Above and Below the Floridian Sands

Seven stories above the sparkling waters of Hallandale, Florida and the ebb and flow of tourists’ shouts live two women with similar life stories. Both were born and raised in Poland, both lost most of their families to the Holocaust, miraculously survived, moved to Israel and then settled in America to raise their families. Both women are in their eighties and survived their dearly beloved husbands. Their children live hundreds of miles away, and though they speak with them often, they can’t help feeling mostly cut off from their families and histories. Happiness sometimes creeps into the loneliness of the everyday, but the latter is their most prevalent emotional state. “It was a different life,” my grandmother’s friend, Masha, confided over our shakily poured cups of tea. “You can’t understand. You’ll never be able to.”

What I do understand is that my grandmother, Edja, and her friends feel that their lives now are so drastically different than the ones they led in the not-so-distant past that they are emotionally irreconcilable. And the most resonant aspect of that reality, on a daily basis, is the loneliness of losing the lives they had with their parents, families, partners and children. As a 21-year-old college student who comes to Florida once yearly, I am expected to run to the beach, tan by the pool and generally kick back my polished feet and relax. Instead, I come to Florida and wonder about the people who preceded the pension checks, and whether we, too, are destined for deep loneliness down the road.

Could it be true that much of what I see in these women’s lives can be attributed to historical specificity? In other words, might I be safeguarded against the unhappiness they met in their older age? Masha’s tastefully decorated condominium bears witness to her life as a younger wife and mother, and as she tearfully showed me her son’s yellowed but once glorious Bar Mitzvah photographs, I remarked on the apparent beauty and happiness of the well-heeled guests. She didn’t explicitly disagree with me, but her shaking voice just said, for the third time that afternoon, “Refugees. They’re all refugees.”

Despite being clearly emotionally rooted in their pre-war European lives, neither Edja nor Masha demanded that their children speak to them in the languages of their youth. And though that decision made strategic sense to them as new immigrants to the U.S., they now suffer its consequences. And so do their descendents. With their hearing worsening and general health starting to break down, my grandmother and her friends would have a vastly easier time communicating with the next generations of their families if only we could speak in their native tongues.

I’ve lost count of how many times my grandmother expresses herself in Polish or Yiddish expecting me to understand. When I don’t, though, and I usually don’t, she is visibly disappointed. And so am I. But my disappointment is laced with frustration towards her, and hers seems laced with indignance that I, her own granddaughter, cannot understand her. When I told her, last year, about the Yiddish class I was taking, she scoffed and asked what good it would do. I would be better off, she told me, if I were to take a class about medicine or law—or even business. But Yiddish? Feh, we spoke it in the ghettos.

I can see that the Holocaust and subsequent linguistic barriers between the past and the present play a significant role in these Floridians’ feeling alienated from even their very own youths. So that part of the equation will not hold up in my (God willing) old age. But it will likely play a role in the lives of many of my peers who are themselves immigrants to the States. Unfortunately, though, my perhaps precocious observations about the key to happiness in old age is not as clear-cut as encouraging your children to speak to you in your native tongue. Indeed, a large part of the loneliness that I witnessed in Florida was in the more traditional sense of the word: they lacked meaningful social interaction.

Truth be told, I’ve been convinced for some time now of the shortcomings of the idea of partnerhood as the pinnacle of interpersonal bliss. But now the flames have been newly stoked. Both Edja and Masha had extraordinarily healthy and happy relationships with their husbands of many years. Both women’s partners were, by far, their closest peers, to whom they dedicated nearly all of their social interaction time. They cared vastly more about their relationships with them than with their other friends. They ate dinner together, relaxed together, spoke intimately about their lives with each other. In short, their other friends were great for playing cards and trading horror stories from their pasts, but their schedules revolved around their husbands

So now, years after their husbands’ deaths, Edja, Masha and (judging from the shock that I would even ask) most of their friends eat alone every night. In their separate apartments down the hall and up the elevator shaft from each other and the Florida sands, these people with similar life stories and similar unhappiness spend their lives missing the company of the days of yore.

The part of me that wants assurance that I will not meet a similar fate rationalizes that the times are different. My friends and I are spending our twenties with each other as family. Though some of us have boyfriends and girlfriends, we spend a significant amount of our youth away from home learning to depend on each other. Maybe today’s generations of young people educated away from home and growing up in relative affluence will prime us for maintaining, or at least returning to, these bonds that we are forming now. Among others, one thing that my grandmother and many of her peers missed in their youth was the opportunity for independence and the meaningful non-familial, non-romantic relationships it can yield. And for now I’ll just hope that in the long run, we will use our relative independence to our—and our descendents’—advantage. And if not, well, we’ll always have the beach.

Ilana J. Sichel ’05 is a literature concentrator in Dudley House. Her column appears regularly.