Where I Stand

I stand, like most in my cohort who have lived ordinary, conventional lives, at the midpoint of a continuum stretching from grandparents to grandchildren -- at an imaginary apex looking backward and forward, Janus-like. I remember my grandparents, though only at the end of their long lives, and I know my grandchildren, though only at the beginnings of theirs. Two generations back, two generations forward and with 81-year-old me at the fulcrum.

It's been a long eventful tramp from there to here. My grandfather Isaiah was born in 1863, a hundred and sixty seven long years ago, and my youngest grandchildren, the twins Caleb and Asher, joined us just five years ago, in 2015. Although it was only an instant in geological terms, nevertheless, the interval from my grandfather's birth to this moment has seen glaciers melt, rivers change their course, cities arise, plants and animals go extinct, governments and empires grow and decline, wars and epidemics rattle the planet. He lived in a world of serfs and rabbis and pogroms; the grandchildren live in a world of nuclear proliferation, global warming, threats to democracy.

There have also been tectonic shifts in the microcosm of my own family. My Ukrainian-born grandparents would not recognize my third-generation American-born grandchildren, and my grandchildren would have an even more impossible task to understand or appreciate the lives of the great-great-grandparents. It's a long leap from StaryConstantine, old Constantine, in the nineteenth century, where my family originated in backward village Ukraine to Washington DC or northern California or Boulder Colorado in the twenty-first. Rural to urban, agricultural to technical, provincial to worldly, religious to secular, inbred to genetically various. My grandparents were born into a world of carts and horses; my grandchildren play with computers in their cribs. Yet here we are.

We're the same, but different. According to family legend, my grandfather Isaiah left StaryConstantine and his family of origin because of a dispute about religion. They, his father and family, were devout but he was a non-believer. In this regard, Isaiah was a true patriarch, because he established an enduring family template. Over the generations, we remain hostile or sometimes only indifferent to religion -- and in its place we embrace the evidence of the senses and the primacy of reason. Looking backward and forward from my pinnacle, I cannot identify a single lapsed atheist or backslider in the family landscape. I know that my father never attended a house of worship except for a rare funeral or wedding. For him, the sabbath was sacred only to his roses and azaleas. I once asked him if his father, Isaiah, had ever visited a synagogue. He said, "I can't swear about what happened in the Ukraine, but I know that once he got here he never did." For Isaiah, atheism would have been a revolutionary fracturing; for subsequent generations, not even slightly stressful. The precious gift of atheism I once called it.

What has replaced religion? Our extended family remains a people of the book. Among my grandfather's forty-seven direct descendant, thirty-five of whom are alive, six have written books, another is a journalist, and five others have earned law degrees, where not unlike the older generations of Talmudists, they can engage in disputations over nice sharp quillets of the law. There are no rabbis, but I can count at least ten teachers of one secular subject or another. My grandfather had no official schooling, but every one of his great grandchildren is a college graduate and many of them have post-graduate degrees.

There are some families that can boast of painters or violinists or actors in their old world heritage; not ours. Nor have we become creative or imaginative in the new world. I count no poets, no musicians, no actors, and except for my outlier brother who once wrote a novel and now makes bricolage sculptures, no artists. If we make anything, it's useful. Furniture or pottery -- not paintings. But then, no criminals or alcoholics or wastrels either. We're substantial reliable citizens -- firmly nouveau bourgeois. We may be conventional and dull, but we are what my father used to call, without irony and with great pride, solid, tax-paying citizens. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

I envy you and your atheistic family. It took me about 20 years to realize how much sense atheism makes, and during those 20 years, I wasted so much time attending religious services and performing meaningless rituals when I could have been doing something enjoyable and useful, like reading a good book or playing punchball or touch football. Has anyone here read the books of Bart D. Ehrman? He used to be a bible-thumping fundamentalist, who attended Moody Institute. When he lost his faith, he suffered a nervous breakdown but today this atheist-agnostic heads the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. Because he knows so much about the bible and because he knows ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, he is qualified to debunk religion, and he does so dispassionately with facts and a sense of humor. Those of us who were raised in a religious family need the help of authors like Ehrman, Dennett, Hitchens, Sam Harris, and James Morrow to help us see how terribly misguided we were. Hitchens' "The Missionary Position," for example, is a rational dissection of the myths that surround Mother Teresa, that incredible fundraiser for the Catholic Church, who ran an unsterile hospital that would speed patients into the hospital's cemetery that Mother Teresa was so proud of.

[Nancy Groce]

Another excellent blog! However, I would point out that my sister, Susan, is a well known printmaker and a professor of art at the University of Maine. And although I no longer make my living as a classical musician, I was trained and still work in a related field producing concerts and recordings -- so perhaps we're not as uncreative a lot as you fear. However, as you note, we're all still devoted atheists.