Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart radiom. My
Speaker 1: mother kept secrets and spoke to me in a kind
Speaker 1: of code. Nothing was straightforward. From childhood. I had to
Speaker 1: figure out how to read her mind too intuite the
Speaker 1: contours of her reality. If I developed empathy at first,
Speaker 1: it wasn't so much a way to find connection as
Speaker 1: a survival strategy. My parents gave me burdens in childhood
Speaker 1: that I honed into gifts. That's Sherry Turkle. Sherry is
Speaker 1: a professor at m I T, where she is also
Speaker 1: founding director of the m I T Initiative on Technology
Speaker 1: and Self. Her most recent book is The Empathy Diaries,
Speaker 1: a memoir. Sherry's is a layered story of many secrets
Speaker 1: and swumming at the center of them all, a massive
Speaker 1: secret she is asked to keep from the time she's
Speaker 1: a a small child, one that slices to the core
Speaker 1: of her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: There were two landscapes of my childhood. There was a
Speaker 1: Brooklyn landscape and a Rockaway landscape. We lived in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which were wonderful streets
Speaker 1: with grocery stores and hardware stores and five and dimes
Speaker 1: and richly textured urban environment. We lived near Prospect Park, Okay,
Speaker 1: so there was a playground and great grounds. And Brooklyn
Speaker 1: of my youth was a wonderful place for children. We
Speaker 1: bounced balls and played Jack's on the sidewalk, and there
Speaker 1: were hardly any cars, and it was really a very
Speaker 1: idyllic street life, a kind of urban street life. It
Speaker 1: made me love the texture of city life. But in
Speaker 1: the house, the boundaries of our home, it was a
Speaker 1: life where no strangers were allowed in the house. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, at Rockaway, where we went in the summer,
Speaker 1: we had the beach Um. Rockaway was very close to Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: We went to the end of Church Avenue, and very
Speaker 1: soon you were crossing a bridge and you were in
Speaker 1: this state of land that was a world away from Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: a kind of summer retreat for lower middle class of
Speaker 1: working people in New York City. I think we paid
Speaker 1: eighty dollars a season for our bungalow. In this bungalow colony,
Speaker 1: you'd have eight or ten bungalows, five facing each other,
Speaker 1: with a court that had three cement pavers that made
Speaker 1: up this courtyard. And the social life of the summer
Speaker 1: was organized around these ten bungalows in this court. And
Speaker 1: there would be fireworks on the boardwalk on Wednesday, and
Speaker 1: there would be maybe a party in the court once
Speaker 1: a week, and that you played with the children in
Speaker 1: the court. There was a generational thing where the older
Speaker 1: people in the court watched the babies, you know, and
Speaker 1: the teenager babies that for the younger children, and everybody
Speaker 1: played majong, and everybody played cards. We amused each other
Speaker 1: by singing to each other. It was really quite another time,
Speaker 1: and this would have been in the in the fifties.
Speaker 1: Again we had a court, we had neighbors. It was
Speaker 1: a much more social world. But my grandparents were intensely
Speaker 1: private and the life of our family was really enclosed
Speaker 1: in the world of our family. So even though we
Speaker 1: lived in a beach setting, we knew all the people
Speaker 1: in that little court. No one came onto our porch
Speaker 1: or into our home. We spoke porch to porch. So
Speaker 1: my childhood was a combination of seeing people in social
Speaker 1: spaces on the street, but really understanding that my family
Speaker 1: was very turned inwards and lived a life of secrets
Speaker 1: and privacy and almost kind of hyper vigilance, as though
Speaker 1: we had secrets to hide, and we were just in
Speaker 1: our family and didn't let people in. This not allowing
Speaker 1: strangers in or anyone else in and staying on your
Speaker 1: porch and talking to other people from that distance, was
Speaker 1: that particular to you. I always knew that we were
Speaker 1: special because we were keeping secrets. The secrets in Sherry's
Speaker 1: family started out relatively small. The lies seemingly innocuous and silly,
Speaker 1: stuff like her mother lied about her height or her age.
Speaker 1: One time, her mom tried to pass off a store
Speaker 1: bought knit beret a gift to Sherry, as something she
Speaker 1: had knit herself. Even as a child, Sherry had the
Speaker 1: sense that something was off. She knew she couldn't totally
Speaker 1: trust the things her mother said or did. My world
Speaker 1: of secrets begins with my mother's character and my mother's ability,
Speaker 1: which I understood in so many ways, um to live
Speaker 1: in the truth that pleased her. So for example, she
Speaker 1: was five eleven or perhaps six ft tall. She was
Speaker 1: very tall, and she didn't make her peace with that
Speaker 1: until she found out that said Teris was five eleven,
Speaker 1: and then somehow she admitted to me that she was
Speaker 1: five eleven. She explained to me that when she was
Speaker 1: a single woman, every time she went to get her
Speaker 1: license renewed, she would explain to the women at the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Motor Vehicles that she needed to shave some
Speaker 1: inches off her height, because a single woman shouldn't be
Speaker 1: five eleven. It's easier to get a husband if you
Speaker 1: were five ten, or five nine or five eight. I
Speaker 1: never quite understood that, but she had gotten herself down
Speaker 1: to five seven, which was preposterous. By the time she died,
Speaker 1: I actually looked in her handbag. I mean she was
Speaker 1: down to five seven, which, as I say, was preposterous
Speaker 1: because she was a beautiful, tall, magnificent woman. And she
Speaker 1: had also gotten her age down to kind of a
Speaker 1: permanent twenty nine. She was twenty nine when she married
Speaker 1: my father, and she was twenty nine six years later
Speaker 1: when she when she married her second husband. And again
Speaker 1: the way this was done, which was kind of by
Speaker 1: just explaining to the women at the registrate for motor vehicles,
Speaker 1: you know that she just needed to be younger to
Speaker 1: catch a husband, or to not far to make her
Speaker 1: husband feel more comfortable with her age. I don't know
Speaker 1: how she did it, but she aged very little. According
Speaker 1: to the records the New York Records Department, the film
Speaker 1: she told about the hat is particularly interesting, and there
Speaker 1: was I have a very clear memory of her coming
Speaker 1: to pick me up. I was at my grandparents house
Speaker 1: and she shows me this white hat that she's this
Speaker 1: little knit hat that she said she had knit for me,
Speaker 1: and I had seen it in a five and ten
Speaker 1: store near my grandparents home, and I knew she hadn't knitted,
Speaker 1: and I didn't know what to do. I was kind
Speaker 1: of paralyzed because I didn't understand, you know. I think
Speaker 1: I said thank you, but it upset me for years
Speaker 1: and years and years, this lie and seeing her as
Speaker 1: as somebody who would tell lies that I couldn't understand.
Speaker 1: I couldn't understand their meaning or why. I kind of
Speaker 1: understood why she wanted to be shorter or younger, but
Speaker 1: why this hat, Why the hat. Indeed, what Sherry couldn't
Speaker 1: have realized at the time when she was given that
Speaker 1: hat at the age of eight, was that her mother
Speaker 1: had been coming from a doctor's appointment at which she
Speaker 1: had received a scary diagnosis. So when she was coming
Speaker 1: home from the doctor to pick Sherry up from her
Speaker 1: grandparents house, she saw the knit cap at the five
Speaker 1: and dime and decided to bring her daughter a gift.
Speaker 1: But what came out of her mouth when she presented it,
Speaker 1: perhaps as a way of connecting with Sherry during a
Speaker 1: worrying time, was I made this for you. I'm so
Speaker 1: struck by your mother's fantasies and her aspirations, but more
Speaker 1: than anything, her ability to bend the world to her will.
Speaker 1: She wanted to be a mother who would have knit
Speaker 1: that cap for you, So she became that in that moment.
Speaker 1: My guess is that she was not aware at all
Speaker 1: that she was lying. In that moment, she just decided
Speaker 1: that that was so, the same way she decided she
Speaker 1: wasn't five eleven, or that she was twenty nine. Yes. Yes,
Speaker 1: in these moments, she was taken up by how she
Speaker 1: wanted the world to be. I think that's exactly right,
Speaker 1: that she was capable of becoming house she wanted to
Speaker 1: could be, and being the person she wanted to be.
Speaker 1: You know, in technical terms, they say that you know
Speaker 1: the neurotic style of hysteric is that they believe their wish,
Speaker 1: the lies they tell is the deepest possible wish. And
Speaker 1: I think that these wishes really structured her, her character,
Speaker 1: These wishes for herself, these wishes for me, really became
Speaker 1: who she was, really became who she was. It's striking
Speaker 1: me too that you know, when you were a child,
Speaker 1: you lived in a Kosher style um and what that
Speaker 1: meant was that in the home there wasn't work, and
Speaker 1: there wasn't shrimp, and you know, there wasn't seafood and
Speaker 1: milk and dairy and meat would be I suppose not
Speaker 1: eaten together. But when you would go out, particularly on Sundays,
Speaker 1: the Jewish ritual of going out for Chinese food on Sundays,
Speaker 1: that you know, all bets were off, like apparently in
Speaker 1: Chinese restaurants, pork was okay. Yes, these were my grandmother's
Speaker 1: ways putting the world together. But the Kosher laws meant
Speaker 1: was what you did in your home is where these
Speaker 1: kosher laws applied. And then what you did outside that
Speaker 1: was a completely different story. None of the rules needed
Speaker 1: to apply there, so pork on the outside didn't count
Speaker 1: as breaking the rules. And again it's making the world
Speaker 1: fit the way you want the world to be. It's
Speaker 1: very my family. In my family, certainly people constructed the
Speaker 1: world the way they wanted it to be. Beyond knit
Speaker 1: hats and secret pork, the greatest secret at the center
Speaker 1: of Sherry's childhood was her her own identity, her very name.
Speaker 1: My name was Sherry Zimmerman, and I hadn't seen that
Speaker 1: name or heard that name really until I started school,
Speaker 1: and legally that name had to be on a piece
Speaker 1: of paper. But I was just part of the Bonnerwits clan,
Speaker 1: which was my family name by my grandparents name. My
Speaker 1: mother had divorced my father, whose name was Charles Zimmerman,
Speaker 1: and when she went back to live with her parents,
Speaker 1: Robert and Edith Bonnowitz, I was just Erry. I was
Speaker 1: told that I was never to mention my father or
Speaker 1: his name. They were constructing a world in which, because
Speaker 1: your mother was divorced when you were very young, and
Speaker 1: divorce was quite uncommon in that milieu, that somehow simply
Speaker 1: you didn't have a father, and you weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: speak or even know anything really about this mysterious person
Speaker 1: and who had been your father and had briefly been
Speaker 1: your mother's husband. His name was never said. I knew
Speaker 1: not to say it or ask anything. It was one
Speaker 1: of those things that it was completely foreclosed. It was
Speaker 1: not you know, it was not like you could ask
Speaker 1: a question and be told we're not talking about that.
Speaker 1: You just knew not to ask. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment with more family secrets. Sherry's mother remarries a
Speaker 1: man named Milton Turkle, and together they have two children.
Speaker 1: These kids think that Sherry is their biological sister, while
Speaker 1: Sherry silently carries the truth of where she comes from.
Speaker 1: So often when secrets are kept, there are times when
Speaker 1: one is asked to become a secret keeper, and you're
Speaker 1: at child, you're being told you must keep something as
Speaker 1: fundamental as your name a secret, and you live in
Speaker 1: fear of slipping up. There are a few incidents, were
Speaker 1: a few moments when I do slip up. Not many,
Speaker 1: but there's one in particular when I do. And it's
Speaker 1: at a girl scout meeting and we're going around, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're asked to say our name, and I
Speaker 1: say that my name is Sherry Zimmerman, and my mother
Speaker 1: is stricken. She clearly doesn't know what to do. I mean,
Speaker 1: it isn't that she's angry. Of course she is angry,
Speaker 1: but more than angry, I've outed her. She doesn't know
Speaker 1: what to do. Looking back, I have pity on myself
Speaker 1: actually because I realized the terrible weight that I was holding,
Speaker 1: because when I slipped up, the pain that I caused
Speaker 1: was terrible, and the pain being uttering your real name. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean that the gesture was so tiny, it's so
Speaker 1: natural that I did it. I meant no harm. You know,
Speaker 1: I was tired. It was an evening to meeting, and
Speaker 1: i'd all day. I had been Sherry' Zimmerman at the
Speaker 1: school that was kind of out of the way, and
Speaker 1: you know, I was sort of sent to a school
Speaker 1: as far away as possible from from where our social
Speaker 1: life was. And yet at this meeting, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I just said the truth, and the truth was it
Speaker 1: was an impossible truth. It was truly a secret. I
Speaker 1: mean it wasn't like a little secret. It was a
Speaker 1: secret that would fracture this family that was built on
Speaker 1: a lie. And I really have such pity and compassion
Speaker 1: for myself and for her, who couldn't make a life
Speaker 1: where this could be known, who felt that she couldn't
Speaker 1: do that. It's so interesting too that you did have
Speaker 1: that slip. It was in front of your mother. Could
Speaker 1: it could have been somewhere else, It could have been
Speaker 1: in some other circumstance where your mother hadn't been in
Speaker 1: the room, But it happened when your mother was in
Speaker 1: the room. Yes, and many psychoanalyzes later. I mean I thought,
Speaker 1: on some level, was that an act of rebellion. I'll
Speaker 1: never know, but there's there's obviously some part of that
Speaker 1: could have been wanting to somehow have some moment of
Speaker 1: truth with her. But what happened, Danny, what happened and
Speaker 1: was so telling, was that she didn't yell at me.
Speaker 1: She didn't speak of it. We didn't speak for I
Speaker 1: think two weeks. And this was a woman who was
Speaker 1: talking to me all the time. I you know, we
Speaker 1: were talking and talking in our you know, our way
Speaker 1: of relating was to tell stories and talk. I mean,
Speaker 1: I got my love of language from my mother. She
Speaker 1: couldn't to me for two weeks, and it wasn't really
Speaker 1: in anger. It was really because she didn't know what
Speaker 1: to say. This was so fundamental, this secret was so fundamental.
Speaker 1: I mean, she i don't think she knew how to
Speaker 1: handle it. In her circle. She was my troop leader.
Speaker 1: She was the leader of this girl's got true. And
Speaker 1: I think it really raised the question for her as
Speaker 1: to whether or not she was going to start to
Speaker 1: tell people or And I think what happened was that
Speaker 1: people sort of start, you know, put two and two together,
Speaker 1: and they sort of I think this was a secret
Speaker 1: that many people knew about. But she just let people
Speaker 1: assume what they wanted to and never confronted him. After
Speaker 1: Sherry is not so Freudian slip, Milton and Sherry's mother
Speaker 1: decide it's time to pursue Sherry's official adoption, for her
Speaker 1: to take Milton's name. That will make things simpler, right,
Speaker 1: But there's this all matter of Charles Zimmerman, who objects
Speaker 1: to the adoption and insists on seeing her. Sherry visits
Speaker 1: her biological father a few times until her mother puts
Speaker 1: a stop to the visits. Of course, Sherry yearns to
Speaker 1: know him. At the custody hearing, the judge turns to
Speaker 1: her and asks the question, do you love your father?
Speaker 1: I was afraid to say no, I don't love my father.
Speaker 1: I mean I didn't want to never see him again.
Speaker 1: So I said, yes, I love him, and then I
Speaker 1: immediately saw my mother turn her face away since this
Speaker 1: was just it was like the worst thing that I
Speaker 1: could have said. And so the judge then says, go
Speaker 1: over and kiss him. And I made to kiss Charles Zimmerman,
Speaker 1: and that I look again at my mother, who's again
Speaker 1: averting her eyes, and I'm taken out of the room.
Speaker 1: This was actually one of the for me, most terrible
Speaker 1: incidents of my childhood, because what had taught me is
Speaker 1: that you have a decision. Any choice is the wrong choice,
Speaker 1: because if I had said I didn't love Charles Immerman,
Speaker 1: I would never have seen my father again. And if
Speaker 1: I said I loved him, well, my mother was stricken.
Speaker 1: And it turned out that I didn't get to see
Speaker 1: Charles Zimmerman much. I saw him maybe once or twice again,
Speaker 1: and then my mother found another way to put a
Speaker 1: stop to it. I mean, my mother was determined that
Speaker 1: I would not see him very much. She had her
Speaker 1: own reasons to be frightened at him, which I learned later.
Speaker 1: Remember how Sherry's mother had received a frightening diagnosis just
Speaker 1: before buying her that knit hat, Well, that was yet
Speaker 1: another family secret, the secret of her mother's cancer. It
Speaker 1: was very common in those days to hide illness from
Speaker 1: children and even other family members. Doctors and the medical
Speaker 1: establishment believed this was for the best. Sherry's mother receives
Speaker 1: a mass ectomy and undergoes treatment. The Cherry doesn't know
Speaker 1: or see. You write something that I was particularly taken with,
Speaker 1: which is when we don't want to know the truth,
Speaker 1: we don't hear the truth spoken to us, or we
Speaker 1: don't see what's playing as a day in front of
Speaker 1: our eyes because we can't afford to yes. That whole
Speaker 1: story of my mother's cancer and how it unfolded, which
Speaker 1: really was over a nine year period from her diagnosis
Speaker 1: to her death, is really a story of my being
Speaker 1: given a tremendous We're having access to a great deal
Speaker 1: of information and not putting it together. She didn't want
Speaker 1: me to know because she wanted me to go away
Speaker 1: to college. This was her focus. She knew. But if
Speaker 1: I knew that she was as ill as she was,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have gone away to college. I would have
Speaker 1: lived at home, and I would have wanted to commute
Speaker 1: to a college in New York City. I mean, I
Speaker 1: just would have That was the nature of my relationship
Speaker 1: with her. Sherry does indeed go away to college, to
Speaker 1: Radcliffe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university that has long been
Speaker 1: her dream. She's a brilliant student and finally is exactly
Speaker 1: where she wants to be. But then in her junior year,
Speaker 1: during exam week, she receives a call that changes her life.
Speaker 1: I get a you know, a note from the dean,
Speaker 1: and they bring it to me in the library. Call home,
Speaker 1: go home, Go to Brooklyn Hospital. There's no one at
Speaker 1: home to call. Go to Brooklyn Hospital, and I just
Speaker 1: go and I talked to a doctor, and as we
Speaker 1: have a kind of miscommunication, I realize he's telling me
Speaker 1: my mother has ten days to live. And I realized
Speaker 1: I behave as though I'm listening to new information, and
Speaker 1: part of me knows that I know. And I've never
Speaker 1: forgotten that feeling. I've never forgotten that feeling of almost
Speaker 1: pretending that I'm learning something new and not knowing if
Speaker 1: I'm pretending I'm learning something new or am I It
Speaker 1: was just an out of body experience, and that feeling
Speaker 1: has never left me. I can read, I can summon
Speaker 1: it even as we speak. I was given so many
Speaker 1: clues that she was ill, and yet I didn't know
Speaker 1: she was ill. But when I find out, when I'm
Speaker 1: told she's ill, I almost have to pretend I'm surprised,
Speaker 1: because part of me obviously knows and has known something
Speaker 1: was in this, and it only raises that question of
Speaker 1: what we know. We can't say you know what's unconscious.
Speaker 1: I want to say it was unconscious, because really, if
Speaker 1: you would say, as your mom ill, I would have
Speaker 1: said no, and I behaved as though she was not.
Speaker 1: Sherry's mother dies, and after her death, the dynamic between
Speaker 1: Sherry and Milton Turkle grows ever more fraught. He refuses
Speaker 1: to do the paperwork that would allow her to have
Speaker 1: clearance for her senior year scholarship at Radcliffe. He wants
Speaker 1: her to stop going to school so she can stand
Speaker 1: in for her mother and care for her younger siblings.
Speaker 1: I think he saw no way forward raising these two children.
Speaker 1: They were aid and eleven by himself. I think he
Speaker 1: thought that was completely beyond him, and he saw me
Speaker 1: as the Not only was I to see could keeper,
Speaker 1: but I was considered sort of the adult in the family.
Speaker 1: I was the designated adult, which was another actually a
Speaker 1: great burden, you know, if there was a handyman coming,
Speaker 1: if there was a you know, I was sent to,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of make sure he did a good
Speaker 1: job and pay him and get the receipt. And I
Speaker 1: was kind of the person who was most even when
Speaker 1: a child, who was considered most most capable to sort
Speaker 1: of deal with the outside world. And this was my
Speaker 1: family being very insular, the shadow of the Holocaust being
Speaker 1: weighing very heavily on them. They're wanting to keep to themselves.
Speaker 1: And in this case, I mean, I just think he
Speaker 1: felt he could not imagine being in charge of what
Speaker 1: was ahead for him. He used the phrase you in
Speaker 1: the old country, the eldest daughter would do it. It
Speaker 1: just was it was his kind of way of summing
Speaker 1: up that there was a way of thinking about this
Speaker 1: where it was a natural thing for me to take
Speaker 1: this on. I no longer think of it as malevolent.
Speaker 1: I think it was deeply selfish. I think it was
Speaker 1: him not being able to put himself in my place.
Speaker 1: It was the anti empathy moment of it was my
Speaker 1: learning empathy by having someone behaved there's no empathy towards me.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if he wanted to be cruel
Speaker 1: to me. I think he felt bereft. I think when
Speaker 1: people feel bereft, they just behave in a crazy way
Speaker 1: and what they see as their self interest. And I
Speaker 1: think that's what's happening with with Milton and his response
Speaker 1: to me, and so he kind of pulls the ultimate
Speaker 1: power play and I just leave. In fact, I dropped
Speaker 1: out of college, but I don't come home to take
Speaker 1: care of my sister and brother. I go to Paris.
Speaker 1: There's kind of running through your story something that I
Speaker 1: relate to, which is that it's really a story of survivor,
Speaker 1: of you know, sort of ultimately, you might have gone
Speaker 1: home and taken care of your younger brother and sister,
Speaker 1: and that would have completely altered the course of your life.
Speaker 1: And you don't you do what's necessary to survive and
Speaker 1: to thrive. Yes, we'll be right back. Sherry does eventually
Speaker 1: end up finishing her undergrad and soon after attends graduate
Speaker 1: school at Harvard, where she studies sociology and psychology. This
Speaker 1: is where she first encounters the seminal concept gname duper
Speaker 1: name of the father, as developed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacom.
Speaker 1: Like you when people say to me will psychoanalysis is
Speaker 1: so passe, the notion of the unconscious? Why do you
Speaker 1: become a psychoagonal? Why do it psycho one of the training?
Speaker 1: What's the use of it? I always say, well, there's
Speaker 1: no way for me to experience the story of my
Speaker 1: life and not believe in the unconscious, because I was
Speaker 1: working through all my life, including yesterday, the fact that
Speaker 1: I was not allowed to know the name of my father,
Speaker 1: and yet I never made the connection until deep into
Speaker 1: my life. That the first serious topic that I study
Speaker 1: in graduate school when it's time to write a thesis
Speaker 1: a dissertation is a psychoanalyst whose theory is based on
Speaker 1: the importance of the name of the father who Jacques
Speaker 1: dot Com and I never made that connection. Thesis was
Speaker 1: not particularly on the CON's theories on the infatuation with
Speaker 1: Freud and France and why after May sixty eight did
Speaker 1: everyone want to become a psychoanalyst. So it was really
Speaker 1: kind of sociological study. It was kind of an intellectual
Speaker 1: history mystery. Was a very exciting thesis of you know,
Speaker 1: why certain ideas take hold at different times. I never
Speaker 1: put together that I was studying somebody who studies names
Speaker 1: of fathers. And then, of course I'm in Paris, I'm
Speaker 1: listening to this lecture about names of fathers, and I
Speaker 1: find myself weeping, and it hits me that I'm hearing
Speaker 1: about my own life. You know, it's hard to believe
Speaker 1: how the unconscious works. Well, of course I'm weeping. I'm
Speaker 1: there in Powers studying the most important question of my life,
Speaker 1: and I sort of had to collect myself and it
Speaker 1: was a transformative moment. And Lacan is someone who I
Speaker 1: mean to briefly state this theory. He basically saying that
Speaker 1: accepting the name of the father is the moment when
Speaker 1: you take in the social world. That psychoanalysis is not
Speaker 1: just about the family romance, you know, mommy, Daddy, you
Speaker 1: It's about taking in the rules and the structure of
Speaker 1: language and the way in which that captures the rules
Speaker 1: of the social structure in which you live. And that
Speaker 1: happens by entering into this order that he calls the
Speaker 1: symbolic order. That's where language and society and the social
Speaker 1: world comes into with your taking on the father's name.
Speaker 1: And really, when he means the father's name, he means
Speaker 1: not just the name, but the structure. Let's say that
Speaker 1: patriarch society that we live in. You know, that was
Speaker 1: going to be pretty complicated for me if I wasn't
Speaker 1: even allowed to say my father's name, or if there
Speaker 1: was some confusion if there was a father or a
Speaker 1: father who had to be erased. Sherry's now in her
Speaker 1: late twenties, living in Cambridge, still attending Harvard, but she
Speaker 1: makes frequent trips back to Brooklyn to care for her
Speaker 1: ailing grandmother. It's during these trips, perhaps spurred on by
Speaker 1: her graduate studies, that her absent father begins to haunt
Speaker 1: her and she begins to actively look for him. On
Speaker 1: every trip, I would stop at the airport and go
Speaker 1: through the Manhattan telephone book because we didn't have a
Speaker 1: Manhattan telephone book in our home, but there was one
Speaker 1: at the airport, and I would get to the flight early,
Speaker 1: or remember one time the flight was delayed, and I
Speaker 1: would spend as much time as I could copying down
Speaker 1: Charles Zimmerman's from the Manhattan telephone book. And then of
Speaker 1: course I tried to Queen's telephone book and you know,
Speaker 1: whatever telephone books I could find to try to get
Speaker 1: the names and addresses of all the Charles Zimmerman's in
Speaker 1: New York was trying to figure out who might be
Speaker 1: my Charles Zimmerman. And this was the beginning. I mean
Speaker 1: I did this obsessively. You know, hundreds and hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of Charles Zimmerman's. I don't know what I was
Speaker 1: planning to do with these names, write them all or
Speaker 1: you know, I was going to sift through them, or
Speaker 1: it was starting my quest Why do you think why
Speaker 1: that moment was it because your grandmother was dying, Why
Speaker 1: at that moment did it become the need to know
Speaker 1: sort of really just rose up and took hold of you.
Speaker 1: My compact with my mother to not find my father.
Speaker 1: She had not wanted me to find him, She had
Speaker 1: not wanted him in my life, and that promise, that
Speaker 1: understanding was with her. And I think that with my
Speaker 1: grandmother's death, her mother's death, I felt liberated that I
Speaker 1: would no longer be hurting. You know that now I
Speaker 1: could now act on my behalf. I could now say
Speaker 1: I could answer this question for myself. I think the
Speaker 1: death of these two women was very important to me.
Speaker 1: And her sister was still alive and I spoke to
Speaker 1: her about it, and she didn't like it, but she
Speaker 1: helped me. My aunt, Mildred gave me a crucial piece
Speaker 1: of information that he had been a teacher in the
Speaker 1: New York public schools and that was the key piece
Speaker 1: of information and let me find him. But she didn't
Speaker 1: know why my mother had left him. She did not
Speaker 1: know the secret. She did not know the mystery. It's
Speaker 1: not until several years later, when she has a job
Speaker 1: teaching at m I T that Terry decides to use
Speaker 1: much of her first year's earnings to hire a detective.
Speaker 1: Writing random Charles Zimmerman's from the phone book is getting
Speaker 1: her nowhere. With the help of the detective and a
Speaker 1: key bit of information provided by her aunt, eventually Sherry
Speaker 1: does find him and they meet to an epic meeting
Speaker 1: because I write him and I you know, I write
Speaker 1: him the letter and I say that I believe that
Speaker 1: I'm your daughter, and here the circumstances so that we
Speaker 1: last connect, and I would very much like to renew
Speaker 1: our acquaintance. As soon as he got it, he called
Speaker 1: me back. I had given him a number to call,
Speaker 1: and we make a date for the following weekend and
Speaker 1: I go to his house. At the time, I was married,
Speaker 1: and I tell my husband we agree he's going to
Speaker 1: stay back at the hotel and I will call him
Speaker 1: if I need him, and I go to his houses
Speaker 1: in Queen's I'm struck by how he looks like me.
Speaker 1: I opened the door in his fos moment when I'm
Speaker 1: so I'm so emotionally, kind of just taken over by
Speaker 1: the fact that of course I'm looking at someone who
Speaker 1: looks like me. It's just just an emotional moment. And
Speaker 1: he says to me, did you find me through the
Speaker 1: New York Times? At the time, there was like a
Speaker 1: set of advertisements in New York subways, like I found
Speaker 1: my jobs at the New York Times. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: did he was he advertising for me all these years
Speaker 1: that I was going to the mailbox and hoping to
Speaker 1: have like a birthday card or Hanecker card? Or did
Speaker 1: I find him through the New York Times? And I
Speaker 1: had this moment of warmth and happiness that he'd been
Speaker 1: looking for me. And he shows me the ad that
Speaker 1: he's been placing in the New York Times, which says
Speaker 1: he wells MC squared is not correct. Queen's high school
Speaker 1: teacher disproves Einstein and for more information, and there's a
Speaker 1: post office box, and his ad in the New York
Speaker 1: Times is about him having a pamphlet that disproves Einstein.
Speaker 1: He thinks he's he thinks there was a mistake in
Speaker 1: Einstein's theory, and then all of a sudden he's talking
Speaker 1: about Michaelson Morley and the mistakes and Michaelson and the algebra,
Speaker 1: Michaelson Orley. I mean, he's like into his theory of
Speaker 1: how he's disproved Einstein, and he's like completely forgotten even
Speaker 1: in the room. I mean, he's like into his disproof
Speaker 1: of Einstein and giving me, you know, getting copies ready
Speaker 1: for me. And it turns out that he was He
Speaker 1: was a rogue scientist who had published two books, one
Speaker 1: on raw food Vegetarianism and World Peace, where he argues
Speaker 1: that only people who were raw food vegetarian should be
Speaker 1: able to leave governments because there'll be more peaceful and
Speaker 1: this disproof of Einstein has written several books on that.
Speaker 1: So bottom line is that as the conversation continues, I
Speaker 1: learned that my mother left him because when I was
Speaker 1: a baby, the scientific bent of his had expressed itself
Speaker 1: by his doing skinner like experiments on me not speaking
Speaker 1: to me for a certain amount of time and seeing
Speaker 1: what happened, putting me in a dark room for a
Speaker 1: certain amount of time and seeing what happened, and all
Speaker 1: the different kinds of skinner box experiments that people were
Speaker 1: doing at that time. Skinner box experiments, simply put, these
Speaker 1: were psychological experiments that studied the effects of positive and
Speaker 1: negative reinforcement using rats. Yes, rats, not humans, and most
Speaker 1: definitely not babies. And these were secret. My mother didn't
Speaker 1: know anything about them, and he did them when she
Speaker 1: was out shopping or visiting me, whenever she was not
Speaker 1: with me. He did them private. And then once she
Speaker 1: came back early from going shopping and she found him
Speaker 1: at an experiment where he had left me alone in
Speaker 1: a dark room and was trying to extend the amounts
Speaker 1: of time that I would tolerate them. So they were
Speaker 1: deprivation experiments at that point, I was one year old
Speaker 1: when she found him at this experiment. She called her
Speaker 1: sister to pick her up and to pick me up,
Speaker 1: and she packed some diapers and a few pieces of clothing,
Speaker 1: and apparently in some eggs from the supermarket, and we
Speaker 1: went back to my grandparents house and never returned and
Speaker 1: that's the story of our departure and the end of
Speaker 1: that marriage. And as your father is telling you this
Speaker 1: story during this meeting that you're having with him for
Speaker 1: the first time in many years, he's telling it to you,
Speaker 1: it sounds like, you know, somewhat sort of proudly. Yes,
Speaker 1: he's very proud of these experiments. I would say I
Speaker 1: went into a sort of dissociated state where I sort
Speaker 1: of could see myself sitting there at the table, listening
Speaker 1: to him, watching myself trying to be present to him,
Speaker 1: as I sort of sad at someplace else, maybe across
Speaker 1: the room, watching these two people talk. Because it was unbearable.
Speaker 1: You know. I wanted to keep this conversation going. I
Speaker 1: wanted to not stop him from talking. I wanted to
Speaker 1: hear this story desperately. I wanted to hear about these experiments,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't bear to. So I sort of had
Speaker 1: this experience of removing myself and kept a piece of
Speaker 1: me sitting at the table with the coffee cup, letting
Speaker 1: him talk to that sherry as part of me just
Speaker 1: drifted away. It was an experience that I had never
Speaker 1: really had before. And he tells me the story and
Speaker 1: then actually I protected myself because I immediately then called
Speaker 1: my husband because I wanted him to hear all this.
Speaker 1: You need a witness. I needed a witness, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to hear this whole thing over again because I,
Speaker 1: you know, I just was by this point, I'm in
Speaker 1: an altered state. And my husband was a computer scientist
Speaker 1: and trying to a great mathematician. And my husband showed up.
Speaker 1: And now my my father, Charles Zimmerman, uh, now he
Speaker 1: has a bona fide m i T. Mathematician in the
Speaker 1: room who understands he can read his equations and the
Speaker 1: Michaelson Morley experiment and the mistakes. And they're sitting there together,
Speaker 1: and Charlie is so excited, and he's going through the
Speaker 1: mistakes and the and I can watch them together as
Speaker 1: Charlie is explaining how he's right and Einsstein is wrong,
Speaker 1: and Charlie is getting all excited about how he's going
Speaker 1: to be famous with these disproof of Einstein. And I understood.
Speaker 1: And over the next many years, my understanding would deepened
Speaker 1: of why my mother had feared the man and had
Speaker 1: just wanted me to never see him. And I I
Speaker 1: learned to feel a deep and deepening and deepening empathy
Speaker 1: and compassion and understanding of how she had fled. She
Speaker 1: had wanted to protect me, she had felt frightened and ashamed,
Speaker 1: and she never wanted to talk about this. She did
Speaker 1: not want this to be part of her story and
Speaker 1: my story. Actually, Rabbis who have spoken to since have
Speaker 1: said that some might have shunned me as being the
Speaker 1: child of such a person, as though I might carry
Speaker 1: his madness. It's even been suggested to me that I
Speaker 1: would have been unmarriageable in some Jewish beliefs. She might
Speaker 1: have even have grown up with that kind of background,
Speaker 1: from a more traditional background than I'm from. I think
Speaker 1: there was just a lot to it. She was in
Speaker 1: over her head and this was something that she had
Speaker 1: to completely erase. Yeah, it makes so much sense. This
Speaker 1: is the secret. This secret was not shared with my grandmother.
Speaker 1: The secret was not shared with her, my grandfather, or
Speaker 1: my aunt. None of them knew this secret. This story
Speaker 1: of the experiments was something that when I went to
Speaker 1: my aunt and tell her about Charlie and what I found,
Speaker 1: this is new to her. You know, she knows that
Speaker 1: he's bad, she knows that he's crazy. But my they're
Speaker 1: told her family that she was unhappy in this marriage.
Speaker 1: But this was a secret she bore alone. She was
Speaker 1: so frightened at this secret. So this was her secret too.
Speaker 1: So I was a secret keeper, but she was a
Speaker 1: secret keeper as well. It took me a while to
Speaker 1: find a way to tell the story of who Charles
Speaker 1: Zimmerman was because it was a lot to talk about
Speaker 1: the experiments that he had done on me, because I was,
Speaker 1: you know, in psychoanalysis, and I was working through what
Speaker 1: that meant to me. You know, we'll never know, I'll
Speaker 1: never know really what that meant to me, but I
Speaker 1: was certainly talking a lot about it, and it was
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't come trippingly off the tongue to
Speaker 1: talk to people about those experiments because I didn't want
Speaker 1: to say something that style about them. It was a
Speaker 1: lot to talk about. It took many years, and I
Speaker 1: think my psychoanalytic work and therapy to be able to,
Speaker 1: you know, to kind of talk about and write about
Speaker 1: what the discovery of Charles Zimmerman had been like as
Speaker 1: an experience. But I could talk about that I kept
Speaker 1: the secret and that it had been corrosive, and I
Speaker 1: was done with that. Family secrets is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. Molly z a Core is the story
Speaker 1: editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you
Speaker 1: have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave
Speaker 1: us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode. Our number is one Secret zero. That's the
Speaker 1: number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at
Speaker 1: Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about
Speaker 1: the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir
Speaker 1: Inheritance m M. For more podcasts for My heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.