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'Tales of Innocence and Experience': What Do You Tell
the Kids?
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times
April 27, 2003 Despite the aging of the population, grandparenthood remains an almost wholly unwritten phase of life. Science suggests that grandmothers conferred a distinct survival advantage on prehistoric children; and we know that, right now in America, tens of thousands of elderly women are raising their grandchildren without help from the intermediate generation. Yet grandparenthood is routinely trivialized as a kind of tipsy version of the real thing -- an occasion for cloying T-shirts and charge accounts at Toys ''R'' Us -- the point, in other words, where doting and dotage intersect. There's nothing cute about the British writer Eva Figes' account of grandparenthood, however. In a book with a title that echoes Blake, ''Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration,'' we find our first serious exploration of grandmotherhood, and it is not recommended for the faint of heart. Figes' first grandchild channels her back to her own childhood, the story of which is revealed bit by bit, with great restraint, although an undercurrent of sadness tips us off. When the granddaughter, who goes unnamed here, asks Figes what was the best Christmas present she ever got, Figes remembers a dollhouse, and how she had to leave it behind when her family hastily left Germany for England in 1939. When she reads fairy tales to the child, she recalls her girlhood fear of the forest and the beasts that dwell within it. And she remembers her own grandmother, who remained behind and whom she never saw again. In short, this is a story of the Holocaust, related with such a fine, poetic delicacy that no summary can do it justice. The Figes family, made up of wealthy, assimilated German Jews, lives in apparently perfect Gemutlichkeit until the day the father disappears, or perhaps the expulsion from Eden should be marked from the day he reappears, gaunt and broken, with shaven head. Naturally, the question arises: how much of this story do you tell a granddaughter who would, in Hitler's world, have qualified for admission to the camps? How to prepare a child for what Figes' childhood taught her, ''that everything can be taken away within seconds''? Eva Figes herself was told nothing. Kristallnacht: the windows were broken because they needed to be replaced. The sudden departure for England: a fresh start. And so on. She discovered the truth only at the age of 13, by watching a newsreel she had been sent to see, and when she got home, her mother -- who had seen the same newsreel and knew exactly what her daughter had just witnessed -- said nothing at all. Similarly, as Figes dips into the mythic, fairy-tale realm where a good part of this book takes place, Little Red Riding Hood's mother sends her off into the forest with an admonition about courtesy but not a word of warning about wolves. You do not have to be a Jew of the Holocaust generation, or even a grandparent for that matter, to agonize over what and when to tell the kids: ''When and how do we explain, try to explain, about the existence of pedophiles, child killers, Dachau, men who wear brown shirts and armbands and high shiny boots, in short, everything that might or might not go on beyond the garden gate?'' But this is not a how-to book, and Figes raises the question only to let it drift off. What grips her is the seemingly inevitable arc of our lives: from innocence to experience, from Little Red Riding Hood picking flowers in the forest to facing the devouring wolf. Whatever she was told or not told, the child Eva would have had to confront the reality of one of the few regimes in history to which the word ''evil'' unarguably applies. We go from innocence, meaning here trust and delight in the radiant goodness of the world, to experience, meaning knowledge, wariness and a chilling estrangement from the glories of this life. Do we, though? I want to embrace Figes as the first theorist of grandmotherhood and of ''the particular bond between the very old and the very young,'' but there is something a little too pat about the narrative line she imposes on each life. Part of the problem lies in her elliptical, poetic style, which dissolves individuality -- and perhaps aims to do so -- even as it charms. This granddaughter, for example: what is she like? Never do we hear how unusual or exceptional she is -- everything she says and does is conventional and age-appropriate -- although for most of us, uniqueness is the very hallmark of a grandchild. Another problem with operating on the high plane of myth is occasional collapses into platitude: ''We find renewal in a newborn infant,'' or ''Sooner or later we must all eat of the fruit, and its taste is bitter.'' The entire innocence-to-experience trajectory seems a little quaint. Childhood innocence is a fine old liberal, bourgeois, pre-Freudian notion; today we worry about the ''moral development'' of the child from id-driven selfishness to conscience and compassion. If innocence is ignorance of evil, then it's almost tautological to say that children lose it as they grow and learn. But the notion of innocence carries a heavy load in Figes' scheme of things; it includes belief in a benign God as well as the ability to find beauty in small things like ''the particularity of every leaf, each blade of grass with the dew still damp'' -- neither of which reliably ends even after the bitterest experience. In fact, in the existential tradition that also grew out of World War II, the true and heartbreaking majesty of the world is revealed only when innocence -- including hope and trust -- has been abandoned. By the end of this quivering, fresh-cut slice of autobiography, Figes
has answered her own question. She leaves it to the reader to connect the
dots, but clearly her greatest resentment, and possible source of lifelong
sadness, stems from her parents' failure to warn or, later, mourn with
her. Their overprotectiveness backfired, as when she blames her mother's
extreme fear of germs and view of the nursery as ''an isolation ward'' for
her later allergies and eczema, ''severe enough to make me an invalid for
years.'' We would like to save our children from microbial predations and
all knowledge of fascist violence, but it is the business of parents to
tell the truth -- in measured doses, of course. And it is the task of
grandparents to illustrate, with what remains of their lives, that it is
possible to know the worst, and suffer for it, and still live with joy and
purpose. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
