June 8, 2023 • 46 mins
Letty’s life is laced with “shanda”—the Yiddish word for shame or disgrace. And the shanda is not hers alone; it stretches back and through many generations of suppression, secrecy, and the enormous heft of overcoming stigma and breaking the cycle for once and for all.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Without the contents of the shopping bag, I could never
have crowds opened the marrow bones of my parents' secrets,
decoded their conflicts, their zigzagging passions, the craggy map of
their marriage, their letters to one another, answer questions I
didn't know enough to ask.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
That's Letty Cotton Pogribin, a founding editor of Miss magazine,
writer lecturer, social justice advocate, and author, most recently of Shanda,
a Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. Letty's story is like
one of those Russian nesting dolls, secrets within secrets within secrets,
each one giving way to the next, and Letty unearths
(00:54):
them tenaciously and courageously, discovering one after another until she
finds arrives at the tiny, hard kernel of what is true.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:17):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The landscape of my childhood had, you know, very few
hills or valleys. It was just a sort of flat
plain of pleasure in my everyday life, except that I
had very very very unhappy parents. They argued every night
after dinner. I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. My parents
(01:48):
moved there from the Bronx. When they moved, they imagined
a land, hired, new life for themselves. We lived next
door to my aunt Hillie. My mother's very close to
a person of my life, and I was a street kid.
I mean I went out in the morning and didn't
come back until dinner time.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
We played stickball.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Jamaica was really like a suburb at that point, and
it's in the Borough of Queens, but it felt like
it was long island. I went to Hebrew School from
age three until I graduated from Hebrew High School, and
in between I went to the Yeshiva Central Queens for
two years, and my dad was the president of the shool,
(02:29):
which made him what we call a big Maha, which
made me the daughter of a big macha. So I
sat on his lap on the bema and I got
a lot of privileges.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Tell me about the mother of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
The mother of my childhood was an omnipresent mother. One
would call her a helicopter mom. I guess she didn't
work outside the home at that point. She was devoted
to me and my father and the house and making
it beautiful and cooking and decorating, and eventually she was
an amateur painter. She always took lessons, she was always
(03:04):
going to adult education.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
She was the kind of woman who.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Had a majon group and on a bridge group, and
she and my dad were sort of leaders of the
Jewish community. My synagogue was quite an institution way back
when synagogues were many of them very small, and then suddenly,
you know, they burst onto the scene when Jews left
the cities and formed these communities where they were kind
(03:29):
of constructing palaces that matched many of the churches they
had seen.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
And my synagogue had a.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Bowling alley in it and a big ballroom and you know,
a chapel as well as a very large sanctuary.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
And so I hung around there.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I played sports there, I went with horror classes there,
and it filled my life that I went to public
school PS one thirty one. Then I went to Jamaica
High School and entirely public school educated except for my
education Jewish education. And I will say that my home
was what you might call today high conservative. In my house,
(04:08):
you know, we did Shabbat in a full blessing fashion.
In other words, my father didn't just say the one
line prayer over the wine. He said the whole kiddish
that type of thing. And my mother lit the candles
and we had a holla, and we usually had chicken
soup and chicken or chicken and brisket, and my mother
(04:29):
made crispy potatoes and overcooked green vegetables because who knew
she was really used to making Jewish food utol mush together.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
So there was the culture of Jewishness and you're very
much steeped in it. What did faith feel like during
those years?
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Faith?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You know, God was a white man and a long beard,
and I had to behave because God was watching me,
and I had to behave because the whole family was
watching me, and they were watching I mean, I'm one
of twenty four cousins on both sides because my parents
were each one of seven, so we had a huge
extended family. Everybody was sort of checked the box of
(05:17):
a different incarnation of Judaism. We had our stream left
wingers who were atheists militant atheists, and we had our
Orthodox who wouldn't let you use the same think for
a very spoonness for a folk that had been in
a piece of roastbeed. If you think fill around the roof.
That's my mother's town. She came here when she was
(05:40):
seven or eight or nine, I'm not sure, because she
lied about her age among all the other things. She
lied about as required by whatever was going on in
her life. And I think my relatives were performative in
the sense that they wanted to be real Americans and
they had to figure out what that meant. So of
course it meant losing your accent, and it meant not
(06:03):
over doing your Judaism publicly unless you were in a
safe space where some of my uncles and aunts were.
They were in very Jewish communities in this country.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Others weren't.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
They were integrated into the larger worlds. And some of them,
you know, looked like they came right off the boat,
and some looked like Petty Lamar or Betty Hutton. And
the only thing that was like uniformly wonderful, warm and
go moochlat, you know, like really homie was our meal times.
(06:38):
Everybody was talking. I loved our meal times.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
They would always just pull up a bench or a
chair or open a bridge table. It was always room
for everybody, and during the conversations I just learned about life.
I mean, they'd had arguments about which bridge to take,
you know, between queens and the province, or whether you
said or kigel to pronounce to pronounce the correct Yiddish
(07:03):
word for noodle pudding, And it was just full of
laughter and jokes and arguments. I learned to argue. One
of the things that I, as a feminist, have always
felt comfortable with is disputation, because I learned it at
my family dinner tables.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
In your nuclear family growing up, you also had a
much older by fourteen years sister named Betty. Can you
tell me a little bit about Betty at that time
and your relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Betty was, for me, as a child, the most glamorous
teenager on earth, and it was during the Second World War,
and she had a dressing table with a tool skirt
and a bit mirror.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
She had a room of her own full of your.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Nineteen forties teenage stuff, record albums and pictures of movie
stars and movie star and magazines. So Betty was my
ideal woman and she never resented me. She taught me
to tell time when I was like.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Four or five. She taught me to read.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I mean, she just was a dream sister to me.
I never missed having anyone my age because I had
so much more I felt.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's nineteen fifty one. Letty is twelve years old. It's
a very cold Sunday in March, and Letty and her
family are at a cousin's bar Mitzah, which is being
held at a seaside community on the north shore of Boston.
Letty's playing Gin Rummy with some of her cousins while
the adults congregate in the kitchen. Letty beats a much
(08:35):
older cousin at cards, and that cousin, in retaliation, blurts
something out.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
And she threw the cards at me and pushed the
bridge table over at me, and she screamed, you think
you're so smart. You know your mother wasn't even in
our family until your father married her and brought Betty.
And you know, I'm the oldest cousin, and Betty is
like pretending to be the oldest cousin. And she just
was shrill and insistent, and I just leapt out. I
(09:05):
couldn't take it in. It just was, you know, too
much to absorb. And when I woke up. My parents
were kneeling on either side of me. My mother had
a wet wash glove to my far and my father
was smoking, you know, one of his lucky strikes. And
they somehow managed to pull me up off the floor
and put me in my toddle pote and they took
me walking out on the beach and they said, we'll explain,
(09:28):
we'll explain, and they did, and we walked and walked
and walked and slobbed in this wet sand, with this
plustery wind and the crashing of the waves. My poor
mother was still in her barments for dress up and pumps.
And they told me they had each been married before
that my mother had a daughter who was my sister Betty.
(09:49):
And eventually it told me my father had a daughter too,
that he hadn't seen her since she was twelve. He
had kind of loust track of her when he married
my mother. So I was extremely confused. It was all
like an avalanche of information. And my father's he was
(10:10):
a lawyer, and he liked to be extremely logical and
very rational, so he said, just listen to the chronology.
Mom and I were each married in nineteen twenty three,
mom's daughter was born in nineteen twenty five. My daughter
was born in nineteen twenty seven. And soon after that
each of us got divorced from our first spouses. And
(10:33):
we met each other in nineteen thirty seven, and you
got married in nineteen thirty nine. And of course this
was no easier to absorb than anything else. So he said,
I'll draw it for you. I'll draw a family tree.
When he took a stick off the detritus on the shoreline,
and he drew like an a tree by barbells, and
on one round side he put his name, and on
(10:55):
the other side he put my mom's name in Then
he drew her husband first us Joe Holtzman.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
And on the other.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Side of his name he drew his first wife, named Paula.
And then he ruws a line down from my mom
and Joe, and he puts a little circle and he
puts Betty's name in it.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Fine, I get that now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
And then he puts with a long line between the
two of them, he puts my name down from their
bar bell. I'm with him, I'm actually with him. I
see my sister came from the first husband, and I
came from their marriage, and he brought a line down
from his bar belt with Paula, and he writes in Ena,
and that's how I found out I had another sister.
(11:40):
It turns out my parents had met each other when
they each of them separately, had put their daughters in
a quote very fine boarding school, the best boarding school,
Jewish boarding school in the country. That kept saying, and
Reena and Betty had become friends. And Reena and Betty
plotted to get my parents together, except they used to
(12:02):
come on separate visiting days. So they made this elaborate
reason why my mother had to come on the day
my father did, or vice versa. And they just said,
and they're going to fall in love and they're going
to get married.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
And they did. So.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean, this was a wonderful story told in a
horrible context, and I was like trembling. And at the
same time I realized that I had been lied to,
that they had constructed and lived in the Queens, as
I said, they moved from the Bronx to Queens to
start a new life, and they lived this lie. But
(12:38):
worst of all, they lied to me. My sister also, Betty,
also lied to me. One time I was looking up
a word and I opened her dictionary and it said
the word Betty Holtzman in the fly leaf, and I said,
who's Betty Holtzman?
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh, oh, she said, you know, I mean, looking back,
I realized she was talking, you know, feeling panicked to
fill in, you know, some kind.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Of believable story.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
And she said, when I was in high school, I
had a boyfriend named Holsman, and I wanted to see
what my name would look like if I married them.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
That was very quick witted of her.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
She was quick witted, to be sure. She was as
much of a prevaricator as my mother. They everybody learned
to lie because they had to keep things nice, They
had to keep the perfect family saga intact.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I understand why your parents kept it a secret and
intended for it to remain a secret from you. But
I'm wondering, why do you think Betty, even as she
became a teenager and a young adult, that she also
for all those years she was part of that deceit.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Because my parents instructed her that I couldn't be told
because I was too young to be trusted to keep
the secret from all their friends, from the Rabbi, from
the counter, from everybody so Betty had to keep the secret.
Everyone knew it, and everyone was onto it. They kept saying,
everything's fine. People accept us as we are. We're just
(14:19):
we're a family. We're a nice Jewish family. With Betty,
I said, well, you know, come to think of it,
didn't anybody notice that we're fourteen years apart? She said, well,
people didn't ask. Most people didn't ask personal questions. But
when some of my closer friends did, said why they
what happened that they're fourteen years apart? I told him
(14:40):
I had trouble conceiving. I mean, my mother had it
all figured out. My mother was a past master at invention, reinvention.
She created a perfect facade because she wanted to be perfect.
She thought all Americans were like that. Shanda means shame
(15:03):
in Yiddish. Everything was a shonda in my and my family.
You know, if somebody had mental illness, it was a shonda.
I mean, divorce was the worst shonda, except for cancer,
that was worse. So my mother had been a divorced
single mother. There was no such thing. There was no
label single mother. That's why my mother. It turns out
(15:24):
I didn't know this, of course, said Betty, took board
in school at age three. She did it because she
had to go to work in a sewing machine factory,
and she would have had to leave Betty with her parents,
who still had a lot of the kids are still
at home.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
My mother was the eldest.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
They lived in three rooms in the Lower east Side
classic if you think of Hester Street movie, that's how
they lived. If you've ever been to the Lower east
Side tenement Mesion, that was their life. And my grandparents
couldn't speak English more than you know, rudimentary English, and
it was kay us there and it was a toilet
in the hallway for like forty people my whole family,
(16:06):
and two or three other apartments. So she didn't want
Betty to grow up there. And my grandparents didn't read
the New York American books or now New York goes,
you know, classical music stations, the where my mother had
learned to do. And so she always told Betty, you know,
that's why I put you there, so that you would
(16:26):
grow up become a real American and a lady, which
Betty did. They had lived through the Shanda, the power
of shame. So my mother when she made new friends,
she told them she was single, and she never said
a word about For ten years, she never said a
word about having been married, or that she had a daughter.
(16:48):
And I, who, as I said, had a helicopter mom,
a mom who you know, did drawings with me and
built little structures with me and teach me to plant seeds.
Mother put her child in boarding school. It's so beyond me.
It's cognitive dissonance, but it's true. So I have to
(17:09):
make sense.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Out of all that. Where do you think that this
capacity to lie so seamlessly and keep secrets? Where do
you think that came from? And your mother?
Speaker 2 (17:21):
My mother was great liar because she was raised by
a great liar. She had a mother who kept secrets
pretty artfully and thoroughly. My grandmother was betrothed to a
man completely inappropriate for her, much too old for her,
and she had to help bear her parents.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So she got married. But in the bridal.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Chamber, while he was going and changing into whatever Orthodox
men put on for that first night, she tied the
bed sheets together and she shinneyed out the window. She
was a runaway bride, and nobody ever knew it because
when they came to America, my grandparents both my grandparents.
She went and ran away to the man who she
(18:03):
loved was my grandfather, and when they came here, they
just blotted it out.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
They never told anybody that.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
She'd ever done that, that she'd had this marriage. They
were desperately afraid that it would be such a shanda
that nobody would marry their kids because in the tightly
organized Jewish ghettos of New York, to put it that way,
on the Lower East Side, everybody knew each other, and
everybody knew, you know, where they came from. They were
just deathly afraid that somebody would know this story and
(18:32):
then they would be shamed, and they couldn't make a
shit off, which is a match with their seven children
and any other Jews seven children. So mom had seen
My mom had seen this, and my mom did this
with her childhood. She faked her high school graduation a
photograph by going to a studio and paying a guy
so she could go into the prop box and take
(18:53):
out a signon to where to make her look older,
and I rolled up diploma and have a picture taken.
And she tithed herself from her salary as a sewing
machine operator to pay back this photo studio guy, so
she could put that up and make people think she
was a high school graduate. She was extremely creative in
(19:14):
her line.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
We'll be right back. When Letty is fourteen years old,
just a couple of years after her father has drawn
(19:38):
their revelatory family tree in the sand, Rena, Letty's older sister,
shows up. It's nineteen fifty four and Rena needs help.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Opened the door and there was a woman with a
very long braid, facing away from the door, and she
flipped herself around and she stuck out her hand and
she said, Hi, bunny, that was my childhood name. I'm
your sister, Rena.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
That's how I met her.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
She had come to us because my father was a lawyer,
as I said, and she needed a lawyer to be
able to get a marshall to allow her to return
to her mother's apartment and retrieve her stuff. My mother
was so happy to see her. My mother didn't abandon her.
It turns out my mother knew her when my mother
(20:27):
married my father.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Rena was part of their life. So my mother was really.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Glad to see Rena, who was a friend of Betty
when they were children. They all sat on this lime
colored half seat. Love's seat. We had two of them,
and I never forget it. Rena just plopped herself down.
My mother came downstairs in her bathroom and it was sweet.
Brina sat down and there there two of them were
talking and I find out she's a PhD in anthropology,
(20:55):
and she was left with a mother who was really psychotic,
and she had become so violent.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
She had cracked right.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Rena's glasses and she had pushed her torso out the
window and threatens to throw her out, and Rena had escaped,
but she had all her you know, scholarly materials. She
was writing a book on her thesis in that apartment.
So she needed my father to be able to get
that stuff. And that's why she had come back to us.
(21:23):
My mother had her live in and we had an attic.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
A different housage make up.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
My father had earned a little more money and it
had a finished attic which Betty and her whole family
would come in with their kids and stay in. And
now here was Rena in this attic. Betty lived in
Westchester at the time, so she wasn't living there, but
she came for you know, weekends, and now Rena was
up there and I had this new sister, and she
(21:48):
was fabulous. Her dissertation was on the Machuaya, who happened
to live on Upper Broadway, and she did all her
field work on Upper Broadway. And while she was living
with she would slept me up there to visit with
this tribe. And these were people who if you see
fortune tellers and doors in store windows and so on,
(22:11):
that's the sort of tribe they belonged to. They called
themselves Romany. And I was at their feasts and I
was sitting and watching them do people's futures and crystal balls, literally,
And I'm fourteen years old, and this person, Rena, has
dropped out of heaven and I am besodic with her.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
I have a sister, Betty.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Who is a Ladies Home journal prototype.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
She makes lambshades out of potholders, and she cooks, you know,
dinners from Good Housekeepings recipes, and she mends things and
she's wonderful and smart. But here's this genius. My father
was quick to say she's a genius. Her IQ is
one hundred and eighty as if he made you know,
he made her this IQ, and she is now suddenly
(23:00):
this with this long braid a part of my life.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
When Letty's fifteen, her father sits her down and offers
her a lucky Strike cigarette. This is highly unusual, a
clue that he's about to tell her something serious, something huge.
And then he tells her that her mother has cancer.
She's very sick. In fact, her mother has only weeks
left to live. And Letty hasn't been the only one
(23:28):
kept in the dark about her mother's illness. It was
kept a secret from almost everybody.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
My mother wouldn't tell anybody. She wouldn't tell her friends,
her best friends. When we had the Shiva and people came,
her friends uniformly said, this is such a shock.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
We didn't know. We didn't know.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So not knowing is such a theme of my life,
of wanting to know everything. It's why I think I
became a writer. It's why I think I became a
feminist because so much she was unavailable to women. Women
didn't tell the truth about their lives because it might
not make them look good, and you had to satisfy
(24:11):
a very exacting norm. Femininity was unachievable, but everybody aspired
to be perfect. And I think I became a feminist
because of all of that that was hidden hiddenness was
to mix a Christian metaphor of my cross to bear her.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
So in a very short span of time, Letty learns
about and meets her new half sister, her mother grows
ill and eventually dies, and in the wake of all
of this, she goes off to college early, when she's
only sixteen years old.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
I went away to college.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
My father just dropped me off, and for a while
as a freshman, I really learned quickly that being a
berieved child was not a great thing for a co ed.
That's what we used to call girls in college. And
I didn't want pity. I wanted acceptance. So I made
very short shrift of the fact that my mother had
(25:11):
died four months before, and I tried to kind of
fit in. But my father had made it clear to
me that he was going to pay the tuition, room
and board, but the rest I was on my own.
So I was sixteen years old, and he told me
that it was important to him to be left on
his own when he was sixteen, and he became a
(25:31):
Hebrew school teacher and he became a tutor of bar
mits for boys, and it was the making of him.
And then he put himself through college and then through
law school. He was very proud he was in nineteen
twenty three. He was a graduate lawyer and not a
lot of Jews were, And you know, he made his
own way and I would too. So I mean, looking back,
(25:53):
as a feminist, I could kind of reframe that whole
thing and say, great, it made.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
Me an independent. But as a child, just as her mother,
it's felt like crap.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And then I realized that, you know, my dormmates had
different lives. Their parents hung around till they had unpacked
their stuff, and then when we were all living together,
my dormmates parents sent them pin money, which was what
it was called, and they would, you know, they would
all hop into somebody's car if there was somebody who
(26:28):
had a driver's license, and go into Harvard Square and
have ice cream cones at Brigham's. And I had to
measure out what pin money I had because I was
working from the beginning, I became secretary to the.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Brandi's Hillel Rabbi.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I worked in the public department in the alumni office,
and I tutored athletes. In my sophomore year, I started
tutoring athletes in English and biology. So I had a
lot of jobs in order to.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
Have the kind of.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Life that a cod in the nineteen fifties was supposed
to have, Like I could buy a lipstick, and I
could have a pizza and all that sort of thing.
And I only mention that because my father had masqueraded
as a very wealthy guy, a successful lawyer. He used
to be the one who picked up the check when
he and my mom went out with another couple. He
(27:21):
always dressed go beautifully, he always had a nice car.
But later I discovered a whole lot of hidden letters.
I discovered my father was really just a performing masculinity,
which included that Jewish men had to provide well for
their families and look good. So my father, when he
(27:43):
said you're going to be on your own, really was
saying I can't help you.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
I'm having enough trouble myself. Who knew? I never knew that.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
But the letters are not uncovered for years. In fact,
(28:16):
Letty lives an entire life before she makes these discoveries
about her father's performances. She finishes college and begins a
career in publishing. She marries Bert, has three children and
eventually six grandchildren. She writes twelve books. She becomes known
as one of the leading feminists of her generation. But
through it all, a certain feeling never leaves her. It's
(28:39):
the feeling that there's more she doesn't know about her family,
that there's more she must find out. Sometime in the
early two thousands, Letty comes across another letter in which
something peculiar stands out, something about twins.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I had taken out my father's album of his trip
to Palestine, and at one point I noticed that there
was a sort of slap in the front cover, and
I reached in to think see if there was anything
in there of interest, and out came a letter one
of my father had written to my mother, and my
mother had written to my father, and in it there
was a ps from my sister saying to my father,
(29:20):
Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
So I read this. My eyes pop out.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I pick up the Varna, call my sister living in Westchester,
and I say, Betty, listen to this. A PS on
a letter that mom wrote to Dad when he was
in Palestine, and it says Mom's doing fine. Obviously about
the pregnancy with me and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
Was I a twin?
Speaker 2 (29:47):
She said, don't be ridiculous. You know she's very matter
of Are you crazy? I wouldn't know if if mom
had twins.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
I was there. I said, what do you mean? I
was there?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I was outside the hospital. I was waiting in the car.
Dad went in to get mom. He came out with
Mom and the nurse had the baby. The nurse put
you in my arms. It was the happiest day of
my life. She said, how would I I would never
forget if there were two babies. I said, Betty, you
weren't in the delivery room.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
She said, they would have told me.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
At this point, you know, I knew my parents had
lied about everything. So I said, they couldn't lied about this.
They were world class liars. They wouldn't have won anybody
in Jamaica to know that mom gave birth to twins
and one died.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
That would be a shanda.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I would be like, oh, yeah, yo, did you hear
what happened?
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Steal?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So they wouldn't have told you. She said, that is crazy.
That's crazy. I don't remember ever writing that, And so
I put the thing away, and I thought maybe it
was a joke. My mother was having so many kicks
in her belly that she called them twins.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
So that's what Letty does. She puts the thing away.
Maybe it was a joke.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
I think throughout my life after my mother died, and
I looked at my childhood writings and my teenage writings
before I started writing journalistically, these things that were just
poured out of me. When I was in college, I
see that I believed I had a presence traveling with me,
and I assumed it was my mother. I felt her presence,
(31:23):
and I know it's very woo woo, but I always
felt what is.
Speaker 4 (31:27):
Going on here?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I feel my mother's presence, and it was a comfort,
but it also was something that couldn't explain. And then
in twenty nineteen, my granddaughter was in a college course
where she studied biographies and then was assigned to write
a biography of a living person. And she asked me
if I might let her write about me, and then
(31:50):
she dug in, Like my granddaughter, Molly just does deep
drill into my life. She read all my books. She
went up to Smith's College where my archives are. She
read to all my article files and my childhood musings
and so on, except I've had left a lot of
stuff in my study in New York and after all,
but she did. She said, I'm coming to your study
(32:12):
and I want to go through whatever's there. And she said,
where are the childhood stuff? I said, oh, I kept
very few. It's under there, and it's a very deep
cabinet with two big shells. And she squats down. She
takes out my little diaries. You know, we all kept
leather bound diaries with locks and keys, as if everyone
wanted to know about our lives, we had to lock
(32:33):
them up. And also underneath water this humongous plastic shopping bag,
huge shopping bag, like if you had bought a winter
coat and put it in your shopping bag, big fat
chopping bag full of letters and documents and citizenship papers.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
And I mean I.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Dumped it on the dining room table. I knew what
it was the minute I saw, but I had forgotten
all about it. When my sister Betty died, I went
up to see her in her sister living place in Brooklyn, Massachusetts.
I knew it was the last time I would see her,
because she was deferring food and she was about to
(33:14):
entery though, three days when she was going to refuse
drink and that would be it. And so I went
up for my last visit with her, and she points
to a bit chopping pad leaning against the wall, and
she says, take this with you when you go home
someday you want to read through it. And I took it.
I took it on the train back to New York,
and I was weeping so hard I couldn't even pick
(33:36):
out one thing. And when I get home, I'm so upset.
I said, I'll read it tomorrow. I shoved it down
underneath in this deep, deep cabinet was deep jails. And
then three days later she died. So I never went
back to that shopping pad. I couldn't think of back
doing that. I was in such deep morning. Eight years later,
(33:59):
Molly comes to my house and finds it. I dumped
it on my dining room table, and there are hundreds of,
you know, earmail qwinkled letters of my parents writing to
each other in those days. They letters and pages and
pages of each other's lives and the weather and what
they ate, but also what were they were arguing about.
(34:21):
That's how I learned about my parents' marriage. They had
arguments in these letters. My mother had pleading pleading my
father to reform his ways. When he plays cards with
his friends, well he's gone. This was when we had
another round of letters when my father sent my mother
and I when I was a baby down to Florida
(34:41):
to spend the winter in Miami because I had constant
colds and cloths.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
So there were.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Letters between them every single day during that period. And
that's when my father was having money troubles. He just
was explicit on the page, and she was honest and
strong on the page. I learned people I had never
known in these crinkly pages with fading ink. My father
(35:08):
wrote like chicken script. My mother wrote beautiful penmanship because
that was for her, being a real American. Was writing
perfectly letters, which they all were. You wouldn't think they
were written with a line, and you know, rule around
to them. And my mother, who had eighth grade education,
turned out to be incredibly lyrical in her or incredibly
(35:30):
furious in her pros. It was on the page. Every
bit of it was. If I found the dead sea
squirrels in my backyard and I learned who my parents were.
I had inklings of who they were. I never knew
who they were. They were always clues along the way,
and this flashed everything out. I feel I know who
(35:51):
they are now. I forgive my father. Took me eighty
something years to forgive my father. I never said the
cottage for my father because he wouldn't let me say
the cottage for my mother when she died, because it
wasn't done.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Letty writes, had my parents known their words would end
up under their daughter's microscope, I doubt they would have
expressed their sore points and vulnerabilities in such unguarded prose.
But the letters don't only reveal her parents' private selves.
They reveal more about that word Letty had tucked away
(36:30):
years earlier, that word she thought might have been a joke, twins.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Then I find this shopping back, and I find two
more mentions of the twins. When my father was in
Palestine and my parents were corresponding. In one letter said
Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking. Then
another letter turns up in which my father writes, I
(36:58):
dance with women on the boat and I lost at
Jin Rummy, and I lost in the dance concert.
Speaker 4 (37:04):
The women didn't.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Dance as well as you did, he said, but I
know I'm coming home to you and the twins, and
I will love you and the twins. So that was
the second and I realized that I had obviously been
unable to process that I was a twin, nor did
I put it together with the fact that all my
(37:25):
life after my mother died, I felt that I was
not alone. And to top it all off, I gave
birth to twins. So since I've been kind of mystical
leaning person, I now wonder if what I thought was
my mother came from the company in some spiritual.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Way, was my twin.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
My daughter Rabigail wrote a book on twins, and she
thought maybe it was a phantom twin. But then I
found out that phantom twins supure much earlier in my
mother and my father were writing in my seventh in
my mother's seventh months, so it would have disappeared in
the first three or four or five months. So I
(38:12):
think I must have been a twin and didn't know it,
And now I believe I was, and I believe that
explains why I never felt really totally alone.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
I want to ask you, you know, all of these
different kinds of shondas they are so different from each other.
There is the shonda of doing something wrong or quote
unquote wrong, or doing something that doesn't fit in the
social mores of society. But then there's the shonda of
(38:47):
becoming sick with cancer, or the shonda of losing a baby,
you know, or in a way what you were talking
about when you first got to Brandie, of feeling like
there was a shonda in having lost your mother four
months earlier, that it would make people pity you. It's
all under this umbrella of shonda. Do you think that
(39:10):
that's particular to Jewish people or do you think that
that's a universal idea.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I am only speaking for a culture I know, and
that is the culture of your speaking Eastern European immigrants
to this country. And I know that shame based secrecy
really well. I don't know others. I've intrigued others, but
I can't vouch for them. I will tell you that
I was steeped in the biblical stories that are full
(39:38):
of secrets. God hides, you know, hester I mean, Lea
is behind a veil and Jacob thinks he's marrying Rachel.
So trickery abounds, Pretense abounds in the talment shaming is
a kind of murder. It's like considered like shedding blood.
So I feel shame and secrecy are intrinsically Jewish because
(40:02):
I know Judaism. I have been steeped in it. It's
my hiding, is my heritage, and it's my legacy from
my family.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
After a lifetime of shanda and all kinds of familial secrecy,
now Letty grapples with her own secret, her own illness.
She's diagnosed with a tumor. It's benign, absolutely not cancerous,
but it is in her brain and she does have
it surgically removed. When she receives the diagnosis. She doesn't
(40:38):
even consider telling anyone outside of her immediate family. It's
in her DNA not to tell. But it's also in
her DNA to understand that secrets don't serve us, not
in the long run, not if we want to be
our fullest, most whole selves. This diagnosis is part of
Letty's story, so slowly, carefully, she begins to tell it.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
As I say, I think it was like this old
joke about what they asked about what real estate and
what matters and what matters is location, location, location, So
what mattered to me was that this illness was in
my brain, and I was raised to believe. I was
like a little Jewish girl who was told we are
our brains. That's what allowed us to survive. We knew
(41:28):
when to hide, we knew when to strive. If you're smart,
you don't have to be beautiful. You'll find a way.
And here I had a tumor in my brain. No
one hears tumor and doesn't think cancer, and so I
still have a lot of trouble telling the story of
it because I know when people hear tumor, they're gonna
(41:49):
think I have cancer. I never had brain cancer. And
you who our schooled as I was that you are
your brain. I didn't want to lose my brain because
I didn't want something growing in my brain because my
brain is my mind. I depend on my mind my
whole life. Having a brain tumor is an involuntary affliction,
(42:12):
but it falls under the rule brick of people will
be talking about me and I will end up being
the woman who has a tumor, and that will be
a shanda. I don't know whether it's called a shanda,
but you just don't want to be exposed when you
don't want to be exposed that in some way, it
(42:34):
will diminish you, it will misrepresent you, it will mark you.
That's the Shonda part, that you're no longer.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Who you are.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
You are a representative of yourself constructed by somebody else
because of this information. You're somebody who might be dying.
You're somebody who can't be hired for lecture day. You're
somebody who might not be clear headed about right.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Can you talk a little bit about what you mean
by good shame.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
I think good shame is alias conscience. I use a
really trivial example, and that is I reached from my phone,
pulled it out of my pocket, and I was walking
on the trails of Central Park.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
I was all by myself.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
In the what's called the ramble, and out of my
pocket wrapped a tissue. And I was walking fast walking,
which I like to do. And I could have kept going.
I could have just kept going. No one was behind me,
no one was in front of me, no one was
sitting up on a ledge. But I stopped and went
back because I would be ashamed of myself if I
left litter on a nature trail, and I count that
(43:45):
as good shame. It's not the shame that the base is,
and it's not corrosive. Of course, you know your own
counturs the day. We spend the whole day repairing and
asking forgiveness, and we feel cleanse and we feel new.
But you can't feel cleansed a new if somebody said
you are a bad person, and if you were raised
(44:06):
by a parent who said shame on you, it's different
then you did this bad thing. I just think good
shame is something that keeps us on the straightened arrow
or trying. It's aspirational.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
You also describe it as prophylactic, preventative, and preemptive. And
the last thing, very near the end of your books
that you write is I'm convinced that happiness lies in
a secret, free.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Life because I got it all out.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
Here's Letty with some wise and beautiful words from Shonda.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Secrets flutter through the chambers of the heart like ghosts
who won't give up the haunt. Yet, when we speak
something once thought unspeaks. When we admit a devastating humiliation
or a violation of societal norms, we freak the immensity
of our shame to human scale, and the truth told
(45:13):
finds its reflection in the eyes of the one who
hears it and makes the choice to accept us as
we are, or to forgive what we imagined to be
forever unforgivable. In that moment, the burden lifts, the window opens,
and we're free.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accurr is
the story editor and Dylan Fagin is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one a day
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(46:04):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Without the contents of the shopping bag, I could never
have crowds opened the marrow bones of my parents' secrets,
decoded their conflicts, their zigzagging passions, the craggy map of
their marriage, their letters to one another, answer questions I
didn't know enough to ask.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
That's Letty Cotton Pogribin, a founding editor of Miss magazine,
writer lecturer, social justice advocate, and author, most recently of Shanda,
a Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. Letty's story is like
one of those Russian nesting dolls, secrets within secrets within secrets,
each one giving way to the next, and Letty unearths
(00:54):
them tenaciously and courageously, discovering one after another until she
finds arrives at the tiny, hard kernel of what is true.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:17):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The landscape of my childhood had, you know, very few
hills or valleys. It was just a sort of flat
plain of pleasure in my everyday life, except that I
had very very very unhappy parents. They argued every night
after dinner. I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. My parents
(01:48):
moved there from the Bronx. When they moved, they imagined
a land, hired, new life for themselves. We lived next
door to my aunt Hillie. My mother's very close to
a person of my life, and I was a street kid.
I mean I went out in the morning and didn't
come back until dinner time.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
We played stickball.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Jamaica was really like a suburb at that point, and
it's in the Borough of Queens, but it felt like
it was long island. I went to Hebrew School from
age three until I graduated from Hebrew High School, and
in between I went to the Yeshiva Central Queens for
two years, and my dad was the president of the shool,
(02:29):
which made him what we call a big Maha, which
made me the daughter of a big macha. So I
sat on his lap on the bema and I got
a lot of privileges.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Tell me about the mother of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
The mother of my childhood was an omnipresent mother. One
would call her a helicopter mom. I guess she didn't
work outside the home at that point. She was devoted
to me and my father and the house and making
it beautiful and cooking and decorating, and eventually she was
an amateur painter. She always took lessons, she was always
(03:04):
going to adult education.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
She was the kind of woman who.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Had a majon group and on a bridge group, and
she and my dad were sort of leaders of the
Jewish community. My synagogue was quite an institution way back
when synagogues were many of them very small, and then suddenly,
you know, they burst onto the scene when Jews left
the cities and formed these communities where they were kind
(03:29):
of constructing palaces that matched many of the churches they
had seen.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
And my synagogue had a.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Bowling alley in it and a big ballroom and you know,
a chapel as well as a very large sanctuary.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
And so I hung around there.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I played sports there, I went with horror classes there,
and it filled my life that I went to public
school PS one thirty one. Then I went to Jamaica
High School and entirely public school educated except for my
education Jewish education. And I will say that my home
was what you might call today high conservative. In my house,
(04:08):
you know, we did Shabbat in a full blessing fashion.
In other words, my father didn't just say the one
line prayer over the wine. He said the whole kiddish
that type of thing. And my mother lit the candles
and we had a holla, and we usually had chicken
soup and chicken or chicken and brisket, and my mother
(04:29):
made crispy potatoes and overcooked green vegetables because who knew
she was really used to making Jewish food utol mush together.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
So there was the culture of Jewishness and you're very
much steeped in it. What did faith feel like during
those years?
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Faith?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You know, God was a white man and a long beard,
and I had to behave because God was watching me,
and I had to behave because the whole family was
watching me, and they were watching I mean, I'm one
of twenty four cousins on both sides because my parents
were each one of seven, so we had a huge
extended family. Everybody was sort of checked the box of
(05:17):
a different incarnation of Judaism. We had our stream left
wingers who were atheists militant atheists, and we had our
Orthodox who wouldn't let you use the same think for
a very spoonness for a folk that had been in
a piece of roastbeed. If you think fill around the roof.
That's my mother's town. She came here when she was
(05:40):
seven or eight or nine, I'm not sure, because she
lied about her age among all the other things. She
lied about as required by whatever was going on in
her life. And I think my relatives were performative in
the sense that they wanted to be real Americans and
they had to figure out what that meant. So of
course it meant losing your accent, and it meant not
(06:03):
over doing your Judaism publicly unless you were in a
safe space where some of my uncles and aunts were.
They were in very Jewish communities in this country.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Others weren't.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
They were integrated into the larger worlds. And some of them,
you know, looked like they came right off the boat,
and some looked like Petty Lamar or Betty Hutton. And
the only thing that was like uniformly wonderful, warm and
go moochlat, you know, like really homie was our meal times.
(06:38):
Everybody was talking. I loved our meal times.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
They would always just pull up a bench or a
chair or open a bridge table. It was always room
for everybody, and during the conversations I just learned about life.
I mean, they'd had arguments about which bridge to take,
you know, between queens and the province, or whether you
said or kigel to pronounce to pronounce the correct Yiddish
(07:03):
word for noodle pudding, And it was just full of
laughter and jokes and arguments. I learned to argue. One
of the things that I, as a feminist, have always
felt comfortable with is disputation, because I learned it at
my family dinner tables.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
In your nuclear family growing up, you also had a
much older by fourteen years sister named Betty. Can you
tell me a little bit about Betty at that time
and your relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Betty was, for me, as a child, the most glamorous
teenager on earth, and it was during the Second World War,
and she had a dressing table with a tool skirt
and a bit mirror.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
She had a room of her own full of your.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Nineteen forties teenage stuff, record albums and pictures of movie
stars and movie star and magazines. So Betty was my
ideal woman and she never resented me. She taught me
to tell time when I was like.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Four or five. She taught me to read.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I mean, she just was a dream sister to me.
I never missed having anyone my age because I had
so much more I felt.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's nineteen fifty one. Letty is twelve years old. It's
a very cold Sunday in March, and Letty and her
family are at a cousin's bar Mitzah, which is being
held at a seaside community on the north shore of Boston.
Letty's playing Gin Rummy with some of her cousins while
the adults congregate in the kitchen. Letty beats a much
(08:35):
older cousin at cards, and that cousin, in retaliation, blurts
something out.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
And she threw the cards at me and pushed the
bridge table over at me, and she screamed, you think
you're so smart. You know your mother wasn't even in
our family until your father married her and brought Betty.
And you know, I'm the oldest cousin, and Betty is
like pretending to be the oldest cousin. And she just
was shrill and insistent, and I just leapt out. I
(09:05):
couldn't take it in. It just was, you know, too
much to absorb. And when I woke up. My parents
were kneeling on either side of me. My mother had
a wet wash glove to my far and my father
was smoking, you know, one of his lucky strikes. And
they somehow managed to pull me up off the floor
and put me in my toddle pote and they took
me walking out on the beach and they said, we'll explain,
(09:28):
we'll explain, and they did, and we walked and walked
and walked and slobbed in this wet sand, with this
plustery wind and the crashing of the waves. My poor
mother was still in her barments for dress up and pumps.
And they told me they had each been married before
that my mother had a daughter who was my sister Betty.
(09:49):
And eventually it told me my father had a daughter too,
that he hadn't seen her since she was twelve. He
had kind of loust track of her when he married
my mother. So I was extremely confused. It was all
like an avalanche of information. And my father's he was
(10:10):
a lawyer, and he liked to be extremely logical and
very rational, so he said, just listen to the chronology.
Mom and I were each married in nineteen twenty three,
mom's daughter was born in nineteen twenty five. My daughter
was born in nineteen twenty seven. And soon after that
each of us got divorced from our first spouses. And
(10:33):
we met each other in nineteen thirty seven, and you
got married in nineteen thirty nine. And of course this
was no easier to absorb than anything else. So he said,
I'll draw it for you. I'll draw a family tree.
When he took a stick off the detritus on the shoreline,
and he drew like an a tree by barbells, and
on one round side he put his name, and on
(10:55):
the other side he put my mom's name in Then
he drew her husband first us Joe Holtzman.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
And on the other.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Side of his name he drew his first wife, named Paula.
And then he ruws a line down from my mom
and Joe, and he puts a little circle and he
puts Betty's name in it.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Fine, I get that now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
And then he puts with a long line between the
two of them, he puts my name down from their
bar bell. I'm with him, I'm actually with him. I
see my sister came from the first husband, and I
came from their marriage, and he brought a line down
from his bar belt with Paula, and he writes in Ena,
and that's how I found out I had another sister.
(11:40):
It turns out my parents had met each other when
they each of them separately, had put their daughters in
a quote very fine boarding school, the best boarding school,
Jewish boarding school in the country. That kept saying, and
Reena and Betty had become friends. And Reena and Betty
plotted to get my parents together, except they used to
(12:02):
come on separate visiting days. So they made this elaborate
reason why my mother had to come on the day
my father did, or vice versa. And they just said,
and they're going to fall in love and they're going
to get married.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
And they did. So.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean, this was a wonderful story told in a
horrible context, and I was like trembling. And at the
same time I realized that I had been lied to,
that they had constructed and lived in the Queens, as
I said, they moved from the Bronx to Queens to
start a new life, and they lived this lie. But
(12:38):
worst of all, they lied to me. My sister also, Betty,
also lied to me. One time I was looking up
a word and I opened her dictionary and it said
the word Betty Holtzman in the fly leaf, and I said,
who's Betty Holtzman?
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh, oh, she said, you know, I mean, looking back,
I realized she was talking, you know, feeling panicked to
fill in, you know, some kind.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Of believable story.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
And she said, when I was in high school, I
had a boyfriend named Holsman, and I wanted to see
what my name would look like if I married them.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
That was very quick witted of her.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
She was quick witted, to be sure. She was as
much of a prevaricator as my mother. They everybody learned
to lie because they had to keep things nice, They
had to keep the perfect family saga intact.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I understand why your parents kept it a secret and
intended for it to remain a secret from you. But
I'm wondering, why do you think Betty, even as she
became a teenager and a young adult, that she also
for all those years she was part of that deceit.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Because my parents instructed her that I couldn't be told
because I was too young to be trusted to keep
the secret from all their friends, from the Rabbi, from
the counter, from everybody so Betty had to keep the secret.
Everyone knew it, and everyone was onto it. They kept saying,
everything's fine. People accept us as we are. We're just
(14:19):
we're a family. We're a nice Jewish family. With Betty,
I said, well, you know, come to think of it,
didn't anybody notice that we're fourteen years apart? She said, well,
people didn't ask. Most people didn't ask personal questions. But
when some of my closer friends did, said why they
what happened that they're fourteen years apart? I told him
(14:40):
I had trouble conceiving. I mean, my mother had it
all figured out. My mother was a past master at invention, reinvention.
She created a perfect facade because she wanted to be perfect.
She thought all Americans were like that. Shanda means shame
(15:03):
in Yiddish. Everything was a shonda in my and my family.
You know, if somebody had mental illness, it was a shonda.
I mean, divorce was the worst shonda, except for cancer,
that was worse. So my mother had been a divorced
single mother. There was no such thing. There was no
label single mother. That's why my mother. It turns out
(15:24):
I didn't know this, of course, said Betty, took board
in school at age three. She did it because she
had to go to work in a sewing machine factory,
and she would have had to leave Betty with her parents,
who still had a lot of the kids are still
at home.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
My mother was the eldest.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
They lived in three rooms in the Lower east Side
classic if you think of Hester Street movie, that's how
they lived. If you've ever been to the Lower east
Side tenement Mesion, that was their life. And my grandparents
couldn't speak English more than you know, rudimentary English, and
it was kay us there and it was a toilet
in the hallway for like forty people my whole family,
(16:06):
and two or three other apartments. So she didn't want
Betty to grow up there. And my grandparents didn't read
the New York American books or now New York goes,
you know, classical music stations, the where my mother had
learned to do. And so she always told Betty, you know,
that's why I put you there, so that you would
(16:26):
grow up become a real American and a lady, which
Betty did. They had lived through the Shanda, the power
of shame. So my mother when she made new friends,
she told them she was single, and she never said
a word about For ten years, she never said a
word about having been married, or that she had a daughter.
(16:48):
And I, who, as I said, had a helicopter mom,
a mom who you know, did drawings with me and
built little structures with me and teach me to plant seeds.
Mother put her child in boarding school. It's so beyond me.
It's cognitive dissonance, but it's true. So I have to
(17:09):
make sense.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Out of all that. Where do you think that this
capacity to lie so seamlessly and keep secrets? Where do
you think that came from? And your mother?
Speaker 2 (17:21):
My mother was great liar because she was raised by
a great liar. She had a mother who kept secrets
pretty artfully and thoroughly. My grandmother was betrothed to a
man completely inappropriate for her, much too old for her,
and she had to help bear her parents.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So she got married. But in the bridal.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Chamber, while he was going and changing into whatever Orthodox
men put on for that first night, she tied the
bed sheets together and she shinneyed out the window. She
was a runaway bride, and nobody ever knew it because
when they came to America, my grandparents both my grandparents.
She went and ran away to the man who she
(18:03):
loved was my grandfather, and when they came here, they
just blotted it out.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
They never told anybody that.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
She'd ever done that, that she'd had this marriage. They
were desperately afraid that it would be such a shanda
that nobody would marry their kids because in the tightly
organized Jewish ghettos of New York, to put it that way,
on the Lower East Side, everybody knew each other, and
everybody knew, you know, where they came from. They were
just deathly afraid that somebody would know this story and
(18:32):
then they would be shamed, and they couldn't make a
shit off, which is a match with their seven children
and any other Jews seven children. So mom had seen
My mom had seen this, and my mom did this
with her childhood. She faked her high school graduation a
photograph by going to a studio and paying a guy
so she could go into the prop box and take
(18:53):
out a signon to where to make her look older,
and I rolled up diploma and have a picture taken.
And she tithed herself from her salary as a sewing
machine operator to pay back this photo studio guy, so
she could put that up and make people think she
was a high school graduate. She was extremely creative in
(19:14):
her line.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
We'll be right back. When Letty is fourteen years old,
just a couple of years after her father has drawn
(19:38):
their revelatory family tree in the sand, Rena, Letty's older sister,
shows up. It's nineteen fifty four and Rena needs help.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Opened the door and there was a woman with a
very long braid, facing away from the door, and she
flipped herself around and she stuck out her hand and
she said, Hi, bunny, that was my childhood name. I'm
your sister, Rena.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
That's how I met her.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
She had come to us because my father was a lawyer,
as I said, and she needed a lawyer to be
able to get a marshall to allow her to return
to her mother's apartment and retrieve her stuff. My mother
was so happy to see her. My mother didn't abandon her.
It turns out my mother knew her when my mother
(20:27):
married my father.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Rena was part of their life. So my mother was really.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Glad to see Rena, who was a friend of Betty
when they were children. They all sat on this lime
colored half seat. Love's seat. We had two of them,
and I never forget it. Rena just plopped herself down.
My mother came downstairs in her bathroom and it was sweet.
Brina sat down and there there two of them were
talking and I find out she's a PhD in anthropology,
(20:55):
and she was left with a mother who was really psychotic,
and she had become so violent.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
She had cracked right.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Rena's glasses and she had pushed her torso out the
window and threatens to throw her out, and Rena had escaped,
but she had all her you know, scholarly materials. She
was writing a book on her thesis in that apartment.
So she needed my father to be able to get
that stuff. And that's why she had come back to us.
(21:23):
My mother had her live in and we had an attic.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
A different housage make up.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
My father had earned a little more money and it
had a finished attic which Betty and her whole family
would come in with their kids and stay in. And
now here was Rena in this attic. Betty lived in
Westchester at the time, so she wasn't living there, but
she came for you know, weekends, and now Rena was
up there and I had this new sister, and she
(21:48):
was fabulous. Her dissertation was on the Machuaya, who happened
to live on Upper Broadway, and she did all her
field work on Upper Broadway. And while she was living
with she would slept me up there to visit with
this tribe. And these were people who if you see
fortune tellers and doors in store windows and so on,
(22:11):
that's the sort of tribe they belonged to. They called
themselves Romany. And I was at their feasts and I
was sitting and watching them do people's futures and crystal balls, literally,
And I'm fourteen years old, and this person, Rena, has
dropped out of heaven and I am besodic with her.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
I have a sister, Betty.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Who is a Ladies Home journal prototype.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
She makes lambshades out of potholders, and she cooks, you know,
dinners from Good Housekeepings recipes, and she mends things and
she's wonderful and smart. But here's this genius. My father
was quick to say she's a genius. Her IQ is
one hundred and eighty as if he made you know,
he made her this IQ, and she is now suddenly
(23:00):
this with this long braid a part of my life.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
When Letty's fifteen, her father sits her down and offers
her a lucky Strike cigarette. This is highly unusual, a
clue that he's about to tell her something serious, something huge.
And then he tells her that her mother has cancer.
She's very sick. In fact, her mother has only weeks
left to live. And Letty hasn't been the only one
(23:28):
kept in the dark about her mother's illness. It was
kept a secret from almost everybody.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
My mother wouldn't tell anybody. She wouldn't tell her friends,
her best friends. When we had the Shiva and people came,
her friends uniformly said, this is such a shock.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
We didn't know. We didn't know.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So not knowing is such a theme of my life,
of wanting to know everything. It's why I think I
became a writer. It's why I think I became a
feminist because so much she was unavailable to women. Women
didn't tell the truth about their lives because it might
not make them look good, and you had to satisfy
(24:11):
a very exacting norm. Femininity was unachievable, but everybody aspired
to be perfect. And I think I became a feminist
because of all of that that was hidden hiddenness was
to mix a Christian metaphor of my cross to bear her.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
So in a very short span of time, Letty learns
about and meets her new half sister, her mother grows
ill and eventually dies, and in the wake of all
of this, she goes off to college early, when she's
only sixteen years old.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
I went away to college.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
My father just dropped me off, and for a while
as a freshman, I really learned quickly that being a
berieved child was not a great thing for a co ed.
That's what we used to call girls in college. And
I didn't want pity. I wanted acceptance. So I made
very short shrift of the fact that my mother had
(25:11):
died four months before, and I tried to kind of
fit in. But my father had made it clear to
me that he was going to pay the tuition, room
and board, but the rest I was on my own.
So I was sixteen years old, and he told me
that it was important to him to be left on
his own when he was sixteen, and he became a
(25:31):
Hebrew school teacher and he became a tutor of bar
mits for boys, and it was the making of him.
And then he put himself through college and then through
law school. He was very proud he was in nineteen
twenty three. He was a graduate lawyer and not a
lot of Jews were, And you know, he made his
own way and I would too. So I mean, looking back,
(25:53):
as a feminist, I could kind of reframe that whole
thing and say, great, it made.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
Me an independent. But as a child, just as her mother,
it's felt like crap.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And then I realized that, you know, my dormmates had
different lives. Their parents hung around till they had unpacked
their stuff, and then when we were all living together,
my dormmates parents sent them pin money, which was what
it was called, and they would, you know, they would
all hop into somebody's car if there was somebody who
(26:28):
had a driver's license, and go into Harvard Square and
have ice cream cones at Brigham's. And I had to
measure out what pin money I had because I was
working from the beginning, I became secretary to the.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Brandi's Hillel Rabbi.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I worked in the public department in the alumni office,
and I tutored athletes. In my sophomore year, I started
tutoring athletes in English and biology. So I had a
lot of jobs in order to.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
Have the kind of.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Life that a cod in the nineteen fifties was supposed
to have, Like I could buy a lipstick, and I
could have a pizza and all that sort of thing.
And I only mention that because my father had masqueraded
as a very wealthy guy, a successful lawyer. He used
to be the one who picked up the check when
he and my mom went out with another couple. He
(27:21):
always dressed go beautifully, he always had a nice car.
But later I discovered a whole lot of hidden letters.
I discovered my father was really just a performing masculinity,
which included that Jewish men had to provide well for
their families and look good. So my father, when he
(27:43):
said you're going to be on your own, really was
saying I can't help you.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
I'm having enough trouble myself. Who knew? I never knew that.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
But the letters are not uncovered for years. In fact,
(28:16):
Letty lives an entire life before she makes these discoveries
about her father's performances. She finishes college and begins a
career in publishing. She marries Bert, has three children and
eventually six grandchildren. She writes twelve books. She becomes known
as one of the leading feminists of her generation. But
through it all, a certain feeling never leaves her. It's
(28:39):
the feeling that there's more she doesn't know about her family,
that there's more she must find out. Sometime in the
early two thousands, Letty comes across another letter in which
something peculiar stands out, something about twins.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I had taken out my father's album of his trip
to Palestine, and at one point I noticed that there
was a sort of slap in the front cover, and
I reached in to think see if there was anything
in there of interest, and out came a letter one
of my father had written to my mother, and my
mother had written to my father, and in it there
was a ps from my sister saying to my father,
(29:20):
Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
So I read this. My eyes pop out.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I pick up the Varna, call my sister living in Westchester,
and I say, Betty, listen to this. A PS on
a letter that mom wrote to Dad when he was
in Palestine, and it says Mom's doing fine. Obviously about
the pregnancy with me and the twins are kicking.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
Was I a twin?
Speaker 2 (29:47):
She said, don't be ridiculous. You know she's very matter
of Are you crazy? I wouldn't know if if mom
had twins.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
I was there. I said, what do you mean? I
was there?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I was outside the hospital. I was waiting in the car.
Dad went in to get mom. He came out with
Mom and the nurse had the baby. The nurse put
you in my arms. It was the happiest day of
my life. She said, how would I I would never
forget if there were two babies. I said, Betty, you
weren't in the delivery room.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
She said, they would have told me.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
At this point, you know, I knew my parents had
lied about everything. So I said, they couldn't lied about this.
They were world class liars. They wouldn't have won anybody
in Jamaica to know that mom gave birth to twins
and one died.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
That would be a shanda.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I would be like, oh, yeah, yo, did you hear
what happened?
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Steal?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So they wouldn't have told you. She said, that is crazy.
That's crazy. I don't remember ever writing that, And so
I put the thing away, and I thought maybe it
was a joke. My mother was having so many kicks
in her belly that she called them twins.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
So that's what Letty does. She puts the thing away.
Maybe it was a joke.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
I think throughout my life after my mother died, and
I looked at my childhood writings and my teenage writings
before I started writing journalistically, these things that were just
poured out of me. When I was in college, I
see that I believed I had a presence traveling with me,
and I assumed it was my mother. I felt her presence,
(31:23):
and I know it's very woo woo, but I always
felt what is.
Speaker 4 (31:27):
Going on here?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I feel my mother's presence, and it was a comfort,
but it also was something that couldn't explain. And then
in twenty nineteen, my granddaughter was in a college course
where she studied biographies and then was assigned to write
a biography of a living person. And she asked me
if I might let her write about me, and then
(31:50):
she dug in, Like my granddaughter, Molly just does deep
drill into my life. She read all my books. She
went up to Smith's College where my archives are. She
read to all my article files and my childhood musings
and so on, except I've had left a lot of
stuff in my study in New York and after all,
but she did. She said, I'm coming to your study
(32:12):
and I want to go through whatever's there. And she said,
where are the childhood stuff? I said, oh, I kept
very few. It's under there, and it's a very deep
cabinet with two big shells. And she squats down. She
takes out my little diaries. You know, we all kept
leather bound diaries with locks and keys, as if everyone
wanted to know about our lives, we had to lock
(32:33):
them up. And also underneath water this humongous plastic shopping bag,
huge shopping bag, like if you had bought a winter
coat and put it in your shopping bag, big fat
chopping bag full of letters and documents and citizenship papers.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
And I mean I.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Dumped it on the dining room table. I knew what
it was the minute I saw, but I had forgotten
all about it. When my sister Betty died, I went
up to see her in her sister living place in Brooklyn, Massachusetts.
I knew it was the last time I would see her,
because she was deferring food and she was about to
(33:14):
entery though, three days when she was going to refuse
drink and that would be it. And so I went
up for my last visit with her, and she points
to a bit chopping pad leaning against the wall, and
she says, take this with you when you go home
someday you want to read through it. And I took it.
I took it on the train back to New York,
and I was weeping so hard I couldn't even pick
(33:36):
out one thing. And when I get home, I'm so upset.
I said, I'll read it tomorrow. I shoved it down
underneath in this deep, deep cabinet was deep jails. And
then three days later she died. So I never went
back to that shopping pad. I couldn't think of back
doing that. I was in such deep morning. Eight years later,
(33:59):
Molly comes to my house and finds it. I dumped
it on my dining room table, and there are hundreds of,
you know, earmail qwinkled letters of my parents writing to
each other in those days. They letters and pages and
pages of each other's lives and the weather and what
they ate, but also what were they were arguing about.
(34:21):
That's how I learned about my parents' marriage. They had
arguments in these letters. My mother had pleading pleading my
father to reform his ways. When he plays cards with
his friends, well he's gone. This was when we had
another round of letters when my father sent my mother
and I when I was a baby down to Florida
(34:41):
to spend the winter in Miami because I had constant
colds and cloths.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
So there were.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Letters between them every single day during that period. And
that's when my father was having money troubles. He just
was explicit on the page, and she was honest and
strong on the page. I learned people I had never
known in these crinkly pages with fading ink. My father
(35:08):
wrote like chicken script. My mother wrote beautiful penmanship because
that was for her, being a real American. Was writing
perfectly letters, which they all were. You wouldn't think they
were written with a line, and you know, rule around
to them. And my mother, who had eighth grade education,
turned out to be incredibly lyrical in her or incredibly
(35:30):
furious in her pros. It was on the page. Every
bit of it was. If I found the dead sea
squirrels in my backyard and I learned who my parents were.
I had inklings of who they were. I never knew
who they were. They were always clues along the way,
and this flashed everything out. I feel I know who
(35:51):
they are now. I forgive my father. Took me eighty
something years to forgive my father. I never said the
cottage for my father because he wouldn't let me say
the cottage for my mother when she died, because it
wasn't done.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Letty writes, had my parents known their words would end
up under their daughter's microscope, I doubt they would have
expressed their sore points and vulnerabilities in such unguarded prose.
But the letters don't only reveal her parents' private selves.
They reveal more about that word Letty had tucked away
(36:30):
years earlier, that word she thought might have been a joke, twins.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Then I find this shopping back, and I find two
more mentions of the twins. When my father was in
Palestine and my parents were corresponding. In one letter said
Mom is doing fine and the twins are kicking. Then
another letter turns up in which my father writes, I
(36:58):
dance with women on the boat and I lost at
Jin Rummy, and I lost in the dance concert.
Speaker 4 (37:04):
The women didn't.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Dance as well as you did, he said, but I
know I'm coming home to you and the twins, and
I will love you and the twins. So that was
the second and I realized that I had obviously been
unable to process that I was a twin, nor did
I put it together with the fact that all my
(37:25):
life after my mother died, I felt that I was
not alone. And to top it all off, I gave
birth to twins. So since I've been kind of mystical
leaning person, I now wonder if what I thought was
my mother came from the company in some spiritual.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Way, was my twin.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
My daughter Rabigail wrote a book on twins, and she
thought maybe it was a phantom twin. But then I
found out that phantom twins supure much earlier in my
mother and my father were writing in my seventh in
my mother's seventh months, so it would have disappeared in
the first three or four or five months. So I
(38:12):
think I must have been a twin and didn't know it,
And now I believe I was, and I believe that
explains why I never felt really totally alone.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
I want to ask you, you know, all of these
different kinds of shondas they are so different from each other.
There is the shonda of doing something wrong or quote
unquote wrong, or doing something that doesn't fit in the
social mores of society. But then there's the shonda of
(38:47):
becoming sick with cancer, or the shonda of losing a baby,
you know, or in a way what you were talking
about when you first got to Brandie, of feeling like
there was a shonda in having lost your mother four
months earlier, that it would make people pity you. It's
all under this umbrella of shonda. Do you think that
(39:10):
that's particular to Jewish people or do you think that
that's a universal idea.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I am only speaking for a culture I know, and
that is the culture of your speaking Eastern European immigrants
to this country. And I know that shame based secrecy
really well. I don't know others. I've intrigued others, but
I can't vouch for them. I will tell you that
I was steeped in the biblical stories that are full
(39:38):
of secrets. God hides, you know, hester I mean, Lea
is behind a veil and Jacob thinks he's marrying Rachel.
So trickery abounds, Pretense abounds in the talment shaming is
a kind of murder. It's like considered like shedding blood.
So I feel shame and secrecy are intrinsically Jewish because
(40:02):
I know Judaism. I have been steeped in it. It's
my hiding, is my heritage, and it's my legacy from
my family.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
After a lifetime of shanda and all kinds of familial secrecy,
now Letty grapples with her own secret, her own illness.
She's diagnosed with a tumor. It's benign, absolutely not cancerous,
but it is in her brain and she does have
it surgically removed. When she receives the diagnosis. She doesn't
(40:38):
even consider telling anyone outside of her immediate family. It's
in her DNA not to tell. But it's also in
her DNA to understand that secrets don't serve us, not
in the long run, not if we want to be
our fullest, most whole selves. This diagnosis is part of
Letty's story, so slowly, carefully, she begins to tell it.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
As I say, I think it was like this old
joke about what they asked about what real estate and
what matters and what matters is location, location, location, So
what mattered to me was that this illness was in
my brain, and I was raised to believe. I was
like a little Jewish girl who was told we are
our brains. That's what allowed us to survive. We knew
(41:28):
when to hide, we knew when to strive. If you're smart,
you don't have to be beautiful. You'll find a way.
And here I had a tumor in my brain. No
one hears tumor and doesn't think cancer, and so I
still have a lot of trouble telling the story of
it because I know when people hear tumor, they're gonna
(41:49):
think I have cancer. I never had brain cancer. And
you who our schooled as I was that you are
your brain. I didn't want to lose my brain because
I didn't want something growing in my brain because my
brain is my mind. I depend on my mind my
whole life. Having a brain tumor is an involuntary affliction,
(42:12):
but it falls under the rule brick of people will
be talking about me and I will end up being
the woman who has a tumor, and that will be
a shanda. I don't know whether it's called a shanda,
but you just don't want to be exposed when you
don't want to be exposed that in some way, it
(42:34):
will diminish you, it will misrepresent you, it will mark you.
That's the Shonda part, that you're no longer.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Who you are.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
You are a representative of yourself constructed by somebody else
because of this information. You're somebody who might be dying.
You're somebody who can't be hired for lecture day. You're
somebody who might not be clear headed about right.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Can you talk a little bit about what you mean
by good shame.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
I think good shame is alias conscience. I use a
really trivial example, and that is I reached from my phone,
pulled it out of my pocket, and I was walking
on the trails of Central Park.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
I was all by myself.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
In the what's called the ramble, and out of my
pocket wrapped a tissue. And I was walking fast walking,
which I like to do. And I could have kept going.
I could have just kept going. No one was behind me,
no one was in front of me, no one was
sitting up on a ledge. But I stopped and went
back because I would be ashamed of myself if I
left litter on a nature trail, and I count that
(43:45):
as good shame. It's not the shame that the base is,
and it's not corrosive. Of course, you know your own
counturs the day. We spend the whole day repairing and
asking forgiveness, and we feel cleanse and we feel new.
But you can't feel cleansed a new if somebody said
you are a bad person, and if you were raised
(44:06):
by a parent who said shame on you, it's different
then you did this bad thing. I just think good
shame is something that keeps us on the straightened arrow
or trying. It's aspirational.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
You also describe it as prophylactic, preventative, and preemptive. And
the last thing, very near the end of your books
that you write is I'm convinced that happiness lies in
a secret, free.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Life because I got it all out.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
Here's Letty with some wise and beautiful words from Shonda.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Secrets flutter through the chambers of the heart like ghosts
who won't give up the haunt. Yet, when we speak
something once thought unspeaks. When we admit a devastating humiliation
or a violation of societal norms, we freak the immensity
of our shame to human scale, and the truth told
(45:13):
finds its reflection in the eyes of the one who
hears it and makes the choice to accept us as
we are, or to forgive what we imagined to be
forever unforgivable. In that moment, the burden lifts, the window opens,
and we're free.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accurr is
the story editor and Dylan Fagin is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one a day
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(46:04):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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