by Susan Jacoby
—
IF WE HAD lived in New York rather than in Chicago, the human landscape of my childhood would have been completely different. In 1912, my Broderick grandmother had to quit school after eighth grade so that she could contribute to her family’s household expenses by picking onions for twenty-five cents a day in the farmland still surrounding Chicago. In that same year, with their father’s legal career still flourishing, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ozzie were attending Manhattan private schools and being groomed for Ivy League universities. And although Ozzie and Edith eventually had to make their own way after their father gambled away his legacy, they never lost the aura of entitlement engendered by their privileged upbringing.
By the fifties, Granny Jacoby and Aunt Edith had both relegated the memory of the family’s downward mobility to the unpleasant past. By the time I came to know them, they seemed to regard their prosperous lives (courtesy of Uncle Ted) as nothing more than their due. Only rarely and vaguely did they talk about the Depression or the twenties, when Ozzie stepped in to support the family while his father’s life disintegrated. The occasional allusions to a wealthy past—the unimaginable time when Granny Jacoby was young and Aunt Edith a little girl—sounded like a remote fairy tale, unconnected either to the specific history of the Jacoby family or to any larger social history.
From my father’s family, I could never have absorbed the lessons I learned from my maternal grandparents—that people could not always make it on their own; that life and society could hand out unexpected and undeserved blows; that intelligence and hard work did not always lead to success for those born without educational and economic advantages. As far as Granny Jacoby was concerned, only moral turpitude (her husband’s) could have caused the family’s financial reverses. Otherwise, the Jacobys would have remained where they belonged—on top.
Before meeting my mother, my father had halfhearted intentions of returning to New York when he was discharged from the army at the end of the war. But there was no chance of that after my mother met Granny Jacoby and Aunt Edith: she immediately sized up both women as born meddlers and realized that my father was much better off living a half-continent away from them. My mom was appalled by Granny Jacoby’s constant criticism of my father, who, although he disliked being around his mother, nevertheless still longed for her approval.
Uncle Ozzie was the only member of my father’s family whom I liked when I was a child, but I did not come to know him well until I was an adult and turned to him for help in reconstructing the family’s past. I didn’t really know Aunt Edith or Granny Jacoby either, but what I saw and heard on our trips to New York was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to spend much time with either of them. In my thirties, I would begin to revise this judgment of my aunt as she told me more about her own relations with her difficult mother, but my view of Granny Jacoby is, if anything, harsher than it was when I last laid eyes on her as a teenager.
When we first started visiting Dad’s family in New York, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted lived in their own house on Staten Island, and Granny Jacoby had a separate apartment. In the fifties, before the opening of the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island seemed even less a part of New York City than it does now. With its large tracts of still-undeveloped wooded land, the island seemed far less urban to me than the Chicago suburbs. Neither Aunt Edith nor Uncle Ted seemed to have any interest in Manhattan (though Ted still went into “the city,” as everyone called it, to work at Macy’s). They lived in an insular, largely Irish Catholic world—most of Ted’s family lived on Staten Island—and the Church was the center of their lives. We always stayed with Edith and Ted, because my parents couldn’t afford a New York hotel, but Mom and Dad naturally took us into the city on the Staten Island ferry so that we could see the famous sights of Manhattan. Edith and Granny Jacoby never came along. The city was too noisy. Too dirty. Too dangerous. Too expensive. The last point was always made by Granny Jacoby in a tone implying that my father could not possibly afford a carriage ride through Central Park or a lunch in one of the Rockefeller Center restaurants. This attitude toward Manhattan—a place I found even more intoxicating than Chicago because it was less familiar—seemed to me a natural extension of Aunt Edith’s and Granny Jacoby’s killjoy attitude toward everything. In view of the cultural sophistication of several generations of Sondheims and Jacobys, this antiurban posture was weirder than I knew. Edith was a passionate music lover; as a young working woman, charged with the responsibility of supporting her widowed mother, she had scrimped on food in order to buy tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and concerts at Carnegie Hall. Yet she secluded herself in the only part of New York City then separated from the concert halls of Manhattan by a two-hour combination of bus, ferry, and subway rides. She was also an art lover (something I did not know at the time), but she only visited museums en route to or from the Catholic shrines of Europe. As far as Edith was concerned, the great collections of the Manhattan museums might as well have been an ocean away. When Uncle Ted, who did like restaurants and good food, would suggest that they get dressed up and have “a night on the town,” Edith would usually agree in order to please him. But it was easy to see that she would have been happier eating one of her own bland and horrible dinners, reading some inspirational article or book connected with Catholicism (especially the sufferings of Catholic leaders, like Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, under the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe), and going to bed early in order to be up in time for the 8 A.M. Mass she attended every day at St. Christopher’s Church.
On our summer trips to New York, I always begged to see pictures of my dad, and the rest of his family, when he was a little boy. At first, I expected Granny Jacoby to bring out boxes of snapshots and photo albums, because that’s what my granny in Chicago did whenever I wanted to see pictures of my mom when she was a little girl. But Granny Jacoby always said that most of the old photographs had been misplaced, left behind during a move from one house to another, or (backing up my father) destroyed in a fire. The only picture of my father that I remember seeing during my girlhood was a handsome formal portrait photograph, taken during his freshman year at Dartmouth. The dearth of family snapshots struck me as just one more incomprehensible peculiarity of my Jacoby relatives.
But there was a family album, covering the period from, roughly, 1895 to 1917. At some point, Granny Jacoby had passed it on to Uncle Ozzie. When Uncle Ozzie and Aunt Mary died, the album wound up in the home of their younger son, Jon, a prominent businessman and financier in Little Rock, Arkansas. It is absolutely typical of the Jacoby style that no one had kept track of this treasure trove of pictures: if Aunt Mary had not been a packrat who saved everything, the album, and the light it sheds on my family’s history, would probably have disappeared decades ago. I first heard about the pictures from Judy Jacoby, the widow of Ozzie’s elder son, Jim, who had been his father’s bridge partner for many years and died of lung cancer in his fifties. (I have always wondered whether Jim’s lung cancer was caused by immense amounts of secondhand smoke—for he, like Ozzie, was a nonsmoker—inhaled at bridge tournaments.) I had never met Jim as a child, but I knew him slightly as an adult because, like his father, he sometimes passed through New York on the way to tournaments. And I had never met Jon at all, though I naturally knew who he was—the only male Jacoby for two generations, as my dad once remarked, who had been smart enough to hang on to the money he made instead of gambling it away. Ozzie’s two sons, and my brother and I, were the only grandchildren of Oswald Nathaniel and Edith Sondheim Jacoby, yet we never met as children. This too strikes me as distinctly odd—a mark not of estrangement but of the carelessness that seems to me both a cause and effect of the Jacobys’ collective memory loss. It simply never occurred to my father or my uncle that their children, first cousins, might benefit from getting to know one another, or that they ought to go out of their way to facilitate such family contacts. When Judy Jacoby told me about the photo album in 1995, I immediately called Jon in Little Rock—the first time
I had ever spoken to him—and asked about the pictures. Yes, he said, there was an album filled with turn-of-the-century snapshots. He wasn’t sure who all of the people in the pictures were, but I was welcome to come down and take a look.
—
IN THE ALBUM of yellowing photographs in Little Rock, I finally discover the family images I so wanted to see as a little girl. I already know what my grandfather looked like from the snapshot Aunt Edith gave me after my father’s funeral, but I have never seen pictures of my Jacoby and Sondheim great-grandparents or my grandfather’s siblings, Harold and Geppy. Here is the patriarch, Max, a white-haired man with a bowler hat and trim beard, slim and dapper in his seventies, holding Ozzie and the newborn Edith in 1907. And Sarah Sondheim, Granny Jacoby’s beautiful mother, her still-dark hair piled atop her head, using a cane and walking a ridiculously tiny dog along a river promenade. One of the biggest surprises is Granny Jacoby herself, a young mother with long, dark hair flowing down her back, playing with Ozzie in the middle of a meadow. I never saw her with her hair down or with anything remotely resembling a playful expression on her face. In another picture with her brother and sisters, she smiles even more brightly. I have no trouble connecting the vibrant, youthful Si, Carrie, Mabel, and Adele with the jolly aunts and uncle I met fifty years after this picture was taken, but I find it virtually impossible to reconcile the unbending grandmother I knew with the approachable young woman in the snapshot. Why would she never show me these pictures when I was growing up? Did she, too, have trouble reconciling the images of the young wife and mother with the crabbed old woman she became? Perhaps it was unbearable for her to recall a time in her life when the future still stretched out endlessly, and hopefully, before her—a time when she expected to raise a family whose members would remain as devoted to one another as her own brothers and sisters did throughout their lives. Would I feel differently about her today if she had ever taken out this album and shared it with me when I was a little girl? Would I be more willing to forgive her for the way she treated my father?
Finally, Jon shows me our Jackson great-grandmother’s silver tea service, a testament to the early-nineteenth-century wealth of Eve Jackson Jacoby’s family. Granny Jacoby had been absolutely determined to hang on to the family heirlooms, even when she needed money desperately in the 1930s, and she succeeded in passing them on to her children and grandchildren. But she failed to pass on the memories, and the history, embodied in the photo album. She could have turned those pages with me when I was seven, eight, nine, ten, and told me the stories connected with each image, each person. That’s what grandparents do. Or are supposed to do.
—
IT WAS ALWAYS with a most profound sense of relief that we packed the car and headed for the ferry that would take us back across the Verrazano Narrows. Aunt Edith would promise to say a special prayer every day at Mass to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, until she knew we were safely home. This was not merely an indication of her intense religiosity: my father needed all the help he could get. He was, quite simply, the world’s worst driver—a deficiency attributable not only to his blindness in one eye but to his chronic (and on the road, dangerous) distractibility. He was one of those drivers unable to carry on a conversation with anyone in the backseat without turning his head around. On the way home—the trip always took three days in the pre-superhighway era—I would think about the puzzling behavior of my father’s family for an hour or two, until my fascination with the Burma Shave signs put an end to the questions raised by both my aunt’s and grandmother’s behavior. When we got home, I would invariably drag out our own family snapshots, which included pictures of my mom’s parents when they were young. Their images formed my image of where I came from. I wouldn’t think about the missing faces on my father’s side of the family until it was time for our next trip to New York. But I knew, all along, that something important was missing from my image of both my father and myself.
Great-grandparents, Maximilian and Eve Jackson Jacoby, 1871.
Great-grandmother Sarah Sondheim, age eighteen, 1868.
Great-grandfather Simon Sondheim at left, off to fight for the Union in the Civil War. (Man at right unknown.)
Great-aunt Geppy Jacoby and her groom, Baron Albrecht von Liebenstein, on their wedding day in New York, 1881.
Great-uncle Harold Jacoby, and his son, Maclear, boating on Long Island Sound, 1897.
Grandfather Oswald Jacoby, age thirty-six, and his first son, my uncle Ozzie, age four, Manhasset, New York, 1906.
Great-grandfather Maximilian Jacoby, at seventy-six, with Uncle Ozzie, age four, 1906.
Grandmother Edith Sondheim Jacoby, age twenty-eight, 1906.
Great-grandmother Sarah Sondheim, Brooklyn, c. 1903.
My father, Robert Jacoby, at age three, with my grandfather, sailing off Long Island, 1917.
Uncle Ozzie, Aunt Edith, and Dad, 1916.
Uncle Ozzie and his first cousin Eve Marion Jacoby, c. 1920.
Uncle Ozzie with Dad on his shoulders, 1927.
At four months with Dad, October 1945.
Dad, Mom, and ten-month-old Susan, Easter, 1946.
Dad, 1948.
At age five with my two-year-old brother, Bob (Robbie).
Mom, Dad, Susan, and Robbie, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, 1953.
VIII
Elementary Education
I LEARNED TO READ when I was five years old, in 1950, before there was a television in my home. This precedence of literacy shaped my tastes and interests in a way that set me apart from many of my contemporaries in childhood and drew me as an adult toward friends born ten to twenty years before me. I began to think and to learn in a quieter, more contemplative world than the one my brother entered only three years after me. I entertained myself as a small child—there was no choice—instead of being entertained by video images. In that crucial aspect, my early childhood resembled that of my parents’ generation more than it did the experience of the baby boomers.
The adults who shaped my childhood were not intellectuals, but they were all passionate readers of books, newspapers, and magazines. We subscribed to at least two newspapers (more when we still lived in Chicago) and all of the mass-circulation, general-information magazines of the era—Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Time, plus a half dozen women’s magazines. Aunt Edith also sent us an annual Christmas subscription to The New Yorker; in spite of her piety, she had not abandoned the witty secular publication she began to read as a New York “career girl” in her twenties. The New Yorker was to play an important role in my intellectual development; when I began reading the articles instead of just flipping through the pages for cartoons, I soon realized that there were very different ways of looking at the world from the conventional wisdom I encountered in the other publications we received. In spite of their shortcomings, nearly all of the general-interest magazines of the fifties offered, to readers of all ages, a staggering amount of serious information, especially when compared to the largely unedited and unverified news on Internet sites with content consisting mainly of unfiltered opinion.
Both of my parents, as well as my Broderick grandparents (especially my grandfather), were always arguing about history and politics—a stream of talk, coupled with my reading, that fostered preoccupations somewhat out of sync with my contemporaries in the neighborhoods where I grew up. In a recent conversation with a much older friend, a woman of my parents’ generation, I made some reference to “the war.” She looked at me curiously and said, “You’re the only baby boomer I know who means World War Two when she says ‘the war.’ ” I take her point, even though I know others of my generation who call the Vietnam War “Vietnam” and reserve “the war” for the worldwide conflict that was over before they were born. But my friend is basically right: my parents’ war does occupy a large and unusually vivid space in my consciousness, given that I was born after the fighting and dying were over in Europe. Growing up, I felt that the catastroph
es of 1939 through 1945, and the ominous events leading to war during the preceding decade, were very close to me. I became attached, at a young age, to a past that wasn’t quite mine.
One explanation for my fascination with the war was the procession of tenth anniversaries, guaranteed to generate discussion within my family, that unfolded when I was in the first through fifth grades. Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, FDR’s death, V-E Day, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: one after another, they became real to me through the memories of my parents and the accounts of journalists for whom World War II had been the defining experience of their lives and the making of their careers. I believe I first saw photographs of concentration camp survivors—and of the corpses of those who did not survive—in the spring of 1955, which marked the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps by the advancing Allied armies.
In the mid-fifties, when we acquired our first hi-fi set capable of playing 33 rpm records, my parents bought a series of albums, narrated by Edward R. Murrow, titled “I Can Hear It Now.” The records strung together memorable speeches by just about everyone who shaped the world in the thirties and forties—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler—as well as famous curios such as King Edward VIII’s renunciation of the British throne for “the woman I love.” I listened to these recordings over and over, driving everyone in the house crazy with repeated renditions of Churchill offering nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” of Hitler raving away in a language I could not understand but in a tone I understood very well, of FDR twitting political opponents for making an issue of his having allegedly wasted the taxpayers’ money by sending a destroyer to pick up his dog, Fala. All of the Roosevelt charm came across on the record. I can hear his teasing irony now: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.”