Nature or Nurture? Justice, Secrets, and Love

A few weeks ago, through a connection with a cousin of mine in Israel (Inbal Jaffe), I received a photo that apparently has been legendary in my family's history. I didn't know it existed until Inbal attached it to an e-mail, but another cousin, Phillip Minden, told me he'd long searched for it. When I saw it, I looked from left to right at the "Three Henry Mindens" in the picture -- noting Dr. (of law) Henry Minden in the center, a man whose generous life I've recently learned about -- and suddenly realized the man on the right was "my" Henry Minden, a man who lived on Long Island when I was a child growing up in New Jersey. More than anyone else, more than my "real" grandparents, who all lived in England, this Henry Minden did for me and my siblings what grandparents do for their grandchildren: He welcomed us at holidays and on Sunday afternoons, hid Easter eggs around the garden for us to find (even though he was Jewish), encouraged us to play musical instruments, and gently assured us that a life of books was a very good life.

As I grew older, my parents revealed a small bit of Henry's story: He and his wife Betty had escaped Europe during the Second World War, via Holland, they said. Later, when I read the story of Anne Frank, I thought maybe they had hidden there, and been sent out secretly. But I didn't ask for more details -- in the family where I grew up, some things you didn't ask about, and most of those had to do with the War and the Camps ... the concentration camps.

Henry died while I was a teen, and I had never been to a funeral. Struggling to read my father's face when he asked me in a neutral tone whether I wanted to go to Henry's, I said, "No thank you." I think my father's relief related to not having to explain to me what I might have heard at that funeral. It was the family's job, as he saw it, to put the sorrow of the past behind, and not speak of it.

So it was that when I turned 50 years old, I knew almost nothing of my father's side of the family. He had said, to the child I was once, that "nobody close" to him had perished in the camps, or the war.

Yet the man with whom I courted that year (and soon married) said to me, "I think your father's family name is in the books in my personal library of Jewish life and history." So, far too late to ask for details from my deceased dad, I learned something in those books of Henry Minden after all ... and put into perspective the crumbs I had kept about my grandfather Ernest, who was my father's father. It took more years before I realized that I also had important "crumbs" to investigate about my father's mother, Lena.

And then everything I thought I knew about my father's family fell apart, as I found that Lena's father (I have a photo of him with my dad!) apparently perished in Auschwitz in 1942; just last year, I learned of my cousin Max who died fighting for "our side" in Italy; and now I think I've found another close member of the family who may have died in the war.

But here is what I know for sure: Henry Minden number 3, the  Henry on the right, was a kind man with a deep love of art and music, and who loved me. My father's family helped many others to reach safety and justice during the war, and afterward. And, as I have slowly come to realize, my mother's own repeated mention of Quakers in her family turned out to be a link to others who wrestled for safety and justice in America's long history -- whether in New England or New Jersey or Philadelphia.

Now I have this heritage, shakily assembled, slowly becoming more certain, of justice seekers and, put politely, secret keepers. I find that there's some of each of those in me, after all, and in my writing.

But most of all, as I realized last week, tears running down my face while I gazed at Henry's familiar face, my family has given me love.

Now, bear with me one more paragraph for an announcement: I am enormously delighted to say that the small local library in my town here in Vermont, the Davies Memorial Library, is acquiring a collection of books on social justice next month. Here are some details -- and I am happy to say that I've had a role in helping this come together:

Tuesday February 16, Educating Ourselves About Social Justice, at the Davies Memorial Library in Lower Waterford at 6:30 p.m. LSC Professor Patricia Shine and several of her students present and discuss some of the most influential titles on social justice. Books available from the library afterward. Free and open to all. Info: 748-4609 and davieslibraryvt@gmail.com

Harper Lee, "Mockingbird," and "Go Set a Watchman"

Today I left this "comment" for Laura Tavares at the "Facing History Blog," and look forward to more conversations on the topic. This morning, I want to bring you all into this ... and hope you'll write something about your own perspective on the Harper Lee books, as well as family secrets that propel you toward seeking justice, or perhaps on The Darkness Under the Water.

My mantra for the examined life has become: "We are all in this together." Right?

Thank you, Laura Tavares, for writing of this new publication as "an invitation to read both books with a more realistic, complex, and sophisticated analysis of morality." I find the sequence of change in the two books very believable, because the same thing happened in my life while writing "The Darkness Under the Water" -- a book that first was "only a mystery" and soon became an effort to probe the Vermont Eugenics Project and its generations-long effects on those of Abenaki heritage. At the time of publication, I carried my own secrets and guilt based in a dual family heritage of Surviving the Holocaust (my father was a German Jew) and certainty that we are morally obliged to step forward against injustice (my mother was a lapsed Quaker). In the seven years since my book's publication and very mixed reception, I've learned far more history and gained further moral imperatives toward the endless struggle for justice. Just as my first and second versions of the book were vastly different, so would be the book I would now write. Harper Lee may well have had the same experience. I hope so -- there is goodness in growing and deepening. 

See more of the Facing History and Ourselves conversations at http://facingtoday.facinghistory.org.

Time, Strawberries, and a Red Squirrel

I see it's been a few weeks since I've added a post here. Some seasons are like that: I visited my sons and in another state my sister, got the vegetable garden planted, hauled a hundred wheelbarrows of shredded bark to dress the flower gardens and the new hedge line, and more. But I'm back in gear.

Last weekend I stood in a nicely shaded oxen shed at the Tunbridge Fairgrounds with eight or nine other authors of Vermont fiction, chatting with people who came to enjoy the Vermont History Expo. On Saturday morning I hurriedly picked some strawberries from the garden to leave on the table for my husband, who gets up a bit later, if time allows. Sunday morning, though, I didn't have time. But Sunday evening when I got home, before I even unloaded the car, I went to water the hanging basket of petunias next to the strawberry bed. Oddly, right in the middle of the "meditation bench" there, I saw a red strawberry. Could I have dropped it there on Saturday? It didn't seem likely. I was so tired that I just shrugged and left it there, figuring I'd catch up with the strawberries on Monday morning (today).

When I got up today, I went to the top of our office stairs, as I always do, to sit out in the fresh air and be silent for a few moments, remembering what Life is for. The stairs lead down to the meditation bench and the berry bed. As I opened my eyes after my pause, a flash of movement on the bench caught my eye! I stayed perfectly still, and realized a bushy-tailed red squirrel was there. A moment later, the squirrel ran away from the bench, toward the other side of the yard -- with the strawberry neatly held in his or her mouth.

What should I believe? That the squirrel has been carefully pilfering from the garden, and accidentally left a berry behind one night, and came back to retrieve it? I am amazed!

Of course, we are already sharing the garden with the robins nesting under the steps, and the catbirds and wrens, and I know the crows come peck holes in the ripest berries. To add a squirrel family as well seems a bit of a strain on the breakfast harvest for my husband.

So, with regret, I fastened the nylon "bird net" over the berry bed just now.

But I don't want the squirrels to have hurt feelings. So every single "rejected" berry from today's picking -- the ones the crows tasted or the ants nibbled -- is now lined up just outside the netted garden, on the grass. Red squirrel, come back. We are in this together, your family and mine.

Oh yes, this is a true story. I must add that assurance, because when I talked with readers at the Vermont History Expo yesterday, we walked carefully along the borders of What Really Happened and how to craft fiction that reflects actual events, not the ones we wish had happened.

"To have peace, we must have justice. To have justice, we must have truth." These are the stories that matter.