In fall of 2008, my brother Sean sent me our great-grandfather’s diary in a long email attachment. He’d called me up earlier in the year right after discovering the manuscript, and I could tell by the giddy note in his voice that he thought he’d discovered something special. Now he’d scanned the document and disseminated it to me and our second cousins, Fred and Deborah. The truth is I felt fairly detached from the thing at first. My mother had always dismissed her grandfather’s writing as dull and amateurish, and our ties with extended family, on both sides, had always been minimal. I felt little more connection to David Blumenfeld than to Teddy Roosevelt. On the other hand, both Sean and I had always jumped at the chance to “meet” whatever long-lost relative fell into our path, especially after we entered our twenties and could connect with kin on our own volition. So curiosity, an interest in exploring and affirming my Jewish roots, and Sean’s enthusiasm overwhelmed me, and I began to read. The mental slide show that had formed in my head, a product of my mother’s, father’s, and grandfather’s stories, began to catch and skip, reshuffle, and add new frames.
Sean and I grew up in a “nuclear” family in Seattle, Washington. My father came out here in 1952 to accept a post as English instructor at the University of Washington. No other family relation lived closer than two thousand miles away. My mother let on that she considered this a relief; she wanted the freedom to think and write free from the entangling meshes of her family (including everyone except her father). Our parents were writers and teachers (my mother is still writing at nearly ninety), and words, books, visiting poets, storytelling, poetry readings, and quirky characters (a.k.a. students) comprised most of our childhood landscape. Aside from occasional visits by my mother’s dad, the Bentleys were a self-contained module.
Grandpa Art, characterized in David’s diary as basically a dimpled, genial anarchist, added zip and zing to our lives whenever he came to town. He was full of funny traveling-salesman stories, loud laughter, and pure warmth of spirit. My mother adored him. Grandma Helen accompanied Art only about every three years, which was fine by my mother. When she did come, there seemed to be a tacit understanding among everyone but me that Grandma was an entity to be tolerated. Grandma’s sole fan, I always sensed that something was missing in the family narrative where she was concerned, but there was little evidence to build upon. Most of the impressions Sean or I had of relatives or forebears was formed through our parents’ stories. If there was one thing our writer parents could do, it was to create vivid, ringing images of their childhood adventures and the relatives who featured in them.
My mother told many stories of Helen’s temper tantrums, acidic comments, and jealousies. Clearly, Grandma had a cruel streak. Yet here and there Helen’s talents and sympathies were revealed, and I held onto these. Meanwhile, I grew up believing my parents were special because they were intellectuals and artists. I never felt as though anything was missing, particularly. Yet as I grow older, I realize that Sean and I missed that chorus of voices that an extended family brings to one’s understanding of his or her perch in the family tree, in the unfolding saga of the generations. We missed out on feeling a sense of belonging to a greater family. Speaking for myself, I could really have used that connection a few decades ago!
To me, David Blumenfeld’s Diary has acted as a voice beckoning us to spend time with him and listen to his side of the story, to ply through the pages of his family history until we find and feel our connection to the people there. If I feel frustration and disappointment in aspects of his narrative, I also experience moments of joy, laughter, respect, recognition, and fascination. I feel our kinship. David’s work ethic, impatience, and love of language seem awfully familiar. I see these things in my mother and in myself. If before I doubted whether I could really call myself a Jew, I do not doubt it now. My great grandfather David has provided me with a map of the trail leading back to a network of relatives, and beyond that, to my cultural heritage. His voice, albeit distant, has joined the small family chorus to which my brother and I belong today. I hope this chorus continues to expand over the course of our lives. I know that it is up to us to seek out and maintain the connections.
One of the most important effects of reading David’s memoir, for that’s what it really is, has been that it has allowed me to gain insight into the forces that shaped my grandmother’s personality and thus profoundly affected my mother. It is only through my great-grandfather’s diary that I have come to understand the extent of the psychic claustrophobia that plagued first Helen and then Beth. Nearly a hundred years after the fact, I am suddenly privy to my grandmother’s childhood episodes of domestic strife. To me, it seems that the strife was mainly an effect of much more deeply rooted causes. While on the surface I can feel annoyed by David’s passive-aggressive behavior and Lena’s antics, I try to focus on what his words teach me about his experiences as an immigrant and his children’s experiences as first-generation Americans.
First, it seems clear that there were residual effects of David’s life in anti-Semitic Russia. Apprenticed at age 10, he missed out on formal schooling. His family was forced to move numerous times, even “beyond the Pale” to the most undesirable territories, and he experienced poverty firsthand. These conditions were a result of the fact that his family was Jewish. Throughout the Diary, David writes about all the opportunities virtually laid at his children’s feet on this “glorious continent.” Having undergone so many hardships himself, he cannot understand why his own children, especially Helen and Albert, seem blind to the sacrifices he has made on their behalf. Helen’s impractical fantasy of being a dancer and Albert’s ineffectual social and academic skills confound their father, who has no patience for their lack of industry and weak character. Now, Abe Calmenson and Belle — those two show patience, practicality, self-sacrifice, and diligence!
Another cause of family strife seems to boil down to David’s old-world conception of gender and family roles. While he showed great flexibility in altering his business practices so that his store was open on Saturdays, when it came to the expectations he had for his children’s and wife’s conduct, he was obdurate. Lena’s role was to be a stoic, loving mother and devoted housewife. Never should she distract him from his duties as breadwinner and involved citizen, and neither should she allow herself to run to fat. David writes that early on, he was disappointed in Lena’s inability to discuss business affairs with him. Yet again and again, he characterizes the ideal wife as being an expert in cooking, child rearing, and easing her husband’s cares, while mention of actual personality is virtually nonexistent. Lena’s litany of medical issues and the nasty remarks she spews out point to the actions of someone who is severely repressed and feels invisible.
No doubt David experienced tremendous frustration and revulsion, but Helen was steeped in blame and constant criticism. Her ideas of child-rearing were formed in David and Lena’s household. David’s children were expected to pursue practical ends, whether in marriage or profession, and to work diligently to take advantage of all that he had worked so hard to provide them with. But each member of David’s family, aside from Belle, was clearly looking around and realizing the range of modern possibilities available. They were becoming quintessential Americans — independent, free-spirited, inquisitive, and adventurous. I am convinced that the root of almost every domestic dispute in these pages to do with the tension between old world versus new, between the horse-and-buggy generation versus the Roaring ‘20s.
When Helen eloped with the handsome, irreverent Art Singer, she was flagrantly rejecting her parents’ authority, their attempts to control her destiny or define her. After marriage, her visits to David and Lena’s home dwindled to several times per year, according to my mother. Clearly, this was due to the way Helen felt whenever she spent time with them, not to any direct rejection of Judaism. Thirty years later, when my mother moved to Seattle to start married life with Nelson Bentley, she was relieved to put some mileage between herself and the mother who questioned whether she had deserved to win the Hopwood Prize in 1948 for the novel she’d written. My mother’s leaving Minneapolis and her clan of relatives was not a repudiation of Judaism, but a result of starting married life with my father. A secondary benefit was that she escaped the smothering force of a family that didn’t understand how serious she was about her art. Exceptions were her grandfather, David, who sent her a letter of congratulation and his own manuscript to read after he heard she’d won, and Art, who thought her writing was “terrific.” So, while it’s true that Helen was the first to loosen ties with her Jewish community and that my mother let the ties go altogether, the separations were more complicated than that. What I see from my vantage point seems more pattern than disjunction.
My great-grandfather’s version of events has provided me with all the evidence I need to defend the grandmother I always suspected had been misrepresented. The fact that she is long gone, having died in 1985, does not detract from the importance of defending her. I have been able to more convincingly suggest to my mother now that her own mother struggled and suffered in her turn, and that she should look back at all the things my grandmother did that clearly demonstrated love for her daughter, even if those demonstrations were clouded over at the time by a history of hurtful remarks and dark moods. For my mother, David’s descriptions of Helen as a sort of demon child, practically from infancy, are almost unbearable to read. It is difficult for her to imagine that the gentle, sweet grandfather she remembers thought so ill of his own daughter.
Beth was never aware of the extent of the criticism inflicted upon her mother. I find it ironic and mildly troubling that my mother’s unconditional love for her grandfather is so similar to what I feel for my grandmother. Where is the truth about who these people really were? At any rate, I feel that it is important to grasp how profoundly one’s childhood affects his or her personality, and that family patterns of behavior are passed down through the generations, but that they can be weakened and weakened until they are obliterated.
David’s Diary has reinforced my sense that no family’s story ever takes one shape or exists in one true account. David’s Diary represents his version of family events only. (It is no small irony that the grandchildren of his most inauspicious offspring are the ones who have taken the most interest in his writings). My response to his Diary is filtered through a lifetime spent as my mother’s daughter, with all the reminiscences and life lessons that have been imparted to me through her. When I add the verbal perspectives of several descendants of David’s son, Albert Blumenfeld, not to mention my own brother, a kind of chemical reaction ensues. The whole story of this one branch of my family seems to expand outward into space. This is the fascination of family stories: only when we bring all of our versions of reality together, does anything approaching the truth emerge. Yet, the more impressions and stories we amass, the more elusive the chain of events seems.