I recently finished reading Bittersweet by Susan Cain, recommended and bought for me by Emily. It’s a thought-provoking book whose subtitle pretty much sums it up: “How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” A younger version of myself might have scoffed at this sentiment and blindly dismissed its Oprah’s Book Club vibe, which is ironic because one of Cain’s central examples is an affinity for sad music. This is pretty much the only type of music that really touched me when I was an angsty teenager and confused young adult swinging around in the dark (and light!) of my 20s. Turns out it’s a pretty common experience to identify with art that evokes a sense of fragility and impermanence, as Cain puts it. It’s easy to extend this affinity for the somber to other mediums too—movies, TV, poetry, paintings, so on. Art is art! Whether it’s “good” or not is subjective, but a pretty solid indicator has always been to what extent a given piece moves you.
For much of the book, Cain explores the connection between bitter and sweet, sadness and joy, death and life, through different avenues that I understand intellectually. A strained mother-daughter relationship (Cain and her own mom). A disproportionate tendency toward sorrow by creative people. An ingenious way to depict the universal experience of darkness bringing meaning to light (Inside Out). However, it was only the chapter on epigenetics toward the end where I felt cracks in the wall I’ve put up between myself and my own emotions.
Epigenetics is the study of how behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way genes work, which can in theory be passed onto the next generation. I’m not a doctor or a scientist, so I won’t pretend to know it intimately or claim it’s an incontrovertible field. I will say that as a child of immigrants, who themselves were children of Soviet Jews that lived through the autocratic regimes of both Hitler and Stalin, the legitimacy it grants to the idea of inherited trauma is something I find appealing. Clearly Cain does too, otherwise she wouldn’t have dedicated a chapter to it—and indeed framed the entirety of Bittersweet with the lifelong guilt she’s felt about her mother. A parent whose family history intersected directly with the Holocaust. Though Cain describes growing up walking on eggshells around her mother for fear of destroying her “fragile psyche,” she writes that later in life, the notion of inheriting her predecessor’s trauma shed a troubled adolescence—and adulthood—in a new light.
“Did these historical events somehow transmit to me, did they contribute to my mystery tears…? And if so, by what mechanism—was the transmission cultural, familial, genetic, was it all three?”
What a question. I’d like to know myself. I’ve touched a bit on my family’s past, and here I’ll stick with a choice line of what I said then: “In short, trauma lurks in the dark crevices of my family’s history. How could it not? We’re [Jews] of eastern European descent.” There’s darkness on both sides, my mother’s and my father’s. As far as being Jewish goes, it’s sadly not a unique story. So much so, in fact, that the following passage mirrors my paternal grandmother’s experience (as I understand it) with an eerie similarity:
“[Dr. William] Breitbart’s mother was fourteen, his father seventeen, when the Nazis came to Poland hunting down Jews. His mother hid in a hole under a stove in a farmhouse owned by a Catholic woman who saved her life…Breitbart’s father had deserted the Russian army and joined a group of partisans fighting in the forest. One night, starving and looking for food, he broke into the farmhouse where Breitbart’s mother was hiding. He convinced her to join his brigade…”
When the Nazis came to her town of Polonne, Ukraine, my grandmother hid in a gentile’s basement. After a couple of years, she also joined the partisans in the forest. The story rises to a triumphant crescendo despite the horror of being the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, she came back to her house and found squatters had taken it over. She promptly threw out their furniture and moved back in. The third piece doesn’t line up with the story of Breitbart’s mother, but it’s my favorite of the few tidbits I’ve gotten from a dark period of my heritage. And taken all together, it underscores the nature of what might be lurking deep in not only my body, but in the body of any descendant of people who have lived through terrible pain and suffering.
If I finished this piece last week, when I started it, I think this is the point at which I’d pivot off of a Bittersweet quote that hammers home the bizarre experience of living with inherited trauma in an American society that avoids confronting sadness and pain at all costs. I’d mix the pain with some humor—as a good Jew does—and opine that my existence is on some level fundamentally screwed. I didn’t finish this piece when I wanted to though, and I missed a week of publishing something through this Substack for the first time since starting back in April. No, instead of playing with the delicious “cellular memory of ancient traumas encoded confusingly in American-born babies bred for optimism and cheer,” I’m going to take things elsewhere.
Last Friday morning, which is when I typically crank out the rest of a week’s post if I haven’t finished it yet, the 6-week-old kitten Emily and I adopted 6 days earlier died unexpectedly. We have no idea how or why it happened, we never will, and the images of him going limp in my arms as I sprinted to the vet 5 blocks from our apartment will always stay with me. We named him Lenny. We barely knew him. We already loved him deeply. We were under the impression that if you bring a helpless creature into your home, and you’re good people, and you’re sensitive and kind and caring, what happens is that you live happily with that creature for 15 years, give or take. But that’s not what happened. That outcome-oriented view, that illusion of control, was shattered the second we noticed something was very wrong with Lenny.
On some level, it feels silly to call the death of our kitten traumatic. Certainly, juxtaposed with the abject misery of my grandparents’ suffering before, during, and after the Holocaust, it feels trivial. And yet…this is what I do. This qualification is what I’ve always done. I didn’t live through the Holocaust. I didn’t live in a Soviet Union inhospitable to Jews, to outsiders, to people. But I carry tremendous guilt with me wherever I go, whatever I do. The challenges I encounter in my life are nothing compared to the suffering that it took for me to even exist. So anything that hurts or feels bad is never fully valid as such, because it’s forever stacked against the horrible reality of my family’s past. I operate as though my life must be one of tremendous success and good fortune, because if it isn’t, what the hell was the point of the hardship required to even give me my first breath? This is an insane way to think, and I can assure you I know it—intellectually. I understand that my parents want nothing more than for me to simply be happy, and that my “success” in the context of our shared history is defined only on those terms, not by some arbitrary golden boy narrative constructed over 33 years of life. But it’s my default.
The truth is that our kitten dying fucking sucks. I mentioned that reading Bittersweet produced some cracks in the wall between me and my emotions—a barrier I’ve built up over time that’s likely at least somewhat connected to the stoic perseverance that’s helped my lineage survive through the worst. Well, if reading the book produced cracks, bringing a helpless and wonderful kitten into the apartment I just moved into with my girlfriend punched holes through it, and losing him smashed it down completely. I don’t care if it sounds ridiculous, or corny, or unworthy compared to anything else. It’s my life, and it’s true.
One thing I appreciate deeply about Cain’s inner and outer exploration of inherited trauma, even more so now than when I first read it, is the unflinching importance she grants to holding two truths at the same time:
“We can see that our forebears’ stories are our stories, but they’re also not our stories. We may have inherited an echo of our ancestors’ torment, but it was not our flesh burned in the ovens; we may have inherited their grief, but it was not us torn naked from our children. The tears they shed ran down their cheeks, not ours, just as their accomplishments were earned by them, even if we may have inherited some of their stature.”
We are who we are because of those who came before us, and these lives are also fully, singularly ours. The pain of losing a pet suddenly is objectively less intense than the pain of losing your entire family, but subjectively it is still painful. It’s still real.
If reading this feels like you’ve met me at a particularly raw moment, well, you have. It will pass, as everything does. But there’s something to be said about capturing it now, as it is, far from what I planned and as authentic as can be. And knowing that the experience—not gaining and promptly losing a pet, but rather the emotions a seemingly net zero affair catapulted me into—are not just mine. If there’s one way to sum up its spirit, what I took away from Bittersweet, and why it resonated with me, it’s a seemingly throwaway quote in the book attributed to Farah Khatib that more or less captures the human condition. I’ll leave you with it, and hopefully get back to more of the lighthearted nonsense next week. See you soon.
“Longing, I just have it. I’m longing to be whole.”
so sorry victor❤️lost a kitten this way when i was younger, it was a breathing issue i guess and we couldn't have done anything to prevent it. still makes me sad to think about. at the risk of sounding v corny, at least you know lenny was loved by you for a big part of his whole life
This is so beautifully written, thank you for sharing it. Thinking about you and Em 💛