Happy Birthday, Grandpa Ben
Reflections on my grandfather and the meaning of independence.
My grandfather, Max Benzion Friedlander, was born on this day, July 4th, 1910 in New York City. “Ben” or “Benny,” was one of five children of the Ukrainian-born, transnational scholar Israel Friedlander and the English-Jewish aristocrat, Lillian Bentwich. On July 5th, 1920, Israel was shot by Cossacks during a relief mission for Jews fleeing pogroms in his native country. The murder sent my grandfather around the globe for much of the next twenty years —from the U.S. to England to Palestine to Germany and many stops in between —before landing back in NYC where he met my half-Jewish grandmother, Eva Straus, who was there after her own multi-country, five-year trip/flight from her native Germany. When my great-uncle Herzl told my grandfather Chicago was brimming with job opportunities and liveable scale, he and my grandmother moved once again, settling in that city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. My grandparents were committed to not subjecting their children —my aunt and dad —to the same rootlessness of their youths, and remained in Hyde Park through their childrens’ education and entire lives.
[I learned a bit of the history from my grandfather’s and aunt’s self-published memoirs, which are filled with awesome history, if not amazing prose.]
Remaining in one place did not free my grandfather from the political tumult that killed his dad, not to mention father-in-law, Isak Straus, who remained in Germany to settle affairs, only to die of a supposed heart attack one day after Hitler became Chancellor in the Spring of 1933. Both the Friedlander and Straus family fortunes had been so dramatically reduced by industrialized, geopolitical strife and scheming, my grandparents committed themselves to denouncing and working against those forces. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the main organization opposing heedless industrial capitalism was the Communist Party, and both my grandparents were active members. His communist affiliation, support of worker’s rights, and anti-war/nuke activism made grandpa Ben a target for persecution, surveillance, and I recently found testimony he gave before a McCarthy-era witch-hunt. My father, who later caught the attention of Hoover for his anti-Vietnam activism, said surveillance vehicles were regularly stationed in front of the family home when returning from school.
My grandfather was a brilliant, removed man, who I cannot recall ever looking me directly in the eyes. Much to the vexation of my grandma, Ben had a multi-decade affair with a woman named Raya. He held a Masters in Chemistry from Columbia University, my alma mater, and spent most of his professional career as a food chemist, a covert, technical role that kept him somewhat out of political view. He spoke fluent English, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, passable French, and was learning Spanish late in life, often practicing in his winter home of Green Valley, Arizona. He could recite the Old Testament line and verse. We often went to museums together, and he, like my father, instilled in me a great love of history , and I often insisted grandpa quiz me on miscellaneous factum. He was a rabid tennis player and fan, a fandom he bequeathed to me while watching first McEnroe-Conners-Bjorg era and later Lendl-Becker-Sampras era matches on his tiny, black-and-white TV in his cramped coop kitchen. One of our last conversations concerned the death of all his age-group tennis cohort, forcing him to play men in his seventies when he was deep into his eighties.
Despite his comically patriotic birthday and birthplace, the lessons I gleaned from grandfather seem decidedly un-American. Few things are less American than the high intellectual, civic, and physical vigor he demonstrated through his long life until his sudden death at 86 of an aneurysm. Similarly un-American, he eschewed wealth, property, and loathed nationalistic violence. The U.S. government rewarded his beliefs with unreasonably and unconstitutional harassment and threats of prison sentences.
I’ve not been shy about expressing my belief humanity is in the throes of an end-times for the industrial age. The Biblically-disposed might call it an Apocalypse. In this situation, whatever major industrial powers are doing is Titanic-deck-arranging from a geologic-time perspective. It’s all going down, and lumbering, geo-industrial-dependent government systems, like the Byzantine one the U.S. has devolved into, will collapse under their own weight and inability to maintain basic public order and safety. When the rate of collapse accelerates, when Chinese-made F150s and American flags no longer ship, people may realize they’re not as “independent” as they once thought.
July 4th has an alternative meaning for me, because on June 29th, 1999, I took my last drink of alcohol. At the time, I was in Munich, Germany debauching through western Europe, this after two years of constant inebriation. I could no longer stand my dependence on alcohol. I later attended 12-step recovery, and through working the steps and later other spiritual and therapeutic modalities, gained a measure of independence from the trauma that required me to self-medicate with booze and other harmful activities. I was able to stack this newfound spiritual and emotional independence with the intellectual and physical independence my grandfather —and our fathers before that —bequeathed to me. Ironically, this sort of independence frequently pits me against supposed liberty-loving individuals and social constructs like the United States. Blessedly for us, this independence has not put us in conflict with our conscience or the fond view history has of us, and that’s the kind of independence worth celebrating.