[00:00:00] Linda: Example of friendships I had was my mom actually with her sisters-in-law , and the nonstop fighting and competition , and there was one crazy one. And so she’d always stir up the pot or tell my mom what someone else said about her.

, there was never an honest conversation of, I love you I don’t want us to fight, or Can you not tell me what other people say about me? ,

[00:00:28] Nina:

Welcome to Dear Nina, conversations about friendship. Today’s conversation already got started in my Facebook group.

Dear Nina, the group where we do have great chats about friendship , I wanted to hear whether listeners felt that as adults, they imitated the friendships they saw their parents have when they were kids, or whether some set out to do the exact. I will say that my friendships 100% emulate how I saw my mom and my dad too, conduct their social lives. In some ways, I wish I could emulate my mom even more. , I’ve had her on the podcast to talk about things that. I’m not as good at. I think she takes things less personally.

She’s better about not over-explaining her feelings or seeking approval, but those are really deep level things. On the surface I have absolutely emulated how she created a social life for herself when she moved to Chicago in. , early twenties and I moved to Minneapolis in my twenties I moved to my husband’s hometown. She moved to her husband’s hometown and is almost creepy in a way when I think about how similar our social lives are. But I did that because I could tell that her female friendships really rounded out her life. And they’re a couple of friends as a couple, and my dad had a lot of guy friends and up until when he died, which was just a little over a year ago, Friendships were really important to him, and when I was a kid he used to have guys come over and play basketball and there was just a lot of time with friends.

my parents didn’t have to tell me. That was important for me to see that that was important. , I believe for my guess, and she will correct me , if I’m wrong, she has a little bit of a different story to share about the example that her parents gave her about friendship. So I’m excited to welcome Linda Pressman. She’s the author of the recently published memoir, Jewish Girls Gone Wild.

I really loved this book. My mom loved this book, her previous memoir, looking up a memoir of Sisters Survivors, and Skokie won the Grand Prize and the Writer’s Digest. 20th annual contest and is part of the permanent collections. Of Yad, VHE and Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and the National Library of Israel.

Her freelance writing has appeared in Newsweek and other venues. She’s a book coach and teaches memoir through Scottsdale Arts. Welcome, Linda. Thank you for being.

[00:02:43] Linda: Hi, Nina. Wonder. To talk to you.

[00:02:46] Nina: why don’t you tell our listeners a bit about your background and what brings you to this topic.

[00:02:51] Linda: , so I am a first generation child of Holocaust survivors. I’m one of seven sisters. I am number six. , my parents both survived the war with most of their family intact. My dad lost a sister and a newborn nephew, but otherwise there were. , siblings on that side of my mother’s three probably cuz they weren’t sent to concentration camps.

They got to the US and they were determined to be very American. And so by the time I was born at the tail end of the family, this was an English speaking family that was really kind of camouflaged. I feel like looking back that their friendships were part of the camouflage because they really didn’t feel comfortable with anybody, , except their siblings or people they could speak Yiddish to.

So anytime among the American Jews was. A little hard for them, especially for my dad. I was born in Chicago, but my parents moved to Skokie, Illinois when I was six months old because apparently they thought having six daughters was too much for a two bedroom apartment.

[00:04:02] Nina: Well, that’s fair.

[00:04:02] Linda: Anyway. And, , I always felt like I had that book in me, the first book, , but , I became aware while I was writing that it would have to be like a thousand pages because , the part about moving to Arizona and having that gut-wrenching change where suddenly we’re not part of this Yiddish immigrant community, and now we’re in Arizona and we have to seem like Arizonans

that seemed very different to me. So I actually broke the books apart into the first one, which covers to 1973. And the second one was high school. And I’m not saying that I’m that interesting, , I’m saying in some way, , my life and my struggles are symbolic of other peoples. Either if they grew up with, , immigrant parents or they grew up in large families, or they just grew.

Not knowing what their place was and having all that awkwardness of adolescence. One other thing, I realized early on that the Holocaust survivor parents just was a topic that kept on given

, my dad died early.

, but my mom was alive until seven years ago

at some point. , I realized that the story of having survivor parents continues, , it continued to, 2016 when my mom died, and it continues to today because in some ways my mom lives inside my head. I don’t think I can ever completely escape it, . That thing of the Holocaust kind of bumping into our safe American life that’s always there and it actually is very triggering for my mother when I become a mother and I adhere to the Jewish community she almost , would’ve preferred that all of us intermarry and disappear from the Jewish people.

[00:05:51] Nina: Yeah. People really respond to that in a couple ways. Either really clinging to Jewish heritage and saying, we’re here, we survived. You can’t, make us go away. And I definitely have heard. The version that you write about too, which is assimilate, don’t stand out, don’t try to assert your Judaism, and I loved your writing about finding Judaism on your own and the youth groups and the things that your parents are

like.

What are you

[00:06:18] Linda: I know,

,

[00:06:18] Linda: and I don’t think it’s a mistake that the day I was in the, , spiritual bookstore looking for my next religion after the last one fell apart. , God forbid we should look at Judaism. , , the little rotating rack of books settled on Wit and Wisdom from the Talmud. It was a big moment in my life and, , for me, the progression from messed up kid. and I don’t know anything, and my parents are not a source of this information to, , becoming a grownup in Judaism, which I’ve been in since I was 21. , that’s a real story.

I’d love other Jews to do it.

[00:06:57] Nina: Yeah, I think in, in my own way, I have two not as extreme, , , my parents are always connected to Judaism. I think most of their friends are probably Jewish when I think about it, and I grew up in a, in a heavily Jewish area of Chicago. Not Skoki, but different kind of Jewish area, I definitely clung to it, sort of inexplicably more than most people I knew growing up, including my own family, including my own friends.

I think what you and I share in common, a rabbi would say is we both have a yk. Like we just, we feel it Maybe more than your upbringing would,

would say you should, let’s get to the piece about friendships and your parents. . other than their friends not being fellow survivors, it seems like they avoided that community. what were their friends like?

[00:07:44] Linda: so there are a lot of different categories of friends. , I realized that there were the neighbor friends in Chicago and then there were the neighbor friends in Scottsdale. But to some degree, , my mom. , she didn’t completely relate to them. I think she felt both, , worse than them because she had an accent and she wanted everything to look perfect basically until she opened her mouth.

And then also she felt better than them because she was a survivor. And there was always a suspicion of. What were these American Jews doing during the war and how dare they be safe? When I was running for my life through the forest, , , the most troubling. Example of friendships I had was my mom actually with her sisters-in-law , on both sides. So, , my dad had two brothers and two sisters and the nonstop fighting and competition , and there was one crazy one. And so she’d always stir up the pot or tell my mom what someone else said about her.

, and I just remember there being a, Fights , and hurt feelings, there was never a way to express that. Like there was never an honest conversation of, I love you I don’t want us to fight, or Can you not tell me what other people say about me? , Like, instead of talking about the deepest topic that they could talk about, which would be the war, . , they’d get caught up in dieting and close in events. You know, who is having a Bar Mitzvah? Who is having a bat mitzvah? How are we gonna prove that the Nazis did not win,

[00:09:24] Nina: So they did stay within the Jewish community in that way. They still did the Barbot Mitzvahs and, and all that.

[00:09:30] Linda: they did for a while. , , my oldest sister got married in 1971 when she was 18, that was the last jewish wedding we had for a very long time. , once we moved to Arizona, which was in 73, it was more like Justice of the Peace and whoever you could drag kicking and screaming to the altar.

[00:09:51] Nina: So do you remember your mom being on the phone with friends? Did she have people she could go to? Because I said at the beginning that I felt maybe your upbringing based on your book was different in terms of like the way I emulate my mom’s friendships.

. So you really should answer that. Did you emulate your mom’s friendships?

[00:10:10] Linda: I would say , until alarmingly recently, I have taken who picked me, let’s say they picked me. , after I had breast cancer, , about a year and a couple months ago, , that changed completely. , I realized there was almost a shorthand for the friends.

Like I almost walked in mid scene and they had always assumed that I knew more than I knew, but I didn’t know it. And I was pretending. And they were pretending. And a lot of it had grown strained over 30 years of pretending. . So I actually let go of a, a lifelong friend. , it was hard. But cancer tends to be like a big, wash where suddenly things wash away.

my mom, , she had a couple different categories. She had been in a displaced person camp right after the war, and she met her friends. , and in all these pictures, they’re all wearing floral dresses that they sewed themselves. And this was fabrics that was donated and they learned how to sew from ort,

and one ends up in Mexico. . One ends up in Israel, one ends up in Canada. My mom ends up in Chicago and another one in la So these were her friends, like they were trying to put the war behind them and, and these are the friends you get, you’re of a

similar age.

She was 19 when she came to the us so this would’ve been more like 17.

, and so what’s funny, as I mentioned my sister’s wedding in 1971, because all of them came and they were.

[00:11:44] Nina: Wow.

[00:11:45] Linda: Decked out. Just decked out. , I mentioned , the one in LA at the end of Jewish Girls Gone Wild. The one who had lost her whole family, she and her husband had, and you might remember that.

. They were decked out and I remember feeling like this was a display to show how much we have thrived in this country. , it was kind of ostentatious, but it was also meant to say that Hitler didn’t win. You know, here’s my family, I’ve. Seven daughters. I’m getting one married off, it’s a Jewish wedding , I just remember all of her friends and, the numbering of the sisters and all that.

[00:12:21] Nina: , it’s not even easy now. With all of the tools that we have at our disposal to really keep up a deep, long distance friendship. How did she do that you think?

[00:12:31] Linda: she talked on the phone a lot. , more than your average mother , to the point where I spent my whole life tapping on her shoulder. Mom, mom, mom. what was amazing to me as a bystander was how easily she would switch into different dialects of Yiddish based on whether the person was from Poland or was from Lithuania or was Russian, And they kept in touch. She and the Israeli friend, they wrote a lot of letters. And when I went to Israel as a college student in 81, she taught me one Yiddish phrase to tell Hana when I got there, which was . And that was all I knew. So I called her up and I said that, and she went, on and on in Yiddish.

And I didn’t understand one word

except. Oh, it means I am ASHA’s daughter. My mom’s name was Helen, but it was Hasha was her Yiddishy name. She’s like, tell it back to me. Tell me again. You’re gonna call Hannah and you’re gonna say that. it was interesting watching the friends change, The Israeli friend because of hardships, she aged, I’d say prematurely, , the Mexico City friend was beautiful and flamboyant and rich, , the Los Angeles friend was, very depressed. And, and there was definitely a feeling that, this is it. I’m just waiting for , the next shoe to.

I wrote in the book about how that next shoe actually did drop for them in Los Angeles, and it was kind of horrifying for me to do that research. , she kept up, we went to Toronto, so we went to visit the, , the Canadian friend, and we were, oh, we’re gonna marry off. We’re gonna marry those sons of hers.

[00:14:15] Nina: do you think that she was able to create a first in Chicago and then in Scottsdale friends that were as close, or was there always a distance because they didn’t have that survivor experience with her?

[00:14:29] Linda: I think there was a distance, she had quite a interesting. Crew , in Scottsdale. My parents became part of this neighborhood kind of kaluki or poker playing group. , all the other couples were American. And then my dad died very suddenly, , so that group wouldn’t allow her in and it was very different. She didn’t automatically belong because of her past, I would say that she belonged with people who were, , Eastern European immigrants. She had to belong by benefit of being in a certain place, location, having a. I told in the book how the neighbor across the street lost his wife four months later and how they paired up and were allowed back in,

[00:15:16] Nina: And she still had kids at home. I mean, some were grown and married I remember in the book, but she, when you have seven kids, you’re gonna have a variety of stages.

You’re gonna be a grandma, but also have kids at home.

and you were living at home, weren’t you at the time , when they moved in

together?

[00:15:28] Linda: sure. My dad died , the same week I turned 15. , . I was trying to get out of there as fast as I could before she married the guy across the street. You know, it was the seventies, so there was a bit of ostracizing, because of the idea that she might steal somebody else’s husband or she might be too attractive.

, she got into real estate and she made a whole different bunch of friends. , with my mom, I can’t really separate her friendships from her need to camouflage. when she got remarried, she got remarried when I was 30 to a, Christian. , who is from Nebraska.

, he was like the farmer , like with the pitchfork that’s kind of very quiet, very, , devoted to his faith, and they. Started having friends , they had a cabin up north in Arizona and, , opening her cards later, they all thought she was Christian.

They absolutely did. And not just like a Santa Claus Christian. I’m talking Jesus. The cards that were sent to my mother and my stepfather assumed that she was, , a reborn Christian.

[00:16:37] Nina: Were they in Nebraska?

[00:16:39] Linda: No. He moved into her house in

Scottsdale.

[00:16:42] Nina: That is so fascinating to me that in Scottsdale, she would feel that she couldn’t be herself,

that his social life kind of

took over.

[00:16:51] Linda: , 1990 was different than 1973 and it’s super different now. .

It was definitely more cowboy, more rural. And by 1990, I’d say, I don’t know why, but my parents were trying to hide from the Jewish community and somehow the Jewish community ended up ringing around her house.

We were living in the boonies and then suddenly a synagogue shows up on the corner, another synagogue, another synagogue on the other side. , the J c C moved from the middle of Phoenix to Scottsdale and the Jewish community that my parents were purposely hiding from showed up around them.

[00:17:27] Nina: , , on one hand she had these, I’m thinking of your mother in particular, that on one hand she had these really deep, long distance friendships that she kept up with for a long time and brought you guys to visit them and, that was so important to her, these women from the DP camp you’re saying they wanted to hide more from people who didn’t have that experience from the American born Jews.

[00:17:47] Linda: Yeah. Especially my mom who needed to talk about, , the war. My dad didn’t talk very much, and of course he died earlier, but my mom had a real need to talk about it, I’d say until I handed her my first book. , she spent so many years saying, who’s gonna write my story?

Who’s gonna write my story ? , and all of us would fly out of the doors of the house. None of us wanted to sit still and listen to her story. But when I began writing, I realized that her story was intertwined with my story. And the story of me being a safe child in Skokie was mirrored by the.

Unsafety, let’s say, of my mother growing up at the exact same age in a town that , , was just invaded by Nazis. I realized I had to allow that for her. So the book is a little bit of a dichotomy. But yeah, I think especially the stepfather stuff, I think that my stepfather formed. Final mask.

And remember, she would go up to Flagstaff, so it wasn’t exactly her Scottsdale crowd, , who knew that she was Jewish. But when she would go to Flagstaff, she didn’t talk about it. And she was married to a Christian man and assumed to be Christian. And then he had, children who were always very devoted to their Christian faith.

And my mom, there’s like millions of pictures of her celebrating Christmas I mean, things that I can’t really do, it would feel very jarring to me. But my mother, she had so many negatives associated with being Jewish that I think it was easier for her.

[00:19:23] Nina: What did she think of your.

[00:19:25] Linda: Oh, she loved it. . Honestly, I told you before, She, , got Alzheimer’s in 2010 and she died in 2016. But even with Alzheimer’s, she would like be kind of reading it. . She wished that it was all Holocaust, , but I had to write it from my perspective and my perspective was kind of coming to terms.

With the fact that my parents weren’t going to be normal, they were gonna be different. They taught us Yiddish words for things, and we didn’t even know that. We didn’t know the, the English words until we were sitting at a table with somebody and asked for a polka instead of a drumstick. . She loved the fact that the story was written down. And later when her Alzheimer’s advanced, I remember her story better than her. She forgot parts of it, until the very end when the all the memories came flooding in.

Yeah.

[00:20:20] Nina: happened at the end?

[00:20:21] Linda: Yeah, it did. Yeah. We hadn’t heard her talk coherently about the war or anything.

It was almost like Alzheimer’s was a gift that finally gave her some respite from her warm memories. And then one day, Grabbed the hand of this doctor and she said, you know, I survived the war. And , we were all just sitting there crying because we hadn’t seen her be that alert and able to transmit her own story for a really long time.

[00:20:51] Nina: It’s almost like that one sentence is the thesis of her life. Everything that came after.

To explain that she survived the war to,

get others to really recognize like what that must

have taken and, and the toll it took on her.

She had a lot of kids too.

I mean, wow.

[00:21:10] Linda: In some ways she wanted to kind of recreate the the Jewish world. I think that my father and her had such a troubled marriage that she almost loved thwarting his desires for a boy, even though she couldn’t possibly know she was gonna have all girls at that age. But she was thrilled.

She loved having seven daughters.

[00:21:30] Nina: Did the, , difficult answer or the ants that you were also close with, get a chance to read the book or both books,

[00:21:37] Linda: One aunt in particular who is not doing well right now, she, reads everything I write,

It’s very kind. Although sometimes I would get emails telling me, oh, no, no, it was this way, but, but you know, my thing was I wasn’t alive for the war. So I just wrote what my mother told me.

I wasn’t going to be a journalist and go out and interview everyone. I was transmitting information that I’d been given. And then of course, I double checked with historical records and all of that because like you, I’m a perfectionist .

[00:22:14] Nina: You’re really lucky that that was the reaction. Cuz I, I know that writing about real life, you know, I, lead writing groups in Minneapolis some people are working on memoirs, some not. But that is something that, Holds people back. It holds me back sometimes in my own writing even about friendship.

I mean, there’s stories I would like to tell, things I would like to say, but I’m so nervous to tell someone else’s story or to say too much things that involve me also involve someone else

[00:22:40] Linda: it’s absolutely true. , I have to say that I always feel my aunt peering over my shoulder and I’m always 100% positive that I’ll hear from her if it’s not right or not her memories of what happened. I do change names. in my books because I think it would be very disconcerting to open up a book and see, oh, then Linda Pressman, blah, blah, blah.

, I like to give them a little bit of anonymity, and also I go back through and I make sure that everything that I’ve written is true. kind and necessary, I have to, , honor the fact that I’m not allowed to tell other people’s secrets, legally as a matter of libel and all that.

[00:23:23] Nina: is there anything else you wanna say about friendship , and whether we. Do things just like our parents.

That’s really our topic. I know we got off topic quite a bit, but, whether we do things just like our parents or if that’s for the better or, is it how difficult it can be to do things differently if you don’t like the way your parents did them

[00:23:40] Linda: I’d say like my mother, friendships are extremely important to me, and it’s absolutely important to me to be able to be honest. So many times when I make a friend, I will trot out something personal and see if I can get that. . , and sometimes I don’t get that back. And I do understand that my mom was like that. My mom was incautious. . She needed to have her heart out there, and I do too. , and so I really appreciate that about her. But the more I thought about the friendship topic, the more I realized that she was segmented.

, there were these friends and those friends, and then later with the marriage there were a completely different set of friends. to some extent, she wore a mask except if she was talking to family.

[00:24:30] Nina: Do you think you are less segment?

[00:24:32] Linda: Yeah,

[00:24:33] Nina: So you did something opposite there.

You did

something different than your

upbringing.

[00:24:37] Linda: not segmented. And I never pretend if I can’t be like fully Jewish in a friendship, I don’t belong there.

, I also didn’t grow up in the time period , when she grew up. So, yeah. And it, and it’s been interesting, , having that, , Age, , all these women have passed away. And seeing what happened with the families and for, some reason, me writing about what happened after.

Like, what were these survivors like as parents? That’s been really interesting to me. I don’t know how to control that. I can’t control it. I can only control it like on this tiny little family level., it’s been hard to see the history because remember they wanted to say that Hitler didn’t win, but

with the amount of assimilation, you know, in a way he did.

[00:25:27] Nina: That’s interesting.

Take, Well, I do need to correct myself . I said at the top of the episode that I suspected your. Take on friendship would be opposite of what you were raised with. , and I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle. It isn’t really opposite. You don’t segment as much, but , you have for , why she really treated things separately that way that she could, but also you share her. What your mom had is like a need to be her full self with, with at least some people I definitely feel a difference in my friendships. Just to, give you , my final take, I divide people between, in my head, people I’m my full, full self with and people I’m a little more guarded with it’s much easier to be my full. Even though I think my full self is sometimes a lot, when I’m holding back , it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to be half of yourself. It really does. It’s tiresome. , I won’t be in a lot of friendships like that, but some are like that.

[00:26:24] Linda: And some have to be like that because perhaps they’re professional relationships.

[00:26:29] Nina: Yeah, just for a variety of reasons or trust , you can always add something.

You can’t really take it,

, it’s a real hard balance. When you are used to being as open as, as I think you are, and it sounds

like your mom was with some people. hard to connect when you’re not open like that. But if you are not sure what’s gonna happen with the information,

you have to close off a little and then you just feel like a different person.

[00:26:49] Linda: Yes. And I wish I was more cautious. based on some of the friendships I’ve had, it would’ve been nice, , not to do this thing where I’m entertaining and here’s my heart and all of that. , I did get that from her, I got that, that heart. , I wouldn’t say she was funny. , but , she had a lot of heart

[00:27:11] Nina: it’s really cool to have had a chance to talk to you

after reading the book. I can’t wait, to read the next book. Can you

tell people where to find you ,

[00:27:18] Linda: my books are available on Amazon and through my website, . Linda j pressman dot.

[00:27:25] Nina: All right, Linda, thank you so much everybody. Thank you for listening. I haven’t said this in a while, but I’d like to remind people to do the Five Stars on Apple Podcast. Leave your review if you can, and most importantly, . Tell a friend, Hey, I listened to this podcast. It’s about friendship.

I’d love if you’d listen to it and maybe if you have something you’d like to work on on that friendship, you could be like, maybe listen to episode 30, wink wink note. Actually, don’t do that cuz I think. . Your friends wouldn’t like that, but just tell them to listen . See you soon. Couple weeks when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around.

Bye.