Category Archives: Current Events

Parenting the Ritalin Generation: An Interview with Bronwen Hruska by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Bronwen Hruska gained national prominence last August as a mother and activist when she published an opinion piece in The New York Times called “Raising the Ritalin Generation.”

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The piece was a clarion call to parents to closely assess the accuracy of a child’s Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis. Hruska outlined her own son’s tumultuous journey when he was misdiagnosed with ADD at the age of 8. Two years later, Hruska and her son decided that the treatment was not only unnecessary, but had also been unwarranted. Hruska, the publisher of SoHo Press, recently published her first novel, “Accelerated,” through Pegasus Publishers. Part thriller and part social commentary, “Accelerated” is a brilliant, complex story about the consequences of over-diagnosing children with ADD and ADHD.
Q: There have been a number of articles, including your own, written about ADD and ADHD. Why do you think there’s an increase in interest?

A: With diagnoses of ADHD increasing 5.5 percent every year in this country, I believe we’re finally at a tipping point. As of 2010, 5.2 million children had been diagnosed with the neurological disorder. If that’s not an epidemic, I’m not sure what is. And I don’t believe that the increase in diagnoses has anything to do with a decreased attentiveness of children overall. There was an article in The Atlantic earlier this year that cited a study by a team of Penn State psychologists in The Journal of Attention Disorders that stated, “Children are no more or less inattentive and impulsive today than in 1983.” But schools and doctors routinely recommend medication for “Inattentive-type ADHD,” which means simply that in distracting situations, such as school, these children find it more difficult to focus. And with more and more children being medicated to help them succeed academically (as opposed to help manage the symptoms of the disorder), more children are at risk of suffering from the real and often scary side effects of the psychotropic medication that has been downplayed by the medical community as “safe.”

“Accelerated” examines the consequences of over-diagnosing children with ADD and ADHD. As medicating kids becomes more and more common, so does the general sentiment that if your child isn’t on medication, he or she is at a disadvantage. It’s the same mentality that created the phenomenon of “juicing” in athletics. We’re ratcheting up the level of competition in school with performanceenhancing drugs.

Accelerated

Q: “Accelerated” is told from a dad’s point of view. Would it have been a different book if the protagonist had been a single mother?

A: I wanted Sean Benning to feel very outside of the Manhattan private school community where his son Toby goes to school. Not only did Sean grow up in Troy, N.Y., but he’s also one of the only fathers in the estrogen-heavy circle of mothers that make up the vast majority of parents responsible for drop-off and pickup at The Bradley School. Without a community of parents to share information with, Sean feels even more at sea when the school strongly suggests that “a little bit of medication could turn everything around for Toby.”

Q: Third grade seems to be the time kids (especially boys like fictional Toby and your own son) are diagnosed with ADD. Why the zealousness? Is it warranted?

A: Schools tend to crank up the scrutiny in 3rd grade. As a parent, I was grateful that teachers were paying attention, making sure nothing fell through the cracks. But in their zealousness I worry that teachers are so determined to find something, anything, that they often err on the side of overkill. Don’t forget, 3rd grade is also the time when children are expected to sit still for longer periods of time, transition quietly between classes and cut the silliness. And the truth of the matter is that some children (especially boys) at 8, 9 and 10, who are perfectly within the developmental norm, still find this challenging.

It’s important to understand that Attention Deficit has become the go-to diagnosis. Sanford Newmark wrote in The Wall Street Journal this fall that many doctors making the diagnoses aren’t distinguishing between normal developmental immaturity and ADHD. These misdiagnoses could account for as many as 20 percent of the current ADHD diagnoses in the U.S., or about 900,000 children.

That said, for kids who do suffer from Attention Deficit, medication could truly turn things around for them. One adult, who was diagnosed late in life, told me that as soon as he took that first pill, the white noise in his head (a noise he’d never even noticed) turned off and he was finally able to complete projects he started, including reading books. It changed his whole life, and he wished he’d been diagnosed as a child. My worry is that kids who are simply not ready for the expectations of accelerated curricula are being diagnosed with a disorder. The flipside, of course, is that in poorly funded regions, children are being medicated so they can succeed within a broken school system with too few teachers.

Q: I read that boys are being treated like “defective girls” with regard to diagnosing ADD and ADHD. Do you think this has some validity or is it just an inflammatory statement?

A: Just look at the statistics. Boys are 2.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls. If 13.2 percent of all boys have been diagnosed with the disorder (as opposed to 5.6 percent of girls), I’d say that we need to determine what the barometer for “normal” is. In “The War Against Boys,” Christina Hoff Sommers looks at how the education system was overhauled in the wake of Carol Gilligan to accommodate the specific learning styles of girls and as a result has left boys in the dirt. I think that schools now do value traits that are more traditionally female, and leave little room for the very normal (and different) developmental style of boys.

Q: Medication doesn’t carry as much of a stigma as it used to. Are we changing the way children develop with so many ADD and ADHD diagnoses?

A: I want to be careful because, again, I believe that for kids who do suffer from ADD and ADHD, medication can actually help them to develop on a level playing field with kids who don’t suffer from it. But when so many kids are taking medication to enhance their academic performance, it really does send a powerful message to an entire generation. We’re teaching our kids that challenges should be met and problems solved by swallowing a pill.

Too often, due to extreme pressure from an accelerated society that demands everything be better, faster and more impressive, kids aren’t being allowed to do the hard work of growing up, getting organized and learning what’s expected of them. Also, if a young child is put on medication and it’s deemed to be “working,” parents are loathe to take them off of it, and as a result will never know whether their child has “outgrown” the attention issues. Instead, dosages continue to be raised as the child grows, and soon kids are selling their prescription medication as study drugs in college where Ritalin and Adderall and other focus drugs are as commonly used the way No Doze was used when I was in college.

Q: How does your novel help parents grappling with the decision to give their kids Ritalin or even to seek out help?

A: The reason I started the novel was to explore the impossible position in which so many parents find themselves – deciding whether or not to medicate. When my son’s 3rd-grade teacher suggested we get him evaluated, it was a no-brainer. Of course, I wanted to catch anything that might be an issue. Of course, I’d trust the school if they thought there was a problem, and I’d trust the doctor who did the evaluation. But there’s a moment when, as a parent, you’re torn between your gut and the experts. There is both too little information out there and too much (if you’re looking on the Internet). You don’t know who or what to trust, and parents aren’t talking about it. There’s this feeling of being alone at sea – you feel like your child is the only one going through this.

As I started researching the topic for my novel, I realized that there were approximately 10.5 million parents having to make this very same decision. I thought it was crazy that no one was talking about it, sharing information, anecdotes, research. Simply knowing how many kids were getting this diagnosis made me think about my son’s diagnoses differently.

I’m hoping that parents read “Accelerated” and continue the dialogue. Whether they like what it has to say or hate it, I want people to tell each other their stories. Just talk. It’s a powerful thing.

A Letter to Anna: Balancing Work & Life by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Dear Anna,

I watch you carry on with your dream of going to medical school and I’m already worried about the work-life balance issues you will inevitably face. Having a profession will present you with a unique set of challenges that men don’t encounter. We are socialized to be the family’s primary caregiver; men are ingrained to be the breadwinner. It’s changing, but it’s changing too slowly.

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Maybe I’ve come late to the party, but a book by local author Michelle Cove and an article by law professor Anne-Marie Slaughter have me reaching deeply into my own life. Let me start by saying that I want more for you. It’s not that I don’t have enough or I haven’t made a successful go of my writing career. But my earnings don’t reflect the hours and the keen effort that I put into my work. While that’s been a source of frustration for me, on the flipside I have control over my schedule. I can run an errand or stay home with a sick kid. But if I do that, you can be sure that I’m working after dinner to make up the time.

Slaughter was a high government official in the Obama administration who decided to return to her teaching position at Princeton after two years. Her son was in the midst of a rocky adolescence and Slaughter went home to spend more time with her family. She published an article last July in The Atlantic called Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. At first glance that title is very provocative. But that’s not why I resisted giving the article a close read. I was scared to hold myself up to this super woman who worked closely with Hillary Clinton and then returned to a tenured position at Princeton University. Until she went to Washington she was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Slaughter and I are not in the same league. But I read on and I found some comfort. “There are genuine super women,” Slaughter writes. “These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.”

Let me back up and mention that I read Slaughter’s article after I read Cove’s book, “I Love Mondays.” It’s a unique book for the way it crosses genres as both a handy reference guide and a practical self-help book for working mothers. Subjects range from how a mom should minimize her guilt if she misses a soccer game to moms, like me, who have home offices and must establish strict boundaries. In a recent interview, Cove agrees with Slaughter that having it all is “completely unachievable. It’s not a sustainable state. Power constantly shifts and we need to be much gentler on ourselves.”

Anna, I think the generation between us is dealing more realistically with the work-life balance than my peers or I have. Slaughter quotes a pair of 30 year-old women who realize the importance of linking together every aspect of their lives. I quote them through Slaughter because I want you to hear their bluntness.

If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of the mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.

This scenario begs a question you’ll have to grapple with someday—“finding the right sequence of family and career.” When do you marry? When do you have a baby? Slaughter and Cove agree that there is no definitive answer.

Cove has been thinking about these issues for a long time and her book was a natural successor to her documentary “Seeking Happily Ever After.” The film was a retort to media representations of 30-something women who were either career obsessed or so desperate to get married that they were driving men away. Cove notes, “As a journalist and a writer I was interested in why the headlines were proclaiming there were more single 30-something women than ever. I picked up a video camera and did street interviews.” The big take away for you, my dear Anna, is to know that women can define their own “happily ever afters.”

I have faith that your generation will finally tease apart the false morality and promises of “family values.” That by speaking up about implementing family-friendly policies in this country and acknowledging the importance of work-life balance, you and other women will close in on the “leadership gap” in the White House, the corridors of multinationals and yes, even the home.

As for me, I’m starting to understand my choices as part of “the new gender gap”—that is, measuring my success by my wellbeing rather than a paycheck. Maybe I’m not too late to take advice myself. In fact, I think I read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article and Michelle Cove’s new book just in the nick of time.

Love,

Mama

 

*Dreaming in Cuban by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Dear Mamá:

You came to the United States in 1958, a year before the revolution. Havana is an aerosoled city—Viva la Revolucion 54 is spray painted everywhere. It’s been fifty-four years since Castro came down from the Sierra Maestra Mountains and triumphantly marched into Havana on New Year’s Day. You once waved the Cuban flag for him. He was going to change Cuba for the better. Maybe he did for some people. But in the end your family fled along with 90% of the country’s middle class. You like to say that your mother packed a small bag and closed the door on forty years of her life at Calle Merced 20.

Calle Merced #20

Calle Merced #20

Calle Merced was a storied address in my childhood. It was Never Never Land, the place of your eternal youth. When I finally saw it a few weeks ago, the heavy wooden door you described was still there and I recognized the balcony from pictures you had shown me. You lived in Old Havana. But that too was consigned to fantasy. There were no marble steps that a maid had shined in your apartment. You lived simply on one floor, with a courtyard between the dining room and kitchen. Sometimes your mother brought home a live chicken and called the shochet – the kosher butcher – to slaughter it for the Sabbath meal. I imagine he did it right there in that open area between cooking and eating.

When I think of what is now our Havana, I envision the laundry on the balconies hanging like team pennants. But we are no longer divided into them and us. The people of Cuba hope and dream and cry with you for your country. How often did I hear you say in one long sigh – Hay Cuba como to estrano. I didn’t realize how much I missed Cuba too until I went there.

I saw the synagogue where you grew up. Women in the balcony, men gathered around a raised bima. I also went to the Patronato where you dreamed of being married before Castro took over the country. Your schoolmate Adela Dworin stayed in Cuba. She said that to be a revolutionary before the age of 40 is about passion. After 40 it seems like a foolhardy decision. Adela’s parents, who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s, stayed in Cuba because she was committed to the new socialism and they couldn’t bear another exile. Adela remembers you. Your old classmate is now the head of Cuba’s Jewish Community, much honored by Hadassah and others for her work with the country’s 1500 Jews.

There were only 11,000 Jews when you lived in Cuba, but you were a thriving community. Enough of you were committed to Judaism to fill five Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues. You had Hanukkah parties and Purim balls. That’s still happening, but the community is mostly growing through conversion and the number of functioning synagogues has dwindled to two. There’s an old joke that in the days when the revolution was in full bloom, a Cuban minyan consisted of nine people and a Torah.

A rabbi from Chile comes to Havana every six weeks to minister to the community. If someone is connected to a Jew, usually through marriage, they are encouraged to convert. This past Christmas over 70 people went into the warm ocean and immersed. When they came out they were Jews. There are over 140 children enrolled in the Albert Einstein Hebrew School. Some of those teachers are Jews by choice.

Havana is more beautiful than I had imagined. It’s in gorgeous ruins—an aging beauty queen who hasn’t lost her looks amid the rubble of benign neglect and abject poverty. The place is translucent with pastel colors and light. The outside of your house is a pretty light green. Green is your favorite color — the color of your eyes.

But the people are hungry. Rations are strict. The black market is darker than the Buena Noche, the Christmas Eve sky. People trade all kinds of things for an extra pound of meat or a cup of cooking oil.  Something as simple as a pair of jeans or sneakers that a relative in the States has brought gives a loved one a leg up in the barter system.

You should see the scene at the airport in Miami. Daily charters to Cuba all leave from the same place at Miami International and the check-in is transformed into a veritable marketplace. Cuban ex-pats going back for a visit have emptied Costco or Target or Best Buy, buying televisions, microwaves, bicycles, and air conditioners for their loved ones in Cuba. I saw my fair share of fishing reels too. That old chestnut of teaching a man to fish so he eats for life went through my mind like ticker tape.

God Bless America for all of her materialism and convenience.

“God Bless America,” that’s what my cab driver said in his fractured English as he drove me to the University of Havana. Aside from Calle Merced 20, that was the other place you wanted me to see. How you wish you could have studied at Alma Mater. Maybe you did or maybe you didn’t walk up its famous staircase.  You believed that you did, and that’s all that matters.

My cabbie leaned in close at a light and told me that from one Cuban to another, he was aburrido de esta vida. He prayed that his 30 year-old Russian Lada taxi would start each morning and that he’d catch enough fares to put food on the table for his kids. We both know that aburrido means so much more than just boredom. It’s a kind of lassitude mixed with the same Cuban melancholia I heard when you said how much you missed Cuba.

The driver had a mother-in-law in New Jersey who sent him money every once in a while. It helped more than I could imagine, he said. When I went to pay him he asked me if I had any medicine — aspirin, antacid, anything—that I could spare. He’d take it in lieu of a gratuity. I gave him a half-full bottle of Advil and a 30 percent tip. I had already donated all of the medicine I brought down to the pharmacy run by the Jewish community. The doctor who runs the operation has the same last name as your mother. “We’re all related,” she said jauntily.

Earlier in the day I had passed a state-run pharmacy where a woman beckoned me to come inside. I had an antibiotic prescription with me that I wasn’t going to use. Yes, she would take that, thank you, and did I also have pens to spare? I gave her what I had. She was about your age. Maybe you passed her on the street once upon a time.

“Tell your government we want to be friends again,” she said. “Tell your President Obama, embargo no.”

Aren’t you aburrida of the embargo too, Mamá?

Love,

Judy

*A version of this essay is forthcoming in the Jerusalem Report

 

 

On a Journey to Safety by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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I’ve been missing my girl a lot. More to the point, I’ve been missing the 11 year-old she was seven years ago. So I decided to do a bit of time-traveling last week and hang out with Girl Scout Troop 73037 based at the Ward Elementary School in Newton. My friend Joanne’s daughter is in the troop and Joanne sensed that as the days got shorter I needed some girl energy the way some people need sunshine. She invited me on one of the troop’s field trips; it involved food so I was keen to go.

The girls and their indomitable troop leader Karine are on a mission to observe how things work. One way they do that is to peek behind the scenes at various businesses. I accompanied the girls to Jonathan’s Bar & Grill in Newton, and was so in awe of the complicated choreography of getting a meal to a table, I didn’t check my cellphone once.

I had a new appreciation for the salad and seared ahi tuna that I ordered that afternoon. I think the girls looked at their food differently too. But what I was most taken with was the way these girls were literally on the verge of young adulthood. I could see the changes coming. In not so many years they would be entangled in crushes, maybe first love. They’d be grappling even more deeply with body image and sexual identity. As young women of the 21st century there would be times they would be at risk and other times they would feel empowered.

An hour after I left those sweet Girl Scouts I sat in Elizabeth Schön Vainer’s office at Jewish Family & Children’s Services. Schön Vainer is the director of the agency’s To Safety Program and it’s well worth reprinting Journey’s poignant mission statement.

Journey to Safety’s mission is to prevent domestic abuse in the Jewish community, while helping those who have been abused find a way to safety, regardless of their background or beliefs. We offer culturally competent, religiously sensitive services to survivors of domestic abuse, with specialized services for the Jewish and Russian-speaking communities. Information, support, referrals, and other resources are available for all domestic abuse survivors, including teens, seniors, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBT community. 

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I met Schön Vainer a couple of years ago when I was invited to learn more about the work of Journey to Safety. One of the distinct memories I have of that meeting was the eclectic group of women who came together. We were social workers, attorneys, nonprofit executives or just concerned women. Some of us were survivors of domestic abuse. The meeting happened in the wake of a tragedy—a relationship between two Wayland teens that had ended in murder. The young woman’s boyfriend had harassed her for months both physically and emotionally. And one night, after they had broken up, he stabbed her to death. Post- break up, particularly for teens, is a proven time of great risk for dating/domestic violence victims. The abuser wants ultimate control by keeping them in the relationship. Sadly, this young woman agreed to meet with her abusive ex-boyfriend in a remote place

That story exemplifies one of the critical reasons that Journey to Safety has recently piloted a peer-led program called TeenSafe. The program bears out research showing that over 80% of teens would sooner tell a peer than an adult about an abusive situation. That statistic has spurred Schön Vainer and her team to recruit a girls leadership group that has been trained to help other teens see their way out of dangerous, controlling or violent relationships.

Training teenagers to identify the inner workings of a healthy relationship is a natural outgrowth of Journey to Safety’s mandate. But the work to educate and prevent domestic violence begins even earlier. Journey to Safety has begun reaching out to girls and boys in middle school through a specialized curriculum. Schön Vainer explains that

For young teenagers we introduce the concept of relationships. What are they? What are the expectations in a relationship? We help them tease apart what makes them feel comfortable and uncomfortable in a relationship. The discussion inevitably leads to talk about establishing boundaries.

The curriculum is also unique for the way it brings together Jewish values and pop culture. A Katy Perry song in which the singer finds the strength to leave an abusive situation is offered alongside two powerful texts that frame a context for looking at relationships:

In the image of God, God created them; male and female [God] created them.

Whoever destroys soul, it is considered as if he or she destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if she or he saved an entire world.

“Abuse,” adds Schön Vainer, “is also about taking someone’s choices away. With younger teens that’s a nuanced conversation.” As she said this, I scribbled in my notebook that I hoped and prayed that the Girl Scouts of Troop 73037 and their peers would know when and how to save a life. And that they would always have choices and delight in those choices the same way they did on an early winter afternoon at Jonathan’s Bar & Grill.

After Newtown: Talking to Our Children by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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I’ve passed the sign for Newtown, Connecticut hundreds of times. Just sixty miles northeast of New York City, Newtown is one letter away from my hometown of Newton. That near coincidence always made me smile. And now I cry because it is just one letter away from Newton. That’s how close this tragedy has been for all of us.

The Columbine murders were incomprehensible. And so were the murders at Virginia Tech and in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. But Newtown was on a different scale of horror. A young man in black fatigues and armed to the teeth walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and slaughtered an entire first grade class.

When did mass murder become the norm in this country?

We shake our heads and try to bring the victims closer to our hearts by piecing together their life stories, staring at their snapshots in the paper. Maybe we’ve stood together in synagogue and said the Kaddish for these fallen sisters and brothers. But it’s no longer good enough to memorialize their deaths. We have to acknowledge the overarching issue of gun control, and we can begin to do that by understanding gun control as a parenting issue.

Taking up gun control within the purview of parenting also connects us to the emotional and mental health of our young people. Maybe it starts with addressing bullying. Yes, we’ve made great strides in making students and parents aware of the deadly consequences of bullying—the suicides, the homicidal rages. I can’t help but think that we haven’t done enough. We’ve tried to legislate against bullying, but a lot of people still shrug it off as human nature or a natural part of childhood.

There has also been a lot written about helicopter parents—parents who constantly monitor their children’s social lives, their grades or their extracurricular activities. We’ve all been there and done that to some degree. Our focus gets blurred. If we step off the high-achiever’s treadmill for a moment, we may realize that our kids really need a good, old-fashioned, swim-in-a-lake camp instead of eight weeks of intensive math in the summer. Down time is highly underrated.

In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, a visibly shaken President Obama fought back tears and declared that Americans were “broken-hearted.” He said that the country must “come together and take meaningful action.” Yet his press secretary put off the subject of gun control that same day at a press conference. All I could think of was the famous quote from Rabbi Hillel who sagely noted, “if not now, when?”

In the meantime, we have to somehow reassure our children that they are safe. After the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, the Child Study Center at New York University provided some good advice for parents and teachers. First and foremost open up the lines of communication. Don’t hesitate to talk about what happened in Newtown. If a child is able to read, chances are that he or she has also heard about the shootings. Between social media and television, it’s almost impossible to shield a child from the news.

Give a child context and perspective. This happened in one community, and although gun violence is out there, the chances are minimal that it will happen in her school too. Continue to reassure the child that he is safe and that you are doing everything you can to keep him safe. Make home a calm oasis. Of all the studies and advice that I read, NYU’s literature was unique in suggesting that parents encourage their children to look towards the future. Stick to goals and continue to make plans.

And there was almost unanimous agreement in all of the trauma literature that I saw to encourage children to give back. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that families find ways to help people. Make sympathy cards for the kids of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Find a child-centered charity and make a contribution. I liked a friend’s suggestion to call local restaurants in Newtown, give a credit card number, and donate a meal.

The Academy also suggested opening up a conversation by asking children how much they know about what happened in Newtown. Clarify a child’s question before answering. Is the child curious about issues surrounding the event such as how people obtain guns? Or is there something deeper, more personal going on like, “could this happen to me or someone I love?”

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Conversations can be more nuanced with older kids. My teenagers have heard me call out falsehoods put out by the gun lobby like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” or “more people are protected by guns than killed by them.” If that’s getting too political just look at the devastating image of the children walking single file out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School—eyes closed, hands on the shoulders of the child in front of them.

I’ll end with part of a prayer written by Rachel Barenblat, a rabbi and poet who writes a thoughtful blog called The Velveteen Rabbi.

Soothe the children who witnessed

things no child should see,

the teachers who tried to protect them

but couldn’t, the parents

who are torn apart with grief

who will never kiss their beloveds again.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: The Boomer and The Holocaust Survivor

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Boom goes my generation with all of the energy and chaos of an atomic blast. Born between 1945 and 1964, there are seventy-six million of us in the United States. Boom goes my generation as we take our places on a historical continuum of social and political revolutions. Boom goes my generation as we take care of aging parents and the children many of us had in our thirties and forties instead of our twenties.

I write this column in my mother’s room at the Hebrew Senior Life Rehabilitation Center. Her house has just been sold. At the moment, her world has shrunk down to one bed as in, “a bed’s come available.” She’s been poked and prodded and operated on while, boom, my siblings and I chase her benefits, balance her checkbook and watch her assets dwindle until Medicare kicks in.

I also write this column after reading Susan Kushner Resnick’s funny, poignant and storied memoir about her relationship with a loveable, difficult Holocaust survivor named Aron Lieb. Boom goes my generation and some of us will blow up before we can appreciate the multi-generational relationships that can so enrich us. Kushner’s memoir is a vital reminder of how important it is to reach across the generational divide, and simply put, love each other.

The title alone—You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving and Swearing in Yiddish— maps out Kushner Resnick’s book to some degree. The reader is cued into the fact that it is also a Yizkor book—A Book of Remembrance. Kushner Resnick tracked down the prototype of such a book about Zychlin—Aron’s shtetl in Poland. “This is not your first appearance in a book,” Kushner Resnick writes to her dear friend. “The other one, published when I was eleven years old [in 1974] is called The Memorial Book of Zychlin.” Boom. Most of that generation of Europe’s Jews disappeared in a pestilent cloud of Nazi genocide.

But You Saved Me, Too is a book of life as much as it is a Yizkor book. It begins with the fact that Lieb and Kushner Resnick both liked to talk to strangers. It tells the truth that their friendship rescued Kushner Resnick from a crushing post-partum depression. That was in 1997. Kushner Resnick has a baby that she leaves in babysitting at the JCC so that she can swim off her depression. She meets Aron Lieb on a lark at the same JCC. “[Aron was] my faux father, my son, my crush, and my cause.”

You Saved Me, Too is also a quixotic book. For anyone who has shepherded a parent through the murky health care system, Kushner Resnick’s advocacy for Lieb’s benefits and his dignity will resonate, deeply and painfully. Kushner Resnick is not shy about indicting the Jewish community and its leaders for Lieb’s benign neglect. In her tongue-in-cheek style, she takes on the honchos, the machors, who made empty promises to help a man who bore the ultimate tattoo of Auschwitz.

That tattoo, the number 141324, takes up residence in Kushner Resnick’s imagination. She notes the sloppiness of the letters—the tattooist must have been in a hurry to go down the long cue of people arriving at Auschwitz—the fact that, “for fifty years, every time you’d taken off your shirt at night or reached out to adjust your side-view mirror on a summer day, you saw those numbers, 141324, the brand the Nazis gave you when they thought you were theirs.”

Boom. Kushner Resnick becomes, in essence, a third-generation survivor or a 3G. She’s bent on keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, intent on telling stories that go beyond the blue Yizkor books from Polish shtetls. “Eventually all the tattooed arms will disappear” she writes. “Then the forgetting will truly commence. … How would the numbers look on my arm? I could get the same tattoo in the same place. 141324. Whenever people asked what it meant, I could tell them about you.”

Although Kushner Resnick, is speaking metaphorically, there are 3G grandchildren who have actually tattooed their grandparents’ numbers on their arms. It’s a radical act that has stirred up as much pride as it has consternation among their survivor relatives. Those numbers are also an address of unimaginable tragedy and entrenched optimism. For all of his heartache and kvetching, Lieb survives because he has dealt with unbearable horror as much as he has thrived in the small joys of life like meeting his friends for a daily cup of coffee at McDonald’s.

With no significant family willing to care for him, Kushner Resnick becomes Lieb’s healthcare proxy and has power of attorney over his affairs. She secures his reparations and learns that she has to open a separate account so that the money is not taxed and therefore not counted as an asset. Boom. She learns that the Boston Jewish community pays mostly lip service to the survivors among them and that it’s a problem also prevalent in Israel.

Halfway through the book she questions her involvement in Lieb’s life. “I can’t write anything conclusive until I figure out why we’re together,” she says. “Some writers say they find the answers by writing their way towards them. But I need to know the last line before I type the first word.” I think I know what she means. My mother sleeps as I type these last words about Aron Lieb and Susan Kushner Resnick, the woman who made his life a blessing for the world to read.

 

*My Grandmother’s Tallit – A Letter to Anna

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Dear Anna:

It’s been five years since your bat mitzvah. In your bat mitzvah state of mind you read trope cues as easily as ABC’s. You teased out meaning from your Torah portion, which recorded the life and death of Sarah. And your wore a tallit or a prayer shawl you picked out in Jerusalem. If you had done any of these things at the Western Wall in Jerusalem the Israeli police might have arrested you and me, the mother who allowed you to commit such a crime.

I must confess to you my dear daughter that I’ve never felt that any of the rituals your Dad and I gifted you with were truly mine. But in light of Anat Hoffman’s recent arrest last week for wearing her tallit at the Wall, your Bat Mitzvah was as much a political statement as it was a rite of passage.

When I look at your tallit—pink and silk and uniquely yours—I think of my grandmother whom I called Abuela. Abuela was born in Greece at the dawn of the 20th century and went to a school there funded by the Rothschilds. She learned the minimum Hebrew to recite the blessings over the Sabbath candles and did needlepoint to fill in the rest of her life.

Nobody wielded a needle and thread like my Abuela. With deft rhythm and mesmerizing patterns, she conveyed a life story of painstaking work and imposed silence. After she arrived in Cuba, Abuela sewed late into the night to make ends meet. She made my mother and my aunt frilly dresses between the sewing jobs she took in from neighbors. Abuela also crocheted her husband and her son’s tallitot—prayer shawls—for which she carefully tied the ritual fringes with sore fingers.

In America Abuela fashioned a kind of tallit for herself when she pulled the wool shawl she wore year round closer to her chest. In her small apartment she sat in a chair with stuffing peeking out of its arm that she was too tired to mend. The few times a year that she ventured to a synagogue, she stood when the ark was opened and blew kisses toward the bimah or altar as if greeting a lover. In a hoarse voice she muttered the Kaddish or the Mourner’s Prayer with her hand firmly on my shoulder so that I could not stand up and tempt fate.

When I was twelve my mother lugged a reel-to-reel tape recorder home, which she borrowed from the high school where she taught Spanish. She had planned to record Spanish lessons for the kids that she tutored on the side. But I quickly seized the recorder. The microphone that came with the machine transformed me into a roving reporter. I walked around the house inventing news about my mundane summer days.

Abuela spent most of that summer sitting on our porch, staring through the slats of the new jalousie windows. I felt that I was doing something important in the way that she intently watched me playing with the reel-to-reel. And then one day I got the idea to interview her. “Talk about anything,” I told her. Recipes, sewing, childhood stories. But mostly I wanted her to sing again. When she was a young girl she played the lute and sang Ladino songs in a lilting soprano. Her father forbade her to sing when she turned twelve.

 

My grandfather, Abuelo, was more than willing to take Abuela’s turn at the tape recorder. He dressed for prayer, winding the straps of his tefillin around his left arm and placing the leather boxes on his forehead and in the crook of his left arm. Abuelo wore a tallit that he snagged from a local synagogue—he had to leave the one that Abuela made him with the rest of his possessions in Cuba. He sang the shacharit—as if offering that morning liturgy as his personal history. His voice started off as wobbly as the plastic reels spooling the shiny brown ribbon of tape.

His voice was stronger after he gathered the tzitzit or fringes of his tallit to recite the Sh’ma—Judaism’s central prayer. Eyes closed. Voice pleading. I joined him at the microphone. It was thrilling to sing about listening for and loving God with all of my heart and my soul and my strength. In that moment I blurted out that I wanted to be a rabbi.

Abuelo stopped singing and the only thing audible was the squeaking of the reel-to-reel tape recorder, making me cringe as if I heard nails scratching a blackboard. He dropped his tzitzit and said, “Eso es muy feo”—that is so ugly. Abuela looked up.

Suddenly, finding her voice, Abuela said to me, “You can be anything you want.” Abuela could have been anything she wanted too, only she wasn’t allowed to think that way. If she were born in a different time, she might have used her voice to defend Anat Hoffman.

I’m sure she would have been inspired by you as you happily wore your tallit and celebrated your coming-of-age by reading from the Torah about every woman’s life.

Love,

Mamma

*This piece was reconfigured as a letter to my daughter and published in the Jewish Advocate

 

How Children Succeed: An Interview with Paul Tough

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Parenting books – love ’em or leave ’em. Most times, I leave them after perusing the table of contents. I don’t like the one-size-fits-all approach that so many of them take. But Paul Tough’s excellent new book, “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character,” rises to the top of the parenting book pile for its deep exploration of failure and the ways in which it builds character in our kids.

First a word about character. It’s as unique to each person as her DNA. Tough offers the revolutionary concept that character, unlike DNA, is not fixed or completely innate in a person. It is, in a word that recurs throughout “How Children Succeed,” malleable. I confess that I was initially very uncomfortable with the word malleable for its implication of weakness and undue influence. But read Tough’s book and you quickly learn that malleable is an asset.

Tough talked about character in a recent interview with [start ital.]The Advocate[end ital.], citing a chain of charter schools called KIPP and its dedicated founder David Levin. KIPP schools dole out report cards for academic performance and character assessment. “Dave is doing new and important work,” Tough said, adding:

“He has a new vision for character and it’s quite scientific in that he’s trying to figure out which character strengths make a difference in a kid’s success. And at the root of his research and thinking is the assertion that character is … a set of qualities that [enables] kids to change themselves and qualities that parents and teachers can instill.”

Tough presents living examples of low-income kids who have had the opportunity through mentoring programs, family members or discerning teachers to pause and look inward to shape and reshape their character. Kewauna Lerma was such a student. On the fast track to derailing her life, Kewauna did an about-face during her junior year of high school. She still lived at the poverty level on the South Side of Chicago, picking fights at school and struggling academically. But a spark was lighted inside of Kewauna through a mentoring program and encouragement from her mother and great-grandmother.

“Kewauna,” explained Tough, “became motivated to be a different person. It was very telling that she changed in that it came from her clear vision that she had of herself. That vision was further clarified in the program she was in as well as by her family.”

There is no question that kids mired in poverty have it tougher than children of affluence. But Tough admirably teases apart the hazards of having it too good without falling into the “poor little rich kid” syndrome.

For wisdom on the challenges faced by kids who seemingly have it all he turned to Dominic Randolph, headmaster of the tony Riverdale School in Riverdale, N.Y. – a well-off section of the Bronx. Randolph was initially the subject of a [start ital.]New York Times Magazine[end ital.]article that Tough wrote last fall. In that article, Tough explored Randolph’s claim that failure and character lead to academic success.

Advocating for failure is a radical step for a head of school where the majority of the class goes on to Ivy League and other highly competitive colleges. But that’s exactly what Randolph did when he came to Riverdale in 2009. Tough noted:

“[T]here is this way that certain high-pressure academic environments can stress kids out. They are on this treadmill versus climbing a mountain. At KIPP kids are climbing a mountain and it’s a bigger challenge than staying on that familiar treadmill. I think that’s why KIPP kids get out of college with more success and character. It’s the way you get on a life path, not the actual life path you end up on, and that makes all the difference.”

Tough points to the documentary “The Race to Nowhere” as a prime of example of affluence undoing kids. Vicky Abeles, the mother of three kids who were scorched by the heat of extreme academic competition, framed her film as a cautionary tale. I’m not a fan of the film because I think it’s slanted toward sensationalism. Tough thinks it’s a helpful example of the importance of establishing a good relationship with failure. “Affluent kids,” he said, “are in suspended animation throughout college without every hitting road bumps. Then they hit an obstacle in their 20s and they don’t have resources to deal with it.”

I think that Tough is on to something big here. We talked about post-college choices that kids who have graduated competitive colleges have made. He asserts that ironically their fear of failure steers them toward investment banking and management consulting jobs.

I wonder if our adult kids’ pervasive fear of failure hasn’t returned them to their childhood bedrooms, dissatisfied and unemployed. Yes, it’s a tough economy out there, but have we made them afraid to take chances, to bypass meaningful engagement and social justice opportunities?

Which brings me back to where I started. Perhaps character is not destiny, that it’s malleable enough to forge the kind of future that can fulfill our kids.

Judy Bolton—A Mom Detective Who Kept Her Kids Safe in Cyberspace

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I share my family name, as well as a penchant for snooping, with “Judy Bolton, Girl Detective,” Fictional Judy was the star of her own mid-twentieth century mystery book series. Judy lived smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania where, surprisingly enough, there was no shortage of mysteries to solve. In all thirty-eight of her books, her snooping was always for the good and welfare of her family and friends. When I became a mother, I snooped for the good and welfare of my children.

Now that they are older, I don’t snoop in my kids’ lives very much. And I have never snooped because I have an unsavory curiosity about other people’s lives. (Though I will sometimes eavesdrop at the table next to me in a restaurant to figure out if a couple is on a blind date). I snoop for interesting stories. I snoop for inspiration to write those stories. I snoop to unknot the mystery of other lives as well as my own. Snooping comes with the territory of being a writer.

While I had no qualms about rummaging around in my children’s lives, it occasionally got me into trouble. When my daughter was 12 she said that I worried over nothing and that I didn’t trust her. Shealso  said that I was nosy.

It’s true. I do worry over nothing until I have something about which to worry. She’s right that I didn’t trust her when she was the tender age of 12. But I didn’t trust because she was too young to understand how quickly the world can turn scary and dangerous.

I prefer to think of myself as curious. And once upon a time my curiosity mostly focused on my children’s computer activities or the dialed and received log on their cell phones. When my children were old enough to have screen names, I ran a benevolent dictatorship. This meant that I was not always right, but I was never wrong. Each month they were required to show me any on-line friends’ lists.

The first rule was that my kids had to know everyone personally—in the flesh—anyone with whom they had an on-line relationship. All the better if I knew them too, but I hadn’t met all of the sleep-away camp buddies. So for 12 and up, I trusted, but only just a little. Under 12, I had to know everyone on a list. No exceptions. This rule, in place like cement, was instituted to prevent my kids from coming into contact with someone they had never met. This rule, to use a word that we used early and often since the dawn of pre-school, was non-negotiable.

I also reserved the right to walk in at any time that my children were on the computer and ask with whom were they chatting on-line or what was new on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, they had to friend me or do without it. If the spirit moved me, I would also ask what they had just typed. Did I mention that I ran a benevolent dictatorship?

All bets were off for a virtual chat room. This was expressly forbidden and would result in the revocation of computer privileges until the age of twenty-five.

Before they were freshmen in high school and old enough to have laptops, my kids had individual accounts on our family computer so they could access the Internet for homework and pre-approved game sites. Each of their accounts had a filter so that a typo would not send them to God knows where in cyberspace. I always knew the passwords to their accounts or to anything else in their lives. If they somehow managed to get on to a commerce site and try to buy something, the dictatorship was no longer benevolent. Luckily, this never happened.

My children never seriously abused their Internet privileges because they knew I meant business. As generous as I am with them, and believe me I am still generous to the point that it sometimes annoys my husband, they knew that I would not tolerate any infractions with regard to the Internet. Just ask my son about the time he hacked into my account and wrote an e-mail to his teacher to excuse him from an assignment. His third grade grammar gave him away and the teacher immediately notified me that he was e-mailing her under my name. What followed were not good days for my boy.

But I never fully warmed up to being a dictator—benevolent or otherwise. I took unique pride in saying that my children were spoiled, but not rotten. Yet, when it came to snooping for their wellbeing, I held my ground.

I think my parents, particularly my father, named me with the hope that I would develop a curiosity that was both intellectual and empathic. Building on my father’s dreams for me, I taught my children to be as curious and responsible as my fictional doppelganger.

Mourning Aurora by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Terry Tempest Williams is an extraordinary writer. She recently published a memoir inspired by boxes of journals her mother bequeathed to her – all of them blank. There was not a single word on those fresh, white pages. They were, as Williams wrote, “paper tombstones.”

That’s what I visualize—paper tombstones—as I invoke the dead and the wounded for this column. They are the victims of the wave of hate and terrorism of the past couple of weeks. The youngest victim at the movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, where a madman opened fire on an unarmed audience, was six years-old. All she did to tempt death was sit next to her mother at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises—the latest Batman movie. Her fate was intertwined with 11 other people, some of whom died shielding their loved ones.

Here we are again, reading names. Piecing together life stories from the snapshots and accompanying biographical summaries. Here we are again in another “there but for the Grace of God Go I” moment.

And there are more names to remember. A suicide bomber attacked a tour bus of Israelis vacationing in Bulgaria. Five were flown home for burial and 33 more were wounded. Geopolitics boils over and once again Jews are targeted.

It’s a brutal time.

God has come up a lot in discussions with my kids over the Aurora tragedy. I dare say at this point Spiderman and Batman are more divine to them than a seemingly absent God. It’s not surprising. A movie featuring these two superheroes is not just a blockbuster; it’s what the industry calls “a movie event.” It’s a phenomenon. Think about Gotham City, Batman’s stomping grounds. It’s a deeply dark place with psychopaths at the ready behind every building.

A masked gunman armed to the teeth. The bewitching hour of midnight. Sex and violence on the screen. I don’t think for a moment that The Dark Knight Rises short circuited the killer’s brain. But the movie provided a horrifying backdrop. Reading the bewildering amount of commentary about the Aurora massacre, I remembered that President Reagan’s would be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver. Loner to loner. Was it a deadly case of transference? Were Hinckley and the Aurora gunman seeking fame, attention, intensely negative admiration? Notice that I won’t name the gunman in Colorado. In this post-Internet age, I won’t make him easier to find on a search engine.

But in the aftermath of this tragedy, how do continue to live with any kind of normalcy? Thanks to Rabbi Harold Kushner’s deceptively simple, brilliant insight we know—we accept to some degree—that bad things happen to good people. Rabbi Kushner wrote his best-selling book from the rubble of his own heartache—his son, Aaron, died in his mother’s arms two days after his fourteenth birthday from a rare genetic disease. It’s no wonder that Rabbi Kushner’s title has a permanent place in our lexicon; he has put a name to a phenomenon so perplexing, so universal. People cling to the notion that tragedy is not deserved. God is far too complicated to want a tit for a tat. God is rarely in those details, I tell my kids.

I’m not wise or worthy enough to understand why God does the things that God does. I do know that when tragedy strikes as it did last week in Aurora and Bulgaria, I don’t believe God is vengeful or sadistic or masochistic. I try to convince Adam, in particular, that God has His reasons for stepping back to observe what human beings, purposefully created in God’s image, have wrought. I don’t know what those reasons might be. I only know that it’s a crazy, twisted, scary, beautiful world out there. Maybe God needs to see what we do next. We are, after all, in a relationship with the Almighty. Pass that along to the children, but don’t forget to talk through the anxiety and fear generated by the Aurora shootings. Don’t plaster this experience with “paper tombstones.”

In Terry Tempest Williams’ Mormon community she notes that the women keep journals and bear children. Her mother’s blank pages are an act of rebellion.  “How do you know your mother didn’t write her entries in invisible ink?” a woman asked Williams at a bookstore reading.

Williams said she wasn’t keen to find out if her mother had pulled a stunt like that. “My mother’s journals are words wafting above the page,” Williams writes in her memoir. Just like the spirits of the innocents that were violently murdered last week in Colorado and Bulgaria.