It was in that brief part of early childhood, before and during the time when I went to preschool, that I got to meet my grandfathers. Both were born in the 19th century, both of them fought in World War I and were too old to fight in War World II. Both died at a ripe old age in the 1970s, one of colon cancer, the other of cardiovascular complications. My grandmothers were also born in the 19th century, but both of them lived well into their late 90s, so I got a chance to know them a little better.
Generations walked with long strides in my family, across large stretches of history. The world of my grandparents youth had not yet seen the Russian Revolution, nor the World Wars. It was a world in which gentlemen officers in Austrian-Hungarian uniforms and white gloves sat in cafes thinking of wars still in terms of Napoleonic campaigns. The world my parents grew up in was a hell of carpet bombing, concentration camps and gas chambers, of resistance fighters and invading armies. My childhood took place at the height of the Cold War, in a nuclear age where people walked in space, and lasted up until the early days of the Perestroyka. How can one try to take a family picture when history rushes past at such a speed!
My mother's family had an interesting history. My grandmother belonged to a decayed noble family where generations of manic-depressive had squandered the patrimony, destroyed the "good name" of the family, and blew their heads off or jumped off moving trains, or committed other highly choreographic suicides. In the time of my grandmother their best possession was debts.
My grandmother was the most frigid person you could possibly imagine. She was afraid, even terrified, of any display of emotions. Who wouldn't, after growing up in that clan of people whose emotional lives had been a category five hurricane.
Unlike most women in the early years of the 20th century, my grandmother worked all through her life. She held a highly coveted state employment as a teacher, a very highly regarded job in those days. As part of an attempt to unify the languages of a country that had never been a country, teachers were sent to work in places often far away from their own town of origin. So it was that she, who oddly enough bore the first name of a Roman emperor, found herself the school teacher of a small village on a steep mountain range that looks down on blue Mediterranean waters. Fishermen folks, for the first time obliged by a distant authority to send their children to school.
That is where she met and married my grandfather, who, being a Jew and therefore the only villager who could read and write properly, had become the headmaster of the school. How could he possibly not fall in love with the newly arrived teacher from the city, with the aristocratic manners and the cold distant look?
My grandfather was himself familiar with stormy mood disorders and the fact that my grandmother, despite her fears of everything emotional and irrational, decided to marry him just confirms uncounted numbers of psychological theories I won't bother to recall here.
He came from a family of people who fancied themselves descendant from none other than the great Darius of the Greco-Persian Wars and who gave their children names such as Xerxes, Artaphernes, Anatolia, Lydia, Olympus, just to make it as clear as possible that they wanted nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Additionally, my grandfather and his father were Anarchists, who were not extraneous to thinking that blowing up a king of two would have done the country a lot of good. Instead, in the muddy trenches of World War I, it was my grandfather's skull that was blown up by a shrapnel, the missing piece of bone later replaced by a large metal plaque.
The dark side of my grandfather's personality fully emerged only after the end of World War II, when he returned from a Nazi concentration camp were prisoners due to be shipped off to the crematories of Birkenau were kept in wait for a repair of the railroad tracks, which fortunately never took place. He owed his life to those bombed out railroad running along the coastal line, but the post traumatic stress disorder that accompanied him ever since the months he spent in that camp clouded over in a fog of resentment and violence the rest of his days.
I don't know exactly the dynamics by which this happened, but my grandfather became very close friend in childhood with a bright kid with a special talent for science who went on some decades later to win the Nobel prize for Chemistry. This encounter had a lasting effect on my grandfather's imagination and a direct influence, some years down the line, on a special passion for science that my mother developed in her youth, but more on that later.
My father's side of the family album was quite interesting as well. His grandmother (my grand-grandmother) was a wealthy businesswoman in a time, the mid 19th century, where such a concept hardly existed. She had inherited a chain of hotels and restaurants in a big city, which she ran like clockwork making huge profit. She was prone to fits of acute depression alternating with grandiose schemes and visions. She married, because so society required, to a navy officer from whom she had two children, my grandmother and her older brother. Her married life alternated between the quiet times when her husband was out wading sea storms and the much stormier times when he was back at home. It didn't last long. He disappeared from her life one day, only to show up years later in New York. She went on with her life and business.
My grandmother was packed off to a boarding school in a nuns convent from the age of six, with the rationale that the life her mother conducted was not considered suitable for educating a well to do girl in the late 19th century. She remained with the nuns until the earliest time when it was acceptable to marry her off. So, while her mother lived a life of freedom above and beyond her time, she saw to it that her own daughter would be trapped safely back into the most conservative of bourgeois of societies. She was married off to a quiet engineer with a stable and conservative catholic background. She never worked, she spawned four children of which one died of pneumonia, and dedicated her most insignificant life to being a shadow. The surviving children, my father and his two sisters, went on to fulfill very different destinies.
My grandmother's brother, meanwhile, inherited all of my grand-grandmother's wealth and promptly squandered it in gambling, alcohol and women. Always too high or too low like his mother, but without her great sense of business, he lost himself in Casinos and bars. My grandmother, on the other hand, was never prone to manic highs, maybe because there was so little in her life to be high about, but she suffered from severe unipolar depressions culminating in repeated suicide attempts.
My father, much like my maternal grandmother, was terrified of any display of emotions and anything that he perceived as an irrational component of the human soul. His interactions with other human beings were on the verge of being autistic. The fact that my mother found herself attracted to him confirms a different sort of psychological theory that I am convinced of and that I want to put forward here: women tend to choose male partners who most resemble their own mother, never their father! Mind it, you'll see that I am right.
