Emulating our parents’ social lives or forging our own paths?
Do your adult friendships mirror what you saw growing up in your household, or did you set out to do the exact opposite in your adult social life? In episode 45, I spoke to author, Linda Pressman, about her experiences growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors, her parents’ friends, and her own adult take on friendship.
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Meet Linda
Linda Pressman is the author of the recently published memoir, Jewish Girls Gone Wild. Her previous memoir, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie won the Grand Prize in the Writer’s Digest 20th Annual Contest and is part of the permanent collections of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Library of Israel. Her freelance writing has appeared in Newsweek, the Times of Israel, on Kveller, and other venues. She is a book coach and teaches memoir on an individual basis and through Scottsdale Arts.
Linda can be reached through her website: http://lindajpressman.com.
Detailed Highlights from my conversation with Linda:
Today’s conversation already got started in my Facebook group. 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.
My friendships emulate how I saw my parents 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 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 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. Likewise, I moved to Minneapolis in my twenties to my husband’s hometown. It’s almost creepy 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. My dad also 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.
A sliver of Linda’s family history. (Read her book for the whole story!)
Linda: 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. They got to the US and 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.
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.
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 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 up not knowing what their place was and having all that awkwardness of adolescence.
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 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.
Linda’s mother’s friends:
There were a lot of different categories of friends. I realized that there were the neighbor friends in Chicago and the neighbor friends in Scottsdale. But to some degree, my mom 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. She also 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 the relationship my mom had with her sisters-in-law on both sides. My dad had two brothers and two sisters and there was nonstop fighting and competition. One of my aunts would always stir up the pot or tell my mom what someone else said about her. I remember there being fights and hurt feelings, There was never a way to have 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? 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 events.
More on Linda’s history and thoughts on friendship:
Linda: Until alarmingly recently, I have taken who picked me as a friend. 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. 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.
My mom had a couple different categories. She had been in a displaced person camp right after the war and she met her friends. In all these pictures, they’re wearing floral dresses that they sewed themselves. And this was fabric that was donated, and they learned how to sew from ORT. One ended up in Mexico. One in Israel, one in Canada. My mom ended up in Chicago and another one in LA. So these were her friends. They were trying to put the war behind them. She was 19 when she came to the US so this would’ve been more like 17. I the book I wrote about my sister’s wedding in 1971. All of them came.
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?
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, 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 Chana when I got there. So I called her up and I said that, and she went, on and on in Yiddish. And I didn’t understand one word.
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. The Los Angeles friend was very depressed. There was definitely a feeling that, this is it. I’m just waiting for the next shoe to drop. We went to Toronto to visit the Canadian friend, and we were going to marry off those sons of hers.
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 share that survivor experience with her?
Linda: I think there was a distance, she had quite an interesting crew in Scottsdale. My parents became part of this neighborhood kind of poker playing group. All the other couples were American. And then my dad died very suddenly, so that group wouldn’t allow my mom in and it was very different. 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.
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. 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 again when I was 30, it was to a Christian man from Nebraska. He was very quiet and devoted to his faith. They had a cabin up north in Arizona and opening her cards later, I realized 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.
On Linda’s mother’s reaction to Linda’s books:
Linda: 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 going to write my story? 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 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 going to be different. They taught us Yiddish words for things, and we didn’t even know that. We didn’t know what the English words were until we were sitting at a table with somebody and asked for a pulke instead of a drumstick. She loved the fact that the story was written down. And later when her Alzheimer’s advanced, I remembered her story better than she did. She forgot parts of it until the very end when the all the memories came flooding in.
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 war memories. And then one day, she 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.
On the trickiness of writing about other people:
Nina: 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 in my own writing even about friendship. There are 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.
Linda: 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.
Final thoughts on friendship and being our full selves:
Nina: Is there anything else you want to say about friendship and whether we do things just like our parents?
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 sometimes I don’t get that back. 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. 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.
I’m not segmented. And I never pretend. If I can’t be fully Jewish in a friendship, I don’t belong there. But I also didn’t grow up in the time period when she grew up.
Nina: You share your mom’s need to be her full self with at least some people. I definitely feel a difference in my friendships. I divide people, in my head, along the lines of whether I’m my full self or more guarded. 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’s tiresome. I won’t be in a lot of friendships like that, but some are like that.
Linda: And some have to be like that because, perhaps, they’re professional relationships.
Nina: Or because of a lack of trust. You can always add something. You can’t take it away. It’s a hard balance. When you are used to being as open as I am and I think you are, and it sounds like your mom was with some people, it’s hard to connect when you’re not open like that. But if you are not sure what’s will happen with the information, you have to close off a little. And then you just feel like a different person.
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 my mom. I got that heart. She had a lot of heart.
Find more about Linda and her family at http://lindajpressman.com.
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