Memories of a Vanished Time: A Tribute to My Mother and Father

By Robert Blumenfeld

My mother, Ruth Blumenfeld, née Korn, was born on January 15, 1915; and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911 and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday… I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else, because in doing so I bring my parents back to life in my memory. I do the same when it comes to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I write also for my family members, who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as being the embodiment in specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States… When my father was born, World War One was several years away, and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War Two, and the subsequent wars… They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone, and of electricity and electric lighting, to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television, and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric clothes drier, and the electric dishwasher, and, later on, of the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and of so much more… The world was a better place because Mom and Dad were in it. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared, and they wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone, a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. When people like them disappear from the earth, the world is a poorer place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669860785

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by Robert Blumenfeld.

All photos from the author’s family collection

Front cover photo of Max and Ruth Blumenfeld in their living room in Princeton, circa 1970, taken by the author

Back cover author photo used by permission of Jean-Frédéric Guidoni-Tarissi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/10/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

846539

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 The Limits of Memory and Feeling

Chapter 2 Our Family: The Blumenfelds and the Korns

Chapter 3 Mom and Dad and Their Families Growing Up

Chapter 4 Growing Up with Mom and Dad and the Family

Chapter 5 Our Family’s Yiddish: We Learn More about Our Roots and Yiddish Culture

Chapter 6 Our Cultural and Social Life: Art, Cinema, Literature, Music, Theater, and Television

Chapter 7 Food: Mom Was the Best Cook and Pastry Chef

Chapter 8 The Last Years in Princeton

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?[But where are the snows of yesteryear?]

—François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Ballade of the Ladies of Times Gone By)

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.

—Shakespeare, The Tempest, act IV, scene 1

PREFACE

What Remains

Ingenting på jorden kan kompensera för förlusten av en som har älskat dig. [Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.]

—Selma Lagerlöf, Jerusalem

M Y MOTHER, RUTH Blumenfeld (née Korn), was born on January 15, 1915, and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911, and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday.

What is left of their material passage on this earth? Their children and grandchildren, alive for now. Me and my two brothers. We share genes from each of them. But Mom and Dad, as living beings with a consciousness of self, are gone, of course. Gone. What a terrible word. For those who, like me and like my parents, do not believe in an afterlife, there is only this life. When it is over, our material being goes back into the universe as physical remains and intangible physical energy, interchangeable with matter, according to Einstein.

What else bears witness to their lives? Memorabilia. Ephemera. Photographs, letters, birthday and anniversary cards—my mother had the most beautiful, elegant handwriting—postcards, address books, glasses, watches, wallets, keys, jewelry…and memories. Wonderful memories.

I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else because, in doing so, I bring my parents back to life in my memory as I reminisce and write. I do the same regarding my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I also write for my family members who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as the embodiment of specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States.

I wish I could talk with Mom and Dad again. We always had such great conversations. And I still have so many questions. As my cousin Jonathan Blumenfeld—the son of my father’s younger brother, my uncle Abe—rightly said, The world we grew up in is gone. It is as gone as the world of Downton Abbey or the Corfu of the Durrells. It is gone because all the people in it are gone. Their attitudes, knowledge of what life was like, their way of living, what they grew up with and what they lived through, and how they spoke the English language are gone with them. There are no more family Thanksgivings with the older generation, no family dinners with our grandparents, nothing at all of that beautiful era of family dinners. The past is now the historical past, with my generation as its living witness. We will soon be gone as well, just like the first of my generation in my family to go, my cousin Rita; as well as a number of close friends with whom I went to Princeton High School or to Rutgers University and who have died in the last couple of years, as have so many people I worked with in show business.

After my mother died, I started going to Philadelphia to celebrate Thanksgiving with Jonathan. We were invited one year to the house of my maternal cousins once removed Jim and Meri (Meredith) Loewer. It was a fairly large gathering, and my cousin Marge Loewer, Jim’s mother, was there, as were Meri’s parents, who had driven all the way in from Brooklyn. Meri’s mother wanted us to go around the table and say what we were thankful for. I went first and said, I am thankful to my parents for having brought me up without the burden of religion and in the spirit of left-wing progressive politics. And I went on to elaborate.

1.

To borrow a phrase from Fintan O’Toole’s review of the fourth volume of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence in The New York Review of Books for November 24, 2016, my book is the result of the transformation of people and places into pure absences that are somehow more potent than any presence. The absence into which the presence of my mother and my father, and all their generation and the generation previous to theirs in our family, has transformed is indeed potent. In Proustian terms, they still exist as they have always existed: inside my heart and mind as I have experienced them and above all, as I have interpreted them. And as Marcel Proust wrote in Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures and Days), L’absence n’est-elle pas pour qui aime la plus certaine, la plus efficace, la plus vivace, la plus indestructible, la plus fidèle des présences? [Is not absence for the person who loves, the most certain, the most effective, the most long-lasting, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?]

Why get up in the morning? Why do anything? What’s the point? The point is to live, to enjoy the gift they gave as much as we can, even without their comforting presence, and to honor them by doing so because that is how I can express my love for them. My mother survived the death of her parents and her husband, my father, for almost two decades. She had the courage to do so, and so should I, living by her example. She always talked about them and often said, I want Mack. That’s what she called my father. I always told her I understood and that I missed him too. Every once in a while, she would ask me to hand her the small framed photograph of Dad that stood on the dresser across from her bed. She would look at it for a while and give it to me to put it back in its place.

What I have to tell you about them can only be a picture of who they were as I knew them—or, rather, as I interpreted them—as I said above, an unconscious interpretation that changed with the years, that matured as I matured. But that interpretation is not necessarily a picture of who they were objectively or how they saw themselves or how others besides myself saw them—not, in other words, a picture of who they were as the people of the same name who existed in the world, to paraphrase Marcel Proust. I know what they told me about their lives and our family, as well as what my grandparents and my parents’ siblings communicated from time to time. And it is hearsay evidence, inadmissible in a court of law. But all of it forms my truth as I perceive it.

I miss my parents every day, no matter what I am doing or how involved I may be. My life has been so different—the world is so different—since the very moment when my mother died. And when she died, my father’s death, which happened more than twenty years before hers, came crowding back into my memory too.

My grief recedes into the background as life and everything I have to do take over; but it will always be there, ready to be reawakened, as it often is. Meanwhile, there are those wonderful memories.

Every once in a while, I will be daydreaming or thinking of something, and the thought pops into my mind, Ooh, I have to tell Mom this or Oh, Dad would get a kick out of this when I tell him. And then, of course, I realize immediately that I can’t.

I am sparing you, the reader, the banalities of the inevitable universal childhood conflicts as limits on behavior are set, as one is disobedient and is scolded for it, as adolescent hormones create chaos until they are dealt with, and as one attempts to become an independent adult. (Is that even possible when we all need each other, and nobody, however misanthropic, functions independently of society?) In any case, when I think of my childhood and everything my parents went through to raise me, what I remember makes me smile as my heart swells with the deepest love for them—the love that was there from the very beginning, from my very first reactions and attachment to Mom and Dad.

Some of the stories and individuals in these chapters that are not about family members may seem peripheral. Still, I have included them because they form part of the warp and woof of Mom’s and Dad’s lives. Yet I have not included events more central to our family life. I have chosen to draw a discreet veil of oblivion over certain distressing, deeply upsetting things, over certain behaviors of a reprehensible, despicable nature—not on the part of my parents, I hasten to add. Those who know me know what I am talking about. As for those who don’t, as the butler Carson says concerning matters he has chosen not to communicate to his employer Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, Nobody has to know everything.

CHAPTER 1

The Limits of Memory and Feeling

Notre mémoire est un monde plus parfait que l’univers; elle rend la vie à ce qui n’existe plus. [Our memory is a world more perfect than the universe; it gives back life to that which no longer exists.]

—Guy de Maupassant, Les Soeurs Rondoli (1884)

W HEN MY GRANDPARENTS were born, the airplane and the radio had not yet been invented. The automobile, the electric light, the telephone, and the wax cylinder gramophone, all invented less than fifteen years before their births, would only become well known and widespread considerably later in their lives.

When my father was born, World War One was several years away; and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War Two, and the subsequent wars. When my mother died, the situation in the Middle East, in all its horror, was still unresolved. It goes on today as I write these lines. They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone and electricity and electric lighting to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television; and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric-clothes drier, the electric dishwasher, and later on, the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and so much more.

My mother was the last of her generation in our family; her brother and sister died before she did, as had my father and his sister and two brothers and the spouses on both sides of the family. My four grandparents had died long before that. So not only my parents but also the entire previous two generations of my family are gone. Their memories are gone with them, of course.

When people like Mom and Dad disappear, the world is a poorer place. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared. They wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone—a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. They tried to help better everyone’s lives, not only their children’s. What Dad did as a chemist, with his work on penicillin and antibiotics, constitutes part of his legacy to the world and benefited people not only during his lifetime but also now long after he is gone.

As accurate as I have tried to be, no doubt many of the numerous anecdotes in this book are fictionalized. I have not always remembered people’s exact words since I never recorded them. And I have relied on hearsay as in my mother’s recounting of certain events, for instance, and my memory of what she said in her last years when we used to sit and talk at night in her bedroom with the lights out, when she was in bed and I sat in the armchair at the foot of the bed. On the other hand, I can say that my memory is excellent and that I have been as precise and error-free as I can be in recounting stories, anecdotes, and events. And there is a lot that has been left out: things I did not know and that have gone with my parents’ going.

1.

As I write these lines, my mother’s death seems so recent, even after more than seven years. That is because her death is always so present in both my unconscious and frequently in my conscious memory, as are the remembrances of her as she was when she was alive. And even now, my father’s death almost twenty-seven years ago is just beginning to seem like a long time in the past. He too is a constant presence.

A few years ago, I ran into a neighbor on 105th Street in Manhattan. He told me he had recently lost his mother. I commiserated with him; and when I told him that it might as well have been yesterday even though it was almost four years since my mother had died, he said, It might as well have been four minutes. He was right.

I decided to write this book shortly after my mother’s death, and I began making notes for it when I went to Paris the September after she died. Everyone told me I should fulfill my plans to go there, where I had been every year for more than thirty years, and I did. I needed to get away, and I needed Paris. Mom hadn’t wanted me to go, and I was considering canceling my trip that year. If I had had to cancel, I would have; but in the event, I didn’t have to.

Don’t go to Paris, she had half whispered in her weakened voice.

Why not?

Because I’ll miss you, she said.

I’ll call you every day.

It’s not the same thing.

With Mom’s death certificates and the will in hand, the first thing I did as her executor was to have her will probated. My brother Richard drove me back and forth from Princeton to the probate court in Trenton. And then I opened the estate bank accounts at my bank in New York City, a few blocks from where I live, and hired an accountant in New Jersey, whom Richard had found after making inquiries and who handled estates and could get the probated will approved by departments of the state of New Jersey so that the inheritance could be distributed after estate taxes were paid. And I initiated proceedings with financial institutions to fulfill the terms of the will. Then I went to Paris, as usual, in September. I figured everything else could wait until I returned, which was the case.

2.

I can visualize, even at this great remove in time, all the houses we lived in. I have even seen the house in Arverne where my mother and her brother and sister spent most of their early years. My uncle Sy drove me and his daughter, my cousin Rita Korn, there from Manhattan to see it. The elementary school where all three of them went is also there, just down the block.

It is almost needless to add that my feelings about and reactions to everything I describe or recount are my own. They might or might not have been shared by others who lived through various events or heard what was said.

During my childhood, our family lived through, in common with everyone else, the awful, scary McCarthy era, with the lump-stupid, obsessed senator presiding over people’s destruction, destroying careers needlessly, especially since those government workers accused of being Communists or Communist sympathizers (fellow travelers) had already been fired around ten years before in large numbers, like my mother’s sister’s husband, Uncle Morton Friedman. He was a man of conscience who ran from New York down to Washington to serve as a lawyer to those he knew and appear before the committee. He never took a penny for his services; he volunteered because he couldn’t stand what was happening.

We followed with horror the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, convicted of spying for the USSR, which was such a terrible miscarriage of justice, the trial a travesty, and the execution a true-life horror story. And other later events now seem like history; but to us, they were and are living reality: the destruction of the Berlin Wall; the Vietnam War; Watergate; the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy; and the financial and treasonous disasters of the Reagan presidency, to name a few. But then, is the past ever really past for those who lived through it?

I was glued to the television during the Watergate hearings. I watched on that same television when the disgraced Nixon, the only president to have resigned the office because he knew he would have been impeached and convicted, departed Washington for the last time, waving from the doorway of the plane.

I also remember where I was when Kennedy was assassinated, just as people who were alive when Pearl Harbor happened remember where they were when they heard the news. I heard what had happened to Kennedy when I was on the Rutgers University bus going from the Douglass campus down George Street in New Brunswick to the Rutgers campus on the other side of town—I had a tiny house near Douglass that Mom and Dad rented for me. I remember Dad negotiating the price with the landlord and pointing out that the place was a bit run-down, although it had a backyard. But it was good enough that at the end of the year, I threw a cast party for the final Rutgers production I was in, Romeo and Juliet, in which I played Capulet.

Kennedy was murdered during the first semester of my senior year, and I was on my way to the weekly class of a course in modern English literature, which was mostly about Lawrence Durrell and James Joyce. Somebody on the very crowded bus had a transistor radio, and the news was announced. In class, we waited for the professor, who was uncharacteristically late. When he did arrive, he said something like, This is such terrible news, but I think he would have wanted us to continue with our education. However, after a few minutes, he said, I’m sorry. I just can’t do this. I’ll see you next week.

In the Cold War, Soviet Communism was still omnipresent as a force that threatened American democracy. The USSR said it was opposing American imperialism. Still, they had occupied and forced their political system (dictatorship of the proletariat, misnamed because it was never really implemented) on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia—in short, on all of Eastern Europe.

My parents, far left as they were in the 1930s, were shocked by the revelations of Stalin’s crimes, among which was the horrible famine in Ukraine that killed so many millions called the Holodomor, hidden for decades with the news carefully controlled within the USSR so that for a long time nothing leaked out. Dad told me that Stalin had betrayed the Russian Revolution and its ideals. Stalin had become the brutal dictator and mass murderer that he was later revealed to be, behind all the propaganda that concealed his crimes from the moment he became dictator and of which most people on the western side of the Iron Curtain knew next to nothing.

My parents gave my brothers and me the gift of life, which was only the first of their gifts to us. They paved the way for us as their parents had for them. And for the rest of their lives, they continued giving to me both emotionally and even financially with annual gifts, giving equal amounts to my two brothers. Even after their deaths, they left us a comfortable inheritance.

And they gave us the gift of the family we were born into and raised with and that we learned to love and cherish.

Among their many wonderful gifts—all their gifts were wonderful—they took us to various theatrical events, about which more later. Often, it was my mother who did this while my father was at work. This meant she had to look up everything happening in the newspapers, call and order tickets, pay for them in cash at the theater (no credit cards in those days when we were growing up), and to drive us back and forth. I never even thought about how much work that entailed, and I took it for granted, until much later, when she was gone although I did tell her often enough in her last years how much I appreciated and loved those expeditions. But even then, I didn’t think of how much work she had had to do to make them happen before we even set out in the car.

I inherited from both of my parents my taste in art, music, theater and film, and all the finer things in life, including good food. The knowledge and appreciation they shared with me shaped the person I am today.

When I was a kid, I hated it when Mom and Dad gave me shirts, underwear, and socks as birthday presents because I didn’t realize the situation— how much money they had and what they had to spend it on. I only wanted books or some art supplies or records. To me, they were presents. Clothing was not. That was stupid of me, but that is how it was. Later, Mom used to take me shopping, and I would pick my shirts. Her taste became my taste, and I love paisley, as she did, and plaid. She never bought me paisley shirts when I was a kid, but she did buy plain and plaid shirts.

I was thrilled when my father took me to a motel when I was about fifteen, I think, to be measured by a salesman for a custom-made Harris tweed jacket—the only custom-made garment I have ever owned—sold at a discount. I think Dad had seen a newspaper ad and made the necessary phone call to arrange the appointment. In due course, the jacket arrived. It remained my favorite one until, alas, I outgrew it.

From my father, I also got a taste for the various branches of science that I found interesting and enjoyed reading about, without having any particular scientific ability or aptitude, and classical music, which he loved. When I was a kid, he was always playing Jascha Heifetz’s performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on the old 78 rpm records. That is among my earliest and still most treasured musical memories.

My friend, the composer and pianist Jean-Philippe Bec, told me he thought I had inherited my father’s scientific approach to things, as with my books on accents and acting. I had not thought of that, but I realized he was right: I admired Dad’s way of thinking and adopted it unconsciously. My approach to coaching accents for actors is indeed scientific. And that is undoubtedly why the Stanislavsky system of analyzing roles and making them one’s own, often called the method, appealed to me.

My mother and father always looked young to me, even when they were very old. When you know someone all your life, without interruption, you always have an image of them as they were when you first were conscious of them. That image influences how you see them at any age. As Marcel Proust says in Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained), Le temps qui change les êtres ne modifie pas l’image que nous avons gardée d’eux. [Time which changes people does not alter the image we have retained of them.] Nor does it necessarily alter how we see ourselves: when he was over eighty, my father said, I feel like I’m twenty until I look in the mirror.

One of the most important things they did for my brothers and me—one of the most important things any parent can do for a child—was to enable us to live independent lives where we could take care of ourselves. In other words, they enabled us to live without them, without their constant help and intervention, by fostering a sense of self-confidence, self-worth, and responsibility. For me, after their deaths, living without their physical presence in the world has often been a very difficult thing to do, but I do it. I must do it. It’s what they would have wanted. As Samuel Beckett wrote in The Unnamable, You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. While they were alive, I had no problem living independently because I could always rely on the fact that they were there. I didn’t have to think about it. We had our visits and phone calls, and now all I can do is miss them.

As I said above, I present my personal view of my parents, family, and life. Every child experiences childhood in his or her own way, even the children in the same household. I can only speak for myself, not for my brothers Richard and Donald and how they experienced their childhoods. Only they can do that.

Even in those days of my young adulthood when I was more distant, both literally and figuratively, from my parents than I had been when we were living together as a family, I had such great memories of our family Thanksgivings; the cultural experiences we shared; the meals and the discussions, political and otherwise, at the dinner table when we were growing up; the visits to grandparents and other relatives; and the general happy nature of my childhood. Most of all, I had the feeling of being loved and cherished (without ever putting that into words) and the security of being taken care of in every way—a security one tends as a child to take for granted; at least, I did—without the awareness or knowledge of how much effort, how much travail, how much work goes into establishing and maintaining that security so that children don’t even have to think about it. Some are not so fortunate in how they are parented, but I was.

Among other things they did for us in their thoughtful, considerate, kind, concerned, and loving way, Mom and Dad had the house at 39 Randall Road in Princeton, New Jersey, built so that we would have a nice place to live growing up and of course, so that Dad would have a much easier commute. Also, they knew the