Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Without the contents of the shopping bag, I could never
Speaker 2: have crowds opened the marrow bones of my parents' secrets,
Speaker 2: decoded their conflicts, their zigzagging passions, the craggy map of
Speaker 2: their marriage, their letters to one another, answer questions I
Speaker 2: didn't know enough to ask.
Speaker 3: That's Letty Cotton Pogribin, a founding editor of Miss magazine,
Speaker 3: writer lecturer, social justice advocate, and author, most recently of Shanda,
Speaker 3: a Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. Letty's story is like
Speaker 3: one of those Russian nesting dolls, secrets within secrets within secrets,
Speaker 3: each one giving way to the next, and Letty unearths
Speaker 3: them tenaciously and courageously, discovering one after another until she
Speaker 3: finds arrives at the tiny, hard kernel of what is true.
Speaker 3: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 3: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 3: and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: The landscape of my childhood had, you know, very few
Speaker 2: hills or valleys. It was just a sort of flat
Speaker 2: plain of pleasure in my everyday life, except that I
Speaker 2: had very very very unhappy parents. They argued every night
Speaker 2: after dinner. I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. My parents
Speaker 2: moved there from the Bronx. When they moved, they imagined
Speaker 2: a land, hired, new life for themselves. We lived next
Speaker 2: door to my aunt Hillie. My mother's very close to
Speaker 2: a person of my life, and I was a street kid.
Speaker 2: I mean I went out in the morning and didn't
Speaker 2: come back until dinner time.
Speaker 4: We played stickball.
Speaker 2: Jamaica was really like a suburb at that point, and
Speaker 2: it's in the Borough of Queens, but it felt like
Speaker 2: it was long island. I went to Hebrew School from
Speaker 2: age three until I graduated from Hebrew High School, and
Speaker 2: in between I went to the Yeshiva Central Queens for
Speaker 2: two years, and my dad was the president of the shool,
Speaker 2: which made him what we call a big Maha, which
Speaker 2: made me the daughter of a big macha. So I
Speaker 2: sat on his lap on the bema and I got
Speaker 2: a lot of privileges.
Speaker 3: Tell me about the mother of your childhood.
Speaker 2: The mother of my childhood was an omnipresent mother. One
Speaker 2: would call her a helicopter mom. I guess she didn't
Speaker 2: work outside the home at that point. She was devoted
Speaker 2: to me and my father and the house and making
Speaker 2: it beautiful and cooking and decorating, and eventually she was
Speaker 2: an amateur painter. She always took lessons, she was always
Speaker 2: going to adult education.
Speaker 4: She was the kind of woman who.
Speaker 2: Had a majon group and on a bridge group, and
Speaker 2: she and my dad were sort of leaders of the
Speaker 2: Jewish community. My synagogue was quite an institution way back
Speaker 2: when synagogues were many of them very small, and then suddenly,
Speaker 2: you know, they burst onto the scene when Jews left
Speaker 2: the cities and formed these communities where they were kind
Speaker 2: of constructing palaces that matched many of the churches they
Speaker 2: had seen.
Speaker 4: And my synagogue had a.
Speaker 2: Bowling alley in it and a big ballroom and you know,
Speaker 2: a chapel as well as a very large sanctuary.
Speaker 4: And so I hung around there.
Speaker 2: I played sports there, I went with horror classes there,
Speaker 2: and it filled my life that I went to public
Speaker 2: school PS one thirty one. Then I went to Jamaica
Speaker 2: High School and entirely public school educated except for my
Speaker 2: education Jewish education. And I will say that my home
Speaker 2: was what you might call today high conservative. In my house,
Speaker 2: you know, we did Shabbat in a full blessing fashion.
Speaker 2: In other words, my father didn't just say the one
Speaker 2: line prayer over the wine. He said the whole kiddish
Speaker 2: that type of thing. And my mother lit the candles
Speaker 2: and we had a holla, and we usually had chicken
Speaker 2: soup and chicken or chicken and brisket, and my mother
Speaker 2: made crispy potatoes and overcooked green vegetables because who knew
Speaker 2: she was really used to making Jewish food utol mush together.
Speaker 3: So there was the culture of Jewishness and you're very
Speaker 3: much steeped in it. What did faith feel like during
Speaker 3: those years?
Speaker 4: Faith?
Speaker 2: You know, God was a white man and a long beard,
Speaker 2: and I had to behave because God was watching me,
Speaker 2: and I had to behave because the whole family was
Speaker 2: watching me, and they were watching I mean, I'm one
Speaker 2: of twenty four cousins on both sides because my parents
Speaker 2: were each one of seven, so we had a huge
Speaker 2: extended family. Everybody was sort of checked the box of
Speaker 2: a different incarnation of Judaism. We had our stream left
Speaker 2: wingers who were atheists militant atheists, and we had our
Speaker 2: Orthodox who wouldn't let you use the same think for
Speaker 2: a very spoonness for a folk that had been in
Speaker 2: a piece of roastbeed. If you think fill around the roof.
Speaker 2: That's my mother's town. She came here when she was
Speaker 2: seven or eight or nine, I'm not sure, because she
Speaker 2: lied about her age among all the other things. She
Speaker 2: lied about as required by whatever was going on in
Speaker 2: her life. And I think my relatives were performative in
Speaker 2: the sense that they wanted to be real Americans and
Speaker 2: they had to figure out what that meant. So of
Speaker 2: course it meant losing your accent, and it meant not
Speaker 2: over doing your Judaism publicly unless you were in a
Speaker 2: safe space where some of my uncles and aunts were.
Speaker 2: They were in very Jewish communities in this country.
Speaker 4: Others weren't.
Speaker 2: They were integrated into the larger worlds. And some of them,
Speaker 2: you know, looked like they came right off the boat,
Speaker 2: and some looked like Petty Lamar or Betty Hutton. And
Speaker 2: the only thing that was like uniformly wonderful, warm and
Speaker 2: go moochlat, you know, like really homie was our meal times.
Speaker 2: Everybody was talking. I loved our meal times.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: They would always just pull up a bench or a
Speaker 2: chair or open a bridge table. It was always room
Speaker 2: for everybody, and during the conversations I just learned about life.
Speaker 2: I mean, they'd had arguments about which bridge to take,
Speaker 2: you know, between queens and the province, or whether you
Speaker 2: said or kigel to pronounce to pronounce the correct Yiddish
Speaker 2: word for noodle pudding, And it was just full of
Speaker 2: laughter and jokes and arguments. I learned to argue. One
Speaker 2: of the things that I, as a feminist, have always
Speaker 2: felt comfortable with is disputation, because I learned it at
Speaker 2: my family dinner tables.
Speaker 3: In your nuclear family growing up, you also had a
Speaker 3: much older by fourteen years sister named Betty. Can you
Speaker 3: tell me a little bit about Betty at that time
Speaker 3: and your relationship with her.
Speaker 2: Betty was, for me, as a child, the most glamorous
Speaker 2: teenager on earth, and it was during the Second World War,
Speaker 2: and she had a dressing table with a tool skirt
Speaker 2: and a bit mirror.
Speaker 4: She had a room of her own full of your.
Speaker 2: Nineteen forties teenage stuff, record albums and pictures of movie
Speaker 2: stars and movie star and magazines. So Betty was my
Speaker 2: ideal woman and she never resented me. She taught me
Speaker 2: to tell time when I was like.
Speaker 4: Four or five. She taught me to read.
Speaker 2: I mean, she just was a dream sister to me.
Speaker 2: I never missed having anyone my age because I had
Speaker 2: so much more I felt.
Speaker 3: It's nineteen fifty one. Letty is twelve years old. It's
Speaker 3: a very cold Sunday in March, and Letty and her
Speaker 3: family are at a cousin's bar Mitzah, which is being
Speaker 3: held at a seaside community on the north shore of Boston.
Speaker 3: Letty's playing Gin Rummy with some of her cousins while
Speaker 3: the adults congregate in the kitchen. Letty beats a much
Speaker 3: older cousin at cards, and that cousin, in retaliation, blurts
Speaker 3: something out.
Speaker 2: And she threw the cards at me and pushed the
Speaker 2: bridge table over at me, and she screamed, you think
Speaker 2: you're so smart. You know your mother wasn't even in
Speaker 2: our family until your father married her and brought Betty.
Speaker 2: And you know, I'm the oldest cousin, and Betty is
Speaker 2: like pretending to be the oldest cousin. And she just
Speaker 2: was shrill and insistent, and I just leapt out. I
Speaker 2: couldn't take it in. It just was, you know, too
Speaker 2: much to absorb. And when I woke up. My parents
Speaker 2: were kneeling on either side of me. My mother had
Speaker 2: a wet wash glove to my far and my father
Speaker 2: was smoking, you know, one of his lucky strikes. And
Speaker 2: they somehow managed to pull me up off the floor
Speaker 2: and put me in my toddle pote and they took
Speaker 2: me walking out on the beach and they said, we'll explain,
Speaker 2: we'll explain, and they did, and we walked and walked
Speaker 2: and walked and slobbed in this wet sand, with this
Speaker 2: plustery wind and the crashing of the waves. My poor
Speaker 2: mother was still in her barments for dress up and pumps.
Speaker 2: And they told me they had each been married before
Speaker 2: that my mother had a daughter who was my sister Betty.
Speaker 2: And eventually it told me my father had a daughter too,
Speaker 2: that he hadn't seen her since she was twelve. He
Speaker 2: had kind of loust track of her when he married
Speaker 2: my mother. So I was extremely confused. It was all
Speaker 2: like an avalanche of information. And my father's he was
Speaker 2: a lawyer, and he liked to be extremely logical and
Speaker 2: very rational, so he said, just listen to the chronology.
Speaker 2: Mom and I were each married in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 2: mom's daughter was born in nineteen twenty five. My daughter
Speaker 2: was born in nineteen twenty seven. And soon after that
Speaker 2: each of us got divorced from our first spouses. And
Speaker 2: we met each other in nineteen thirty seven, and you
Speaker 2: got married in nineteen thirty nine. And of course this
Speaker 2: was no easier to absorb than anything else. So he said,
Speaker 2: I'll draw it for you. I'll draw a family tree.
Speaker 2: When he took a stick off the detritus on the shoreline,
Speaker 2: and he drew like an a tree by barbells, and
Speaker 2: on one round side he put his name, and on
Speaker 2: the other side he put my mom's name in Then
Speaker 2: he drew her husband first us Joe Holtzman.
Speaker 4: And on the other.
Speaker 2: Side of his name he drew his first wife, named Paula.
Speaker 2: And then he ruws a line down from my mom
Speaker 2: and Joe, and he puts a little circle and he
Speaker 2: puts Betty's name in it.
Speaker 4: Fine, I get that now.
Speaker 2: And then he puts with a long line between the
Speaker 2: two of them, he puts my name down from their
Speaker 2: bar bell. I'm with him, I'm actually with him. I
Speaker 2: see my sister came from the first husband, and I
Speaker 2: came from their marriage, and he brought a line down
Speaker 2: from his bar belt with Paula, and he writes in Ena,
Speaker 2: and that's how I found out I had another sister.
Speaker 2: It turns out my parents had met each other when
Speaker 2: they each of them separately, had put their daughters in
Speaker 2: a quote very fine boarding school, the best boarding school,
Speaker 2: Jewish boarding school in the country. That kept saying, and
Speaker 2: Reena and Betty had become friends. And Reena and Betty
Speaker 2: plotted to get my parents together, except they used to
Speaker 2: come on separate visiting days. So they made this elaborate
Speaker 2: reason why my mother had to come on the day
Speaker 2: my father did, or vice versa. And they just said,
Speaker 2: and they're going to fall in love and they're going
Speaker 2: to get married.
Speaker 4: And they did. So.
Speaker 2: I mean, this was a wonderful story told in a
Speaker 2: horrible context, and I was like trembling. And at the
Speaker 2: same time I realized that I had been lied to,
Speaker 2: that they had constructed and lived in the Queens, as
Speaker 2: I said, they moved from the Bronx to Queens to
Speaker 2: start a new life, and they lived this lie. But
Speaker 2: worst of all, they lied to me. My sister also, Betty,
Speaker 2: also lied to me. One time I was looking up
Speaker 2: a word and I opened her dictionary and it said
Speaker 2: the word Betty Holtzman in the fly leaf, and I said,
Speaker 2: who's Betty Holtzman?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Oh, oh, she said, you know, I mean, looking back,
Speaker 2: I realized she was talking, you know, feeling panicked to
Speaker 2: fill in, you know, some kind.
Speaker 4: Of believable story.
Speaker 2: And she said, when I was in high school, I
Speaker 2: had a boyfriend named Holsman, and I wanted to see
Speaker 2: what my name would look like if I married them.
Speaker 3: That was very quick witted of her.
Speaker 2: She was quick witted, to be sure. She was as
Speaker 2: much of a prevaricator as my mother. They everybody learned
Speaker 2: to lie because they had to keep things nice, They
Speaker 2: had to keep the perfect family saga intact.
Speaker 3: I understand why your parents kept it a secret and
Speaker 3: intended for it to remain a secret from you. But
Speaker 3: I'm wondering, why do you think Betty, even as she
Speaker 3: became a teenager and a young adult, that she also
Speaker 3: for all those years she was part of that deceit.
Speaker 2: Because my parents instructed her that I couldn't be told
Speaker 2: because I was too young to be trusted to keep
Speaker 2: the secret from all their friends, from the Rabbi, from
Speaker 2: the counter, from everybody so Betty had to keep the secret.
Speaker 2: Everyone knew it, and everyone was onto it. They kept saying,
Speaker 2: everything's fine. People accept us as we are. We're just
Speaker 2: we're a family. We're a nice Jewish family. With Betty,
Speaker 2: I said, well, you know, come to think of it,
Speaker 2: didn't anybody notice that we're fourteen years apart? She said, well,
Speaker 2: people didn't ask. Most people didn't ask personal questions. But
Speaker 2: when some of my closer friends did, said why they
Speaker 2: what happened that they're fourteen years apart? I told him
Speaker 2: I had trouble conceiving. I mean, my mother had it
Speaker 2: all figured out. My mother was a past master at invention, reinvention.
Speaker 2: She created a perfect facade because she wanted to be perfect.
Speaker 2: She thought all Americans were like that. Shanda means shame
Speaker 2: in Yiddish. Everything was a shonda in my and my family.
Speaker 2: You know, if somebody had mental illness, it was a shonda.
Speaker 2: I mean, divorce was the worst shonda, except for cancer,
Speaker 2: that was worse. So my mother had been a divorced
Speaker 2: single mother. There was no such thing. There was no
Speaker 2: label single mother. That's why my mother. It turns out
Speaker 2: I didn't know this, of course, said Betty, took board
Speaker 2: in school at age three. She did it because she
Speaker 2: had to go to work in a sewing machine factory,
Speaker 2: and she would have had to leave Betty with her parents,
Speaker 2: who still had a lot of the kids are still
Speaker 2: at home.
Speaker 4: My mother was the eldest.
Speaker 2: They lived in three rooms in the Lower east Side
Speaker 2: classic if you think of Hester Street movie, that's how
Speaker 2: they lived. If you've ever been to the Lower east
Speaker 2: Side tenement Mesion, that was their life. And my grandparents
Speaker 2: couldn't speak English more than you know, rudimentary English, and
Speaker 2: it was kay us there and it was a toilet
Speaker 2: in the hallway for like forty people my whole family,
Speaker 2: and two or three other apartments. So she didn't want
Speaker 2: Betty to grow up there. And my grandparents didn't read
Speaker 2: the New York American books or now New York goes,
Speaker 2: you know, classical music stations, the where my mother had
Speaker 2: learned to do. And so she always told Betty, you know,
Speaker 2: that's why I put you there, so that you would
Speaker 2: grow up become a real American and a lady, which
Speaker 2: Betty did. They had lived through the Shanda, the power
Speaker 2: of shame. So my mother when she made new friends,
Speaker 2: she told them she was single, and she never said
Speaker 2: a word about For ten years, she never said a
Speaker 2: word about having been married, or that she had a daughter.
Speaker 2: And I, who, as I said, had a helicopter mom,
Speaker 2: a mom who you know, did drawings with me and
Speaker 2: built little structures with me and teach me to plant seeds.
Speaker 2: Mother put her child in boarding school. It's so beyond me.
Speaker 2: It's cognitive dissonance, but it's true. So I have to
Speaker 2: make sense.
Speaker 3: Out of all that. Where do you think that this
Speaker 3: capacity to lie so seamlessly and keep secrets? Where do
Speaker 3: you think that came from? And your mother?
Speaker 2: My mother was great liar because she was raised by
Speaker 2: a great liar. She had a mother who kept secrets
Speaker 2: pretty artfully and thoroughly. My grandmother was betrothed to a
Speaker 2: man completely inappropriate for her, much too old for her,
Speaker 2: and she had to help bear her parents.
Speaker 4: So she got married. But in the bridal.
Speaker 2: Chamber, while he was going and changing into whatever Orthodox
Speaker 2: men put on for that first night, she tied the
Speaker 2: bed sheets together and she shinneyed out the window. She
Speaker 2: was a runaway bride, and nobody ever knew it because
Speaker 2: when they came to America, my grandparents both my grandparents.
Speaker 2: She went and ran away to the man who she
Speaker 2: loved was my grandfather, and when they came here, they
Speaker 2: just blotted it out.
Speaker 4: They never told anybody that.
Speaker 2: She'd ever done that, that she'd had this marriage. They
Speaker 2: were desperately afraid that it would be such a shanda
Speaker 2: that nobody would marry their kids because in the tightly
Speaker 2: organized Jewish ghettos of New York, to put it that way,
Speaker 2: on the Lower East Side, everybody knew each other, and
Speaker 2: everybody knew, you know, where they came from. They were
Speaker 2: just deathly afraid that somebody would know this story and
Speaker 2: then they would be shamed, and they couldn't make a
Speaker 2: shit off, which is a match with their seven children
Speaker 2: and any other Jews seven children. So mom had seen
Speaker 2: My mom had seen this, and my mom did this
Speaker 2: with her childhood. She faked her high school graduation a
Speaker 2: photograph by going to a studio and paying a guy
Speaker 2: so she could go into the prop box and take
Speaker 2: out a signon to where to make her look older,
Speaker 2: and I rolled up diploma and have a picture taken.
Speaker 2: And she tithed herself from her salary as a sewing
Speaker 2: machine operator to pay back this photo studio guy, so
Speaker 2: she could put that up and make people think she
Speaker 2: was a high school graduate. She was extremely creative in
Speaker 2: her line.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. When Letty is fourteen years old,
Speaker 3: just a couple of years after her father has drawn
Speaker 3: their revelatory family tree in the sand, Rena, Letty's older sister,
Speaker 3: shows up. It's nineteen fifty four and Rena needs help.
Speaker 2: Opened the door and there was a woman with a
Speaker 2: very long braid, facing away from the door, and she
Speaker 2: flipped herself around and she stuck out her hand and
Speaker 2: she said, Hi, bunny, that was my childhood name. I'm
Speaker 2: your sister, Rena.
Speaker 4: That's how I met her.
Speaker 2: She had come to us because my father was a lawyer,
Speaker 2: as I said, and she needed a lawyer to be
Speaker 2: able to get a marshall to allow her to return
Speaker 2: to her mother's apartment and retrieve her stuff. My mother
Speaker 2: was so happy to see her. My mother didn't abandon her.
Speaker 2: It turns out my mother knew her when my mother
Speaker 2: married my father.
Speaker 4: Rena was part of their life. So my mother was really.
Speaker 2: Glad to see Rena, who was a friend of Betty
Speaker 2: when they were children. They all sat on this lime
Speaker 2: colored half seat. Love's seat. We had two of them,
Speaker 2: and I never forget it. Rena just plopped herself down.
Speaker 2: My mother came downstairs in her bathroom and it was sweet.
Speaker 2: Brina sat down and there there two of them were
Speaker 2: talking and I find out she's a PhD in anthropology,
Speaker 2: and she was left with a mother who was really psychotic,
Speaker 2: and she had become so violent.
Speaker 4: She had cracked right.
Speaker 2: Rena's glasses and she had pushed her torso out the
Speaker 2: window and threatens to throw her out, and Rena had escaped,
Speaker 2: but she had all her you know, scholarly materials. She
Speaker 2: was writing a book on her thesis in that apartment.
Speaker 2: So she needed my father to be able to get
Speaker 2: that stuff. And that's why she had come back to us.
Speaker 2: My mother had her live in and we had an attic.
Speaker 4: A different housage make up.
Speaker 2: My father had earned a little more money and it
Speaker 2: had a finished attic which Betty and her whole family
Speaker 2: would come in with their kids and stay in. And
Speaker 2: now here was Rena in this attic. Betty lived in
Speaker 2: Westchester at the time, so she wasn't living there, but
Speaker 2: she came for you know, weekends, and now Rena was
Speaker 2: up there and I had this new sister, and she
Speaker 2: was fabulous. Her dissertation was on the Machuaya, who happened
Speaker 2: to live on Upper Broadway, and she did all her
Speaker 2: field work on Upper Broadway. And while she was living
Speaker 2: with she would slept me up there to visit with
Speaker 2: this tribe. And these were people who if you see
Speaker 2: fortune tellers and doors in store windows and so on,
Speaker 2: that's the sort of tribe they belonged to. They called
Speaker 2: themselves Romany. And I was at their feasts and I
Speaker 2: was sitting and watching them do people's futures and crystal balls, literally,
Speaker 2: And I'm fourteen years old, and this person, Rena, has
Speaker 2: dropped out of heaven and I am besodic with her.
Speaker 4: I have a sister, Betty.
Speaker 2: Who is a Ladies Home journal prototype.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: She makes lambshades out of potholders, and she cooks, you know,
Speaker 2: dinners from Good Housekeepings recipes, and she mends things and
Speaker 2: she's wonderful and smart. But here's this genius. My father
Speaker 2: was quick to say she's a genius. Her IQ is
Speaker 2: one hundred and eighty as if he made you know,
Speaker 2: he made her this IQ, and she is now suddenly
Speaker 2: this with this long braid a part of my life.
Speaker 3: When Letty's fifteen, her father sits her down and offers
Speaker 3: her a lucky Strike cigarette. This is highly unusual, a
Speaker 3: clue that he's about to tell her something serious, something huge.
Speaker 3: And then he tells her that her mother has cancer.
Speaker 3: She's very sick. In fact, her mother has only weeks
Speaker 3: left to live. And Letty hasn't been the only one
Speaker 3: kept in the dark about her mother's illness. It was
Speaker 3: kept a secret from almost everybody.
Speaker 2: My mother wouldn't tell anybody. She wouldn't tell her friends,
Speaker 2: her best friends. When we had the Shiva and people came,
Speaker 2: her friends uniformly said, this is such a shock.
Speaker 4: We didn't know. We didn't know.
Speaker 2: So not knowing is such a theme of my life,
Speaker 2: of wanting to know everything. It's why I think I
Speaker 2: became a writer. It's why I think I became a
Speaker 2: feminist because so much she was unavailable to women. Women
Speaker 2: didn't tell the truth about their lives because it might
Speaker 2: not make them look good, and you had to satisfy
Speaker 2: a very exacting norm. Femininity was unachievable, but everybody aspired
Speaker 2: to be perfect. And I think I became a feminist
Speaker 2: because of all of that that was hidden hiddenness was
Speaker 2: to mix a Christian metaphor of my cross to bear her.
Speaker 3: So in a very short span of time, Letty learns
Speaker 3: about and meets her new half sister, her mother grows
Speaker 3: ill and eventually dies, and in the wake of all
Speaker 3: of this, she goes off to college early, when she's
Speaker 3: only sixteen years old.
Speaker 4: I went away to college.
Speaker 2: My father just dropped me off, and for a while
Speaker 2: as a freshman, I really learned quickly that being a
Speaker 2: berieved child was not a great thing for a co ed.
Speaker 2: That's what we used to call girls in college. And
Speaker 2: I didn't want pity. I wanted acceptance. So I made
Speaker 2: very short shrift of the fact that my mother had
Speaker 2: died four months before, and I tried to kind of
Speaker 2: fit in. But my father had made it clear to
Speaker 2: me that he was going to pay the tuition, room
Speaker 2: and board, but the rest I was on my own.
Speaker 2: So I was sixteen years old, and he told me
Speaker 2: that it was important to him to be left on
Speaker 2: his own when he was sixteen, and he became a
Speaker 2: Hebrew school teacher and he became a tutor of bar
Speaker 2: mits for boys, and it was the making of him.
Speaker 2: And then he put himself through college and then through
Speaker 2: law school. He was very proud he was in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty three. He was a graduate lawyer and not a
Speaker 2: lot of Jews were, And you know, he made his
Speaker 2: own way and I would too. So I mean, looking back,
Speaker 2: as a feminist, I could kind of reframe that whole
Speaker 2: thing and say, great, it made.
Speaker 4: Me an independent. But as a child, just as her mother,
Speaker 4: it's felt like crap.
Speaker 2: And then I realized that, you know, my dormmates had
Speaker 2: different lives. Their parents hung around till they had unpacked
Speaker 2: their stuff, and then when we were all living together,
Speaker 2: my dormmates parents sent them pin money, which was what
Speaker 2: it was called, and they would, you know, they would
Speaker 2: all hop into somebody's car if there was somebody who
Speaker 2: had a driver's license, and go into Harvard Square and
Speaker 2: have ice cream cones at Brigham's. And I had to
Speaker 2: measure out what pin money I had because I was
Speaker 2: working from the beginning, I became secretary to the.
Speaker 4: Brandi's Hillel Rabbi.
Speaker 2: I worked in the public department in the alumni office,
Speaker 2: and I tutored athletes. In my sophomore year, I started
Speaker 2: tutoring athletes in English and biology. So I had a
Speaker 2: lot of jobs in order to.
Speaker 4: Have the kind of.
Speaker 2: Life that a cod in the nineteen fifties was supposed
Speaker 2: to have, Like I could buy a lipstick, and I
Speaker 2: could have a pizza and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And I only mention that because my father had masqueraded
Speaker 2: as a very wealthy guy, a successful lawyer. He used
Speaker 2: to be the one who picked up the check when
Speaker 2: he and my mom went out with another couple. He
Speaker 2: always dressed go beautifully, he always had a nice car.
Speaker 2: But later I discovered a whole lot of hidden letters.
Speaker 2: I discovered my father was really just a performing masculinity,
Speaker 2: which included that Jewish men had to provide well for
Speaker 2: their families and look good. So my father, when he
Speaker 2: said you're going to be on your own, really was
Speaker 2: saying I can't help you.
Speaker 4: I'm having enough trouble myself. Who knew? I never knew that.
Speaker 3: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 3: But the letters are not uncovered for years. In fact,
Speaker 3: Letty lives an entire life before she makes these discoveries
Speaker 3: about her father's performances. She finishes college and begins a
Speaker 3: career in publishing. She marries Bert, has three children and
Speaker 3: eventually six grandchildren. She writes twelve books. She becomes known
Speaker 3: as one of the leading feminists of her generation. But
Speaker 3: through it all, a certain feeling never leaves her. It's
Speaker 3: the feeling that there's more she doesn't know about her family,
Speaker 3: that there's more she must find out. Sometime in the
Speaker 3: early two thousands, Letty comes across another letter in which
Speaker 3: something peculiar stands out, something about twins.
Speaker 2: I had taken out my father's album of his trip
Speaker 2: to Palestine, and at one point I noticed that there
Speaker 2: was a sort of slap in the front cover, and
Speaker 2: I reached in to think see if there was anything
Speaker 2: in there of interest, and out came a letter one
Speaker 2: of my father had written to my mother, and my
Speaker 2: mother had written to my father, and in it there
Speaker 2: was a ps from my sister saying to my father,
Speaker 2: Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4: So I read this. My eyes pop out.
Speaker 2: I pick up the Varna, call my sister living in Westchester,
Speaker 2: and I say, Betty, listen to this. A PS on
Speaker 2: a letter that mom wrote to Dad when he was
Speaker 2: in Palestine, and it says Mom's doing fine. Obviously about
Speaker 2: the pregnancy with me and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4: Was I a twin?
Speaker 2: She said, don't be ridiculous. You know she's very matter
Speaker 2: of Are you crazy? I wouldn't know if if mom
Speaker 2: had twins.
Speaker 4: I was there. I said, what do you mean? I
Speaker 4: was there?
Speaker 2: I was outside the hospital. I was waiting in the car.
Speaker 2: Dad went in to get mom. He came out with
Speaker 2: Mom and the nurse had the baby. The nurse put
Speaker 2: you in my arms. It was the happiest day of
Speaker 2: my life. She said, how would I I would never
Speaker 2: forget if there were two babies. I said, Betty, you
Speaker 2: weren't in the delivery room.
Speaker 4: She said, they would have told me.
Speaker 2: At this point, you know, I knew my parents had
Speaker 2: lied about everything. So I said, they couldn't lied about this.
Speaker 2: They were world class liars. They wouldn't have won anybody
Speaker 2: in Jamaica to know that mom gave birth to twins
Speaker 2: and one died.
Speaker 4: That would be a shanda.
Speaker 2: I would be like, oh, yeah, yo, did you hear
Speaker 2: what happened?
Speaker 4: Steal?
Speaker 2: So they wouldn't have told you. She said, that is crazy.
Speaker 2: That's crazy. I don't remember ever writing that, And so
Speaker 2: I put the thing away, and I thought maybe it
Speaker 2: was a joke. My mother was having so many kicks
Speaker 2: in her belly that she called them twins.
Speaker 3: So that's what Letty does. She puts the thing away.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was a joke.
Speaker 2: I think throughout my life after my mother died, and
Speaker 2: I looked at my childhood writings and my teenage writings
Speaker 2: before I started writing journalistically, these things that were just
Speaker 2: poured out of me. When I was in college, I
Speaker 2: see that I believed I had a presence traveling with me,
Speaker 2: and I assumed it was my mother. I felt her presence,
Speaker 2: and I know it's very woo woo, but I always
Speaker 2: felt what is.
Speaker 4: Going on here?
Speaker 2: I feel my mother's presence, and it was a comfort,
Speaker 2: but it also was something that couldn't explain. And then
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen, my granddaughter was in a college course
Speaker 2: where she studied biographies and then was assigned to write
Speaker 2: a biography of a living person. And she asked me
Speaker 2: if I might let her write about me, and then
Speaker 2: she dug in, Like my granddaughter, Molly just does deep
Speaker 2: drill into my life. She read all my books. She
Speaker 2: went up to Smith's College where my archives are. She
Speaker 2: read to all my article files and my childhood musings
Speaker 2: and so on, except I've had left a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff in my study in New York and after all,
Speaker 2: but she did. She said, I'm coming to your study
Speaker 2: and I want to go through whatever's there. And she said,
Speaker 2: where are the childhood stuff? I said, oh, I kept
Speaker 2: very few. It's under there, and it's a very deep
Speaker 2: cabinet with two big shells. And she squats down. She
Speaker 2: takes out my little diaries. You know, we all kept
Speaker 2: leather bound diaries with locks and keys, as if everyone
Speaker 2: wanted to know about our lives, we had to lock
Speaker 2: them up. And also underneath water this humongous plastic shopping bag,
Speaker 2: huge shopping bag, like if you had bought a winter
Speaker 2: coat and put it in your shopping bag, big fat
Speaker 2: chopping bag full of letters and documents and citizenship papers.
Speaker 4: And I mean I.
Speaker 2: Dumped it on the dining room table. I knew what
Speaker 2: it was the minute I saw, but I had forgotten
Speaker 2: all about it. When my sister Betty died, I went
Speaker 2: up to see her in her sister living place in Brooklyn, Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: I knew it was the last time I would see her,
Speaker 2: because she was deferring food and she was about to
Speaker 2: entery though, three days when she was going to refuse
Speaker 2: drink and that would be it. And so I went
Speaker 2: up for my last visit with her, and she points
Speaker 2: to a bit chopping pad leaning against the wall, and
Speaker 2: she says, take this with you when you go home
Speaker 2: someday you want to read through it. And I took it.
Speaker 2: I took it on the train back to New York,
Speaker 2: and I was weeping so hard I couldn't even pick
Speaker 2: out one thing. And when I get home, I'm so upset.
Speaker 2: I said, I'll read it tomorrow. I shoved it down
Speaker 2: underneath in this deep, deep cabinet was deep jails. And
Speaker 2: then three days later she died. So I never went
Speaker 2: back to that shopping pad. I couldn't think of back
Speaker 2: doing that. I was in such deep morning. Eight years later,
Speaker 2: Molly comes to my house and finds it. I dumped
Speaker 2: it on my dining room table, and there are hundreds of,
Speaker 2: you know, earmail qwinkled letters of my parents writing to
Speaker 2: each other in those days. They letters and pages and
Speaker 2: pages of each other's lives and the weather and what
Speaker 2: they ate, but also what were they were arguing about.
Speaker 2: That's how I learned about my parents' marriage. They had
Speaker 2: arguments in these letters. My mother had pleading pleading my
Speaker 2: father to reform his ways. When he plays cards with
Speaker 2: his friends, well he's gone. This was when we had
Speaker 2: another round of letters when my father sent my mother
Speaker 2: and I when I was a baby down to Florida
Speaker 2: to spend the winter in Miami because I had constant
Speaker 2: colds and cloths.
Speaker 4: So there were.
Speaker 2: Letters between them every single day during that period. And
Speaker 2: that's when my father was having money troubles. He just
Speaker 2: was explicit on the page, and she was honest and
Speaker 2: strong on the page. I learned people I had never
Speaker 2: known in these crinkly pages with fading ink. My father
Speaker 2: wrote like chicken script. My mother wrote beautiful penmanship because
Speaker 2: that was for her, being a real American. Was writing
Speaker 2: perfectly letters, which they all were. You wouldn't think they
Speaker 2: were written with a line, and you know, rule around
Speaker 2: to them. And my mother, who had eighth grade education,
Speaker 2: turned out to be incredibly lyrical in her or incredibly
Speaker 2: furious in her pros. It was on the page. Every
Speaker 2: bit of it was. If I found the dead sea
Speaker 2: squirrels in my backyard and I learned who my parents were.
Speaker 2: I had inklings of who they were. I never knew
Speaker 2: who they were. They were always clues along the way,
Speaker 2: and this flashed everything out. I feel I know who
Speaker 2: they are now. I forgive my father. Took me eighty
Speaker 2: something years to forgive my father. I never said the
Speaker 2: cottage for my father because he wouldn't let me say
Speaker 2: the cottage for my mother when she died, because it
Speaker 2: wasn't done.
Speaker 3: Letty writes, had my parents known their words would end
Speaker 3: up under their daughter's microscope, I doubt they would have
Speaker 3: expressed their sore points and vulnerabilities in such unguarded prose.
Speaker 3: But the letters don't only reveal her parents' private selves.
Speaker 3: They reveal more about that word Letty had tucked away
Speaker 3: years earlier, that word she thought might have been a joke, twins.
Speaker 2: Then I find this shopping back, and I find two
Speaker 2: more mentions of the twins. When my father was in
Speaker 2: Palestine and my parents were corresponding. In one letter said
Speaker 2: Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking. Then
Speaker 2: another letter turns up in which my father writes, I
Speaker 2: dance with women on the boat and I lost at
Speaker 2: Jin Rummy, and I lost in the dance concert.
Speaker 4: The women didn't.
Speaker 2: Dance as well as you did, he said, but I
Speaker 2: know I'm coming home to you and the twins, and
Speaker 2: I will love you and the twins. So that was
Speaker 2: the second and I realized that I had obviously been
Speaker 2: unable to process that I was a twin, nor did
Speaker 2: I put it together with the fact that all my
Speaker 2: life after my mother died, I felt that I was
Speaker 2: not alone. And to top it all off, I gave
Speaker 2: birth to twins. So since I've been kind of mystical
Speaker 2: leaning person, I now wonder if what I thought was
Speaker 2: my mother came from the company in some spiritual.
Speaker 4: Way, was my twin.
Speaker 2: My daughter Rabigail wrote a book on twins, and she
Speaker 2: thought maybe it was a phantom twin. But then I
Speaker 2: found out that phantom twins supure much earlier in my
Speaker 2: mother and my father were writing in my seventh in
Speaker 2: my mother's seventh months, so it would have disappeared in
Speaker 2: the first three or four or five months. So I
Speaker 2: think I must have been a twin and didn't know it,
Speaker 2: And now I believe I was, and I believe that
Speaker 2: explains why I never felt really totally alone.
Speaker 3: I want to ask you, you know, all of these
Speaker 3: different kinds of shondas they are so different from each other.
Speaker 3: There is the shonda of doing something wrong or quote
Speaker 3: unquote wrong, or doing something that doesn't fit in the
Speaker 3: social mores of society. But then there's the shonda of
Speaker 3: becoming sick with cancer, or the shonda of losing a baby,
Speaker 3: you know, or in a way what you were talking
Speaker 3: about when you first got to Brandie, of feeling like
Speaker 3: there was a shonda in having lost your mother four
Speaker 3: months earlier, that it would make people pity you. It's
Speaker 3: all under this umbrella of shonda. Do you think that
Speaker 3: that's particular to Jewish people or do you think that
Speaker 3: that's a universal idea.
Speaker 2: I am only speaking for a culture I know, and
Speaker 2: that is the culture of your speaking Eastern European immigrants
Speaker 2: to this country. And I know that shame based secrecy
Speaker 2: really well. I don't know others. I've intrigued others, but
Speaker 2: I can't vouch for them. I will tell you that
Speaker 2: I was steeped in the biblical stories that are full
Speaker 2: of secrets. God hides, you know, hester I mean, Lea
Speaker 2: is behind a veil and Jacob thinks he's marrying Rachel.
Speaker 2: So trickery abounds, Pretense abounds in the talment shaming is
Speaker 2: a kind of murder. It's like considered like shedding blood.
Speaker 2: So I feel shame and secrecy are intrinsically Jewish because
Speaker 2: I know Judaism. I have been steeped in it. It's
Speaker 2: my hiding, is my heritage, and it's my legacy from
Speaker 2: my family.
Speaker 3: After a lifetime of shanda and all kinds of familial secrecy,
Speaker 3: now Letty grapples with her own secret, her own illness.
Speaker 3: She's diagnosed with a tumor. It's benign, absolutely not cancerous,
Speaker 3: but it is in her brain and she does have
Speaker 3: it surgically removed. When she receives the diagnosis. She doesn't
Speaker 3: even consider telling anyone outside of her immediate family. It's
Speaker 3: in her DNA not to tell. But it's also in
Speaker 3: her DNA to understand that secrets don't serve us, not
Speaker 3: in the long run, not if we want to be
Speaker 3: our fullest, most whole selves. This diagnosis is part of
Speaker 3: Letty's story, so slowly, carefully, she begins to tell it.
Speaker 2: As I say, I think it was like this old
Speaker 2: joke about what they asked about what real estate and
Speaker 2: what matters and what matters is location, location, location, So
Speaker 2: what mattered to me was that this illness was in
Speaker 2: my brain, and I was raised to believe. I was
Speaker 2: like a little Jewish girl who was told we are
Speaker 2: our brains. That's what allowed us to survive. We knew
Speaker 2: when to hide, we knew when to strive. If you're smart,
Speaker 2: you don't have to be beautiful. You'll find a way.
Speaker 2: And here I had a tumor in my brain. No
Speaker 2: one hears tumor and doesn't think cancer, and so I
Speaker 2: still have a lot of trouble telling the story of
Speaker 2: it because I know when people hear tumor, they're gonna
Speaker 2: think I have cancer. I never had brain cancer. And
Speaker 2: you who our schooled as I was that you are
Speaker 2: your brain. I didn't want to lose my brain because
Speaker 2: I didn't want something growing in my brain because my
Speaker 2: brain is my mind. I depend on my mind my
Speaker 2: whole life. Having a brain tumor is an involuntary affliction,
Speaker 2: but it falls under the rule brick of people will
Speaker 2: be talking about me and I will end up being
Speaker 2: the woman who has a tumor, and that will be
Speaker 2: a shanda. I don't know whether it's called a shanda,
Speaker 2: but you just don't want to be exposed when you
Speaker 2: don't want to be exposed that in some way, it
Speaker 2: will diminish you, it will misrepresent you, it will mark you.
Speaker 2: That's the Shonda part, that you're no longer.
Speaker 4: Who you are.
Speaker 2: You are a representative of yourself constructed by somebody else
Speaker 2: because of this information. You're somebody who might be dying.
Speaker 2: You're somebody who can't be hired for lecture day. You're
Speaker 2: somebody who might not be clear headed about right.
Speaker 3: Can you talk a little bit about what you mean
Speaker 3: by good shame.
Speaker 2: I think good shame is alias conscience. I use a
Speaker 2: really trivial example, and that is I reached from my phone,
Speaker 2: pulled it out of my pocket, and I was walking
Speaker 2: on the trails of Central Park.
Speaker 4: I was all by myself.
Speaker 2: In the what's called the ramble, and out of my
Speaker 2: pocket wrapped a tissue. And I was walking fast walking,
Speaker 2: which I like to do. And I could have kept going.
Speaker 2: I could have just kept going. No one was behind me,
Speaker 2: no one was in front of me, no one was
Speaker 2: sitting up on a ledge. But I stopped and went
Speaker 2: back because I would be ashamed of myself if I
Speaker 2: left litter on a nature trail, and I count that
Speaker 2: as good shame. It's not the shame that the base is,
Speaker 2: and it's not corrosive. Of course, you know your own
Speaker 2: counturs the day. We spend the whole day repairing and
Speaker 2: asking forgiveness, and we feel cleanse and we feel new.
Speaker 2: But you can't feel cleansed a new if somebody said
Speaker 2: you are a bad person, and if you were raised
Speaker 2: by a parent who said shame on you, it's different
Speaker 2: then you did this bad thing. I just think good
Speaker 2: shame is something that keeps us on the straightened arrow
Speaker 2: or trying. It's aspirational.
Speaker 3: You also describe it as prophylactic, preventative, and preemptive. And
Speaker 3: the last thing, very near the end of your books
Speaker 3: that you write is I'm convinced that happiness lies in
Speaker 3: a secret, free.
Speaker 2: Life because I got it all out.
Speaker 3: Here's Letty with some wise and beautiful words from Shonda.
Speaker 2: Secrets flutter through the chambers of the heart like ghosts
Speaker 2: who won't give up the haunt. Yet, when we speak
Speaker 2: something once thought unspeaks. When we admit a devastating humiliation
Speaker 2: or a violation of societal norms, we freak the immensity
Speaker 2: of our shame to human scale, and the truth told
Speaker 2: finds its reflection in the eyes of the one who
Speaker 2: hears it and makes the choice to accept us as
Speaker 2: we are, or to forgive what we imagined to be
Speaker 2: forever unforgivable. In that moment, the burden lifts, the window opens,
Speaker 2: and we're free.
Speaker 3: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accurr is
Speaker 3: the story editor and Dylan Fagin is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one a day
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.