history), Ed took me to Allentown, where I met Uncle Julius and his wife (whose name I used to know). My only memory of this excursion is their kind of small candy-and-similar-products store, where Julius gave me my pick of candy they sold. O the long-term influence of tiny acts of kindness!
I find it impossible to keep up with all the family intricacies that relatives are sharing via Jesse’s astounding willingness and industry (but then, he is an historian, isn’t he?) to collect and organize all this data. But I’m certainly glad the information is available.
Jesse: are you collecting all this somewhere other than facebook to pass down as new family members emerge and old ones disappear?