The Case against Modernity: My Mother versus My Grandmother
The desecration of Judaism and sanity in the true story of one Jewish family
By
David Gottfried
My Grandmother was born in 1898 in a shtetl (small village) in Russian-occupied Poland. She was one of ten half-starved Jewish siblings.
My Grandmother’s first three siblings all died in infancy of diptheria, before my Grandmother was born. Distraught with grief, my great grandparents sought the intercession of a “Tzadik.” A Tzadik is a very, very good man. His prayers may have more weight than the prayers of the most learned Rabbi. A Tzadik does more than scrupulously utter every prayer and perform every Jewish ritual at the appointed time. He is a man who never, ever cons or rips off anyone, Jew or gentile, in business. When a Tzadik prays, the Lord is listening.
The Tzadik blessed my great grandparents and blessed my great grandmother’s womb, and he decreed: All your Children, and all your children’s children, will have normal life spans. All of the seven children born after the Tzadik’s blessing had life spans that were normal by contemporary standards.
In 1905 and 1906, during the failed first revolution against the Tzar, my Uncle Morris was slated to be sent to Siberia because of his affiliation with a Marxist outfit that tried to assassinate the Tzar. My great grandparents found out that Morris’s imprisonment was imminent, and Morris, my Great Grandmother and the whole Mishbucha (the extended family) escaped from Tzarist Russia, got to Liverpool, England and thence to New York. By escaping to America, the Tzadik’s blessing was fulfilled as all of my Great Grandmother’s children, and their children, were spared the Holocaust.
In America, my great grandmother’s children’s children, my Mother’s generation, got “excellent” educations thanks to, among other things, CUNY, the City University of New York, which, because of the beneficence and wealth of New York, had been providing quasi ivy league educations, for no tuition at all, since the middle of the 19th century. Any high school graduate with a 90 average got in for free.
By providing so much knowledge to the unwashed of Emily Lazarus’s “teeming shores,” (Footnote 1) the City University of New York was a lot like the tree of “Knowledge of Good and Evil” in the Garden of Eden. My Great Grandparents’ children’s children ate the forbidden fruit, and the Tzadik’s blessing was revoked. After World War Two, my great grandparent’s children’s children started to drop: Uncle Al’s son committed suicide. Aunt Rose’s daughter, Eleanor, died of leukemia, sometime in the 1950’s, shortly after giving birth to her first son.
My Mother was an especially avid sinner who eagerly supped on the mordant and moody intellectual fantasia of fin de siècle Europe. She was an exceptionally brainy child, and she started Brooklyn College at age 15. My Mother was thoroughly enamored of every intellectual “insight” that lobbed a hand grenade at the holy tabernacle of the Jewish faith -- and the Christian faith as well.
Although the City University system was filled to the gills with Marxism, my Mother already knew of and accepted Karl Marx. When she started college, she had the nerve to tell a proud and preening Wasp professor that the entrepreneurs he had
praised in his lectures on economics were nothing but “legal thieves.”
For my Mother, the delectable, forbidden apple of Brooklyn College’s Garden of Eden was psychoanalysis. Just as Catholic nuns used to fancy themselves brides of Jesus, my Mother seemed to imagine that she was Sigmund Freud’s bride. This condition lasted till her death: While she was dying of colon cancer in Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, she kept hoping that the psychoanalyst, she had been seeing for the preceding 40 years, would visit. Of course. he never visited.
In any event, Mom was stuck or fixated on psychoanalytic dogma as it existed in New York at the end of the Second World War. In fact, most psychoanalysts and their patients were stuck on the same stuff up through the early seventies. My Mother, and Freud’s groupies in general, had one overwhelming fear and obsession: Domineering Mommies were Castrating their sons and husbands and disabling American manhood and turning guys queer.
Psychoanalysis, as it was practiced in New York, was telling every third male patient, until about 1970, that his mother was a bitch, his father was a wimp and that he was seriously at risk of becoming a faggot.
Of course, there is such a thing as the indomitable bitchy, ball buster from hell. Shit, on certain TV stations in New York, they bow down to Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at least once a month – it’s as if a bunch of fagelas (A pejorative Yiddish term for a gay man) have decreed that since women must bleed once a month, they will duly bleed for women by imbibing the toxic feminist rhetoric of Bette Davis at least once a month.
Yes, bitches exist, but why must we bemoan their existence for ever and a day. Somehow, it never seemed to dawn on the academic simpletons of psychoanalysis that talking about a problem, incessantly, can underline and underscore the problem until it is etched with acid in the recesses of the patient’s mind. Then, the patient cannot forget, let alone surmount, the saga of his maternal mutilation. The analytic community did not hear this criticism until Eric Fromm wrote “The Crisis of Psychoanalysis” in 1970 and charged that analysis can magnify and amplify a problem by talking about it ad nauseum.
My Mother talked about our family’s problems all day long. While she drove to Nathan’s in Coney Island, while she angrily gulped down Nathan’s hot dogs lathered in mustard, while we anxiously eyed the mustard bins that gave dozens of Nathan’s customers acid trips in 1967, she would recite her mishugenosis (Mishugena means crazy; the suffix osis connotes prognosis or diagnosis) of our family:
My Mother told me that her Mother, my beloved grandmother, had chopped off Herb’s wee wee (Herb was my Mother’s brother), and she demonstrated the ill effects of her Mother’s surgical ministrations by rudely impersonating her brother and going up several octaves to portray him as a castrato with a screechy high voice. My Mother said that her sister (My Aunt Trudy) had castrated her son, Barry (When he was 12 and I was 5, Barry routinely put my head in the toilet bowl and called me a faggot), and my Mother told me that Barry walked like a crippled ballerina. Finally, she told me that her Mother had made her Father a wimp and faggot.
In fact, that alleged wimp and faggot was the consummate tough guy, and he used his brawn and bravado to make a fortune during Prohibition. Because my Grandfather was a licensed pharmacist (He came to this country at age 16 knowing not a world of English and soon became a graduate of Brooklyn College’s School of Pharmacy – he was a real brain in addition to being a tough motherfucker), he had access to, and could sell, alcohol during prohibition. Drunks used to stand outside of his pharmacy for hours waiting to buy his alcoholic medicines. While most Jews were still in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and the Bronx, he had already made it to White Plains, a rich suburb of New York City.
My Mother even told me that she had tried to deman me but that her compulsion to harm me had been held in check by her doctor and my doctor.
Of course, I saw a shrink too, right after my Father died at age 6, and I was given to understand that my shrink was there to ward off the risk of a homosexual orientation owing to my Father’s death and my wildly insane Mother.
The reader may opine that I dwell too much on ancient history. I plead guilty. Since I was taugtht, starting at age 6, to exhaustively excavate and examine every aspect of my early childhood, I developed a freakish tendency to examine my life like a theologian scrutinizing every shred and shard of evidence in the Dead Sea scrolls.
It is hard for me to discuss this in detail, but I think this vignette from my life, as a twelve-year-old, is instructive:
My Mother was known as the woman who scavenged through the rat-infested basement of our apartment building looking for old playboy magazines. If she was asked why she was amassing a collection of old playboys, she might say, with the zany look of a religious groupie who was extolling the greatness of his guru, that she was getting playboys so she could give them to her son and facilitate the development of a heterosexual orientation. Indeed, she continually asked me if I enjoyed the playboy magazines, and it seemed to me, at times, that she might barge into my room, at any time, with a measuring tape to gauge the length of my cock.
In her weirdness, my Mother seemed to be the second coming of the incomparable and maniacal Melanie Klein, the director of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin in the early 1930s. In her inimitable madness, Melanie Klein decided to psychoanalyze her own son, Hans Klein. She started “therapy” when poor Hans was 6.
Sample Ms. Klein’s therapy with her son: Hans once told her that he was afraid of walking down a certain street. Ms. Klein told her son that the street he feared had tall trees, that the tall trees reminded her son of big penises and the big penile trees reminded him that he had a small penis. Somehow, that presumed Madame Curie of the mind was oblivious to the politics: The Kleins were Jews. The city they were in was Berlin. The time was the early 30’s. And the street in question was famous for loud anti-semitic outbursts and rallies.
Many or most of the therapists and patients at the Berlin analytic institute were Jews. If Melanie Klein had any sanity left in her arrogant and asinine mind, she would have told everyone at the clinic to hurry up and try to get the hell out of Germany as fast as possible. In any event, when Hans was 14, he indicated that he was Gay (Big Surprise) and was transferred to a male therapist. When Hans was 30, he shot himself.
I would never do myself in. I’m too damn angry.
My anger rose as I matured, and puberty poured gasoline over the fires burning in my mind, and before long I was wailing and belting and thundering like a mob waging a holy riot, a riot that made me demolish a car just as Joshua fought the battle of Jericho where “the walls came tumbling down,” a riot that would scream like a grogger (Noisemaker) shouting out its rebuke whenever Haman’s name was uttered when the Megilla was read on Purim, and a riot that would emulate my heroes, the Vietcong, the glorious murderers of bourgeois liberalism. I was enchanted and transfixed when I read Andrew Kopkind’s witchy pronouncement in the New York Review of Books in 1967: “The Civil War (race riots, student rebellion), and the Foreign One (Vietnam), have murdered liberalism in its official robes.” But my love affair with the New Left, which transcended the disciplined, dreary Stalinoid left my Mother learned in Brooklyn College, is more appropriately the subject of a separate essay.
While my Mother pock marked my mind with her outbursts of analytically inspired psychobabble (Every so often, for no apparent reason, she would tell me that “when a homo is sucking cock he manifests his need for his Mother’s breast”; When the Flip Wilson show appeared on television, she was terrified that Flip Wilson’s hilarious impersonations of women would make black boys gay (Flip was black), and she wrote solemn epistles to leading black politicians demanding that the scourge of Flip Wilson be removed from television) she continually told me that my Grandmother was a castrating bitch. Footnote 2
As the 70’s progressed, my Grandmother sunk deeper and deeper into the dementia of Alzheimers. While my Grandmother was falling in the street, was gift-wrapping containers of ordinary orange juice, and was losing her vocabulary and declaring that everything from the heavenly to the beastly was “putrid,” my Mother was convinced that her Mother was a diabolical engine of psychic destruction.
My Grandmother, who lovingly gave birth to and nurtured three children, made thousands of scrumptious Jewish meals, and who happily married her husband and never looked at another man till the day she died, was, in my Mother’s mind, the quintessence of pure psychopathology.
Finally, my Mother, and her siblings, Aunt Trudy and Uncle Herb, made my Grandmother surrender all her assets. They promptly put my Grandmother on Medicaid and threw her into a Jewish Nursing home, the “Menorah Home.” This godless “Jewish” nursing home housed the forsaken parents of upwardly mobile Jewish social climbers who couldn’t be bothered with unsightly beings who drooled and wet their pants and would embarrass them at catty, bratty, social functions for the rich and famous in places like Great Neck, New York.
Shortly after my Grandmother was admitted, she was chained to her bed (The staff took umbrage at her tendency to get up and to try to clean up that smelly institution forever reeking of piss and shit), she promptly lost the ability to walk and bore black and blue marks, which I believe were inflicted by the staff who did not like her tendency to refer to them as “shvatzas.” My Uncle, who is worth ten million dollars, and is so litigious that he demanded my legal services because he did not want to pay a 5,000-dollar hospital bill (Several hundred thousand was paid by insurance) after Columbia Presbyterian Hospital saved his life, didn’t ask anyone for legal assistance while his Mother was being tortured in Menorah Nursing Home.
Nietzsche used to say that because he had been steeped in decadence, he was the keenest critic of decadence. Likewise, since my life was steeped in psychoanalysis, I am the finest critic of psychoanalysis and poised to render the most accurate analytic assessments. Moreover, since analysis inculcated my queer desire to constantly dig up and analyze the past, I have decided to prepare, as my Mother so indelicately put it, a mishugenosis of my Mother:
My Mother was sort of like a cancerous lymph node. That comparison sounds outlandish, but hear me out:
The lymphatic system is part of our immune system, and microbes are dragged to lymph nodes where agents of the immune system destroy the microbes. However, in some cases, the lymph node is overrun by disease, and the disease, seeded to the lymph nodes, can then branch out and infect other parts of the body. In these cases, the lymph node, which originally was our ally in combatting disease, must be excised because it harbors disease.
In my Mother’s case, psychoanalysis, which was designed to combat disease, had become an agent of emotional turmoil and anguish as the rhetoric and habits of psychoanalysis degenerated into a farce in which analysis only consisted of telling a patient, ad nauseum, that he has been demanned. Psychoanalysis was no longer a tool to attain health; it was a weapon which forever demeaned, demanned and debased the patient.
And why did my Mother scream, ad nauseum, about men being castrated by bitchy women like her Mother. Because, I think, she wanted to do the castrating, could not admit this to herself, and so projected the castrating urges onto her Mother.
Very simply, until my Uncle was born, my Mother was the darling of the family because she was a bit of a genius. She was doing long division at age 4. However, when she was five – at the very height of the Oedipus complex – her brother Herb was born. As the boy, he became the star of the family. He would become the doctor. My Mother was insanely jealous of her brother who. by virtue of his sex, stole her glory. I think my Mother wanted Herb eliminated. She could not admit this, and she had to conceal her rage toward him, and ultimately to all men, and so she projected her castrating intentions onto her Mother. Moreover, by affecting sadness for her brother’s status as a castrato, she was able to underscore her brother’s wounded status and make him feel that much more miserable and castrated.
And she ultimately felt this way about all men. She told my Father, and every boyfriend she had ever had, that their mother had maimed their manhood.
And when I was sixteen, and I was with my Mother and some of her friends, my Mother got drunk. And “vino veritas” (The truth comes out with alcohol) proved my point: When a woman asked my Mother if David had any girlfriends, my Mother savagely snapped, “that coward, that faggot, of course David has no girlfriends.”
When she finally died, I was relieved. During the pendency of her life, I was often afraid that I would murder her. Thank G-d she finally died. Now I can never murder my Mother. The Lord my G-d did if for me.
--
Footnote 1: I think that Lazarus poem, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, is the first poem I learned:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shores
Send those the homeless, tempest tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.
Footnote 2: My Aunt Trudy (my Mother’s Sister) was also bent out of shape by Flip Wilson’s comedic sketches. She decreed that Flip Wilson should forcibly undergo a sex change operation as punishment for mocking women.