Love

Some years ago, I wrote about meetings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle, a biennial gathering of my immigrant grandmother's family and also of her many cousins, spouses and descendants. I recalled that Youthful Me objected to being dragooned into attending these sessions. I also confessed that I hadn't a glimmer of understanding of what those meetings meant. Here's what I wrote: 

What I didn't know, and is so obvious to me now, was that I was much more important to them than they were to me. That I was "doing well in school" were words that they dearly wanted to hear. It was for my generation and for me that they had braved the Cossacks, sold the farm, deserted from the Russian army, left backward White Russia  or the Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new and utterly foreign world. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," get an education, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.

It is still painful to admit how little I had appreciated these diminutive and ancient but very brave people.

As it happens, I was not the only person to come to the same conclusion.

In A Walker in the City (the city is the Brownsville section of Brooklyn), the distinguished man of letters Alfred Kazin had long ago (1951)made the identical point:

My [immigrant] father and mother worked in a rage to put us above their level; they had married to make us possible. We were the only conceivable end to all their striving; we were their America.

Kazin proceeded to analyze his parents' marriage (he's a generation older than I so his words are relevant not to my parents, but to my grandparents and those of their Chafetz generation). "Love" became his subject. As I type his words, I think of Joseph and Sonia, Isaiah and Etta:  

Our parents, whatever affection might offhandedly be expressed between them, always had the look of being committed to something deeper than mere love. Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy.; they were arrangements. 

Powerful words, I think. Their marriages were "arrangements" -- certainly not the touches of sweet harmony.

Not "love." Love was not for such as his parents (or, to continue the argument, my grandparents).

I am perfectly sure that in my parents' mind, love was something exotic and not wholly legitimate, reserved for "educated" people like their children, who were the sole end of their existence. So far as I knew, love was not an element admissible in my parents' experience. Any open talk of it between themselves would have seemed ridiculous. It would have suggested a wicked self-indulgence, a preposterous attention to one's own feelings.... They looked on themselves only as instruments toward the ideal "American" future that would be lived by their children. 

I have the same sense about my forebears. I never heard any of them use the word "love" and I don't think it would have been a comprehensible value for them. To fall in love, to be in love, was not their expectation. Their aim was more elemental: simply, to survive.  

Moreover, not only did they not recognize romantic love, they also, as far as I can remember, attached little importance to "happiness."

What an oddity!  They had left the dark backward of eastern Europe, lands of dearth and pogroms and cholera, and traveled to a country in which the "pursuit of happiness" was inscribed in its founding documents. But their aim, I am absolutely sure, was not to achieve ephemeral happiness; their aim was to put a roof over their heads and put food on the family table.

Life and liberty, yes; the pursuit of happiness -- an utterly alien concept.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

You are accurately describing my grandparents on my father's side, who lived on Amboy Street between Sutter and Pitkin. They lived into their 90s but probably never experienced much of happiness or love but took so much joy in seeing their grandchildren, and we could never understand why and we couldn't stand being the objects of their adoration and we couldn't understand them since they spoke very little English and we hated traveling into that awful neighborhood in Brownsville. And it saddens me that I was too young to be appreciative of what they suffered and why they suffered and too young to even attempt to communicate with them.