for Sophie
My sister says that she was “magnetic”.
At our mother’s funeral twenty-two years ago, my sister’s two-year-old daughter, Sophie, cried and said, “My grandmother died, and I didn’t even know her.”
When I remember her, my throat tightens and my heart opens.
Alice Grün was born on March 20, 1928, according to the birth certificate we still have, issued by the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde, that is the Jewish Community in Vienna. She was her father’s third child and her mother’s first. Her father, a widower, had remarried. Alice was the youngest, the only girl, the only biological child of her mother, and she had two protective older brothers.
As a grown woman, Alice was beautiful, not in an expected or predictable way, but with a strong nose, light skin, auburn, later blond, hair, and blue green eyes that changed with the light. She carried herself with style and a little mystery.
Alice wasn’t tall, but she had a strong presence, engaging and direct, at other times reserved. Maybe she let her guard down with her friends; otherwise she only showed her vulnerability at home. She was aware, fashionable, more so than most women around her, more visually sophisticated, a bit more noticeable. She carried herself differently, perhaps like some of the women I have met in Vienna, and she dressed in an informal, careful, California style: slacks, simple dresses, very little make up. As a young mother, she had her eye on sales at I. Magnin, the fashionable Bay Area department store. In India she wore saris; in Singapore she had dresses made. In her later years, she went to small, interesting shops in Los Gatos or Santa Cruz. She was not afraid of color, occasionally pushing the edges of convention, and she tried to encourage her daughter to dress with a little more daring.
Although not always disciplined in her emotions—Alice certainly did not hold back at home—she was strict in her personal habits. She was up early on weekday mornings. Her house was orderly and clean. She took care of herself and her children.
During their first year in California, in the early 1950s, George and Alice rented a house on the east side of San Jose then moved west to Los Gatos, an older 19th century town at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains. They bought a new, three bedroom tract house on Azalea Way for $17,000, and lived there with their children for about twenty years. Yesterday, walking on Glenridge Avenue, in an older section of town, I remembered coming with them to look at a larger house for sale, overlooking the downtown, but they decided that paying for our college educations was more important.
Alice’s parents had owned a restaurant in Vienna, and Alice began cooking as a teenager in New Jersey, after school while her mother was at work. She was good at it, occasionally making a few dishes from her childhood, schnitzel, risibisi (rice and peas), red cabbage with apples. Her food was as she was, something from someplace else, mostly American.
Alice spent a lot of time talking to her friends, over coffee at home, and very frequently on the phone. She talked while sitting on her bed, her back against the headboard and her legs straight in front of her. These conversations were lengthy. Calls east to her father or her brothers were briefer and rarer. Cross-country telephone connections were more complex; distance was more significant.
Alice was attentive, considerate, courteous. There were visitors to the house, a varied circle over time: friends for coffee, dinners, parties, lots of conversation. Alice talked and listened; we could hear her laugh across the house. Our friends were welcomed, asked questions, invited to speak. The men were doctors, lawyers, professors, business owners, engineers, military officers (in India). Many of the women were educated but most no longer worked. There were exceptions. Helen Monday was a successful interior decorator; Miriam Resnick co-authored several books. In California, most friends lived nearby, in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Willow Glen; later my parents had friends in Santa Cruz, Soquel, Aptos. Alice was one of the few women working full time (beginning in her forties), cleaning teeth to educate her children. Yet her work never seemed to affect her confidence, her stature, her social sense, her manner, although it affected her outlook. She was nearly always the most glamorous woman in the room.
George and Alice processed people differently; my father liked everyone and enjoyed information exchange; Alice was discerning and more personally engaged. Living abroad, or when we were guests, she told us to watch and follow. Watching taught me when and where I could have elbows on the table, which cutlery to use, where to lean when served, when and how to talk to different types of people and to people I had never met, how to listen. Alice cared how people treated each other, about appearance, about aesthetics, but she did not care about formality. It was the intent, the discipline, the ability to adapt; she expected us to pay attention.
Guests were greeted, listened to, answered. Adults were not called by their first names until we were well into our twenties. As children, we were asked to join guests at dinner parties in the living room, for a few minutes before bed, to say hello, to answer questions. It was not acceptable to speak disrespectfully. At times, Alice was intense, angry, but at home and generally with her husband. I don’t remember angry or rude behavior outside the house.
My mother enjoyed attention; she knew how to draw people in, but her great social skill was her ability to come out of herself, to show her interest, to encourage people to talk, to really listen. She had extremely close friends, and these friendships with other women were very important.
I never saw her encourage a man or flirt. She danced with her husband occasionally in public, and they kissed sometimes, but it was affectionate and hardly suggestive. Neither of my parents spent time alone with friends of the opposite sex. That was their generation; they were not alone in this.
Alice was well liked, and she liked others. That didn’t stop her from being critical; she enjoyed analyzing human behavior. As an older child and teenager, I talked with her often. She had a way of looking at things that commanded my attention, and I identified with her point of view. It took me years to see its weaknesses. Without remembering them precisely these conversations were often while she was sitting in her phone-call position in the bedroom. We talked about people and circumstances, about why people were the way they were and how to handle them. What I learned from her was the enjoyment of understanding what makes people tick.
Occasionally someone found Alice to be “too much”, too inquiring, too many questions, perhaps too insistent, that is, occasionally, insecure. This was particularly true of my sister’s men.
Alice Grün was loved, but history did not give her a protected childhood. Her father, Max, was from Dembitz, a town east of Krakow in Austrian Galicia, a progressive rabbi and midwife’s son. Her mother, Klara (née Landau), came from further east, somewhere near Lviv, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. They were among the many Orthodox Jews that moved to Vienna from the eastern provinces. Neither of her parents was formally educated but they had the training and skills to start businesses and to earn. Max went to work early, moved to Vienna sometime before World War I, and purchased a small apartment building in his father’s name in the Ottakring district. He then served in the Austrian army during the war. Klara moved to Vienna with her family at the beginning of the war, trained as a wig maker (for orthodox women) and started a successful business in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s largely Jewish 2nd district.
After they married, Klara joined Max in the Ottakring, his two small boys, George and Jack, then baby Alice (1928), Klara’s parents and her sister, Dora. They started a small restaurant on the ground floor, then bought a second building and opened a larger one. My grandmother closed her wig business. Her very long blond hair was gathered up but uncovered. A younger sister married; Dora divorced. Max stopped wearing a yarmulke in the restaurant. The sisters lost their mother in 1934, then their father in 1938.
When the Nazis annexed Austria in early 1938, that life ended. As described by her brother, George, the Gestapo came to the house, while the three children and Dora hid on the floor under the table. The Nazis knocked and tested the lock, until a neighbor told them that no one was at home. Alice was shoved down a flight of stairs at school; a childhood friend was forbidden to see her.
Max was arrested. Klara dressed herself up, walked to the police station and talked her husband out of prison. Didn’t they want the Jews to leave?, she asked. They had visas pending she argued (since most of the family was already in the US). Affidavits and visas were eventually obtained, and in January 1939, the Grüns left in the middle of the night, by train to Bremen, and then on the Hamburg-Amerika line to New York. Their property was seized. Aunt Dora disappeared. Research by our Vienna lawyers in 2021 indicated that she was deported to Minsk in November 1941.
The rest of Alice’s life is an American story. She assimilated, discarded her Austrian clothes and the German language, and spoke English with an American accent. As an eighth-grade graduate she was given the DAR award. Her brothers joined the American army and the invasion of Europe.
Alice, a young immigrant
with her parents in Austria or the Catskills, late 1930’s, early 1940s
According to her high school yearbook, Alice wanted to study psychology. She was admitted to Rutgers University in New Jersey, but her parents did not support a four-year college education. They were practical and wanted her to be independent, and for them that was learning a skill to make a living. Alice enrolled in a two year dental hygiene program at Columbia University in Manhattan. Much later, in her 50’s, after we had finished college, she went back to school and finished her own liberal arts degree at the University of San Francisco.
Alice did not hide her refugee status, but she didn’t discuss it much. It was in the background, a sometimes badge of honor, witness to centuries of victimhood, a trauma that was not readily visible, something in the past, not in our present. She was an articulate and capable mother, clear in what she expected, adaptable, able to handle nearly everything. She knew how to fit-in without being inconspicuous. She conveyed pride, confidence, control. She could be reserved, but often she was friendly and outgoing, warm to those she liked or trusted.
Alice was not always composed at home. On a rainy evening, when we were very young, and George was over an hour late, she was “sure” he’d had an accident or was dead. She was hysterical when he showed up, enraged. Years later, when her daughter was in graduate school, and couldn’t be reached at a late hour, she insisted that George call the New Haven police. (My sister had a boyfriend.) When I told her that I was gay, she was afraid that something terrible would happen, although, to her credit, she worked that out with her therapist. In those years, I did not relate any of this to her history. To her, terrible things could happen, to us they never did.
Alice met George through Max’s sister Ida, who was a close friend of George’s mother. Ida had saved her niece for George and invited her to Queens to meet him after the war. George could not refuse Ida, and he was smitten with Alice, even after a visit the next morning, and seeing her as he said “in the cold grey light of dawn”. He proposed a week later—Alice agreed, though not immediately.
George’s parents were poor; his father was an immigrant from Odessa and a drinker. Alice’s parents were not sure, but Ida vouched for him. She saw something in this one; there were three other brothers she might have chosen. George was a Cooper Union graduate, an engineer, perhaps already working on a graduate degree at Columbia. Several in his family were educated, ambitious, successful, with some idea of their place in the world and their obligations to it. My father carried these values forward, bringing Alice with him.
George and Alice were married in 1948. The photo album shows a large, traditional wedding, with a white dress and bridesmaids, the American kind, but Alice was not the kind of woman who talked about weddings. She was interested in femininity, but her focus was not on baby showers or pregnancies. She wasn’t satisfied with the constraints of traditional marriage. She wanted to create something else for herself and for her daughter, and that is what she did.
There was a housing shortage after the war, and Max and Klara bought a four-unit building in Belleville, New Jersey to house the newly married couple. They offered to give the building to my parents, but George declined, preferring to support his family himself. When her mother died in the late 1950s, Alice received a significant inheritance, but her father asked her to return it, to start a new business. The men managed these things in the earlier years, but over time, George and Alice managed their work and their money together, and they were good at it. In the 1960s, there were arguments at the dinner table about why George hadn’t finished his Phd. Maybe it was the increased salary, or the status, or simply his professional success, but in later years Alice focused more on what she was doing, and on the money she was making.
Newly married Alice, the daughter of affluent parents, went into New York and spent two weeks’ salary on a suit at B. Altman’s; George poured a bucket of water on the floor to scrub the floor army-style. These were (among) their first disagreements. For years, Alice wore the pink and grey tweed suit for air-travel. Dad did the painting or the outside work (until he could afford to pay someone else); mopping floors was no longer his responsibility.
The couple wanted children, and Alice had three or four miscarriages. George reached out to his aunt, Adele, a physician in Manhattan, who referred them to a doctor on West End Avenue, not far from where I live now. Pregnant again with me in 1953, Alice was told to rest in bed for three months. (Her daughter came much more easily.)
My mother loved me intensely, no less. By that I do not mean that she was easy on me; she wasn’t. It is more that she wanted me, felt for me, was concerned for me, saw and appreciated me, believed in me, fundamentally, as I was. My father believed in what his children could accomplish and did what he could to prepare us. My mother understood. By chance or design we were somewhat similar, so she sensed my feelings. This had consequences. It was hard to differentiate from her, but it was reinforcing.
George and Alice moved to northern California in 1954, where George took a teaching position at San Jose State, and their lives changed completely. They created a new existence, independent of their families and their histories, relying instead on each other. They focused on their children, eventually on their friends, their desires and their values. Their first home, a tract house on the east side of San Jose, was likely chosen because it was near campus. There are photos at this house of Terry, their daughter, who was born in San Jose, of us, two children, with Alice’s parents and with George’s mother.
In San Jose, they had pork chops, a freedom they didn’t have near Alice’s family and her rabbi grandfather. For some years, Alice baked them in a white and green ceramic casserole, thoroughly, and with rice that had absorbed the flavorful juices. The chops were always white and dry as cardboard; pork had to be well done. My father didn’t like seafood, so shrimp was a treat when he wasn’t at home. Generally, Alice and George loved good food and encouraged their children to try everything. When we were out, and their food was good, they encouraged us to try it, but I reacted by wanting to protect my plate.
In 1955, my parents bought a new house in a subdivision in Los Gatos. It was a typical ranch house, on one floor, with three bedrooms and an open plan around a fireplace core, vaguely influenced by Japanese design, with huge windows to the back yard and garden. Los Gatos was a nice older town, with good schools and a beautiful location at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Alice and George in the Sierras, an American couple
Now, Alice and George were no longer immigrants or the children of immigrants. They had simply stepped into the American professional class, like other young couples around them. California, the suburban Bay Area where they lived, was an ahistorical place. Nearly everyone had moved there from someplace else. Their pasts were not secrets, but they did not matter. George was a serious reader of European history, but Europe and the War were far away. Alice did not identify with Austria or with Europe, quite the opposite; she rejected those identities. She did not speak German and banned books about the concentration camps from the house. Judaism was what she kept; it was her history; it underlay her outlook, her value system, and her view of family, although she did not study it until years later. She fused it into her American and California identities, and into her liberalism, and she assimilated.
Alice on Azalea Way in Los Gatos
Alice was always busy, up early, cleaning, running errands, cooking, taking classes, lots of exercise classes. She dieted frequently and made healthy meals; she was discerning. She knew what was good and what wasn’t, and she was very clear about it. There was nearly always meat or fish and always a salad, dressed and tossed in a large, oiled, wooden bowl. She often added chopped green onion and made the dressing herself, a blend of oil and vinegar, salt, pepper, and herbs. There were no bottled dressings; there were no processed foods. Some desserts were too sweet, she said.
My parents liked to eat outdoors, so when the weather was good, we often sat on the back patio. George had built a large wooden trellis. He never added a roof, but Alice planted a wisteria that eventually covered it entirely and with long purple flowers in the spring.
My parents ate out frequently, often driven by Alice’s sense of adventure or work schedule. When we were very young, this was limited and too expensive, but in Singapore in the late 1960s, it was at least weekly, on the cook’s night off. We were at Chinese banquets, food stalls in the car park on Orchard Road, a fancy Russian restaurant for George’s favorite, “shashlick”. In later years, when Alice worked, we ate out during visits home, at any of a number of local restaurants in Los Gatos. There was a very good dessert soufflé, at a French restaurant on Santa Cruz Avenue, the kind of pleasure my father encouraged. When Alice and George moved to La Selva Beach, south of the city of Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s, the habit continued: lunches in Monterey or downtown Santa Cruz, coffee in Aptos. I loved one place in particular, India Joze, modernist, facing a garden, wonderful, now closed.
In the early years in Los Gatos, Alice joined the League of Women Voters, where she made close friends, some of whom we knew years later. But we were her focus. She spent endless hours talking with us, driving us to school, to the library, to her friends, to her mother-in-law’s nursing home, nursery school, music lessons, swim practice (for me), baton twirling or horseback riding (for my sister), religious school, Hebrew school, food and clothes shopping, my Bar Mitzvah. She made sure we did our homework, read my papers and told me where to clarify them. Yet by today’s standards, we had a fair amount of independence. I walked or biked to school and friends’ houses, and stayed occasionally for dinner (if I called). She never interfered with my friendships, even later when they merged with attractions, which she noticed.
with her children, perhaps at Fallen Leaf Lake, late 50s, early 60s
In the 1950s and early 60s, George and Alice were tennis players. They were early members of the Los Gatos Swim and Racquet Club, a utilitarian place with tennis courts where we spent summers by the pool. Alice gave up tennis before we were teenagers, but George was hooked well into his 80s. For Alice, diet, health and appearance were important. She exercised regularly and dressed carefully, mostly informally as I have written, but also in hats, gloves, nylons in the earlier years, lipstick, face creams, and some make up. There was a dressing table with a mirror in her bedroom. Almost the entire bedroom closet was reserved for her. George’s overflow was relegated to my room, or later—perhaps after she noticed my resistance—to a redone hallway closet.
Alice wanted and enjoyed a nice house, and Helen Monday, a close friend, was a talented interior decorator. Furniture, drapes, and carpets were selected and custom ordered. In the early years, everything was new; nothing came from the past. The house was modest, but the presentation pulled together. It was modern, what we now call mid-century. There were no western antiques, no family photos or inherited things; actually they were somewhere, but not displayed until later in her life. Alice enjoyed finding art and objects when we were in Asia. To prepare for a trip to Bali, she read about the artists, and we visited one or two studios where she chose portraits, one of a young man and the other of a young woman. These are now in my upstate library and living room.
Alice at Gail Maddux’s wedding, 1960s
Azalea Way, Los Gatos, 1960s
A party in George and Alice’s backyard, Los Gatos 1960s: from left, Bill Lorell, Evie Lorell, Lilian Nerenberg, Doris Maddux, Edie Mae Stutzman with “Stutz”
Eventually, Alice began to look backwards. After paying for our educations, in the 1970s, she and George bought an old craftsman house on Peralta Avenue, not far from the Glenridge house they had previously declined, a house that reminded her of her parents’ house in Caldwell, New Jersey. In the pantry, she displayed blue onion Czech dishes that her parents had brought from Europe. Photographs and family portraits were retrieved and framed.
At the far end of the kitchen, there was a breakfast table in a windowed bay overlooking the back garden and the pool. It was a square English table, probably bought with Helen, and it was usually covered with a batik cloth, placed at an angle exposing the table’s edges. We had breakfast there in the morning, young adult children visiting. Dad offered eggs, if we wanted them, sunny side up or scrambled. There was coffee, fruit, toast, often bagels, cheese. Sometimes, depending who was there, we’d talk, the two, three or four of us, for half an hour, for an hour or more, sometimes until eleven. Usually it was sunny; it was California; it was intimate, warm, secure, and in those years I did not realize that it wouldn’t last forever.
Our calm, somewhat typical, suburban childhood had ended in the early 1960s, not due to any misfortune but to my father’s choices. He accepted a teaching position in India, through the Agency for International Development (AID), the agency that is now being dissolved by the Trump administration.
As was often the case in the earlier years of their marriage, George came up with the big professionally-related changes. My mother controlled the house, social life, our upbringing.
Yet, as with the move to California, there must have been a sense of adventure. There was no indication that she objected to the India posting, nor to a later two-year position in Singapore. She put a lot of energy and work into them, packing, shipping, vaccinations, a house to empty and rent out, new households to set up. In Asia, there were new schools, uniforms, friends, entertaining . . . entirely new places.
In India, at eight years old, I was enrolled at the Woodstock School, an American missionary boarding school in the Himalaya mountains. My father chose it after reading that the colonial elite had sent their sons away to school. Surprisingly my mother did not object, although she deftly managed my transfer to a local Catholic school after five or six months.
Alice adapted to household servants and guests, made friends, and entertained frequently. In India people stopped by in the early evening, unannounced, for appetizers and drinks; she had to be ready, and we sometimes ate alone while my parents were with friends on the front veranda.
In Singapore social life was more predictable, although our Indian cook, James, complained one evening when asked to delay serving dinner for late-arriving guests. Alice was used to controlling her house and kitchen, but she adjusted to her 60-something year old cook, staying mostly out of his way. He knew how to read, and she gave him recipes. The servants worked for her and for my father, she said. For us, they were adults.
“Your country is judged by your behavior”, she told us. Alice was talented, friendly, articulate, attractive, able to adapt without hiding. In India, she socialized with Indian couples and military officer’s wives, westernized and likely to speak English, in Singapore with Chinese friends, other American women, some Israelis. We travelled regionally, in India and in southeast Asia, later through Europe. Much of this was organized by my mother. In the 1960s the family of an American academic travelled fairly well. The hotels and restaurants were a bit better than those I frequent now. Alice was organized, composed. Only in Austria was she displeased. At a hotel in the Austrian Alps, the owner became friendlier after she saw George’s signature stamp, on a letter, and addressed her as Frau Professor. This did not flatter Alice.
with George and his students at their house in Adam Park, Singapore, 1967-1969
She was an immigrant and her husband the son of immigrants. Despite these outside influences in their childhoods, they were in the background of their adult lives. We were Americans at home or when traveling abroad, but with a talent for adapting. This was a playbook that we children learned well: how to blend in without hiding; how to attract some, but not too much, attention and respect. How to join in while retaining our separate identities. Where or how did Alice learn to do this? Perhaps her mother, or she might have said that this was necessary for a young newly-arrived Jewish woman adapting to American non-Jewish society.
Yet for many Jews, this is not the focus. In New York, we assimilate less; perhaps it isn’t necessary to a sense of belonging, but in places where Jews are a tiny minority, blending-in is common. This was Alice’s experience through most of her life, and it was mine until I moved to New York.
Alice (center), with her father, Max, his third wife, Hannah, George and me, (bar mitzvah), October 1967
Just once, a young American teacher in India, with training in linguistics, asked my mother if she was foreign-born. Otherwise it was not visible, and there were relatively few foreigners in my parents’ California life. There was Bill Lorell, an Austrian, my father’s friend, teaching colleague, and business partner. He taught with George at the City College of New York and again at San Jose State, and he lived not far away in a house in the mountains above Los Gatos.
Bill was handsome, sophisticated, Viennese, ¼ Jewish, enough to flee the Nazis. Alice was friendly but did not identify with him. Their common language was English; she was not an admirer; she did not like the way he went through women—four wives as I remember it. There was Ralph Parkman and his wife, Yetty, a refugee from Holland. Ralph was another colleague of Dad’s, a low key kind of guy, and they lived in our neighborhood. Alice liked the Parkmans but was not close to them.
Alice did not seek others who shared her experience, but her circle of close friends always included American-born Jewish women. In in the 50s and early 60s, she was very close to Rebecca Carter, the wife of another close colleague of my father’s. Alice loved Rebecca, she said, and we were close to her children. Other close friends were Miriam Resnick and Peggy Hall, educated, interesting, informed, open-minded, women whom we knew and loved. In later years, in Santa Cruz, there was Judith Berman, a younger woman, different from the others, but I cannot say how. Many of Alice’s friends were not Jewish, Doris Maddux, Helen Monday, and in earlier years Edie Mae Stutzman, who died fairly young. These friendships lasted for years, for most of her lifetime, all except Rebecca. These women were sophisticated, articulate, friendly, some very attractive. It took a lot of traveling and living in supposedly grander places to realize it; at the time, I had no basis for comparison.
Education and ethics were George and Alice’s stated priorities; we were expected to behave according to their standards and to study seriously, which we did. They wanted us to go to the best colleges possible, but George’s academic salary and consulting earnings were insufficient to pay for the educations they planned. So following perhaps several conversations in their bedroom, after we had returned from Singapore (1969), Alice went back to school and updated her credentials in dental hygiene. She then worked for a number of years, using her salary to pay tuitions and room and board at Princeton and Pomona College. I was then helped with living expenses for business school at Columbia; my sister may have gotten some help in graduate school at Michigan and Yale. My mother was proud of her contribution to what was also a family accomplishment.
Alice knew how to focus her energy, and she was flexible. She moved willingly from the role of young mother/housewife to running houses with servants, and then to cleaning teeth in Los Gatos. All and none of these roles defined her. What did affect her, early, was Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, which was published in the early 1960s. Alice saw herself in that book. She went back to work and changed. She valued her ability to earn and shifted the balance of power at home. She asked Dad to take on more household chores. Generally, he supported what she wanted, and the changes were significant, but they were limited. Things at home were still to her standards; once we were out of school, she quit and changed jobs as she wished, a freedom that George never allowed himself. Alice had a strong, reliable husband, and she knew it. In her 60’s, in her Bat Mitzvah speech, she called him her protector, but for some years she resented that she needed him.
Alice had some very interesting work, but she lacked her husband’s education and the years invested. She started late and did not have the skills or confidence to gain seniority or income at his level. At some point in her 60s, she was hired as a consultant. She wrote a report on the computer in the early days of word processing but lost the entire document. George encouraged her to reconstruct it, but she couldn’t. She simply said that she was unable to complete the assignment. This would have been impossible for my father or for her children. Alice was capable, but she wanted more for us than she felt able to achieve.
So she focused on my sister. While Alice’s relationship with Terry was occasionally combative, my sister’s independence was very important to her. In this, she was somewhat like her parents, but without the limitations they had placed. Her daughter earned a doctorate in economics at Yale and became a professor, eventually teaching at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Western Ontario. My mother said “You can have sex and not get married.” and “You can have a man and not need one.” These my sister did.
Alice’s daughter Terry, Los Gatos, 1970s
Alice was always attractive and social, but in later years her priorities shifted. She was somewhat less interested in assimilation, “fitting in”, beauty, social mobility. These had already been achieved. She became an activist, challenging the authority of the physicians she had previously admired. She was involved in the dental hygiene association, with an eye to increasing professional autonomy. She was appointed to a county health planning board whose mandate was to spread resources among hospitals and avoid expensive duplication. She got involved in health care policy through her job as the health care representative of the chair of the County Board of Supervisors. She and George became pro-gay activists on my behalf (or as an antidote to her fear). She had become more economically independent, as she evolved into the activist wife of her long-time activist husband. In her 50s and 60s, Alice was outspoken in her own right, a phenomenon.
Alice loved the beach, and in the mid 1980s she and George bought a new townhouse near La Selva Beach, south of Santa Cruz. They sold their last place near Los Gatos, and after a few years of driving back and forth over the Santa Cruz mountains, made the beach place their primary residence.
Alice retired from her county job and then made another significant shift. She embraced Judaism seriously and systematically, more than she had previously, focusing on her own religious education and spiritual life. She was active in the reform synagogue in Aptos; she encouraged the synagogue to sponsor gay commitment ceremonies; she ran the adult education program; she studied and, in her 60s, she became a Bat Mitzvah. There was a service and a luncheon; she invited her family and many of her old friends. It was a public event, with a speech, and she described herself as no longer afraid to be a Jew.
Alice loved Santa Cruz. She said that that her years there were the best in her life. She kept her old friends, made new ones, loved walking on the beach and the open-minded culture. When visiting our long talks continued, with her, with her and my father, but always somehow, I felt closer to her. We were rarely four. Terry and I had our own schedules and our own trips. We were together for major events, George’s 70th in San Jose, Alice’s Bat Mitzvah in Aptos, later Dad’s 80th in Palm Desert, and at the end, their funerals. Speeches were part of what was expected ; we knew how to write and how to give them.
Alice at La Selva Beach, Santa Cruz County, California, late 1980s or early 90s
Alice with her brothers, George (l) and Jack (r) Greene
When I was in Santa Cruz, I joined my parents at the synagogue. We walked on the beach, went out to lunch or to dinner, and they cooked. We drove downtown and occasionally to Monterey. My visits were brief; Alice and George could be a bit much for me. I’d break up my trips, drive up to the city for a few days to see friends, then back again before returning to New York. The visits were warm and close, filled with conversation and fairly frequent, perhaps twice a year. George and Alice also visited: my sister in London, Ontario, with her difficult first husband, later with Kim, the wonderful second one. In New York, they sometimes stayed with me, but my apartment is small, and they usually rented somewhere when they came together. Alice and George had family and old friends in New York and New Jersey, so visits with me merged into visits with them.
Alice had setbacks in her 50s and 60s, but she found trusted women therapists to help her. She told me this, presumably she told both of us as was my parents’ practice, but I was not yet mature enough to ask questions. At some point, she said that she had been taking medication, that things had improved, and that she was taking herself off of the pills. Now in her late 60s, Alice was in physical pain, from fibromyalgia, which was hard to treat. She slipped and started to get worse without getting better. Something more was happening, and it was not just physical, but I was in my forties, living in New York, dealing with my own issues.
Mom loved the rabbi in Aptos; he was inspiring, and George was on the synagogue board, but there was disagreement about the low salaries of the synagogue staff. Some members are bragging about their expensive cars and their trips to Europe, my father said. The rabbi would not speak up, a disappointment and contrary to my parents’ values. For Alice it contributed to her internal crisis, and she quit her part-time job at the synagogue.
For a time the fibromyalgia was under control. Alice found a doctor in San Francisco who was helpful, but his methods were novel and his practice was shut down by a California state medical board. Alice felt crushed, abandoned, consumed by pain, anxious, depressed, desperate. Her doctor had advised a move away from the humid coastal climate, from the place that she loved, and she insisted.
She and George looked inland at Scott’s Valley in the Santa Cruz mountains, further south towards Monterey but none of this worked. Los Gatos was now expensive and no longer interesting. So they moved much further south, to Palm Desert, in the late 1990s.
George adapted well, but moving did not help Alice. She weakened further, her strengths receded. “I am just an old woman here” she said. “Nobody knows me or what I did.” She withdrew, stayed indoors, stopped caring for herself—the opposite of whom she had been—and avoided even her closest friends. She told a doctor that she was feeling suicidal, a doctor who didn’t know her, and she was committed for a few days to a psychiatric institution. I was in Los Angeles, and my father asked me to come immediately. I came to the psychiatric ward, touched her feet, and the pain disappeared, but it came back the next day. With the help of a college friend, George organized a stay at the Mayo Clinic pain center, in Minnesota, but that did not help.
Alice had fantasized about marrying her children at the old house in Los Gatos; she had hoped that we would raise families nearby. Eventually, she realized that this was never going to happen. So she had let go of the fantasy, put the house on the market and negotiated its sale while George was recovering from heart surgery. She no longer wanted it and no longer expected the weddings, but she still wanted a grandchild.
There was no chance of my having one. Gay men couldn’t marry; gay marriages with children were not thinkable; we didn’t even want them. My sister’s men were not Jewish; but that wasn’t the issue. Alice would bring the child to visit; she would Judaize her; she would take her clothes shopping. Instead, my sister was a late bloomer, like me, busy with her studies and career, then divorced, so it looked like there might never be grandchildren. By the time Terry was with Kim and pregnant, Alice was sinking. She was leaving, so I knew for sure that the child would come.
Alice has a glamorous granddaughter, but when Sophie was born, it was too late for her to see the glamour or to know her. Sometimes, I feel that I am raising my mother, my sister has said. For some years, when I visited, I took Sophie clothes shopping.
From Minnesota, George flew Alice to Los Gatos, to sessions with a trusted therapist, Bee Olender, but after several weeks, Alice was too much even for B, a survivor of the Japanese internment camps in Indonesia. I joined them in Los Gatos, and we had a family session, a meeting where B encouraged Alice to step through her fear, but Alice said that she couldn’t. B met with me alone, to explain what was happening. This wasn’t unusual for children who had survived the war, she said. There are chemical changes in women as they age, she said; as older survivors, they no longer had the will or the resilience that carried them earlier.
At Peggy and Bob Hall’s house, where we were staying, there were intense conversations, the two and three of us, and then a break, a separation between my mother and me. I cannot remember exactly what was said, but I remember detaching, perhaps to protect myself, something I have never really accepted or forgotten. I had always been close to my mother, had always understood her thinking, but I didn’t want to go “there” with her, not to where she had gone. Facing the loss of the person who had loved me the most, I felt heartless. I wanted her to let go, to take the risk, even of falling into the void she feared, but Alice could not, and I couldn’t bring her back.
My father asked me to help him drive her back to Palm Desert. I declined. They stopped at my uncle’s in Los Gatos, on their way out of town, and Alice apologized to her sister-in-law, Frances, for the years she had not understood her depression and withdrawal. She asked my uncle to drop by and check on me, which he did.
From beginning to end, Alice’s illness lasted six or seven years. George took care of her, occasionally calling for support or help talking with her, but mostly, he handled everything. He wouldn’t put her in a nursing facility; he’d had many good years with her, he said.
Alice had withdrawn, from me, from everyone I think. We no longer had conversations; she asked only a few questions. Was I seeing anyone, she once asked, her constant worry. For months, she phoned us, starting in the morning, to hear our voices, and the calls followed us throughout the day. She wanted to hear her children, but she wouldn’t speak when we answered. Frustrated for both of us, I told my father that I would not talk to her at all if she didn’t stop. But she needs this he said, then he turned from the phone, “Alice . . . ” and told her what I had said; the calls stopped.
The Nazis are outside she told her brother; she rarely left the house. One night she came into the bedroom, wet from the swimming pool, and asked my father to kill her. Eventually George took her to a psychiatrist; she was medicated and calmed down. The pain subsided, and she lived behind a veil, standing to eat, lying in bed. (Yet she pushed herself to dress for George’s 80th and to briefly greet old friends.)
My mother died at 76, while Dad and I were in New Jersey at a party for her brother’s 50th wedding anniversary. The call came as we left. I was sure that she had timed it. At the funeral in Santa Cruz, she returned to me and said, “You and I have done everything we were meant to do together, and I have done what I was supposed to do for you. This is not about you and me. It is about your father, and I want you to support him.”
In leaving she was my mother again, reminding me of what I failed to realize, of what she expected, of what really mattered.
February 2025
This is incredibly moving and beautiful. You perfectly convey the essence of your mother’s complex character in such a compelling memoir. Reading it I felt immersed in the story of the life she chose, her charm, her elegance, her intellect and most of all her determination to stay true to herself in so many ways. Thank you for sharing this, Larry.