Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  Being a member of that imperfect society, the Salinger family, has strengths and weaknesses, costs and benefits. There is both a beauty and a danger in attempting to create paradise on earth. To sustain paradise requires perfect people—or dead ones, not mere mortals who are “works in progress,” imperfect but forgiven. But the attempt also permits a glimpse of heaven, without which life can be too hard to bear.

  IT’S HARD WORK to find the proper balance, the point of equinox for oneself. My friend Jacobo Timerman told me something nearly twenty years ago, when he was newly released from torture in a clandestine jail in Argentina. To this day, it remains the single most useful thing anyone has ever said to me. I can’t re-create the elegance of a lifelong journalist’s language, but the gist of what he said to me is as follows. He asked me why I had such sad eyes. I didn’t have an answer; that was part of the problem. I felt like an idiot for having sad eyes: I’d not been in jail, I’d not been tortured by the military. He said, It is a very hard thing to find happiness. Hundreds and thousands of examples exist of how to be miserable, and they are everywhere you look for you to copy. It is easy to be miserable, he said, millions can show you the way. It requires no thought or creativity of your own, just following. To be happy is hard, because no one can show you, it is something you have to work out, create for yourself. No one can give you a model to copy, though many will volunteer, because happiness is not off the rack, one size fits all, it is something each of us has to tailor-make for himself or herself.

  Up until that point, I had felt ashamed of myself, as well as sad. He took the shame away. When I saw him off at the airport, he gave me a painting of a pasture, surrounded by barbed wire, in the highlands in Argentina. On the back of the painting he wrote, “¡Ánimo! Margarita” (which translates loosely as grab some life, fill yourself with life; it’s a cry that urges you on, all that and more).

  The last few years have taken the sadness away, the quiet wish I had until recently that, if I had my choice, I’d have never been born. It happened a while ago that the balance between sadness and happiness in my life tilted toward the living, but I didn’t really realize it until one moment, shortly after my hellish pregnancy and worse childbirth replete with flashbacks, and unspeakable postpartum panic attacks. I remember looking at my son sleeping in his cradle at the end of a long day and thinking, I would live my life all over again just to have spent this one day with you. Even if he or I should die tomorrow, as I envisioned over and over in my panic attacks, life is in balance, nothing missing, nothing owed.

  THE OTHER DAY my son came home from nursery school very upset. He’d had a fight with Katie, one of his best friends, and there had been some harsh words and name-calling. Someone may even have thrown something, but he wasn’t volunteering who. Larry and I tried to reassure him; we said, “You have to learn to use your words, and you both will.” I said, “Daddy and I fight about stuff sometimes, but we always work it out.” He looked at us as if to say, Do you think I was born yesterday? He said slowly and clearly so we fools would understand, “Grown-ups don’t fight; only kids do.” Larry said, Yes, we do, honey; our son interrupted, “My teachers don’t, you and Mommy don’t, grown-ups don’t fight and that’s that.” Larry and I looked at each other. We’re very different and we sometimes disagree, but we couldn’t remember the last real fight, the child’s equivalent of name-calling, throwing things, hurt feelings, and so on, we had had. It suddenly dawned on us: boy, are things ever peaceful around this house. I can scarcely imagine growing up with parents who genuinely enjoy each other’s company, who are committed to lifelong “learning to use their words,” and who think that marriage and children are the best things that ever came their way. It’s so out of the realm of my experience that it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment just how far we’d come, and how very, very different my son’s world is from mine growing up. Now that’s a keeper, that’s a happy ending. Not perfect, but real, and beyond my wildest dreams.

  It is so still in the house.

  There is a calm in the house,

  The snowstorm wails out there

  And the dogs are rolled up with snouts under the tail.

  My little boy is sleeping on the ledge,

  On his back he lies, breathing through his open mouth.

  His little stomach is bulging round—

  Is it strange if I start to cry with joy?

  (Anonymous Inuit mother’s poem)

  L’ Chaim

  * * *

  1. This is the word “psychics” usually prefer to use in referring to themselves and one another.

  2. See the previously cited article “Post Mind Control Syndrome” in Social Work (March 1982) by Lorna Goldberg and William Goldberg, who co-lead a therapeutic group for former members of religious cults: “Individuals fear punishment for leaving the cult. For example, they fear that the airplane they will ride in will crash or that their parents will be hit by cars. Nightmares are not unusual during the first few months after leaving the cult.”

  See also Destructive Cult Conversion by Dr. John Clark, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School: “To think for oneself is suspect in many groups; to think wrongly is satanic and punishable by psycho-physiological reactions such as migraine headaches, terror and panic, sharp depressions, or gastrointestinal symptoms.”

  3. Paul Simon.

  4. Hagiography is a type of religious work concerned with chronicling the lives of saints.

  5. The history of the attempt is probably as old as humanity. No less than Plato himself tried, several centuries before the birth of Christ. Plato’s unsurpassed attempt in the Republic to create a perfect world ended when he came up against the problem of finding persons with perfect judgment, “philosopher kings,” to rule such a perfect world. He considered the problem to be an intractable one. He thus moved on to an exploration of the many forms of imperfect society, their strengths and weaknesses, costs and benefits.

  Afterword

  THE VERY NICEST and most unexpected gift I received after this book was first published was a warm and touching letter from a relative, my father’s first cousin, Jay Goldberg. He is just three months older than my father. His mother, Birdie, and my father’s father, Sol, were brother and sister, together with siblings Stella, Gertie, and Sam Salinger. I found I have a wealth of cousins, some my father’s age, some my age, some my son’s age, eager to meet me. I never knew they existed. Over a series of letters, Jay Goldberg has, with great richness of memory and generosity of spirit, filled the gaps in this book and in my knowledge of our family. I think the reader, too, will find it a fascinating, vital addition, both as a portrait of the Salinger family and as a portrait of an era.

  One of the things he sent me was a copy of a letter he wrote to my father in 1988, but did not send. He wrote:

  Dear Sonny,

  We are getting perilously close to the Biblical age of “Three Score and Ten,” which in pre–medical advance days meant that seventy was IT. At any rate, we’re not Holden Caulfield’s age anymore or even close to it. Without being macabre, I’m old enough to give you my thoughts. You didn’t ask for them and you don’t need them, but they say catharsis is good for the soul.

  I am really proud of you. Just think—the kid I played with in New York in your apartment has become one of the world’s most popular and enduring and important writers. Catcher in the Rye still sells hundreds of thousands of copies, after so many years. It is always nice to see the expression on people’s faces when they ask, “Are you really J. D. Salinger’s first cousin?” All of us in the family, I suppose, have basked in the light of your popularity.

  I also respect your great determination to remain utterly private. You have a right to lead your life as you wish, provided you do no harm to anyone.

  Having said all that, I will confess that I think you made a touchdown, but lost the game. By that I mean that you neglected to evince any feelings for anyone in the family—except your mother and sister. Fame and adulati
on are wonderful, but family is also very important. It is vital, I feel, in one’s life and in the raising of one’s children. . . .

  Did your children know anything about the Salingers—their great-grandfather, their cousins, their uncles and aunts? I think it is their loss—and yours.

  You obviously turned your back on your heritage. Many Jews died through centuries of persecution. You and I are indeed fortunate our great-grandfather and grandfather had the guts to escape and come to America. It’s a very meaningful background, and yet I get the strong impression you have totally rejected it. Here, too, I feel you have lost a great deal. “Zen” may be terrific, but you had a rich Jewish heritage right in your own backyard.

  Sonny, I wish you well in the years remaining and I hope your children will have a long and happy life. And I trust they have learned something valuable in this article I have written about who they really are.

  Jay

  This one of Sonny’s children, named Margaret, did learn from my father’s cousin Jay something of great value about who I really am—who we are—as will my children and, God willing, my children’s children. I am deeply grateful for this gift. Jay sent me a copy of our family’s history that he had written in 1980 and amended in 1988. What follows are selections taken from his work.

  “THE SALINGERS: A FAMILY ALBUM.”

  These notes will have some words about Sonny [the family name for J. D. Salinger], but it is primarily about the remarkable family from which he and I come. All my life, I have always had enormous pride in the Salinger family. I felt that Sonny’s and my grandfather, the late Dr. Simon F. Salinger, was a particularly remarkable man. My gratitude to my grandfather Salinger is great. He had the courage to run away from a little town in Lithuania and eventually make his way to America, I feel deeply that if he hadn’t come here, I might not be among the living. (Nor would Sonny.) The Jews from that area were virtually annihilated by Hitler, in later years.

  Simon Salinger was born in 1860 in a very small town called Tauroggen, in southern Lithuania. At most, it was about a few thousand people, as even today it is only ten thousand. I was puzzled to learn recently that his citizenship paper (1890) listed him as a native of Germany. In it he renounced “all allegiance and fidelity to the Emperor of Germany.” Tauroggen at the time of his birth was under Prussian rule.

  When our grandfather, Simon, was twelve, he ran away from home because his father was a difficult man. He went from town to town, literally singing for his supper. He would walk or get a ride on a wagon from a peasant. He had an excellent voice and he managed to get food and lodging in return for being a boy cantor. He was also a highly intelligent youngster with a rare command of Talmudic lore. So he found employment as a scholar, too. In those days in Europe, particularly in that part of the world, studying the Talmud daily was a way of life among Jews.

  One day in his wanderings he came to a small village and was put up by a family named Kaplan. There he struck gold! It wasn’t the monetary variety, but the gold of human relations. He found a surrogate father, Rabbi Morris Kaplan, and a surrogate mother in Morris’s wife. Rabbi Kaplan was a learned man and also a jovial one. He maintained his spirit despite the poverty in the village and the hardship of providing for seven children. One of these was a little girl, Fannie. Although she was only ten, and Simon about fifteen, he noticed Fannie from the start. They would later marry in another far-off land.

  Simon and his future father-in-law heard of a pulpit in Manchester, England, and there they went. They worked together in an Orthodox congregation for several years. However, their ultimate aim was always to come to the “promised land”—America. Eventually, their diligence and perseverance brought them to this country, where they landed in 1876. At immigration, it seems, Rabbi Kaplan’s name was changed to Copland. They found a congregation in Syracuse, New York, where Simon surely must have been one of the youngest members of the rabbinate in the United States. They moved sometime later to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There, in 1882, Simon and Fannie (Sonny’s and my grandparents) were married, Rabbi Copland presiding.

  A year later, Simon and Fannie became proud parents of a boy, Hyman, who lived only a year and a half. In 1885 the Salingers moved to Cleveland. There, another son, Samuel, was born. Two years later, in 1887, Sol, father of J. D. Salinger, was born. The following year, Simon took Fannie and their two little boys to Louisville, Kentucky, where he became rabbi of a small synagogue called Adath Jeshurun. He set about making some radical changes. In those days, Orthodox Jews separated the men and the women in their places of worship. Simon Salinger was a pioneer in Conservative Judaism, which later became the third branch of the faith, along with Reform. To give you an idea of how revolutionary this was, I, his grandson, was part of a struggle nearly seventy years later to get the two sexes to worship together in a Cincinnati Conservative congregation. Another innovation was that Simon preached his sermons in English, where previously they were in Yiddish or, in some Reform temples, German. He became friendly with Lewis Dembitz in Louisville and this was a decided help to the young rabbi. Dembitz was the uncle of Louis Dembitz Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice. (Justice Brandeis was named to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 after a long fight for confirmation in Congress.) Lewis Dembitz was a nationally recognized authority on constitutional law, and when Grandpa Salinger came to Louisville in 1888, Dembitz was writing a revised constitution for the state of Kentucky. The two men became close friends. They learned from each other. Dembitz scrutinized my grandfather’s sermons and helped him correct grammatical errors. In return, Dembitz, who was an observant Jew and admired Salinger’s vast knowledge of Judaism, was given lessons on the finer points of Talmudic learning.

  Simon Salinger taught lessons in Hebrew and Jewish history and customs daily to the children of Adath Jeshurun. He presided over the minyans, or prayer sessions, every day at sunrise and sunset. He slaughtered kosher meat. He officiated at funerals, circumcisions and weddings. He scarcely had time to breathe! For all this he was paid the princely salary of $600 a year.

  Still there was time to have and raise an ever-growing family. My mother, Birdie, was born in 1889, and a year later another girl, Stella, arrived. He could no longer raise a family on his salary, and at the age of thirty-two, he assumed the rabbinate at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, a congregation that later would become one of the most prestigious in America. A fifth child, Gertrude, was born, and that same year, Simon Salinger, in addition to his rabbinical duties entered the University of Pittsburgh Medical School—this from a young man with no previous formal schooling.

  Things worked out well despite the hardships. Simon obtained tutoring help from a young man who had just arrived in America from Europe. The refugee was highly educated and tutored my grandfather in subjects he needed for the curriculum. In return, Simon obtained a position for the new arrival and housed him. Numerous immigrants were aided over many years by Simon and Fannie. The Salingers helped bring them over and gave them housing and aid until they could sustain themselves. Among the immigrants were both strangers and family, including Simon’s only sister, Ada, his brother Barney, and finally his mother. Ada, my mother Birdie recalls, “later married a man named Morris Greenberg. They didn’t get along too well. In fact, they had separate bedrooms and didn’t talk to each other for forty-two years!” They somehow managed to have three children, however. Barney earned a modest living as a tailor in Indianapolis.

  In 1896, Simon was graduated near the top of his class in medical school, having completed the course in three years. He resumed his rabbinate at Adath Jeshurun in Louisville, practiced medicine, and became the medical examiner for Louisville’s health department. He was among the first who instituted examinations of children in the schools. He worked these three jobs for ten years.

  Sam, the eldest of Simon and Fannie’s children, went to work at age twelve to help support the family. He was later able to enter Louisville Male High. He needed t
wo years of Greek to catch up to the junior class and Dr. Salinger called his friend Professor Reuben Post Halleck to seek tutoring for Sam over the summer so he could join the class of his peers. Professor Halleck agreed, but expressed pessimism about Sam’s chances, whereupon Simon contacted his old friend Judge Dembitz. Dembitz taught Sam two years of Greek in three months that summer and insisted that he also study advanced Hebrew. This Sam did, along with working in a store for long hours. Sam became valedictorian of his class at the age of fifteen.

  Sol quit school at age thirteen and went to work full time. He didn’t much like school, although studies came easily to him. He worked for Goldstein’s wholesale house in Louisville ten hours a day for one dollar a week. Meanwhile, Birdie was obliged to quit school, at age twelve, much to her disappointment. She was an avid student. She had suffered an attack of typhoid fever. She said, “In those days there were very many fatalities from typhoid fever. It was from the water. The Ohio River was polluted, filled with muck. In the spring, the water was like a sheet of mud. We had to put it in buckets and let it settle. Then we carefully let it spill off into other containers and boiled the water. There was nothing like today’s water purification systems.” She was not allowed to return to school for fear of her weakened health. Both parents worked with her on home studies, and Birdie started to read all kinds of books—biographies, history, philosophy. She said that the women of her mother’s generation who were raised in Lithuania did not receive any formal schooling, even in Hebrew. Her father, however, taught her both Hebrew and German, which she spoke and wrote beautifully, along with English. This thirst for learning prevails even today at age ninety-one. Recently she called me to ask about a point in Plato’s Republic. I had to confess that I didn’t remember it.

  She corresponds regularly with the family throughout the country. Her handwriting is as firm as it was at twenty-one. When she spots something she considers wrong in the body politic, she fires off a letter to the offender, be he a Cincinnati judge or the president of the United States. Conversely, when she sees a good deed done, she writes or calls the person involved so he will know the act is appreciated. She has voted in every election since women were granted suffrage. She not only votes regularly, but studies the issues and candidates with a microscope. If something bothers her about a man running for office, she doesn’t hesitate to write or call him for clarification. She was the first recording secretary of the Louisville chapter of Hadassah in 1912; one of a handful of young Jewish women who had the foresight sixty-eighty years ago to form this organization dedicated to the re-birth of the State of Israel. She is grateful that after all those years, the dream became a reality. “People thought we were strange back then to work for a Jewish state, to be formed in what was then called Palestine,” Birdie recalls. “I guess we were too young to realize how few we were and how arduous the task would be.” She was a highly gifted artist and was offered a scholarship at the Chicago Art Institute, but her parents refused to let her attend, fearful that her fragile health wouldn’t permit it. She also had an excellent singing voice. Many felt she could have become a top-flight professional singer, but she did not pursue it—again due to parental objections. At age eighty-six she wrote in her diary: “This inability to take advantage of such fine offers remained for many years as a deep hurt. In my more adult years, as I turned to elevating the mind and filling my being with as much knowledge as possible, and with an appreciation of many worthwhile things offered—music, art, religion—my deep hurt was softened, then put to rest. . . . One thing I have found is that if you begin to get sour and start complaining, it works on you. First thing you know, you are not well anymore, and it can affect your mind, too.” She married my dad, Lee L. Goldberg in 1912 and, despite doctor’s warnings, had two children. The young girl about whom her parents agonized because of ill health is still going strong at ninety-one.