Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (33 page)

I was among the readers who found that response surprising. When I was growing up in Kansas City, the few references to Freud that drifted my way gave me the impression that what he wrote was
schmutzig
, or dirty, and this is the first evidence I’ve come across that in those days I was thinking along the same lines as Jorge Luis Borges on any subject at all. Also, the fact that Borges would use a homey Yiddish word like
schmutzig
required me to make some adjustments on the image of him that I had been carrying in my mind. It was as if I’d been informed that distinguished literary personages who called on Henry James in his London drawing room were customarily greeted with a cheery “Hey, goombah!”

I should say that, now that I’m grown up, I no longer associate
Freud’s writings with smut. These days, my views on Freudianism are virtually identical to my views on Presbyterianism: Some people believe in it, I was brought up not to be disrespectful of other people’s beliefs, and, for all anybody knows, it could turn out to be right on the money.

I was therefore not someone who took particular satisfaction in the discovery, made some years ago, that Freud had fudged the data in order to come up with his seduction theory, which is central to Freudian thought. I’ll admit that I was interested in the controversy provoked by that discovery, in the way I’d be interested in what Presbyterians would have to say if it were discovered that their belief in predestination was the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding at the printer’s in 1536.

Either case would bring up what I think of as the Davis Conundrum—how to deal with information that may call into question a tenet that is central to a system of belief. The Davis Conundrum takes its name from a wine-tasting test that I’m told is sometimes given at the highly regarded department of oenology at the University of California at Davis. It turns out that, under blind-test circumstances, the tasters, some of them professional wine connoisseurs, are often unable to tell red wine from white wine. That triggers the Davis Conundrum: Does the failure to distinguish red from white undercut all the learned talk you hear about body and vintage and integrity and which side of the hill the grapes came from?

I assume that there have already been any number of seminars on the question of whether the seduction theory’s being based on incorrect data invalidates the Freudian theories that followed. The recent publication of the first volume of
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi
is likely to provoke even more seminars. In these letters to a trusted disciple, Freud, not surprisingly, has some critical words to say about his rival Carl Jung. You might expect him to write, “Jung, of course, is transferring to me his suppressed infantile homoerotic attraction for his Uncle Heinrich,” or words to that effect. Not at all. According to what I read in the
Times Book Review
, here is what Freud wrote to Ferenczi about Jung: “Jung is
meshuga
.”

Meshuga
, of course, means crazy in Yiddish, and I must say that I was delighted to hear that Sigmund Freud as well as Jorge Luis Borges employed that dazzlingly expressive language, which many German-speaking
Jewish bourgeois have scorned. This raises the possibility that Freud’s grandson—the renowned artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings of not altogether beautiful people were such a hit not long ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—may as a child have called the great doctor
zayde
. For some reason, contemplating that possibility makes me feel better about both of them.

On the other hand, could this actually be Sigmund Freud’s diagnosis of Carl Jung—“Jung is
meshuga
”? When the founder of psychoanalysis offered his opinions in a private letter rather than in a paper designed to be read by the profession at large, was this the way he talked? If that’s the case, his frank personal opinion of any of his most celebrated analysands might have been (translated from his vernacular to ours) “The man’s bonkers—off his squash, nutty as a fruitcake, a cuckoo bird.” If so, what’s all this talk about sublimation and Oedipus complexes and penis envy? As Borges might have put it, why did we need all that
schmutz
?

1994

And who is Jacob Schiff that he should be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky? My father’s family certainly came to Missouri
from eastern Europe around 1908 via the Port of Galveston, and, I’ll admit, that route struck me as rather odd every time we read in history class about how all the tired, poor, huddled masses swarmed into this country through Ellis Island. It never occurred to me, though, to explain it all by assuming that Jacob Schiff found my family not only tired and poor and huddled but also embarrassing. I always considered the Galveston passage to be one of those eccentricities of ancestral history that require no explanation—the kind of incident we hear about so often from people who have family trees concocted for themselves by wily English genealogists (“For some reason, the old boy showed up late for the Battle of Hastings and therefore survived to father the first Duke, and that’s why we’re here to tell the tale”). I have always been content—pleased, really—to say simply that my grandfather (Uncle Benny’s brother-in-law) happened to land in Galveston and thus made his way up the river (more or less) to St. Joseph, Missouri, leaving only sixty miles or so for my father to travel in order to complete what I had always assumed to be one of the few Kiev—Galveston—St. Jo—Kansas City immigration patterns in the Greater Kansas City area.

To be absolutely truthful, it occurred to me more than once that my grandfather and Uncle Benny might have caught the wrong boat. I have never heard my mother’s views on the subject, but I have always assumed that she would believe that the use by my father’s family of a port no one else seemed to be using had something to do with the stubbornness for which they retain a local renown in St. Jo. As I imagine my mother’s imagining it, my grandfather would have fallen into an argument with some other resident of Kiev (or
near
Kiev, as it was always described to me, leading me to believe as a child that they came from the suburbs) about where immigrants land in the United States. The other man said New York; my grandfather said Texas. When the time came to emigrate, my grandfather went fifteen hundred miles out of his way in order to avoid admitting that he was wrong. My grandfather died before I was born, but my Uncle Benny is still living in St. Jo; he has lived there for sixty or seventy years now, without, I hasten to say, a hint of scandal. Stubborn, okay. But I simply can’t understand how anyone could consider him embarrassing.

“Who is Jacob Schiff that he should be embarrassed by my Uncle
Benny Daynovsky?” I said to my wife when I read about the Galveston Project in
The Provincials
.

“You shouldn’t take it personally,” my wife said.

“I’m not taking it personally; I’m taking it for my Uncle Benny,” I said. “Unless you think that Jacob Schiff’s descendants are embarrassed by my moving to New York instead of staying in our assigned area.”

“I’m sure Jacob Schiff’s descendants don’t know anything about this,” my wife said.

“And who are they that they should be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky?” I said. “A bunch of stockbrokers.”

“I think the Schiffs are investment bankers,” my wife said.

“You can say what you want to about my Uncle Benny,” I said, “but he never made his living as a moneylender.”

I’m not quite sure how my Uncle Benny did make his living; I always thought of him as retired. As a child, I often saw him during Sunday trips to St. Jo—trips so monopolized by visits to my father’s relatives that I always assumed St. Jo was known for being populated almost entirely by Eastern European immigrants, although I have since learned that it had a collateral fame as the home of the Pony Express. Until a few years ago, Uncle Benny was known for the tomatoes he grew in his backyard and pickled, but I’m certain he never produced them commercially. A few years ago, when he was already in his eighties and definitely retired, Uncle Benny was in his backyard planting tomatoes when a woman lost control of her car a couple of blocks behind his house. The car went down a hill, through a stop sign, over a median strip, through a hedge, and into a backyard two houses down from Benny’s house. Then it took a sharp right turn, crossed the two backyards, and knocked down my Uncle Benny. It took Uncle Benny several weeks to recover from his physical injuries, and even then, I think, he continued to be troubled by the implications of that sharp right turn. One of his sons, my cousin Iz, brought Uncle Benny back from the hospital and said, “Pop, do me a favor: Next time you’re in the backyard planting tomatoes, keep an eye out for the traffic.”

“First that car makes a mysterious right turn, and now he’s being attacked by a gang of stockbrokers,” I said. “It hardly seems fair.”

•  •  •

“There’s something very interesting about the Schiffs listed in
Who’s Who
,” I said to my wife not long after our first conversation about the Galveston Project.

“I think you’d better find yourself a hobby,” she said.

“As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about taking up genealogy,” I said. “But listen to what’s very interesting about the Schiffs listed in
Who’s Who:
The Schiffs who sound as if they’re descendants of Jacob Schiff seem to be outnumbered by some Schiffs who were born in Lithuania and now manufacture shoes in Cleveland.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“Well, if Jacob Schiff thought people from Kiev were embarrassing, you can imagine how embarrassed he must have been by people from Lithuania.”

“What’s the matter with people from Lithuania?” she said.

“I’m not sure, but my mother’s mother was from Lithuania and my father always implied that it was nothing to be proud of,” I said. “He always said she had an odd accent in Yiddish. I’m sure he must have been right, because she had an odd accent in English. Anyway,
Who’s Who
has more Lithuanian Schiffs than German Schiffs, even if you count Dorothy Schiff.”

“Why shouldn’t you count Dorothy Schiff?” my wife said. “Isn’t she the publisher of the
New York Post
?”

“Yes, but why is it that she is publisher of the
New York Post
?”

“Well, I suppose for the same reason anybody is the publisher of any paper,” my wife said. “She had enough money to buy it.”

“Only partly true,” I said. “She is the publisher of the
New York Post
because several years ago, during one of the big newspaper strikes, she finked on the other publishers in the New York Publishers Association, settled with the union separately, and therefore saw to it that the
Post
survived, giving her something to be publisher of.”

“Since when did you become such a big defender of the New York Publishers Association?” my wife said.

“My Uncle Benny Daynovsky never finked on anybody,” I said.

“Maybe that passage in
The Provincials
was wrong,” my wife said when she came into the living room one evening and found me reading
intently. “Maybe Schiff gave the money to the Galveston Project just because he wanted to help people like your grandfather get settled.”

“I’m glad you brought that up, because I happen to be consulting another source,” I said, holding up the book I was reading so that she could see it was
Our Crowd
, which I had checked out of the library that day with the thought of finding some dirt on Jacob Schiff. “Here’s an interesting passage in this book about some of the German-Jewish charity on the Lower East Side: ‘Money was given largely but grudgingly, not out of the great religious principle of
tz’dakah
, or charity on its highest plane, given out of pure loving kindness, but out of a hard, bitter sense of resentment, and embarrassment and worry over what the neighbors would think.’ ”

“I don’t see what you hope to gain by finding out unpleasant things about Jacob Schiff,” she said.

“Historical perspective,” I said, continuing to flip back and forth between the Jacob Schiff entry in the index and the pages indicated. “Did you know, by the way, that Schiff had a heavy German accent? I suppose when it came time to deal with the threat of my Uncle Benny, he said something like, ‘Zend him to Galveston. Zum of dese foreigners iss embarrassink.’ ”

“I never heard you make fun of anybody’s accent before,” my wife said.

“They started it.”

“My Uncle Benny never associated with robber barons like E. H. Harriman,” I said to my wife a few days later. “When it comes to nineteenth-century rapacious capitalism, my family’s hands are clean.”

My wife didn’t say anything. I had begun thinking that it was important that she share my views of Jacob Schiff, but she was hard to convince. She didn’t seem shocked at all when I informed her, from my research in
Our Crowd
, that Schiff had a private Pullman car, something that anyone in my family would have considered ostentatious. When I told her that Schiff used to charge people who made telephone calls from his mansion—local calls; I wouldn’t argue about long distance—she said that rich people were bound to be sensitive about being taken advantage of. “One time, he was called upon to
give a toast to the Emperor of Japan, and he said, ‘First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen,’ ” I said.

“It’s always hard to know what to say to foreigners,” she said.

“What about the checks?” I said one evening.

“What checks?” she said.

“The checks Schiff had framed on the wall of his office,” I said.