Joyce’s story
According to my half-sister Joyce, Hilda
had done some duty as a spy for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, posing, with her Nordic looks as “Hilda Holland” and joining the German-American Bund of Milwaukee, where she helped to gather information to discredit the anti-Semitic propaganda about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish garbage. This specious screed had infected the country with a belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy in the late 1930s, though a definitive refutation was published by her father, Herman Bernstein. If neither she nor anyone else was able to do much to stem the time of ant-Jewish sentiment, which persisted and flourished even after World War II. she at least proved she could work effectively outside the home.” (pp. 131-2 of Prickly Roses, 2017)
The story as I learned it from my mother was different in several details, and the dig at the end of the paragraph is especially odd since Hilda had been working for years at Macy’s and for most of her marriage to Joyce’s father, Murray Gitlin, was the breadwinner in the family. What she proved was that she was capable of being much more than a sales clerk. But Joyce had a deep resentment of Hilda, only occasionally surpassed by her even deeper resentment of Murray; both had truly mistreated her as a child, not physically but emotionally, in ways that seem barely conceivable today. What’s surprising is that she remembered so much of it, though perhaps she embellished her traumas during many years of psychotherapy. But then I wasn’t there, so maybe her account was accurate enough, and certainly explained some of her later attitudes toward me.
What Hilda told me was that she had gone undercover for the FBI in Atlanta, posing as the cousin that her targets had never met, and intercepting reams of propaganda and evidence of collusion which she relayed to the authorities. I assumed that the family she spied on had eventually been convicted, or at least exposed and discredited. She seemed to have no fear of anyone coming after her after the war (except Senator Joe McCarthy). Still, thinking back on it, I wonder why we needed to leave the U.S., except that she thought fascism could triumph in America, and Jews might be targeted.
It’s hard to imagine the atmosphere of those times, either politically or within the family. Remember, this was before the publication of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946), which was Hilda’s bible when it came to my growing up. Some of the things that Hilda and Murray were said to have done to Joyce as a child — locking her in a closet, or out of their apartment, or leaving her with perfect strangers for several months at a time — may have seemed completely normal at the time. I experienced my own traumas, but they were nothing compared to hers.
But knowing what had happened, or at least how Joyce had experienced it, helped me understand better why she might choose to cut us out of her life when she did. I also realized that I had never asked her about her life, and she probably thought I was the arrogant, snotty little brother who had some kind of love-hate relationship with her in my mind, while the reality was that I was simply being (in her mind) condescending. Yet I had expected better of her — since she was so much better trained in psychology than I was, and ought to have understood the dynamics of dealing with a sister who was twenty years older and who disapproved of my upbringing.
Be that as it may, Joyce’s stories have given me glimpses into Hilda’s life and political leanings before I really got to know her. Hilda always said that she had not been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, and really identified as a socialist, but Joyce claimed that they had been openly communists during their time in Ravinia.
I will skip over her brief description of Hilda’s attempt to kill herself, apparently over another lover’s rejection after she divorced Murray, to focus on her account of my own birth.
“When she was 43 she met Joe Cloud, the handsome, debonair, hard-drinking, womanizing Metro editor of the Washington Post, and married him. At the age of 44, she had a son by him. The day she came home from the hospital she found him in their bed with another woman.
I’ve already told this story, and how it led to her divorcing my father, and my seeing him only a few times during my boyhood.
What brought a lof this back to me was Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra, about the period when Hitler’s Fascism almost triumphed in America. Clearly, it was not just about one individual, Senator Joseph McCarthy; but while the details are already getting fuzzy, there was an active German American Bund during the 1930s that sought among others to keep the US out of the European conflict leading up to the Second World War. Hilda told me that she had worked for the FBI during the lead-up to the war, and almost as soon as the war was over she feared that fascism would triumph in America, as one of the outcomes of the Cold War.
But of course, I understood little of this as a child, and my experience of Hilda as a person came much later and outside of the U.S. It’s almost as if she were a completely different person after we moved to Mexico. Or perhaps she has simply changed. She was not a sentimental person, but she was also not the heartless and indifferent month that Joyce describes, at least not to me. And of course, I relished my freedom. Unlike Joyce, I never felt that she had distanced herself from me; on the contrary, I was the one who held her at bay, assuming like most kids that she did not and could not understand me and so I justified failing to understand her as fully as I might have.