MY
FOLKS
IN A
FEW WORDS
Psychoanalysis XVI or XVII
By Izzy Ess of Happiness
Ironically,
Irving Bluestein Jones wrote for Vochenblatt, in Yiddish, and he translated it
for the New York Times. His friend was
Thomashevski, the original member of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe
who had started he old Jewish Theatre on Broadway. His son was renamed Michael Tillson Thomas
who went on to study Music at the Julliard and elsewhere and eventually was
appointed to the some famous Philharmonic Orchestras, like Buffalo and San
Francisco, as conductor. I believe he is
the permanent conductor of the LA Philharmonic and he also directs other
excellent music organizations all around the world, like Joanne Falleta, who is
now director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and about a dozen Philharmonics
elsewhere in the world.
Thomashevski
was responsible for putting Isaac Balshevicks’ great Jewish plays and novels on
the Broadway stage, like “Die Milchecher,” a story about Tevia, a Jewish
Russian dairyman who had five daughters and a basketful of social and financial
problems in his native Russian and his Stetl in amongst the Tsarists. My father saw the play, in Yiddish, when he
was in Toronto, in the middle 1920s, and he did know that it became “The
Fiddler on the Roof.” I believe the play
in Toronto, for Toronto’s huge Jewish population, was a travelling version of
the Thomashevski’s Broadway production.
Irving
was originally named as Yitzchok, a known, common name for Jewish men,
including Yitzchok Berlinski who became Irving Berlin, I do believe, or
Yitzchok Stern, Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, Yitzchok Perlman, Itzik
Perlman, another famous violinist and me, Yitzchok Sommerstein, who is not so
famous, whose name was not accepted by the clerk in the St. Joseph’s Hospital,
in Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, in 1938, at the world height of anti-Semitism,
just before the WWII. My mother who
spoke no English at the time, was assisted by my father, Reuben Sommers, of the
Sommersteins of Austro-Hungarian origin, who had learned his English reading
the Toronto Globe and Mail and the racing forms of the Toronto Sun. He suggested to the clerk that I would an
Izzy be, to join the five Izzy’s who were named from the spirit of my mother’s
revered father, Yitzchok Balaban, of Mavskievska, in Ukraine, between Kiev and
old Odessa, who was killed by Lithuanian “Hooliganers” who were wont to raid
all Jewish Stetls, kill the men and rape the women and ride off in triumph,
before the Russian Revolution ended in 1923.
Before he was murdered, he sired some 14 children, including my mother,
seven of whom died of pneumonia during the world-wide epidemics of the flu,
1917-1918. The seven surviving children,
my mother and my aunt and uncles, and my grandmother escaped to Canada in the
middle 1920’s, settling in a great big house on Harbord Street, near Bathurst,
which still stands. I have some early
memories of living there and watching my big grandmother making dough for pasta
and my dad who owned a Jewish Deli on Harbord, on the other side of Bathurst,
from 1940 to 1942, when I was 2 to 4 years old.
My
earliest memory, in 1940, is of my dad giving me “holy hell” for knocking a box
of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes off the top shelf after figuring out how to use the
long grabbers with the gizmo near the handle which worked the grippers at the
other end. I remember being proud of
figuring out the grippers, while my dad focussed on my gross misbehaviour that
was less than perfect. This was my first
lesson in the unfairness of Life and Family, where no credit was given for my
creativity and intelligence, while lots of shame is handed out for perceived
misbehaviour. I’ve since learned that
this is typical of the European attitude toward all children: don’t swell their
children’s heads with compliments, while instilling shame and fear is de
rigeur. I thought for most of life that
this was peculiar to my family, alone, but later I did see that this was
practically universal in many families, world-wide. The practice of encouraging children to be
creative and resourceful apparently came later with the famous Sigmund Freud
and others of his ilk who stressed that a loving attitude is more productive
than a shaming one.
I was
born a little early for the Freudian influence to make a difference and had to
wait for psychoanalysis in my thirties to become aware of what it was I was a
victim. I guess, I survived, after a
fashion, despite it all and now at 75, I’m happier and freer than I’ve ever
been before. It was a struggle that
could have killed me and my moody personality, but I’m lucky in many ways to
have gotten through it all with lots of help from understanding, creative and
intelligent, professional psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and a few loving
kith and kin, to whom I am eternally quite grateful, whether they like it or
not.
Irving
Bluestein Jones, was, of course, another Yitzchok and an Izzy, or an Izzie, to
his friends. He is a fictional character
that I made up to write a story of the old New York City huge population of
Jews, some of whom went on to fame as show biz people, while some established a
tremendous trade in diamonds and others did many other famous and infamous
things, like bootlegging during Prohibitions, and writing plays, music and
novels for a living. Some, like
Guggenheim, were famous patrons of the arts.
Some like the Bernsteins and the Gershwins, were very famous musicians,
composers and conductors. Some were like
Bugsy Siegel, who was a gangster and went on to establish the Sin City, in
Nevada, in very dramatic and self-destructive ways. Other famous Jews were Fanny Brice and Yankee
Doodle Dandy, himself, George M. Kohan.
Since
I am Jewish, these folks are interesting to me.
If I were Italian and Catholic, there would be a huge population of New
York Italians about whom I would love to relate. I love the movie Moonstruck, with Cher and
Nikolas Cage, where it could have easily been a Jewish family, where all
important business and family conversations and interchanges are done at the
kitchen table, just like with my family in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada. I have the strongest memories of
my family’s kitchen in a small rented house on North Caroline Street, next to
Stelco, on a CPR railroad spur that came right up my street, in Hamilton.
The
psychodrama that I had played out in a Gestalt Therapy Group, supervised by an
erstwhile classical Freudian Psychoanalyst, turned Gestalt Group Therapist who
was assistant Dean of the Department of Psychiatry at Loyola University Medical
School and Hospital, in a Chicago Suburb, with my second wife, reduced me to
tears, and still reduces me to tears. My
father, a gambler, would complain about the heat of the soup, with, “How can
you serve a hungry man hot soup?” My
mother was known to make the soup as hot as possible, in the first place. She would mumble something in Yiddish and my
dad would stand and scream at her. In
the meantime, my mother would stand and take a glass from the cupboard right
next to the window of the kitchen and pour hot tea into it, in the Russian
style of drinking hot tea in a glass through a sugar cube. The glass would break and the hot tea would
be spilled all over the cupboard shelf.
My dad would scream at her again for her stupidity, which was known by
the family to be her way of getting along with everyone, inasmuch as I learned
later, was the most intelligent of my immediate family, a talented master
seamstress in the Jewish Garment trade in Southern Ontario, before she got
married and had us four children. My
father stomped out to find his gambling friends for the evening. He was the happiest when he was gambling as I
saw later with my many uncles who also liked to play cards for money. My mother would be crying and still mumbling
something derogatory about my dad. The
last insult fired at my mother was a Slavic term whose really meaning I didn’t
know until much later when I had a flashback of this heated argument when
arguing with a nurse at the small community hospital in which I worked in the
1970s and 1980s.
With
a red face and spittle coming from his mouth, my dad would loudly call my
mother a Puskudniak Yachneh. I apologize
to all my Eastern European readers who know the meaning of this phrase. I spoke Yiddish and English in my
childhood. My folks spoke the Slavic
languages of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and all the rest because of their
childhoods. They never taught us much
although I did know what some Hebrew and mild Jewish cursing sounded like and
understood. When they wanted to converse
so us kids didn’t understand, they used Polish I believe. Puskudniak is an adjective that refers to the
asshole of a bull, or the poop, itself.
Yachneh is a Hebrew word, I believe, which indicates a vicious gossip,
as opposed to a Yentah, which is a kinder person who gossips and is a
matchmaker, a VIP in any Stetl or Jewish population grouping. Please excuse the profanity, my dear
readers. I believe it would be “Fightin’
Words,” in any language. I can see it
and hear it all very clearly, as my mother would cry and mumble something like,
“Oh, go already, you stupid gambler. Go
with your stupid gambling friends and leave us be alone, again, this evening,
like all other evenings.” I would cry
with her and try to comfort her, as would my siblings, two younger sisters and
a younger brother.
In
another home in Toronto, when I was already a Medical student, older than 17,
perhaps 19 or 20, my father was threatening to leave my mother and the rest of us. My mother was crying and my dad was yelling about
how stupid she was and how stupid I was.
I was crying and pleading for my father not to leave. He didn’t but he didn’t hesitate to yell and
my mother, it seems was always crying when he did. Later, I became aware that my mother had a
severe mood problem with moods that varied from very happy to very sad and that
she was hospitalized at least seven times for severe depression. I believe she received electroshock
therapy. I know she had lithium therapy
which knocked out her thyroid requiring her to take life-long thyroid
supplements.
Despite
everything, including saying to her and to me, “Who could live with you?” my
folks stayed married until my mother died of the family disease, lung cancer,
at age 76. At the funeral, and during
the mourning period at my dad’s condo, “sitting Shiva,” my siblings and I
hadn’’t really discussed things together for over twenty years, all of us being
married, at least once, and living in different cities. We couldn’t stop laughing. We recalled our great monopoly marathons, our
playing jacks and skipping rope, our playing cards and chess and all the funny
incidents of our lives as youngster with our unhappy parents. Essentially our group of four siblings, led
by my sister who was and is the “Balabusteh,” a Slavic term, I believe, to
describe the reigning Matriarch of the family.
My sister was, in fact, the executor of both my father’s and my mother’s
wills. She and my other sister made all
the decisions which my brother and I, more or less, gladly accepted.
My
father died of a massive heart attack, the coroner said, at age 84. He expressed pride that he had tolerated me
and my mother for all these years and stuck with her to the end and provided
food, always, for his children. My
sisters sold the condo and the proceeds were split evenly between me and my
siblings. The furniture was split
between us. My brother got the most
valuable stuff, I believe, the family pictures.
Most are in black and white and include all our naked baby pictures and
the pictures of my happy looking folks when they were married in Toronto in
1936. Approximately ten years after they first met through my uncle Solly, my
mother’s older brother, a never married, always angry, man who was my dad’s
gambling buddy, I believe. In the early
years, my dad’s favourite joke was to say, “oh, there’s another wedding and
they’re getting buried… er, married.” I
remember most, if not all, of the jokes my father told me. In those days, he repeared to himself as a DP,
a “displaced person,” a favourite way to refer to all his immigrant friends and
relatives.
Once,
when I was about ten, I asked my mother why she married my dad, because it was
obviously not for love. She replied, “it
was a marriage of convenience. She
wasn’t pregnant unit two years later, with me.
She indicated that she was single and my dad was single and with the
connection through my uncle Solly, it was understood that to “fill a vacuum”
that did not tolerate single people in a Jewish family, they got married, I’m
guessing. Apparaently my mom was quite
happy as a spinster and a sought after “master seamstress.” She could convert a fashionable dress in an
Eaton’s window to the pieces that could be sewn together to recreate the dress
for her bosses. I and my siblings
believe that this reflects her superior spatial conceptualization that may have
qualified for genius in the garment trade.
It was my sister, the balabustah that made me recognize the intelligence
of my mother who was otherwise “stupid” in the eyes of my father and others. Her term for getting along with everyone was
to make yourself, “toma shevotah” a phrase in Hebrew meaning “third and
fourth.” In the Jewish culture the
number one son was the cleverest and the second might be clever too, waiting in
the wings to inherit the family jewels, if number one son did not make it to
adulthood. Numbers three and four, in
line were assumed to be stupid and unworthy of consideration for executive
powers in the family. That’s how I
understood my mother’s deliberate attempt to cover up her intelligence. In many cultures, I believe, the smart women
learn to look and act stupid because then they are granted everything, whereas
if they were obviously smart, they were feared and shunned.
Now
that I’m 75, I’ve learned that showing my intelligence and creativity is feared
and shunned by my kith and kin, for the most part. This includes my own children. In a sense, since I am now quite
impoverished, I appear to be left to my own devices for fear I’ll ask for
money, or something like that. I believe
the most valuable part of me is my life’s experience which in other cultures,
especially aboriginal ones, this is revered and sought after. In my culture, unless you are rich, you can’t
be very smart and have nothing to offer.
On occasion, I have been honoured for my life’s experiences,
intelligence, present stability and creativity.
Doing this blog helps me a lot.
I’m hoping your agree, my dear, precious readers, but I’m still not very
confident about my real ability to write and teach and communicate. My artistic efforts with my paintings,
sculptures and my drawings have not yet seen the light because of my distinctly
different style. I did get some kudos
for my poetry and photographs, including awards and cash prizes.
Actually,
at an earlier age, I was more proud of my athletic abilities than my academic
achievements. This doesn’t wash with
most of my family who pass it off because it was never profitable. Nevertheless, I treasure my memories of having
a very well-co-ordinated physical body and being able to flip and roll and
swing on the parallel bars and flying rings, play a decent game of squash,
handball, racquetball, bowling and badminton and hit a tennis ball with some
authority. Now, like most of the males
in my family, I have bad knees and a stiff back, though I pride myself at not
having to use a wheelchair or a cane at 75.
In fact, I am proud to be able to bathe myself, safely, a skill I lost
temporarily about 6 months ago when I had delirium due to a bladder infection
due to an enlarging prostate. In fact,
I’m happy to have outlived some doctors who had predicted an early death from
Heart Failure due to an unknown agent, Idiopathic Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy,
which should have laid me low more than twenty years ago.
My
stubbornness is what I believe got me through it all and my parents strong
genes helped a lot. I’m overweight by
all standards, I still smoke little flavoured cigarillos and I love my
coffee. In 1938, when I was born, my
mother and my father smoked cigarettes in huge amounts and drank pots of coffee
daily. I believe my mother would have
gained about a hundred pounds.
Therefore, I rationalize that I was born with a caffeine an a nictotine
addiction and an overeating addiction, which have stood me in good stead
throughout my life. I really don’t know
how much longer I will live, but I assume, that I have a chance to live more
than the 84 years my father lived. My
mother died of lung cancer in her 76th year, still smoking a pack a
day of cigarettes and still drinking lots of strong coffee. My mother and most of my maternal aunts and
uncles died of cancer, mainly lung cancer.
They were all heavy cigarette smokes.
I consider every year to be a bonus if I can still kick a bit. If I can still write and paint and fantasize
about reality and surreality, I would be quite happy living another ten years
or so. My really good friends say I have
an honest chance of doing just that because I’m too stubborn to lie down and
wait for death.
I was
impressed by the length of time that my folks stayed married and lived
together. They actually seemed to enjoy
each other. My mother bested my father
in his favourite game of gin. My mother
picked more winners at the racetrack than did my father. They sat for hours in a smoke filled condo
watching television and enjoying games of cards. After my mother died, I asked my dad why he
didn’t date or spend time with other women.
He was essentially charming and handsome, always well dressed and well
groomed and he liked to wear fedoras like the old movie stars. Everyday despite his left gimpy knee, like my
left gimpy knee, he walked his favourite Jewish Bakery and Café in Toronto
every morning and went to his synagogue every day, despite his having told me
earlier that he never had much enthusiasm for the rabbis who admonished him for
gambling. I thank my dad daily for his
teaching me how to play chess and how to gamble and win a little and be
satisfied with a little. His technique
for betting on horses is what I do these days with a modicum of success,
impressing some of my friends at the senior centre who believe I know
horses. Actually, I only know his
system, which he refused to call a system, which is a winning system,
consistently. His system works for
slots, craps, black jack and poker, too, as well as some of the newer oriental
games I’ve tried, when I have money in the Casino in the nearby Niagara
Falls. My dad’s system is not infallible
but it is entertaining for me and a source of a few extra bucks from time to
time.
It is
also a source of “freebies,” offered by the casino, one of which are “free
shows,” one of which I saw last night which was the most fun I’ve had for some
time, “The Voca People,” a comedy-music group from Israel. My tickets were upgraded from the cheap seats
to the VIP lounge with free food and non-alcoholic drinks and a very
comfortable couch from which I stood and danced and sang and had a wonderful
time, while my “date” almost fell asleep, mainly because she was unfamiliar
with the classical music references and the irony of the humour, which included
Jewish humour. I thought of those things
I inherited and learned from my folks which allowed me to understand and laugh
and dance with the Voca People of Israel.
I’ll
finish now, because I am sleepy and my kitten is already asleep. I did some painting today and this is my
writing effort. I also spent some
quality time with my Korean buddy who always prepares for me some great tasting
and therapeutic ginger tea. I hope you
find this opus informative and entertaining.
Thanks for listening, my dear readers.
Good evening and happy landings.
Love, Peace and Harmony be with you!
I’ll write my fictional idea for a story about Irving Bluestein Jones, some other time.
Amen and Hallelujah!
THE
END
© izzy sommers, md
Welland, Canada
October 20th, 2013
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