Preface Part 2: Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions

"If we’re talking about how to understand the Abigail who sets forth on her life journey in the opening pages of this book, I could be deemed naive. But about the hovering presence of unspeakable horror at the outside of this visual screen of the world that I was looking at, I couldn’t be unaware of that."

Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a dearabbiesilvousplait@gmail.com.We live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews.  To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.

Transcript

Jerry: Having said that true love is Plan A for most people, you then say something about cynicism, which may be the contrary of true love. After all it’s one route one can take in life, to give up on X, Y, and Z, whatever your original aspirations were. Whereas you say, “Cynicism was a rigid filter I declined to wear. It too was insincere, I thought. Cynics, I felt sure, expressed disappointment. To me it seemed more honest to honor one’s original hope and make a second or third attempt to realize it. Better to remember how the first got thwarted and try not to make the same mistakes again. That would be preferable to abandoning the aspiration.”

Suppose a person has lived through a series of one hopeless love after another. So what’s your advice? Well, this one didn’t work out, and then I thought another one would, and that one didn’t. And now you know, a third came along and I don’t know how that’s going to work out, but I think better to abandon this whole effort. People come to that as a kind of practical or maybe worldly-wise way of understanding life.

Abigail: It just comes to me that the people who inhabited and peopled my parents’ home were none of them cynics. And, by the same token, it comes to me that the rather celebrated and achieved public intellectuals that I would come across from time to time immediately failed to interest me, because one of the ways they sported their sophistication would tend to be, to express their views of life with an overlay, a patina of cynicism. They were worldly in what to me was an intensely boring way. 

Please! I don’t want to be bothered with your “worldliness.” It’s a patina! It’s varnish! It’s not you. You couldn’t be as interesting with your worldliness as you might have once been before you got to be that worldly. You know your youth has been varnished and that’s called worldliness—and it struck me as a human failure.

Jerry: They treat people like you, with your attitude, as naive. As if patting you on the head and saying you know, little girl, get real! The older cynic says that to the young romantic.

Abigail: Yes, and I thought. No, you have to unlearn what you think you learned because it spoiled you. You know, you’re like a tomato or an orange that’s been sitting out too long.

Jerry: It is a crucial feature of you and your personal situation as you explain that you were a Jewish girl, born and raised in Manhattan, now in Paris, away from home for the first time. You do say that the Holocaust was happening when you were very very young, and it made you aware of the moral seriousness of history. 

Abigail: If we’re talking about how to understand the Abigail who sets forth on her life journey in the opening pages of this book, I could be deemed naive. But about the hovering presence of unspeakable horror at the outside of this visual screen of the world that I was looking at, I couldn’t be unaware of that. My father had been in the rabbinate in his younger days. They brought ten families over, refugee families from Europe, while one still could. You had to find sponsors and I remember my mother repeating what she said to one or more of these sponsors who had to assure the State Department that the refugees would not become a public charge. The sponsors had to promise to support these people if they didn’t get work. Mother would say to some rich man, “I promise you, you will never see them. Don’t worry! Just sign on the dotted line. We’ll pick up the pieces if need be.” And these refugees were in our house. 

Jerry: Some gave you your early dentistry, I gather.

Abigail: Oh yes, if they couldn’t get an American license, they worked on me and it really hurt enough to scream. But you know, “That’s life!”

Jerry: That’s the price.

Abigail: I mean, they were very weird people, many of them. One of them was a communist. He used to leave leaflets in my mother’s lingerie drawer, you know, in the bedroom. I don’t know why he thought if she picks up the leaflets when she’s reaching for a piece of lingerie, that’s going to strike her as revelatory. It certainly didn’t, but I was aware that people were coming from murder, you know, a surround of murder. 

My mother captured … we lived on the edge of Yorkville, which was the German-American neighborhood … .

Jerry: In New York City.

Abigail: We lived in a walkup apartment building on 86th and Park. You know, in Manhattan, an apartment house is taken care of by the superintendent. Our superintendent, Mr. Z, would tell the tenants not to go down to the basement where storage was located. He would carry tenants’ suitcases or trunks down to the basement himself. My mother, who was not naive—she was the daughter of the chief rabbi of Odessa—paid attention to Mr. Z. Especially one time, when he was fixing the radiator and remarked, “It will be very good when Hitler gets here.” You know, an American-born person might dismiss that as ethnic pride or something. But my mother knew the difference between ethnic pride and a purposeful statement. So her ears went up.

Her next clue came in the form of two middle-aged men with German accents who rang the doorbell on a floor beneath ours. It was opened by an equally middle-aged woman with hair that was not gray, tied back in a severe bun. They said to her, smiling, “Guten morgen, großmutter.” Grandmother. And my mother thought, “She’s not old enough to be their grandmother.”

Immediately, my mother went downstairs to Park Avenue and 86th Street where their car was parked. In those days, there weren’t a lot of cars on the street. She read the license number, memorizing it as she went back up the stairs to our place, saying it again and again to herself while carrying my sister and me in one arm and another. She wrote it down, got on a bus, and went to the FBI headquarters in midtown. They listened. They paid attention, as she did. They made a raid on Mr. Z’s basement, where the tenants were not supposed to go, and found a shortwave radio and equipment by which he could reach … I don’t know, was it U-boats?

Jerry: There were U-boats off New York harbor, monitoring when the fleet was moving in and out, where they’re going.

Abigail: Exactly. They took Mr. Z off to what I think of as Volleyball Camp for the duration of the hostilities. I sometimes joke that maybe my mother saved New York. You know, maybe it’s not a joke. She saw him again in 1946 or ’47, after the war was over, and she said that he gave her “a very sour look.”

Jerry: She certainly spoiled the war for him.

Abigail: Exactly. Party’s over, Mr. Z. You don’t get to destroy New York or whatever he was planning. He was planning something. Why did they need a contact on 86th and Park?

Jerry: What was hiding in the basement that they didn’t want anybody to see?

Abigail: They also helped to bring over Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention.

Jerry: Oh, wow.

Abigail: My mother said that, like the painter Modigliani, he was “a Jew with one idea.”

Jerry: But it was a big one. It was a big idea.

Abigail: When Lemkin came to my high school to talk about genocide, I walked up to him after the talk and said, “I’m the daughter of Rachelle Rosenthal.” And he kissed me. So I, with the stamp of Lemkin’s kiss and the memory of Mr. Z’s excursions in the basement, I was not born yesterday regarding the seriousness of real life. I remember feeling in my childhood that my parents were naive to think we would win the war. I thought we might lose it. I don’t know why I thought that.

Jerry: Well, you were right. Any war can be either won or lost, and they were assuming—it’s an assumption that makes it easier to bear each day, to assume we’re going to come out on top, whoever the “we” is in one of these struggles—a war or some other struggle. And you, as this child without heavy preconceptions, thought, “Yikes, we could lose!”

Abigail: Yes, as Longfellow says, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.” Life was real and earnest. I wasn’t proceeding on my little trajectory to Paris, France, with the idea of, you know, “Maybe I’ll have a romance, maybe I’ll see the Eiffel Tower.” Rather, I felt, “This is closer to where conflicts that have changed history occur.”

All of us Fulbright grantees wanted to know “the real Paris.” We didn’t want to stay on the touristic surface. You know, you go to a place, you want to make contact with the essence of that place. You don’t want it to pass you by. And you don’t want to pass it by. This is your youth. This is something of the greatest consequence. Something that will mark the future. So I had all that. And it included, I’m sure, a sense that very much hangs on changes in history.

Jerry: And your mother really gave the demonstration of the fact that an individual can make a big, big difference. You don’t know in advance because history is too big and complicated, but anyone who reads history knows that occasionally someone just puts their finger in the dike at the right moment and saves the day. There are multiple examples of that. Or they do the opposite and drop the ball, and, ah, disaster comes. It’s the attack on Pearl Harbor. Messages either not getting through, some ignored you know—don’t call me again, that kind of thing—and then you have the Pearl Harbor disaster. The beginning of the World War II, the war in the Pacific. Incredible things can happen either way.

Abigail: Yes, exactly. So that my desire to live unencumbered by premature cynicism or premature know-it-all-ism, which is similar, was not a concomitant of youthful illusions. I had a sense that the steps you take in life are potentially of high consequence. And life itself is full of consequence.

Jerry: So in that way, you were not at all naive.

Abigail: No, not really.