Legacies

I talk a lot about my family of origin, which is half of Sarah, but I’ve hardly touched on Max’s family background at all. Max’s parents were really a whole generation older than my parents. His dad Leonard was born in 1918, and Max’s grandfather died from the Spanish Flu before Max’s dad was born. Max’s mom Jeannette was born, I think, in or around 1923. They got married right around the start of World War II and had their first son, Max’s oldest brother Jeffrey, when she was 18 or 19. Max’s dad was in WW II but was posted to serve as a guard for prisoners-of-war in Texas rather than being sent to the front. Max’s mom was a real Rosie the Riveter, working in factories in Philadelphia during the war and raising Jeff, and Max’s other brothers Ted, Kit, and Bruce. These four brothers are (I think) 21, 18, 14, and 12 years older than Max respectively. (I may have to publish a retraction.)

Max made his surprise appearance late in his parents’ lives when his mom was well into her forties and his dad was fiftyish. Jeff was right on the cusp of leaving for graduate school in Michigan and Ted had plans to go to medical school. Max and I were both surprise babies in our families and have that in common, but were both very loved and welcomed.

Max was born in early July and his mom really didn’t skip a beat from her usual summer routine of packing up the family and going to the Jersey Shore from Philadelphia for the summer. She took baby Max from the hospital and he’s gone every summer since then, more or less. Sarah loved the Jersey Shore so much too and had that legacy from infancy.

Max’s dad died long before our relationship started, and unfortunately, his mom died when I was pregnant with Sarah. We gave Sarah her name, Jeannette, as a middle name, and we also gave Sarah his mom’s Jewish name, Shaindel, as her Jewish name. Max’s dad didn’t start out Jewish, but he converted to Judaism in the very political 1930’s. He was one of those 1930’s radical student types who believed fiercely that Communism was going to save the world, and was trying to organize labor unions and fight oppression along with his mostly Jewish friends. So he converted to Judaism, although like my family, Max’s family was never particularly observant or devout. Unfortunately, Leonard would come to regret his radical leanings (but not his conversion) by the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the McCarthy hearings opened and Leonard was holding down a U.S. government job – a job he loved – as a a field investigator for the Philadelphia Office of the National Labor Relations Board. He quit rather than take the chance that the hearings could expose his past and threaten his family, and went to work as a certified public accountant, a job he didn’t like and was never happy with.

I’ve had a long career in government myself, and many years ago, when Max’s mother was alive, she urged me to apply for a promotion opportunity that I was considering at the National Labor Relations Board, where Leonard had worked. “You will like the intellectual atmosphere there,” she told me. I took the job, and it felt like my closing the loop somehow. I kept a picture of Leonard on the job in the 1940’s on the wall of my office. I even had fantasies of Sarah possibly working for the Board some day in some capacity. A family legacy.