Investigating a Family Mystery
When, and why, did my father and his parents begin to hate each other?
This greeting on Mother’s Day 1949 from my father, Paul, to his mother, Julia, practically seems to burst with Hallmark-like affection. It comes from a packet of correspondence that Grandma Julia left to the family of my father’s sister, Isabel (known to all as Izzy). After my beloved Aunt Izzy died, her daughters passed them along to me. Four decades after my father’s death, these letters and postcards that he wrote to his parents, mostly in 1948 and ’49, when he was a twentysomething in Georgia working for Blacks’ voting rights (later finding work as a schoolteacher), have upended my understanding of our family history — and of my dad, and of myself.
One thing I’ve known since I was a little boy, because Dad said it to me over and over: He hated his parents. Loathed them! As long as I can remember, he never had any contact with them. Even when Grandpa Fred was being treated for stomach cancer at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital — just a few blocks away from where we lived in Washington Heights — Dad refused to go see him.
The hatred was reciprocal. After my father had had a terrible stroke, in 1979, I brought my little brother Jacob — who, like his younger sister and brother, Amy and Sam, had never met his paternal grandparents — to go visit Fred and Julia in the condo they’d retired to in Miami Beach (as prescribed by Jewish law). Soon after little Jake and I walked in their door, Grandpa Fred — from his reclining chair — barked: “Your father is a very stupid man!” He repeated this constantly during our (very long) several-day stay with them: “Your father is a very stupid man!”
The only reason I’d stayed in touch with my dad’s parents was that my mom, Bunny (his first wife), and my stepmother, Sue (his second), had encouraged it.
I remember going to see Grandma and Grandpa Kornbluth every six months or so when I was a little boy. Grandpa Fred, driving one of the enormous Cadillacs he leased annually, would pick me up from my mom’s building in Manhattan. In the summer, the Cadillac was beautifully air-conditioned, and I loved the smell of the cigars Grandpa smoked. He took me to their building in the tony Grand Concourse neighborhood of the Bronx. As we strolled through the lobby, he’d proudly point out that they had a doorman. I’d nod and smile, but I’d wonder, How did my communist father come from this?
When I stayed over there, they’d put me up in Dad’s childhood bedroom, which they seem to have kept exactly as it was when he was a little boy. I knew from Dad’s stories that he’d gone off to City College (where he met my mom) as a teenager, interrupting his undergraduate years to volunteer for the Army during World War II. But in that bedroom — in the whole apartment — there were no photos of Paul past the onset of puberty. It was as if, post-childhood, he’d ceased to be. As if he’d died.
Here’s a story that Dad told me hundreds of times:
When I was a schoolboy, I won the Latin Prize at my school. I was so excited! I ran up to receive my prize from the headmaster. When I rejoined my parents, my father said, “Why did you run? Why couldn’t you walk, like all the other boys?”
That night, I had a dream in which my parents took the form of rats, filthy, with beady eyes.
My whole life, my father had ranted about his parents. How they were evil and hateful. How they’d only had children because “otherwise, what would the neighbors think?”
I haven’t mentioned yet that Grandma and Grandpa Kornbluth had a lot of money — certainly by our standards. For years Grandma Julia owned an upscale boutique called Grace Bear. (In fact, down in Miami Beach, everyone referred to her not as Julia but as Grace.) Grandpa Fred — who, according to Dad, had posed as an Irishman while selling boilers in Irish neighborhoods during the Depression — had been less successful in business. But thanks to Grandma’s store, they were able to afford the doormen and the condo.
Money tensions abound in these letters that my dad sent to his parents, which start in the late ’40s. Grandma keeps questioning whether the only reason he’s writing to them so lovingly is because he wants money. This clearly devastates him. And reading their correspondence, it devastates me. Because I think it’s very clear from the letters that Paul did love his parents — and desperately needed them to affirm that they loved him and were proud of him. And even though (with one gut-wrenching exception, which I plan to write about in a future post) all of these missives went in only one direction — from Paul to Julia and Fred — it became clear to me, as I began to make my way through them, that this parental expression of love would never be truly expressed. As for him wanting them to be proud of him: It was painfully obvious that Paul’s parents were utterly disappointed in him. And I believe that, despite his bluster and rage at them, my father internalized their low opinion of him — that in some fundamental sense he hated himself, with such a corrosive force that it’s a miracle he lived into his 50s.
Also a miracle: This same man, Paul Kornbluth, was the most loving of fathers — was, indeed, one of the most beautiful, loving souls I’ve ever known. So to encounter him, as a young man, in these letters, as he tries so desperately to elicit his parents’ love, is so disturbing to me, so wrenching, it almost takes my breath away.
And here’s the thing: I want Grandma and Grandpa to love him. Still! Long after they’ve all passed. Going back through this correspondence in chronological order, I still, quixotically, live in hope of a reconciliation. Maybe this time, the family will be healed.
Coming (relatively) soon: The first letter my dad wrote to his parents from Savannah, Georgia, on Aug. 21, 1948.
Families can be so complicated. 😢
Such challenging stuff, families. The profound need for connection, wow. Thank you so much for sharing your family stories, all your stories! Keep 'em coming.....