My mother did not work outside the home and, in fact, rarely ventured forth beyond the apartment house and neighborhood, also keeping her girls close at hand. In the Bronx at that time almost all immediate needs for food, clothing, education, and meager recreation could be satisfied within a few blocks; so my world was narrowly circumscribed. Anne was fearful and overprotective; consequently -- and also because I was not athletic, to say the least! -– I never learned to swim, skate, or ride a bike and was a “steady-ender” at jump rope. None of us girls ever went to camp or had a lesson in anything outside of school.
My father was ill with a horrific and never diagnosed skin disease for a large chunk of my childhood. At times he couldn’t work, and money was scarce. However, I never felt particularly poor as we always had plenty of good food and a decent, if cramped, home (for several years before Lila was born my maternal grandparents lived with the four of us in a four-room apartment); also, most of our neighbors and classmates lived in similar circumstances.
World War II was raging during my early years, but I was not much touched by it. I always knew that the Allies would “win” in the same way that the nearby New York Yankees always won. I knew practically nothing about the Holocaust until the early fifties when newsreel films were widely shown. The Korean Conflict was more frightening as I was older and participated in “take cover” drills at school, in which we learned to protect ourselves from atomic bombs by crouching under our desks and covering our eyes and the backs of our necks with our hands.
I was a shy and somewhat lonely child with few friends. My sister Flora was more social, but, being four years older, she didn’t include me in her crowd. Lila was much younger than I, seven years. (We all became very close as we grew older.) I had lots of nearby girl cousins on my mother’s side, but we were more competitors than friends. It was at school that I found my place to shine, P.S. 35, just down the street. There I worked hard and basked in the praise of my teachers. (Years later a grade-school classmate who became the very well known children’s book author Johanna Hurwitz dedicated her book Teacher’s Pet to me. I guess Johanna was resentful, but we’re good friends now.) I usually was first in my class and class artist.
After World War II, family circumstances improved somewhat. My father bought a car in 1946 and we regularly took Sunday drives, the three girls mute in the back seat and our parents arguing in the front. Better, we began going away for the summer to a bungalow in “The Mountains,” Liberty, NY, in the Catskills. I loved it there. For several years, from age eight to about thirteen, I had an adventurous best friend, Sheila, and we had freedom to roam beyond the range of our mothers’ spheres. We particularly enjoyed “breaking in” to see the variety shows at hotel casinos.
My world expanded in seventh grade as I had to walk several blocks to Junior High School 22. There, for the first time, I was part of a clique of boys and girls in my class who frequently hosted “spin-the-bottle” parties in their homes (though not mine!) without much parental supervision. After graduation from ninth grade, I actually began traveling by subway to high school in upper Manhattan, Music and Art. I was an art major, but continued to focus more on academics. I had some good friends, but I was not really part of the in-crowd and I disliked the prevailing pretentious attitudes, which seemed more suited to a private academy than a public high school. I plodded along, acquiring top grades but otherwise little involved in school affairs and showing no school spirit. When I turned out to have the highest grades and would be class valedictorian, some school officials were clearly disappointed and made no bones about it; later the rules were changed to require a “service” component as well as grades.
My parents did not value education for its own sake and insisted that I prepare for teaching if I was going to college. Unfortunately, we had no advisors who might have pointed out burgeoning opportunities for college graduates. So I graduated in 1958, untrained for anything but elementary school teaching (and ill prepared for that), and not wanting to teach. I was utterly miserable as a new teacher in a difficult school in Harlem for a few months, then quit cold – probably my first spunky act.
I had acquired some office skills holding down odd jobs while in high school and college and after a few false starts I took a position as secretary and research assistant to an ecologist in a department called “Vegetation Studies” at the American Museum of Natural History. I loved this job, the collegial museum environment, and my young, handsome, married boss; but after the department was closed, I was at loose ends as I didn’t have the scientific credentials that might have kept me on at the museum.
Shortly before, when I was twenty-three, I had finally moved out of my parents’ home –- a scandalous act for an unmarried daughter of any age –- to a tiny apartment in Brooklyn Heights with a college friend, also named Marilyn, as roommate. Marilyn promptly got engaged, jeopardizing the roommate relationship. When I met my future husband, Sam Brownstein, who lived nearby, in the spring of 1961, I told him that I needed a boyfriend, an apartment, and a job. Sam took on the first, I moved to another Brooklyn Heights apartment with my friend Lorraine, and I found my first job in publishing, at Grolier, Inc.
Sam was from West Virginia and a businessman, outgoing and refreshing after the assortment of introspective pre-professional New Yorkers I’d dated. He rolled over two hangers-on and swept me off my feet. We were married on December 23, 1961. Lila was maid-of-honor; Flora was long married to Jack Warstadt and already the mother of Gary and Michelle.
I hung on at Grolier for twelve years, becoming senior editor for Social Studies at Encyclopedia Americana, while Sam was building a business in radio station advertising sales. We moved from Brooklyn Heights to Washington Heights, then to mid-town Manhattan where our two children were born, Jessica on October 10, 1966, and Peter on January 16, 1969.
We lived the good life in our first home in Westport, Fairfield County, for twenty-nine years, and we still live in the county, at its fringes, in Monroe, having moved in 1999. Sam and I continued to commute to our jobs in New York City for several years, then managed to find employment in Connecticut. From 1975 to 1993, I worked near home at Greenwood Press, publishers of academic books. I was senior humanities editor and acquisitions editor for reference books. As you can see, I didn’t do the moving around that might have advanced my career, partly because of inertia and also because I was involved in raising our children and some community affairs.
Sam sold his New York company in 1983 but was not happy with early retirement. The following year he bought a faltering radio station in Waterbury, CT; and by the time he’d managed to turn it around and sell it, in 1988, he was relieved enough to welcome retirement. I was getting jealous, but it was expedient that I wait till age fifty-five to retire, which I did in early 1993. We did some traveling abroad (which we’d also done during our working lives, with and without children), but we wanted to try actually living in another, wholly different environment. Now retired and with our parents gone and our children grown, we could make some major changes in our lives.
We chose Albuquerque, NM, where we’d visited previously for short periods, and bought a second home there in 1994. Albuquerque to us seems more exotic than some foreign cities, refreshingly Western with Hispanic and Native American influences, very unlike the effete East! We’ve been roughly dividing the year, generally spending October through March in New Mexico and April through September in Connecticut, enjoying a sometimes schizoid existence with some travel from both locales.
We have a wonderful circle of friends in each location, though, of course, our families and long-term friends are in the East. The pull to Connecticut is somewhat stronger, especially since the birth of the grandtwins. So, when we can no longer manage the dual life, we’ll probably end up in Connecticut where our children will be able to look after us. I hope that’ll be a long way off. I really love Albuquerque -- its climate, starkly beautiful landscape, its lifestyle. Art is so pervasive in New Mexico that for the first time since high school I’ve been painting in acrylics and fiddling around with ceramics. I don’t do much art in Connecticut, but I sew and read voraciously (both places) and occasionally have taken on some editing jobs. Mainly, I’m a lady of leisure, though where is all that free time?
A large and rewarding part of our lives comes from our thirty-year involvement in Humanistic Judaism. I was not always enthusiastic about organized Judaism. Growing up, I was part of a clearly Jewish family of the lox and corned beef variety. We children were Jewish by birth and osmosis, but we were not educated in Judaism or taken to services. Insofar as my parents observed, we were Orthodox. That is, my father went to a tiny local shul on High Holidays and to say Kaddish; my mother kept Kosher half-heartedly -– and with many digressions; her mother lit shabbot candles. We did not belong to any congregation, and my idea of celebrating the High Holidays was parading around on the Grand Concourse with my friends, dressed in our best clothes. We certainly didn’t celebrate Christmas, but Hannukah also passed unnoticed, except that my maternal grandfather would give us “gelt.” We didn’t have a Passover Seder until Flora brought her future husband, Jack Warstadt, into the family and he officiated.
At P.S. 35, I learned a little about scientific method and logical thinking and was very uncomfortable with the reading of psalms in the auditorium. Naturally skeptical, I early placed God in the same category as Santa Claus and declared myself an unbeliever. Sam’s theological views were similar to mine, but he felt strongly that our children should be educated in their Jewish heritage and wanted to join a temple, which I opposed. This could have been a major problem, but we were fortunate to find the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism in Fairfield County and its Sunday School. Here we could joyfully embrace Jewish traditions and values without the public prayer or insincere pious statements I so objected to, without compromising our belief in humanism -- in people taking full responsibility for their own actions. Sam and I, at different times, have been president of this congregation and also delegates to the national Society for Humanistic Judaism. We even started a tiny congregation in Albuquerque. Many of our close friends are members of this movement, sharing a worldview. If any of you would like to know more about Humanistic Judaism, I’d be glad to oblige.
I can be reached at samar12@juno.com. I’d love to hear from you, and I’m looking forward to a time when we’ll be able to resume meetings of the Freilicher Cousins Club!
Marilyn Freilicher Brownstein, 7/3/01