For the last three years, I’ve been writing a book entitled Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy in which I revisit aspects of my life that were shaped by my parents’ humiliations. I delve deep into their shame about being Greenhorns (immigrants), impoverished, imperfect, unhappy, inadequate – and their abiding fear of disgrace, the shanda. Retrieving childhood feelings and experiences is hard at any age but thanks to my discovery of a large plastic bag stuffed with correspondence dating back more than eighty years, my memory was turbo-charged and the book is richer for it.
The letters my parents wrote to one another in the 1930s and ’40s exposed their inner lives, their searing conflicts, their secrets and fears. Those I wrote as a teenager in the 1950s, when my mother was dying, and through my four years at Brandeis University, reconnected me to my former self and explained, in large part, how I became who I am.
Someone once said, “Jews remember; Jews write” – for us, history is memory and memory history. Sadly, letter-writing has gone out of style; emails are rushed, utilitarian, mostly bare of telling details, intimacy and grace. But some are worth saving. This Rosh Hashana, I’d like to suggest a New Year’s resolution for young people:
Whenever you write or receive an emotionally meaningful or substantively personal electronic message, print it out. (Words still carry more weight on the page.) File it where it can be retrieved, or stumbled upon by accident like a precious earring or cufflink that turns up years later in the crevice of a couch. Save the raves about your best days and the rants about your worst. Document your feelings before you forget them. Your future self, your future progeny and Jewish history itself will be grateful you did.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an activist and the founding editor of Ms. Magazine. www.Lettycottinpogrebin.com
