My father had a good voice and I loved hearing him sing Yiddish songs along with my aunt Luba on our family gatherings. My mother did not care for any sort of music and I never heard her sing a line—that gene she must have passed along to me. On Sunday mornings, my father and I almost always played chess together on that red baroque table, and he would play some Yiddish songs on the phonograph and sing along with them until my mother screeched, “Genug, Barel, genug!” (“Enough, Ben, Enough!”). And he always obeyed. Those are the times I was most disappointed in him and wished so much that he would have stood his ground and confronted her. But it never happened.
My mother was a good cook, and I often think of the dishes she made. Often, to this day, I try to replicate them using her heavy aluminum pots. I feel very attached to those pots. Food tastes better when I use them. My children often covet them, but I am still hanging on to them.
When we moved to our new house, my mother cooked dinner every day, and then she drove the twenty minutes to the store, where she spent the rest of the day and evening. I warmed up the food and ate my meals alone while reading a book. (My sister, Jean, had started at the University of Maryland.) My father came home to eat and take a nap, but our mealtimes rarely coincided.
THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER AND FATHER IN FRONT OF THE BLAGDEN TERRACE HOME, WASHINGTON, DC, 1947.
Blagden Terrace, our new street, was lined with tall sycamore trees standing before large, handsome homes, all filled with children my age. I remember being welcomed my first day there. The kids on the street playing touch football waved to me—they needed more players and I dived right in. Later that day, directly across the street on the front lawn of their home, I saw thirteen-year-old Billy Nolan playing catch with his elderly grandfather, who, I later learned, had once pitched for the Boston Red Sox. Billy and I were destined to play a lot of baseball together. I remember also my first walk around the block. I spotted a front-yard pond with several floating lily pads—that excited me because I knew the water would hold fine pickings for my microscope: swarms of mosquito larvae floating on the surface and hordes of amoebae that I could scrape from the bottom of the lily pads. But how to collect the specimens? In my old neighborhood I would have snuck into the yard at night and stolen a few expendable creatures from the pond. But I had no idea of how to behave here.
Blagden Terrace and environs offered an idyllic setting. No filth, no danger, no crime, and never an anti-Semitic comment. My cousin Jay, who has been my close lifetime friend, had also moved only four blocks away, and we often saw one another. Rock Creek Park was only two blocks from my home with its creek, trails, baseball fields, and tennis courts. There were neighborhood ball games almost every day after school until darkness.
Goodbye to the rats! Goodbye to the roaches, to crime, to danger, and to anti-Semitic threats. My life would now be changed forever. I occasionally went back to the store to help out when there was a shortage of workers, but for the most part I had left those sordid surroundings behind. And never again did I need to lie about where I lived. If only Judy Steinberg, my girlfriend from summer camp, could have seen my new house!
CHAPTER TEN
MEETING MARILYN
I always encourage student therapists to enter personal therapy. “Your own ‘self’ is your major instrument. Learn all you can about it. Don’t let your blind spots get in the way of understanding your patients or empathizing with them.” And, yet, I’ve been so closely bonded to one woman since I was fifteen years old and thereafter so wrapped in my large family that I often wonder whether I can truly enter the world of a person who goes through life alone.
I often think of my years before Marilyn in harsh black and white: the color seeped in after she entered my life. I remember our first meeting with preternatural clarity. I was in the tenth grade of Roosevelt High School and had been living in my new neighborhood for about six months. One Saturday in the early evening after I had spent a couple of hours gambling at the bowling alley, Louie Rosenthal, one of my bowling chums, told me there was a party nearby at Marilyn Koenick’s house and suggested we go. I was shy and not very keen on parties, and I didn’t know Marilyn, who was in ninth grade, a half-semester behind me, but, as I had no other plans, I agreed to go.
Her home was a modest brick row house, identical to every other house on Fourth Street between Farragut and Gallatin, with a few steps leading to a small front porch. As we approached it we saw a large bolus of kids our age gathered at the stairs and on the small porch, trying to get into the front door. I, socially avoidant as I was, immediately spun around and began to walk home, but my ever-resourceful chum, Louie, grabbed my arm, pointed to the front window facing the porch, and suggested we raise it and crawl in. I followed him through the window, and we made our way through the throng to the vestibule, where, at the absolute center of the milling crowd, stood a very petite, very cute, vivacious girl with long, light brown hair, holding court. “That’s her, the short one, that’s Marilyn Koenick,” Louie said as he moved into the next room to find himself a drink. Now, as I said, I was generally very shy, but that night I astounded myself and, instead of turning back and retreating through the window, I pushed through the crowd and made my way to the hostess. When I got to her I had no idea what to say and simply blurted out, “Hi, I’m Irv Yalom and I just crawled in through your window.” I don’t recall what else we said before her attention was diverted by others, but I do know I was a goner: I was drawn to her like a nail to a magnet and had an immediate feeling, no, more than a feeling, a conviction, that she was going to play a crucial role in my life.
I nervously phoned her the following day, my first phone call to a girl, and invited her to see a movie. It was to be my first date. What did we talk about? I remember her telling me she had recently stayed up all night reading Gone with the Wind and had to miss school the following day. I found that so lovable I could hardly see straight. We were both readers and immediately fell into endless discussions of books. For some reason she seemed very interested in my dedication to biography at the central library. Who on earth would have ever thought my A–Z biography venture would come in so handy? We each suggested books for the other—I was on a John Steinbeck binge at the time and she was reading books I had never considered—Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I enjoyed James Farrell, she, Jane Austen, and we both loved Thomas Wolfe—sometimes we read the most melodious passages from Look Homeward, Angel, out loud to one another. After only a few dates, I bet my cousin Jay thirty dollars that I would marry her. He paid up on my wedding day!
What was it about her? As I write this memoir and reacquaint myself with my younger self and realize what a mess I was and how much I moaned throughout my life about not having had a mentor, it is suddenly dawning upon me: I did have a mentor! It was Marilyn. My unconscious grasped that she was uniquely suited for the task of civilizing and elevating me. Her family history was similar enough to mine for me to feel at home with her, but differed in just the right ways. Her parents were also immigrants from Eastern Europe, but were a quarter- or a half-generation ahead of mine and had had some secular education. Her father had arrived as a teenager, but not in such dire economic straits as mine. He had an education, he was a romantic, he loved the opera, and he traveled throughout the country like his hero, Walt Whitman, working at a variety of menial tasks to support himself. After marrying Celia, Marilyn’s mother, a beautiful, sweet woman who had grown up in Krakow and possessed not a trace of my mother’s anger and coarseness, he opened a grocery store that we learned, years after we met, was only one block from my father’s store! I must have walked or biked by that small DGS (district grocery store) hundreds of times. But her father had had the foresight not to submit his family to living in that turbulent, unsafe, impoverished neighborhood, so Marilyn had grown up in a modest but safe middle-class neighborhood and almost never set foot in her father’s store.
Our parents met many times after we started dating, and paradoxic
ally, her parents developed great respect for mine. Her father was aware that my father was a highly successful businessman, and he perceived, correctly, that my mother had a sharp, insightful mind and was really the driving force behind my father’s success. Unfortunately, Marilyn’s father died when I was twenty-two, and I never had the opportunity to know him well, though he did take me to my first opera (Die Fledermaus).
Marilyn was half a year behind me in school, and in those days there were graduation ceremonies both in February and in June. A few months after meeting her I attended her February graduation from McFarland Junior High (which was next door to my high school) and listened in awe as Marilyn, with remarkable poise, delivered the valedictory address. Oh, how I admired and loved that girl!
We were inseparable all through high school and ate lunch together every day, and without fail, we saw one another every weekend. We had such a strong, shared devotion to literature that our other divergent interests seemed of little consequence. She had, very early, fallen in love with the French language, literature, and culture, whereas I preferred the sciences. I managed to accomplish the rather extraordinary feat of mispronouncing every French word I ever saw or heard, while she, for her part, could see only her own eyelashes when she gazed through my microscope. We both loved our English classes and, unlike other students in the school, were oddly entranced by the reading assignments: The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, and The Return of the Native.
One day in high school, all afternoon classes were canceled so that the entire school could attend a showing of the 1946 British film Great Expectations. We sat next to one another and held hands. The film remains one of our all-time favorites; over the decades, we’ve probably alluded to it a hundred times. It opened up the world of Dickens for me, and before long I had devoured every book Dickens had written. I’ve reread them many times since then. Years later, when I lectured and traveled a great deal in the United States and Great Britain, I fell into the habit of visiting used book stores and buying Dickens first editions. It remains the only thing I ever collected.
Marilyn, even then, was so adorable, intelligent, and socially skilled that she won over all her teachers. In those years I was many things, but no one would in their wildest dream have thought of me as adorable. I was a good student and excelled in the sciences and also in English, where Miss Davis regularly increased my unpopularity by praising my compositions and posting them on the bulletin board. Unfortunately, in the twelfth grade I was switched to Miss McCauley, the other English teacher, who was also Marilyn’s teacher and prized her greatly. One day in the hall she saw me leaning over Marilyn’s locker chatting with her and thenceforth referred to me as a “Locker Cowboy.” She never forgave me for courting Marilyn, and I had no chance in my classes with her. She was wont to make scathing and ridiculing comments about my written assignments. She mocked me for my stiff performance as a messenger in the class reading of King Lear. Recently two of my children, looking through old papers in our closet, came across a rhapsodic piece I had written about baseball that Miss McCauley had graded C+, and they were outraged that she had mercilessly marked my pages with such comments as “foolish!” or “such enthusiasm about such trivia.” And, mind you, I was writing about such giants as Jolting Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, King Kong Keller, Smokey Joe Page, and “Old Reliable” Tommy Henrich.
I never lose sight of my great fortune of having had Marilyn in my life since I was fifteen. She elevated my thoughts, prodded my ambition, and offered me a model of grace, generosity, and commitment to a life of the mind. So thank you, Louie, wherever you are. Thank you so much for helping me crawl through that window.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
COLLEGE DAYS
Two years ago I was sitting in a café in Sausalito with my friend Larry Zaroff, looking out over San Francisco Bay. The wind buffeted the seagulls about and we watched the Sausalito ferry lurching toward the city until it disappeared from sight. Larry and I were reminiscing about college: we had been classmates at George Washington University and had taken most of our classes together—grueling courses like organic chemistry, qualitative analysis, and comparative anatomy, in which we dissected every organ and every muscle of a cat. We were hauling in memories of days that were, for me, the most stressful of my life when Larry launched into a story of a wild fraternity party, full of rowdy drinking and packs of friendly coeds.
I bristled. “Fraternity? What fraternity?”
“TEP, of course.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tau Epsilon Pi. What’s with you today, Irv?”
“With me? I’m really upset. I saw you every day of college and never heard of a fraternity at GW. Why wasn’t I invited to join? Why didn’t you invite me?”
“Irv, how can you expect me to remember? This is 2014 and we started GW in 1949.”
When I left Larry I phoned my close friend Herb Kotz, in Washington, DC. Herb, Larry, and I were always together in college. We were the top three in every class we took, and we drove to school and ate lunch together nearly every day.
“Herb, I’ve just been talking to Larry and he told me about belonging to a fraternity, TEP at GW. Did you know about that?”
“Well, yeah. I was a member of TEP, too.”
“WHAT? You, too? I can’t believe it. Why didn’t you ask me to join?”
“Who can remember that long ago? I probably did ask but all we did was have beer parties on Fridays, and you hate beer, and you weren’t dating at all then—just staying loyal to Marilyn.”
I nursed that grudge a bit until a few months ago, when, during a big housecleaning, Marilyn found a 1949 letter welcoming me to Tau Epsilon Pi and a certificate of membership. I had, indeed, been a member of the fraternity, but I had never attended a meeting and had entirely erased the memory from my mind!
This incident truly depicts how uptight and anxious I was as an undergraduate at George Washington, a fifteen-minute commute from my home. To this day I remain envious of those who remember a joyful undergraduate experience—class spirit, roommates who became lifelong friends, camaraderie surrounding athletic events, fraternity pranks, a close mentoring relationship with a professor, and the secret societies akin to the one depicted in Dead Poets Society. It was a part of life I missed out on entirely, yet I also know that I was so anxious and so uncomfortable with myself that it was just as well I didn’t attend an Ivy League college: I doubt I would have enjoyed, or even survived, such an undergraduate scene.
In my therapy work I have always been struck by how often my patients recover memories of their own lives at various stages when their children pass through these same stages. It happened to me years ago when my children were in their senior high school year and contemplated college, and it happened once again when my grandson, Desmond, began college. I was astonished and envious at the many resources available to help him and his classmates in choosing a school. Desmond had college advisers, written guides to the best one hundred small liberal arts colleges, and conversations with college recruitment teams. I recall no guidance whatsoever in my day: no high school college advisers, and, of course, my parents and relatives knew nothing of this entire process. Moreover, and this was crucial, I knew no one in my high school or neighborhood who had elected to go away to college: everyone I knew chose one of the two local colleges—the University of Maryland or George Washington University (both, at that time, large, mediocre, and impersonal institutions). My sister’s husband, Morton Rose, was an important influence. I respected him greatly: he was an excellent physician who had attended George Washington University both the undergraduate and the medical school, and I was persuaded that if George Washington was good enough for him, it should be good enough for me.
Finally, when my high school awarded me the Emma K. Karr Scholarship—a full-tuition scholarship to GW—the issue was settled: no matter that the annual tuition was only three hundred dollars.
; At the time I felt that my whole life, my entire future, was on the line. I had known since my encounter with Dr. Manchester at age fourteen that I wanted to go to medical school, but it was common knowledge that medical schools had a strict 5 percent quota for Jewish students; George Washington Medical School had classes of one hundred and accepted only five Jews each year. The high school Jewish fraternity I belonged to (Upsilon Lambda Phi) had far more than five intelligent seniors who planned to take a pre-med curriculum and apply to medical school, and that was only one of several such fraternities in Washington. The competition seemed overwhelming, and so, from my first day of college, I settled upon a strategy: I would put everything else aside, work harder than anyone else, and make such good grades that a medical school would be forced to accept me.
It turns out I was not alone in that approach. It seemed that all the young men I knew, all the sons of Jewish immigrants from Europe arriving after World War I, deemed medicine to be the ideal profession. If one could not get into medical school, then there was dental school, law school, veterinary school, or, lastly and least desirable for the idealists among us, going into business with one’s father. A popular joke of those days: a Jewish male had two options—either become a doctor or a failure.
My parents were not involved in my decision to attend GW. We were not in close communication in those days: the store was about a thirty-minute drive from the house and I saw little of my parents except on Sundays. Even then we rarely spoke about anything consequential. I had hardly spoken to my mother for years, ever since she had accused me of causing my father’s heart attack. I made a decision to protect myself by keeping my distance. I would have liked more closeness with my father, but he and my mother were too tightly attached.
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