The Americanist

Part One

part one i I was born in Chicago, August 4, 1912. Both of my parents were dead by my tenth year and virtual strangers to me before they died—my mother in 1921, in the Pottenger Sanitorium in Monrovia, California ; my father a year later. Nor was I in rapport with relatives, friends, or other informants who might have been able to ‹ll in the gaps of family history had I been curious enough or geographically close enough to consult them. The snippets they provided never coalesced into a consecutive story. But over the years, I did pick up a smattering of alleged facts about the short lives of Rose Weinstein (1883–1921) and Henry Jacob Aaron (1879–1922), both small children when they emigrated from their different Russian birthplaces to New York City. I never tried very hard to ‹nd out the circumstances that brought them, why and when the two families moved on to the Midwest, and what happened to them after they had settled in Chicago. The few scraps I picked up came from anecdote and hearsay. One story relates to my father’s mother, who long outlived him. It seems that during one tough period, she preserved family dignity by a clever subterfuge: would-be dispensers of charity about to investigate reports of a hungry household were put off by the sight of scrubbed children in scrubbed rooms and by the smell of turnips cooking on the stove. Other reminiscences have to do with one of her grandfathers, who had lived in Baltimore for a time in the 1840s before he returned to his homeland, and with a – 9 – second grandfather (or was it the same one?), who remembered the frozen corpses of French soldiers, their blue uniforms visible in the snow, on the road to Smolensk. Grandma Aaron was my last link to a world that then seemed to me constricted by musty orthodoxies and totally incompatible with my secular America. A pious and time-weathered woman, she must have felt responsible for the religious grooming of her eldest son’s parentless kids. In her eyes, we had stopped being Jews even before the death of our parents, and she did what she could to retrieve us. It was too late in my case. I was like one of those New England children captured and “Indianized” during King Philip’s War who refused repatriation and chose to remain with their captors. My unwillingness and inability to “come home” to what I considered to be a foreign place wounded her deeply and con‹rmed her worst fears. Even before I married a gentile, she considered me lost. Had she known that my future father-in-law would urge me to change my name before I married his daughter (to him all Jews were “rebaters” and dollar chasers), I doubt it would have surprised her. I know even less about my mother’s murky family history and her early years than I do about my father’s. It was as if large segments of her life had been blotted or distorted by rumor or gossip. From the wispy recollections of her in-laws that came to me secondhand , she appears to have been more socially and intellectually unconventional than my father’s people and more casual about religious observances. Apparently her opinions and style of living didn’t sit well with the in-laws, who, while showering her with superlatives, remarked sotto voce on her extravagance and impulsiveness , the very qualities that in retrospect drew me to her. I like to think that, like me, she envisioned an America that incorporated and superseded the older civilizations from which it derived. In any event, I play with the fancy that one important event in her life foreshadowed my introduction to American history. That event was the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, a few months before my third – 10 – birthday. Among the notable nonsurvivors aboard the torpedoed ship were the homespun inspirational journalist Elbert Hubbard and his wife, Alice, revered names in our household. A decade before, my mother had been a member of Hubbard’s Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York, and I and my brothers and sisters grew up in the aura of its founder, “Fra Elbertus,” the sage. His strenuous apothegms and preachments echo dimly in my family history. The story has it (for...