All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir

by Michael Blumenthal

Overview

Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.
 
As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily—and terrifyingly—similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943665266
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal is the author of six books of poetry, including Days We Would Rather Know and Against Romance. He has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Paris Review, the New Republic, and Time. The recipient of Pushcart Prizes as well as a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller/Bellagio, and other prestigious awards, he was the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard for ten years. He currently lives in Marseilles.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Beginnings

It is a gift if one is born happy. Those who are born unhappy are incurable.
-- Henry Miller

It hardly seems likely that I was born happy. For there are other mothers and fathers in this story as well.

My biological mother, Nelly Atlas, a rabbi's daughter from a small German town near Leipzig, met my father, Berthold Gern, on a moshav in Palestine by the name of Moledet near Afula, just west of the Sea of Galilee, several years after Berthold left Germany in 1934. Their first child, Daniel, died of infantile typhus when he was ten days old. All the evidence points to the fact that my mother Nelly -- having then given birth to my brother and sister -- wasn't all that wild about bringing a fourth child into the world, particularly under the circumstances into which I was born on March 8,1949.

My parents had come to the States for what was to be a two-week visit in the fall of 1947, just before the outbreak of the War of Independence, to celebrate my grandmother Johanna Gern's seventieth birthday at the home of my father's sister and brother-in-law, Betty and Julius Blumenthal, with whom my grandmother lived in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

The Blumenthals, like most German Jews who managed to get out in time, had left Nazi Germany at virtually the last feasible moment, for a simple reason: to avoid Hitler's gas chambers and crematoria. After several years as a busboy at New York's Hotel Governor Clinton, Julius had managed to work his way backinto the only profession he had known since entering the doors of Meyer und Vogel at age fourteen -- the fur business. Within Just a few years -- thanks to an unending supply of charm and flattery ("Gnädige Frau," he greeted every woman who entered his showroom, "in this coat, you will schtop the traffic.") -- he had been able to build a fairly successful business as a retail jobber on West 29th Street, allowing him, his wife, and his blind mother-in-law to move into their sunny, five-room, sixty-eight-dollar-a-month apartment along Fort Washington Avenue, at 801 West 181st Street.

So it was with a great deal of anticipation (and a certain amount of envy) that my biological parents set out from Tel Aviv with their four-year-old daughter, Judy, and two-year-old son, Amos, one afternoon in October 1947 for what they thought would be a brief reunion with their comparatively worldly and successful New York relatives.

But, as fate would have it, just after Berthold and Nelly Gern's arrival in New York and the celebration of my grandmother's seventieth birthday at Café Geiger on East Eighty-sixth Street, the Israeli war against the British intensified. And Julius Blumenthal, whose life's motto was, "Es ist nicht nötig dass man lebt, aber mir dass man seine Pflicht tut" (It isn't necessary to live, but to do your duty), decided he simply couldn't allow his wife's family to return to such an insecure, dangerous existence.

After turning the obituary pages of the German-Jewish weekly Aufbau one morning just after the Gerns' arrival, he noticed in the FOR SALE column an offering of a five-acre, ten-coop chicken farm in the small, heavily Jewish community of Vineland, New Jersey, Just three hours from New York. Leaving the house early the next morning for what he said was an appointment with a customer, he drove 120 miles south on the New Jersey Turnpike, plunked twelve thousand dollars in cash on the table of South Jersey Realty, and returned that night to proclaim his brother- and sister-in-law the proud new owners of a three-bedroom brick-and-shingle house, five acres of land, and a purchase-and-sale agreement for 7,500 two-week-old baby chicks, to be delivered a week from that Monday to their new home at 1066 East Sherman Avenue, Vineland, New Jersey.

"I don't know how we will ever make it up to you," Berthold Gern, on the verge of tears, told his brother-in-law.

"Ja," his wife, Nelly, concurred, "it is so generous. I don't know what we could ever give you in return."

"You would, I know, do the same for us," Julius Blumenthal assured his relatives. "After all, Es ist nicbt nötig dass man lebt, aber nur dass man seine Pflicht tut."

And so, with a quick flick of Julius Blumenthal's eager pen and an overnight trip to Montreal to apply for residence visas to the United States, my parents Nelly and Berthold, along with their children, Amos and Judy, packed themselves into Julius Blumenthal's burgundy-colored 1946 Chevy and headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. There, approximately a year later, amid several thousand other farm-fresh eggs incubating their way toward life or some family's breakfast table, I made my first, tentative motions toward the light and air of this world.

My adoptive father, Julius Ernst Blumenthal, had met my mother, Betty Gern, in the small German town of Georgensgmünd, just outside Nuremberg, in January 1936, when he stopped at the widow Johanna Gern's house at 16 Friedrichsgmündstrasse to pick up the key to the Jewish cemetery where his stepmother's son lay buried.

My father must, of course, have been depressed by Claire's departure, frightened by the ominous march of Julius Streicher and his SS troops through the streets, increasingly terrified about his own life and future. And his stepmother, the loveless, ever-withholding Janette Lissauer, must still have been deeply wounded as well by the death of her only son from her first marriage.

So that, on that morning when, ever dutifully, my father went to get the cemetery key, he must have been pondering his own death as well. He must -- his true love gone, his real...

All My Mothers and Fathers. Copyright © by Michael Blumenthal. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Beginnings 5

2 Golden Days 10

3 The Eight Days 27

4 Malheurs 36

5 Muses 60

6 Eggs 78

7 The Graduate 87

8 Hallowed Halls 110

9 Again Through New Eyes 120

10 Rebirths 126

11 She and I 145

12 Kafka's Fathers 155

Epilogue I Haifa, Israel, December 1996 185

Epilogue II Jackson Heights, Queens, March 1999 189

Postscript 193

Acknowledgments 199

Editorial Reviews

Michael Blumenthal's astonishing book has a Dickensian power quite unlike anything we're used to in modern American memoir. . . . Here is a book that turns the familiar immigrant story on its ear, and makes of that American tale a profound meditation on family and history."
Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education and The Florist’s Daughter


"The touching story of [Blumenthal's] search for his true identity."
Library Journal
 

From the Publisher

Imagine being told at the age of ten that your mother and father are not your biological parents. The couple that conceived you are the aunt and uncle chicken farmers you never much liked and who never much liked you. A mysterious swap, in which your aunt and uncle became your mother and father and your parents became your aunt and uncle, apparently took place when you were seven days old. Such is the fate of poet Michael Blumenthal, who recounts his peculiar heritage in this memoir about growing up in a family of German-Jewish immigrants in the Northeast. Blumenthal has a childhood that calls to mind Harry Potter. He suffers neglect and wicked treatment from surrogate parents, yet he possesses creative powers that will ensure his survival and future. The memoir has moments of poignancy as well as comedy, yet the story becomes increasingly frivolous and self-indulgent as Blumenthal discusses his marriages, his early sexual exploits and the fact that he once taught at Harvard. The mystery behind the poet's childhood is fascinating, but by the end, readers may be glad to be done with him.
—James Schiff

Poet and novelist Blumenthal's biological parents, New Jersey chicken farmers, gave him away at birth to his uncle and aunt, Holocaust survivors who raised him as their own son in Manhattan. He learned this when he was 10, the year his adoptive mother died. "The truth is," he writes in this memoir, "I have had two of everything two mothers, two fathers, two siblings, two versions of manhood, two homes. And all I want is to have one." After his adoptive mother's death, his adoptive father remarried an uncaring woman who "may have damaged forever my ability to love as I would choose my ability, even, to love myself the way an intact human being should." Blumenthal (Dusty Angel; When History Enters the House: Essays from Central Europe) is a deft storyteller, relating his desire for belonging, despite the trying environment, but his memoir is distorted by rage and self-pity. His stepmother, for example, is one of the "women who, cumulatively, never showed me a minute of anything that could conceivably pass for a mother's love." His adoptive father flirts with stereotype, a passive old Jewish man who mutters, "God loves you and so do I," endlessly. With the exception of a sharp account of the author's second wife, the book is cast with ciphers, while the author's own needs and grievances emerge almost too vividly, as when he writes, "Neither man nor animal nor saint nor God... can help me shoulder the burden of my parents." Agent, Lane Zachary. (Mar. 10) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Blumenthal, a poet and director of Harvard's creative writing program, has written the touching story of his search for his true identity. After he was born, his biological parents left him to be raised by his aunt and uncle; it was not until later that he discovered that his "parents" were in reality not his birth mother and father. After the woman who raised him died of cancer, his adopted father married again, and this unloving stepmother made his life extremely difficult. Although many of the events in Blumenthal's memoir are traumatic, his narrative is filled with humor. In the final sections, with the deaths of his two fathers and stepmother, the mood changes, and his thoughts on his heritage as well as his legacy to his own son are reflective and deeply moving. Adding to the book's pleasures are selections from Blumenthal's poems that relate to the events and moods of the narrative. Recommended for all public libraries. Morris Hounion, Ursula C. Schwerin Lib., NYC Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Claustrophobic, self-obsessed memoir by poet and novelist Blumenthal (Weinstock Among the Dying, 1993) that examines the scars inflicted by his unusual family circumstances and their continuing effects on his life. Until he was ten, Blumenthal believed he was the only son of German-born furrier Julius and his wife Betty, who had escaped the Nazis to settle in New York. Though embarrassed by his father's poor English and extrovert behavior, he had a happy childhood punctuated by holidays in the Catskills and visits to his uncle and aunt, Berthold and Nelly Gern, on their chicken farm in New Jersey. But when Betty died of breast cancer, Blumenthal learned that the Gerns were his real parents. Recently immigrated from Israel and too poor to rear another child, they had given him to Berthold's childless sister Betty. Then Julius remarried, and widow Alice Kahn proved to be the "archetype of the wicked stepmother . . . incapable of anything bordering on genuine human affection." Michael was tempted to flee to the Gerns, but his affection for his adoptive father prevailed. Moving back and forward over the years, Blumenthal briefly details his education, adolescent adventures with girls, career, two marriages, and the birth of a son he hopes to raise free of the traumas that shaped his childhood. He also recalls Julius's sexual envy of his success with women and vituperative attacks on his gentile wives, as well as Alice's miserliness: she makes off with most of his bar mitzvah presents, including a typewriter. The deaths of his father and stepmother further embitter him when their wills reveal additional betrayals. Blumenthal writes vividly and elegantly, but though his tribulations wereunquestionably troubling for him, he doesn't succeed in convincing the reader that they were as terrible as he clearly found them. He was always clothed, fed, and educated, so his plaint often sounds more like a narcissistic whine than a searing litany of horrors. Obviously heartfelt, but unaffecting.

Kirkus Reviews