From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: Oh, please, what would I do?

  SR: I think a lot of marriages founder on this. The person who makes more money, the person who is more visible, can easily use that as leverage. It happens all the time.

  CR: I do remember saying to you, there were years and years and years when not only did you make more money than I did, but I made hardly any money at all, and you didn’t resent that. I know there’s a difference between attitudes about men and women on this question, I’m not stupid, but I think you heard me.

  SR: Cokie’s success in many ways has been liberating for me. I was able to make some decisions, like teaching college, not based on money because I was no longer the chief breadwinner.

  CR: Which is a terrible burden. I had never really thought about it because I was a girl. We have this expectation of men that they are supposed to be out there making it right for the whole family and it’s an unfair expectation.

  SR: Things had come to a head for me at the Times. I had left the Hill to cover the last two years of the Reagan White House, but as the Bush Administration was coming in, a new bureau chief came in as well and decided to shift reporters’ assignments. And I realized that I was running out of options for advancement.

  CR: He had always talked about this problem, even when we were very young. He would say, a guy joins the Times, goes to New York, goes to Washington, goes abroad, and then he’s thirty-six years old and where is he? Well, Steven was older than that, but still, the pyramid was narrow at the top and he could do one of three things: keep doing what he’d always done, become an editor, or leave.

  SR: I had seen several generations of people above me go through that process and I knew it was inevitable. One of the options that the Times suggested was becoming an editor and in some ways it made sense. I had always produced a lot of ideas and helped plan our political coverage and tried to be a mentor to young people in the bureau. But I had become a reporter because I loved being out every day and learning something new, and I feared that by coming inside I’d stop learning and deal only with recycled information. More important, I had to be honest with myself—would I be happy losing my visibility, my byline, at the same time that Cokie’s career was taking off? When I asked that question the answer was no, I would not be happy, and in fact I thought it would be risky for our relationship. So I decided to accept an offer as a senior writer from U.S. News and World Report, where I would have a chance to move beyond straight reporting and establish myself as an analyst and commentator.

  CR: I couldn’t imagine him ever leaving the Times, and I worried that would put us in a bind at some point because his loyalty was so great. Look, I’m the beneficiary of his loyalty to me. I think it’s wonderful. But I worried that his loyalty to the Times meant he could never leave. For many years, if you woke Steve up in the middle of the night and said, “Who are you?” he would say, “A New York Times reporter.”

  SR: After I made the decision Cokie joked that it was a question of my leaving the Times or leaving her. A gross exaggeration, but the experience reminded me of that series I had done about divorce back in California. I remember one therapist saying to me, listen, marriages are forced to carry so many burdens. People want to change their lives, but there’s not much they can actually change. They can’t change the way they look, at least beyond a certain point. They can’t change their skin color or ethnic origin or who their parents are. They can’t even change their basic talents and abilities. What they can change is their spouse, and marriages can easily crack apart under that pressure. So I was much better off trading in a twenty-five-year job instead of a twenty-three-year marriage. And I actually think that leaving the Times was very healthy for our relationship.

  CR: Partly because that last year had grown so unpleasant. You were no fun. After you had been gone from the Times for a few months, the sunny you returned. I suddenly looked around one day and realized, “I’ve got my husband back.” Neither one of us was fully aware of how destructive that period had been until it was over.

  Steven felt unappreciated at the Times; everything about that relationship had gone stale. So starting a new job where people wanted him and flattered him made him feel good as a person. We’ve been saying that in any marriage, it’s important to appreciate each other and do the things that work for each other. We can’t make bosses do that, no matter how hard we try. And no matter how hard we try to leave work problems at the office, they’re bound to affect life at home as well.

  SR: But even after I left the paper I had to come to terms with Cokie’s growing celebrity. In those last months of turmoil at the Times, one possibility was returning to Capitol Hill. It probably was not a good idea anyway, but the bureau chief said no and appointed a woman to the job instead. At one point my frustrations came spurting out and I said to Cokie, “This woman only got the job because she was a woman.” I was hurt and angry about it, and my feelings spilled over onto Cokie. It was one of the few times that I expressed any resentment or rivalry toward her, and I didn’t like the way I felt or sounded. At that point I decided that the only way to manage this was to stop being competitive. Our relationship was too important to put in jeopardy over professional jealousy.

  CR: There were some fairly dramatic conversations where I would announce, “I’m quitting. This is not worth it.” There has never been any question in my mind about what the priority is here. Let’s make that clear.

  SR: Every time you said that…

  CR:…you always said, “That’s crazy.”

  SR: I never expected you or wanted you to give up your career. I knew what made you happy. This goes back to our first days in New York, with you parading around in your nightgown in the middle of the afternoon.

  CR: I had a coat on.

  SR: What made it easier is that I’ve always been Cokie’s biggest supporter. People come up to me all the time and say, “I’m a great fan of your wife’s,” and my answer is, “So am I.” I knew her talents long before the wider world did.

  CR: And had confidence in me long before I did.

  SR: But people don’t always believe me. In fact, there was even a magazine piece written by a woman who was absolutely determined to portray me as this fragile male who simply could not handle being married to a famous woman.

  CR: She didn’t like you. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know why, but she plain didn’t like you.

  SR: Apparently not. But it seems to me that the key to sanity is a sense of proportion. One day a TV interviewer asked Cokie to retape a conversation because she had talked a little too long and kept him from saying more. Here’s a guy who appears on national TV all the time and he was bickering about a few seconds. The thought occurred to me: “How much is enough?” Somebody else will always be richer, better looking, appear on TV more often. Since then, that phrase has become a maxim we say to each other when things are getting a little nutty. How much is enough?

  That time we hit on something important on our own, but often we’ve needed someone looking in from outside to make us realize that there’s some lesson we needed to learn. Familiarity is a great gift, but over a long period of time we’ve occasionally fallen into patterns of behavior where we’ve irritated each other and not listened. And sometimes it’s valuable to have someone else point that out.

  CR: I have a sense from my friends that good marriage counselors do that. They’re voices from outside saying, “Listen to yourselves.” Steven had this experience after reading a book by the linguist Deborah Tannen.

  SR: She’s a shrewd observer of speech patterns and the way people relate to each other, and a few years ago I interviewed her for a program on public television. One thing that would drive me crazy about Cokie, and occasionally still does, is her tendency to interrupt me. It caused some real tensions. There were evenings after parties with very unhappy recriminations. But I had to study Deborah Tannen’s work to do this TV show, and she says in one of her books that this is a common problem between men and women because they a
pproach conversations differently. Men see them as competitions…

  CR:…as speechmaking…

  SR:…as occasions to score points…

  CR:…to show off…

  SR: Women see conversations as a more cooperative endeavor, and when women chime in, or interrupt, they think they’re helping.

  CR: That’s the way we talk. And the truth is, when Steven listens to a conversation between women, he can’t stand it. We’re constantly interrupting and going off on a path and coming back. We all know what we’re doing. It’s a completely different language from the one men speak. I can’t abide going to a meeting with men because they rattle on trying to impress someone, and who cares? I feel like they’re wasting my time. I could be doing something important like folding the laundry! By and large, women don’t behave like that. So when Steven read this book, it hit him in the face—hey, this is what we’ve been arguing about all these years. She’s just acting like a girl.

  SR: I can’t say we’ve never had a disagreement on this subject since. But that insight sanded down a particularly sharp edge in our relationship. And even though it’s true that the way women talk can be irritating, it’s also true that I generally prefer the company of women to men. I don’t go out and pal around with a lot of guys who are insensitive or uninterested in what women say. I find that by and large women talk about relationships and men talk about…

  CR:…sports…

  SR:…issues. I’m more interested in relationships. I like having conversations with women at parties. I’ve always liked listening to talk about people and families. I remember as a little boy sopping up the stories my grandfathers and grandmother used to tell. My father’s father in particular fascinated me with tales of life as a youth in Eastern Europe, a place that seemed so strange and foreign to an American boy in the 1950s. As I grew older I wished I had some way to connect to those stories, but it never seemed possible—I always felt walled off from my past. Cokie’s direct ancestor first landed in America in 1620, and there’s a good record of her family going back quite a long time. In some ways, I’ve always envied her that. For me, as for most American Jews, those records don’t exist. Our ancestors often fled the old country in panic and fear and didn’t want to look back. Whoever stayed behind was slaughtered during the Holocaust. And for most of us, our homelands were locked behind the Iron Curtain; we couldn’t visit them even if we wanted to. And when those places did open up, after the fall of communism, there was no one left to preserve the records or the graves or the memories.

  I was very fortunate, because I knew my grandfather well, he lived only three blocks away, and his storytelling provided me with a rich oral heritage about his hometown of Bialystok, which is now in eastern Poland. My family name was Rogowsky, the “sky” was dropped at Ellis Island, and my birth certificate says Rogow, not Roberts. My father changed our name when I was two, but my grandparents and all my cousins on that side were Rogow and still are.

  Living in Europe had brought me closer to my heritage, and after the fall of the Berlin wall, we planned a trip to Eastern Europe, starting in Vienna, where our niece was living. I badly wanted to see Bialystok and Cokie agreed, but I had no idea how to start. So I literally looked up Bialystok in the New York City phone book, and found an old-age home on the Lower East Side with that name. I called the number, described what I wanted to do, and asked if anybody there knew the town. I was in luck, the director of the home hailed from Bialystok, and after we talked awhile he told me to write to his friend Anatole who lives in Warsaw and studies the Jewish history of eastern Poland. I wrote to him and heard nothing back, but I had his phone number, so when we got to Warsaw, I called. Anatole said, well, I’m getting old, it’s a long trip, but when I heard your family name I decided I had to help because Artur and Shmuel Rogowsky were two of my father’s best friends when I was growing up and they must be your great-uncles. It turns out they’re not my uncles. But Anatole agreed to guide us, we hired a car and driver, and we set out the next day for Bialystok, about two and a half hours due east of Warsaw. On the way we stopped at Anatole’s home village, and while we’re walking around he talked about how fondly he remembered Artur Rogowsky singing the prayers on Friday night in a beautiful voice.

  CR: I said that settles it, he can’t be a relative of yours, nobody in your family can sing a note.

  SR: So much for sentiment. Anyway, we were standing in the main square when I said, I’ve always heard my family name comes from a village around here. And Anatole answered, I know the place, but I need directions. I was stunned. I’d come wanting to find some sign—a birth record, a gravestone—that my family had been there.

  CR: We both thought our best bet was a graveyard.

  SR: So we drove down this dusty country road in rural Poland…

  CR:…it could have been the nineteenth century, there were oxen pulling carts…

  SR:…and we came to a roadside sign that reads ROGOWO. There was my name!

  CR: It was a sign all right.

  SR: I said I was looking for a sign. I didn’t bargain for a real road sign! There were, of course, no Jews left in the village; still, we took a lot of pictures under the sign. Then we went on to Bialystok, which turned out to be thoroughly depressing. The town is one monument to devastation after another. On that corner, a synagogue was set on fire, killing five thousand Jews. In this field, the Nazis slaughtered six thousand Jews. We went to the graveyard, but most of it was overgrown, except for a small plot that Anatole tended himself. There was an obelisk on the plot, a memorial to about seventy-five Jews killed in a pogrom in 1906. My grandfather would have been about sixteen in 1906 and I realized that this was probably the pogrom that had helped drive him out of Bialystok. I approached the obelisk, where the names were written in Hebrew or Yiddish. When Anatole slowly started reading the names, I realized that, in effect, we were saying “Kaddish,” the Jewish prayer for the dead, and I remembered enough from my Hebrew-school training to point to each name as Anatole read it.

  CR: You could actually read a good many of them once you started.

  SR: I could follow it. When he said “Katz,” I knew which one was Katz. I’m sure some of them knew my family, my grandfather. His name could have easily been on that obelisk. Then I said to Anatole, you know the one place I always remember my grandfather talking about was the railroad station. My great-grandfather was a cloth merchant and Grandpa Abe would always go down to the railroad station and pick up packages for him. It was from that railroad station that he left for Palestine. Anatole’s face lit up; you’re in luck, he said, because the railroad station is still the way it was a hundred years ago. It’s practically the only building left in Bialystok your grandfather might have seen. We went to the station, I walked out onto the platform, and then I knew I was standing in his footsteps. I could almost feel his presence. I said to myself, “Pop, we survived, and I’ve come back to prove it.” Then I broke down and sobbed for twenty minutes, totally without warning.

  It was a moment of profound meaning. It connected me to my whole past. I wrote about it for U.S. News and was flooded with letters from people saying, “How can I do what you did? How can I get in touch with my ancestry?” Many wanted to share the stories of their own families and one of them wrote, this is where my family’s from, this is what the name was, maybe it has some meaning for you. I realized that that’s what all those letters were about; people were searching for meaning, for connection, for some sign of their own that their families had been a part of history.

  CR: There is a coda to the story. Steve’s grandmother was from a small village outside of Bialystok called Eishishok and we had heard the story many times about how his grandfather and grandmother had met—how he fell in love with a picture of her in a photographer’s window. But we couldn’t find Eishishok. It wasn’t on any map. We knew it couldn’t be too far from Bialystok, they didn’t have cars, but no one we asked knew what we were talking about. There was a town with a similar name, and whe
n we got home we said to Steve’s dad, “We couldn’t find Eishishok anywhere; it simply doesn’t exist. Is it maybe this other town?” He said, “No, no, no, I don’t have this wrong, it is Eishishok.” We let that pass. Then Steve’s sister and I went one day to the Holocaust Museum and lining the central tower of the museum are photographs from the town of Eishishok. We couldn’t find it because it no longer exists. It was completely wiped out.

  SR: Also, it was in Lithuania and it had a different name in Lithuanian.

  CR: I grabbed Laura and whispered, “This is your grandmother’s town! We couldn’t find it but here it is!” They were studio portraits of ordinary life, weddings and birthdays and anniversaries, pictures that would have hung in photographers’ windows. They were taken perhaps fifteen or twenty years after Steve’s grandmother had left the town, but of course there had to be relatives in those pictures.

  SR: I got a phone call after my article appeared from a cousin of mine who was sobbing: “I read your article and I’m so grateful. We have all of these scrapbooks and mementos of my husband’s family, but I never had anything about our family to show our children. And now I do.” And I said, “Pam, that’s why I went, I went for all of us.”

  CR: We were particularly pleased to be able to come home and tell Steve’s dad about our trip; after all, it was his father whose story we were trying to trace.