PASSOVER STORY

This is a true Passover story.

I was 5 months in the womb right before Passover and Easter in the spring of 1931. My mother, age 42, stopped having her periods and so she consulted a gynecologist. He asked if she could be pregnant, and she said no, she was married to an old man. My father was not that old, he was 60 and healthy and strong. The uterus was enlarged, so that if she was not pregnant, it had to be a tumor, and the tumor had to be removed. She was admitted for surgery, right before Passover.

My father, a religious man, formerly a Talmudic scholar, thought it would be a sin for his wife not to prepare for the traditional seder meal, so he prevailed on her to sign out of the hospital against medical advice and come home and cook. So that's what she did. When Passover was over. she got second opinion, and that was that she was pregnant. She did not want to be pregnant. She was 42, already raised a daughter by herself, working hard and long hours in the grocery store. Belle, my half sister, who was now 23, worked as a secretary in Manhattan and knew nothing of this.

As for my mother, why did she need another kid at this age, married to an old man? Why did she let the old man knock her up? Did she have to go through with it? Maybe there would be a miscarriage if she worked hard in the grocery store. Maybe the kid would be stillborn. She wore large dresses and nobody knew her belly was getting big. For some reason she sent her daughter away to the Catskills for a vacation at the time of the confinement. If is was a stillbirth, no one needed to know.

There were no preparations for a baby in the Bronx apartment across the street from the grocery store. When I was born my cradle or crib was a dresser drawer. I was healthy but my mother didn't want me, so she didn't feed me, hiding the crime, thinking I would die in a few days. She couldn't keep it up, she couldn't stand the crying which didn't stop, and her breasts were full, so she relieved herself, finally. I guess I sucked so hard I gave her a nipple infection and so I was relegated to the bottle, after which I thrived. Miraculously, I was passed over on Passover!

With my father 60, my mother 42, my half sister 23, I was like a little Moses in the family, the youngest of four generations! I spent the first four years of my life on a velvet cushion, no playmates, no rough games, which is why I never became athletic. After age 4 I got dumped unceremoniously onto the mean streets of Crotona Avenue, in Little Italy of the Bronx. I was not skilled at fighting and didn't have social skills, so I was teased and tormented on a regular basis, and was beat up by the other kids, who were taught to hate Jews and take out their hostility on me. There was plenty of hostility, given what was taught at Catechism at Mount Carmel in 1936, when I was five. Father Coughlin was in his heyday on the radio, spewing antiSemitic hatred.

I took my lumps, gave back some and decided to become a doctor. After the war the neighborhood kids were older and came to me with their medical and psychiatric problems. Johnny could not believe what he heard parents did, or must have done for him to have a sister. I said it was true. Parents did this thing to have babies. He didn't think they did it; it was too revolting to even think about, let alone talk about. I point out the obvious truth that he had a sister, so they must have done it at least twice. He almost couldn't stand it, so I reassured him that it was all right, it wasn't so bad, it was the Nature's way of doing things, how people reproduced. I was doing pro bono psychiatry as a teenager!

If his parents hadn't done it, where would he be? And if my parents hadn't done it in December of 1930, where would I be? Finally Johnny calmed down and thanked me, but that was not the beginning of my being a psychiatrist. I began my psychiatric thinking at a young age when my mother told me she hated her life and didn't want to live anymore. It was my job to keep her alive. I was only eight and I still needed her. My pop and me, we still needed her around, regardless.