FLYING COUCH: A Family Postscript

Amy KurzweilAuthor, Flying Couch How should we confront the past? How should we think about our personal, familial or cultural histories, particularly their darkest moments? As I see it, the way each individual deals with history is unique, but falls along a spectrum. On one end, we have people who would rather not think about […]

Amy Kurzweil
Author, Flying Couch

How should we confront the past? How should we think about our personal, familial or cultural histories, particularly their darkest moments? As I see it, the way each individual deals with history is unique, but falls along a spectrum. On one end, we have people who would rather not think about these matters. In talking about bygone loss, grief, or victimization, we make that pain present again. Why reopen old wounds? We should learn to let go, actualize the selves we want to be, in this moment, free.

On the other end, we have individuals who say the truth of our experiences lies in our memories and the memories of those who came before us. So what if these stories are painful; we cannot hide from them, nor outrun them, and if we try, these stories will make themselves known and felt anyway, rising in our minds and bodies in ever more unpleasant ways. We remember and recall for our salvation. We tell the stories so they don’t tell us.

I think it’s safe to say that the Jews of the world overlap more with this latter category than the former. Every Passover, we tell the same thousands-of-years-old story of Jewish enslavement. We think about this story for a week, every spring. Every fall, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we meditate on our sins and the sins of others for another week. There are at least two Holocaust remembrance days annually. The rallying cry of Never Forget.

Forged in the fire of these cultural mnemonics, with four grandparents who lost their families and/or homes in the Holocaust, a mother born in a displaced persons camp, remembering history became, for me, an exercise in paradox. I was an American girl raised in the suburbs with all the world’s privileges, but I was called to remember, over and over, all the violent and heartbreaking losses my tribe had suffered again and again throughout history. Over and over, again and again. It begets a kind of mental vertigo, like an extreme sport of the soul.

When I was 20 years old and considering my senior honors thesis, my mother gave me the transcript of her mother’s interview with a Holocaust historian. This tragic gift gave back. It inspired my undergraduate thesis, my MFA thesis and then my first book. Flying Couch tells my grandmother’s survival story and the story of what came after: the anxious, banal, funny, maddening and uplifting moments of a family life in the shadow of such drama. It also became the memorial my mom had hoped for, a source of healing that completely surprised her.

As I revisited history, it didn’t occur to me that I might be the one prompting my mother toward deeper reflection on past events. Perhaps she’d been closer to that first end of the spectrum than I’d realized, and there I was: 20, 24, 28 years old and brazen, asking her to remember, over and over, again and again. Her relationship to the project was double–edged: unwavering in her support, but some days, especially during the later promotional phases of my tour, eager to get it over with.

My mother arrived in America in the 1950s, when many immigrants assimilated and worked toward middle-class lives. In my millennial America, we shout our myriad identities from our variegated rooftops. My mother didn’t share the specifics of her cultural identity with peers, she didn’t tell her family’s story to most people, and while I knew there were times in her life when thinking about her parents’ experiences was necessary for her, she’s not the one who wanted to write a book about it.

And now that Flying Couch is written, I understand her mixed emotions. I understand wanting something to happen but wanting it to be over. As for that spectrum I mentioned, I think each of us slides across it and back, over and over, again and again, throughout our lives. We tell the past so it won’t tell us, and once we’ve told it, we can move on for a little while, until we need to tell it again.

My mother recently spoke with me at my hometown library in Newton, MA, sharing, publically for the first time, her personal relationship to our family’s past, how she’s healed from history and the role my book has played in that process. You can read a version of her speech below. Imagine me hearing her words, ten years after starting this project, grateful to remember: it was worth it.

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Sonya Kurzweil, Ph.D.

In Flying Couch, aptly named for a journey of discovery embarked upon from a place of safety, comfort, and support, my daughter Amy tells a story about our family. This story is about herself, the artist; me, the psychologist; and my mom, the survivor. It’s an American story. It’s a World War II Story. It’s a Holocaust story. It’s a story about refugees, immigration, trauma, adversity and resilience. Flying Couch is also a story about coming of age and what I call “coming of identity.” In Amy’s case, she comes to her identity as a serious female artist. And as it turns out, Flying Couch prompted a healing process which resulted in an evolution of my identity as well.

Raising Amy in safe, comfortable, Newton, Massachusetts, it did not occur to me that she would be so affected and captivated by my mom’s Holocaust story. As a psychologist with a fondness for stories and books, I’m surprised to think about this now because my mom’s story is so amazing and heroic. Actually, this perspective is a gigantic leap for me. Growing up in my small Midwestern town, I found my parents war stories to be excruciating, fragmented, incoherent, unimaginable, never ending, nightmares. I was grateful for everyday I did not think about anything to do with World War II. For everyday I did not have an image of what my parents suffered. Of their losses. Of the injustice. Of the innocent people murdered. Of the children that perished.

Full disclosure: I was born in a DP camp in Germany. I am Ellis Island class of 1951. I am the first person in my family to graduate from high school. I became a naturalized citizen after 7 years in the US at age 11. Despite this shaky start and a few rocky years in inner city Detroit, where we landed after Ellis Island, I had a wonderful small town Midwestern childhood and adolescence.

My mom and dad were born in Poland. Each had 4 siblings. Each teenagers when the war began. Each the only ones of their families to survive. Owing to the Immigration act of 1948 and sponsored by the American Jewish Federation, we immigrated from Germany on one of the Liberty ships when I was a 4 years old. We had no relatives at the time.

For much of my childhood and young adulthood, I repressed a lot of embarrassment, grief, anger, grief, sadness, rage, and oh did I mention, grief . . . about the facts of my life pertaining to my apparent victimhood. As an adult, talking in therapy with someone also close to this history helped me confront and understand this. I can’t say enough about how much that helped.

When the word Holocaust was first introduced into popular culture around the 1980s, that was very important. Finally, I could name it. Labels can be very powerful. Stories began to emerge about the Holocaust. People, a larger community, began talking about what happened. Books, movies and memorials began to emerge. I found this very validating. It occurred to me: Maybe it could be comprehended.

The Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List came out in 1993. This was also very big for me for similar reasons. It shed light on the attempted genocide. It created greater awareness with a wide audience. It made me less alone with my Holocaust history. I took some comfort in that.

Woefully encouraged by cultural shifts, I tried to piece together some fragments of my mom and dad’s past. My mom was interviewed in the mid ‘90s as part of an effort at the University of Michigan to collect stories of survivors. It took me a while to summon the courage to read this. But I began to read it, and some pieces came together. I remember anguished moments, sitting with my mother in the kitchen of my beautiful Newton home and I would try to talk to her, to fill in details of what had happened. Hearing of how her four younger sisters perished in the Warsaw Ghetto was the most difficult thing to bear. She was the oldest and eventually the only one.

I finished reading her interview. And eventually, I created a coherent narrative. I felt I had heard it all. I didn’t have to fear hearing more painful details. I felt I knew the worst. I took comfort in this.

I normalized with the insights that tragedy, even catastrophe, are a part of the human condition. Living well and doing right are how to overcoming being a victim. This perspective sufficed for a time.

Then came the early drafts of Flying Couch. Among other things, Amy seemed to have portrayed my mom as something of a cultural hero. I imagined my mom in superhero spandex with a cape and huge B for Bubbe on her bosom. Though Amy outed me as displaced person and immigrant, she also characterized me as a fighter, a comforter, and a successful person, as well as a close and loving presence in her life. Where I once felt victimized, I here began to feel something different: Pride. That was a huge leap for me. In my opinion, pride is essential to overcoming adversity and victimization.

I should add, our extended family has grown and prospered and so has my mom. I am amazed by her good health at 91, her six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She plays an active part in all of their lives, recently traveling from Michigan to San Francisco to attend the oldest great-grandchild’s fifth birthday party We now have a wonderful extended family and it is fabulous to have relatives!

It was this mix of psychological insights and the tangible realities of good fortune (family, satisfying work, economic prosperity) that I clung to for my well-enough being with my traumatic history. I wouldn’t have called it well-being, but for me it was well-enough being. I thought: some things can never be totally over. And I was ok with that.

And then, during this past year with the completion and release of Flying Couch, I was reluctantly drawn into presentations of Amy’s book. This stirred me to recall and rethink some early experiences bringing on another wave of emotional processing, insight and clarity. So much so that I was able to speak about this publicly for the first time.

Also in the last year, we have experienced an outpouring of empathy and praise from friends and family who have celebrated Amy’s book and our family story. This appreciation has been healing in a way that I’m at a loss for words to fully describe, but I guess it is something like the healing power of love. And I am very grateful to our friends for this.

It’s clear that Amy’s enlivened portrait of the three of us demonstrates how each generation bears the imprint of it’s family history. This is not unique to our family. It’s universal to all families. Psychodynamic therapy teaches us: in understanding the imprint of the past, we may transcend. We transcend victimization, shame, guilt and dysfunction and can come to pride, hope and empowerment.

Likewise, history demands understanding and personalization, in our case, because they aid in combating prejudice, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. We pave the way to a better world and a better humanity with our empathy and understanding. These are ambitious undertakings, but endeavors in which, I believe, Flying Couch also succeeds.

Sonya Kurzweil, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice working with women, children, parents, and families. She has faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College for Graduate Education in Psychology and is an Overseer at Boston Children’s Museum. Her research articles have been published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Infant Behavior and Development, and the American Journal of Psychotherapy. With her daughter, she has co-authored a book of poetry for children entitled Forever Poems for Now and Then. She lives and practices in Newton, MA.