Heretic's Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution

Introduction

I am watching a commentator on Public Television discuss the case of a former terrorist from the 1960s who has turned herself in. The pundit tells me that the sixties were a time of darkness. Although I have heard statements like his before, I still find myself startled by his words, since I, and many of the thousands who participated in the events of that era, continue to describe them as luminous.

Why can no one write successfully about this period? so many of us continue to wail. Why do we let the history we have experienced be so easily rewritten? Over the years various autobiographical accounts have appeared, usually by men of a certain fame. They are usually sad and occasionally embarrassing; heavy on sex and drugs, with politics kept to a minimum; told with the supposed voice of experience and an odd absence of doubt, as if their authors once were lost but now truly know where they are going. But if these writers were painters you would say that their present canvases are much smaller now. And if they were starship captains you would say they had given up the search for new worlds.

I look back on the 1960s differently. Although I was part of many of the defining political events of the period—as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, as a student activist in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and as an American sugarcane cutter who went to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade—by position and gender I was never considered a part of the dominant story. Accounts of the sixties by women are rare and our vision is somewhat different.

Further, for many of us politics and ideas meant more than sex, drugs, or rock and roll. Like most people that age at the time—although so few admit it even now—I was pretty inept at sex and only did it comfortably when I was alone. As for drugs, I smoked grass with the rest, but I was too scared to take LSD in my teens, or even in my twenties, and when I finally tried it in my thirties, the 1960s were long gone and the 1970s were giving their last gasp. As for rock and roll, when I was offered a ticket to Woodstock I turned it down. Just a commercial rock concert, I thought, perhaps a bit too smugly. I rejected much of the sixties’ counterculture as decadent, but I also believed that the drugs, the sex, and the rock and roll were but the outer trappings of a rich world of ideas. I still believe this.

One of those ideas was simple. As stated every week on Star Trek, it was that the world is infinitely varied and that variety is to be cherished; that there are an infinite number of ways to live, to love, to create structures of society and government and community; that change is the only constant and if there is a prime directive, it is to respect difference, to let others choose their own path in freedom, and to assume that there are always more possibilities than one can conceive.

This book is partly about the 1960s as a quest for that ideal, the 1960s I experienced. We believed that anything was possible and that everything was open to reexamination. That ecstatic sense of possibility, a feeling that is so hard to come by today, was borne out by reality; sweeping changes were happening every day, brought about by concerted human action.

But the 1960s were also about a struggle between different notions of authority: between individual and group authority, between received wisdom and intuition, between the knowledge that comes from one’s own skin and bones and heart, and knowledge that comes from the ecstasy of community effort. It was also about a struggle between politics and spirit that continues to this day.

I spent most of the 1960s desperately trying to be a cadre—a revolutionary communist or socialist footsoldier, totally dedicated to the battle to change the world. I failed as a cadre, and that’s part of the story. My own life today, as a journalist somewhat uncomfortably in the mainstream, and as a priestess of the old religion of nature, is an attempt to bridge two different worlds that are often at odds.

So this book is also the story of a journey, even an initiatory one. Starting with a childhood of enormous freedom, lonely daydreams, and the mysterious spiritual gifts of wild nature, it moves through an adolescence of turbulent politics and revolution, and circles back to spirit, nature, and mystery at the end.

My account of this journey starts in the 1950s, partly because the decade of the 1960s was the rebellious child of the 1950s and partly because these conflicting notions of freedom, autonomy, and community, of spirit and politics, were formed for me in that period.

The tired joke about the 1960s is If you remember it you weren’t there. But a friend of mine observes with amusement that I didn’t need a good memory, I had rent control.

I have lived in the same sprawling old apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for forty years. In our culture hardly anyone keeps their possessions in the same place for that amount of time. I have several cartons of documents and letters from my parents’ lives, much of it dating from World War II; I have every letter I ever wrote my mother, starting in the 1950s, and every letter she wrote me. And then there are two hundred pages of letters between me—a Berkeley radical in 1967—and an American soldier in Vietnam. The original impetus for this memoir came from people who had heard some of these war letters read aloud.

Living in the same place year after year, I never went through the inevitable paring down that almost everyone in my generation of mobile professionals has done and continues to do with each move. My own journals and letters from friends sat in cartons for decades; I just never got organized enough to throw them away. And while I am in terror at the hubris of anyone under sixty committing even a portion of their life to the relative eternity of the written word, I also realize how rare it is, in an age when the phone call has replaced the letter, to have so many documents from an era that has suffered from such poisonous revisionism. Much of my journey was already on paper before I sat down to write about it.

Of course, saying that doesn’t mean that my memory is not still flawed, fickle, selective, and often faulty. Sorting through diaries and letters was a humbling experience. Although I had clear recollections and often a letter or a photograph would bring back a flood of pictures and memories, a few of my most vivid recollections turned out to be questionable. Reading these letters and journals has been exhilarating and disturbing; it has brought home to me how distorted certain stories may be, how apocryphal others. For example, in order to evoke some remembrances of childhood, I returned to my grammar school to find my favorite novels. Some were lost, some were exactly as I remember them, and others were two different stories tacked together in my mind. Another example: letters from a boyfriend I had remembered as a mere sexual predator revealed a nineteen-year-old who was an exquisite writer, with an astonishingly honest and poetic nature.

But the letters and journals do confirm what I best remember. For all the limitations of my generation—our unconscious actions, our unexamined ideas, our often silly phrases—we were alive to the deepest spiritual values. We believed that exploration was lifelong, that one’s life work had to be honorable, creative, and transformative. We seldom thought about consumption, or the eventual need to live the good life, issues which obsess the current generation of adolescents. We believed that nothing was fixed, either in human nature or in society, and so we experimented endlessly.

We had a multitude of failures and successes. To echo the words of Ms. Frizzle, the science teacher in the wonderful series of children’s books and TV shows: We took chances. We got messy. We looked for connections. If Heretic’s Heart can show one fraction of the ecstasy we felt in our work and play it will have succeeded.

"It’s Only Once Around

the Merry-Go-Round"

CHAPTER 1

MY MOTHER , Freyda, has been dead for twenty-five years, but her exuberant energy was so intense that she still receives mail. A skeptic might say that it’s the persistence of junk mail in our society that is remarkable, that explains why civil rights groups are still asking her for donations and banks are still offering her credit cards. But as I recently began to go through personal and family documents—journals and letters dating from the 1930s to the 1960s that I’d kept over the years—I came to realize that much of my life has been animated by my mother’s persistent spirit, and that she, more than anyone, has a claim on setting and naming the parameters of my political and spiritual journey.

My mother died in January of 1970. She was sixty-one. She had been a heavy smoker who quit too late in life (actually, one of her friends recently hinted to me that she never really quit). Her illness was diagnosed just months after the end of a bitter New York teachers’ strike in which my mother, in deep turmoil, had crossed a picket line for the first time in her life—that of her own union—to support a group of black parents. Her illness also happened at a time when she was truly happy and in love, perhaps for the first time. Just a year before her diagnosis, she confided to me that she had finally experienced going over the rainbow. I always wondered if a small voice inside her said that she came from a suffering people and had no right to such happiness. She developed lung cancer which quickly metastasized to her brain and then her liver. The end was a lingering, unpleasant death that she only partly comprehended.

In the late 1960s, most patients with cancer were not told the truth of their situation. In my mother’s case, many doctors, including a psychiatrist, decided that she did not really want to know. Their policy of disguising the truth was taken to such an extreme that when my mother asked to see her medical records, one of her doctors served up a phony piece of official-looking paper that said her tumor was benign. B-e-n-i-g-n, she told all of her friends, is the most beautiful word in the English language. And then she could never understand why she wasn’t getting better.

Among those of my parents’ generation, illness and death were rarely discussed. When I was a teenager my father waited a full week to inform me that my grandmother had died, not wanting to ruin my vacation. And when my aunt went into the hospital some years later for cancer, I was told it was a heart problem.

Most of my mother’s friends also accepted the wisdom of the time, believing that she either did not want to know or in fact knew everything on some deeper level. At the time I felt intuitively that this policy was hellish, that my mother, a woman who planned so well for everything, would have despised such paternalism. She would have desired the truth in order to prepare for the end of her life with dignity. But I did not feel I could fight the combined judgment of seven male doctors single-handedly. I acquiesced. And I raged, silently, confused that I, a mere twenty-three-year-old, knew, while the most powerful figure in my life was kept from the truth, infantilized. I knew I would never again take a doctor’s statement at face value and all institutional documents would remain suspect. For several years after my mother died I would take a longer route to avoid the hospital that had deceived her. And when my mother told me, several months after she’d been told her tumor was benign, I feel like I am in a dark tunnel, and I can’t see the end, I did not find myself reassured that my own silence was right.

What a character my mother was, even in illness. How strange, my mother wrote to a friend (who had also just had a serious brush with death) only days after she was shown that piece of paper with the big lie written on it, "that both of us at the last lap of our full lives should be reborn! But perhaps this gift is only given to people capable of dying many times. . . . I am O.K. I was scared shitless. . . . But even in death fantasies I remained the manipulator, so I wondered how I could get my friends in the Juilliard Quartet back from tour to play Schubert’s Death of the Maiden for my funeral." Four months later she had a seizure; the cancer had entered her brain and she became a shell of her former self for the last three months of her life.

While she never got the Juilliard Quartet to play for her funeral, she left a packet of explicit instructions for funeral arrangements, and even a request that the minister of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a man known for his radical innovations in both drama and politics, give the service. In her letter she said that although her roots were Jewish, she and this minister had talked seriously and philosophically about the end of life.

The memorial service took place on February 4, 1970. It was crowded, and although the service couldn’t take place in the space she actually requested—perhaps an open airy school rooftop—it did have some of the flavor of joy in life that she insisted on daily. There were students she had taught thirty, forty years ago. There were old friends, but also people she had affected who simply read the obituary in the New York Times and came. Knowing how much my mother had defied convention in her life, we asked her mourners to contribute to the defense fund of the Chicago Eight, the activists who were on trial as a result of their leadership of the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, rather than sending flowers. Instead, of course, most people gave money in her memory to their favorite charities like the American Cancer Society, as well as to a few groups that my mother would have probably spit on, had she still had the breath to let spit fly.

When I think of Freyda Adler, the playwright Saul Levitt said, reading his eulogy during the memorial service,

I think of certain streets in Brooklyn, long dark mean streets and of struggling people . . . frantic and worried—complex difficult people.

This is the world she came out of.

She grew out of it carrying with her a burden of fears and anxieties.

She had a preoccupation with herself, like that of a drowning person needing to stay above water, and this feeling was in her all her life.

I say all this about Freyda to begin with because it makes all the more remarkable her gift of response to others. She could be summoned out of her preoccupations—summoned out of her drowning feelings. You had to call out:

Freyda, listen . . .

Oh, I wasn’t listening.

Then listen.

And she listened. . . .

Imagine that. To feel panicked and frightened about oneself—and yet have the capacity to be called out of such fears . . . to have a capacity to respond.

She acted through her life for causes or for this or that person or for children. . . . Her gift of response went wider—to the struggle for quality education—for neighborhood control of schools—for civil rights. But essentially her response was to the people involved in such struggles. . . .

It seemed that she lived in a great personal democracy. Who else was equal among equals with so many people on all levels of life? I know of no one who was more unselfconsciously responsive to direct human exchange.

And within this great range of people there was a smaller private circle—those with whom she was almost literally constantly in touch—those to whom she said goodnight every night—tucking them in for the night and being tucked in herself. These were friends for thirty or more years.

I say for myself Freyda had a successful life. By which I mean she fought back against a difficult personal heritage and held all her life to the certainty that human exchange was primary and the rest secondary. This is what the young people are trying to say. In some future this will seem very normal.

At the close of her life Freyda Adler had the feelings of a young person—an enthusiastic vulnerable young person. This is how, I believe, we all see her. Even now.

Freyda was born on Sixth Street and Avenue C, on the Lower East Side. Her original name was Freda Pasternack. Her mother, Rebecca Margot, never learned to read. Her father, Moritz, was also uneducated, but he taught himself to read and write in Yiddish. Both parents came to the United States at the turn of the century, in steerage, and both were dead before I was born. Freyda used to say that her father spent his first night in the United States on a New York City park bench. According to the story, after Moritz arrived he went to see his brother, who had come to America earlier and had become a successful businessman. This brother threw Moritz out on the street. That’s how he ended up on the bench.

I was never told much about my maternal grandfather, except that he committed suicide in 1937, six months after his wife died of an illness; that he left a note that said simply, Pay so and so the five dollars I owe him; and, perhaps most unusual, that he died by throwing himself off the sixteenth floor of the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, the building where his more affluent brother worked. Telling this story, my mother always said that after his death she sold the family house in Brooklyn and gave most of the money away, even handing some of it out in the street. While this always seemed hard to believe, the suicide took place in the middle of the Depression, and, knowing my mother, it just might have happened that way.

But one day I was looking through my mother’s papers after her death and there, in my mother’s own hand, translated from the Yiddish, was her father’s suicide note—a note filled with much more pain than the stories I had been told. Moritz wrote:

That I wasn’t worthy of more—all my enemies will laugh and be happy. I won’t see them, but, children, don’t be angry with me, for alone I can’t live, and I can’t stand it, as I did until now. I am sad enough at taking such a step. My wife doesn’t leave my thoughts for one second. I don’t sleep and I can’t eat. I am very lonely and nothing can save me. The more I think, the more thoughts I get. I am not writing right because my thoughts aren’t right. . . . [then a digression about a woman he was seeing, perhaps a mistress] . . . Why did I keep her? I couldn’t help myself because one can’t be alone everywhere. I broke down. I am no philanderer with women. . . . I have two children, very good ones, but I feel that I was unworthy to them—I am paying for that.

I have taken nothing from anyone. . . . I am afraid of people. . . . I have enough money to live but I am full of woe because my wife is away from me and can’t bear how my dear child Willie suffers. I have tried various ways not to be lonely, but it didn’t succeed.

Will: I have 50 cases of eggs in Northern Market, five cases of Lucky’s in Jersey City.

I have no more patience. This is the last writing. Good bye. I am a fool. I cannot help it.

I want to be near my wife—not to forget. Call up Eckman and tell him he should excuse me.

Reflecting on this letter, I realize that Moritz never mentioned his daughter, my mother, by name. Of course, his was a world in which boys were more valued, even though Freyda would make a successful life for herself and her brother would not.

My mother did not tell me much about her parents. I do know that, growing up as a first-generation American in a home where English was a second language, she did what so many other children of immigrants did to survive—she ran as fast and as far away as she could from the culture that oppressed her, only to return, years later, to pick up the few pieces of her Jewish roots that still nourished and sustained her, mainly a certain sensibility, a way of looking at the world, and a sense of identity, as well as a group of intimate, loving Jewish friends.

Of her relatives, she only expressed abiding love for two—her Aunt Gertie, an old radical and union organizer in the garment industry, and her brother Bill, a man who had music and comedy in his blood but who had put his love and talent aside to enter the grocery business just like his father. At one point Bill was hospitalized for many years with severe depression. When he got out, near the end of his life, he finally followed the joy of his heart, and was a volunteer comedian at hospitals and old-age homes.

The picture my mother painted of her childhood was bleak. My brother was given the fifty-cent Hebrew teacher, she said, but since I was a girl, I was only given the twenty-five-cent Hebrew teacher, the one where you learned to pronounce the words but not to understand the meaning. I knew that she was drawn to the theater at an early age. At seven, she said, she saw the great Yiddish actor Jacob Adler perform King Lear, and, returning home, acted out all the parts, to the delight of her family. There is a faded picture—now more than seventy years old—of her acting in a school play. She is radiant. I knew that her brother had been offered money toward a college education, which he rejected, and that my mother wanted it desperately, but it was not offered to her.

At the age of eighteen my mother left home. She worked in a candy factory and a five-and-dime, to put herself through Maxwell Training School for teachers. She also worked as a skip tracer, tracking down people who didn’t pay their bills. She met and married a violinist named Manual Compinsky, but the marriage didn’t last long. Unlike many of her friends, as a teacher in the public schools she was gainfully employed throughout the Depression.

I remember when I first met her, said my mother’s friend Dena Levitt, a film editor. She was passing herself off with this incredible story that she was half Jewish and half French. I never believed it. And, determined to escape a background that seemed to be nothing but a source of oppression, she did change her last name from its original, Pasternack, to Compinsky (the short-lived marriage) and finally to Nacque. I knew she had mingled with bohemians in the Village during the 1930s, and had associated with poets, writers, and theater people. I knew that she had gone for therapy with Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, and that she had refused to go to bed with him when he sat her on his lap and told her that by doing so she would solve her problems with her own father. When she told me about this she simply laughed it off; although she was fairly vulnerable in some ways, she was pretty tough in others.

Many of the stories of her adventures functioned as allegories. They either described how the world worked or were humorous escapades with a moral: spunk and chutzpah will always outfox the authorities. For example, while working in the candy factory she was admonished to stop chewing gum. But instead of complying she gave a defiant speech in her own defense, which so surprised the floor supervisor that her jaw dropped and her own gum fell out of her mouth.

And then there was the time my mother—this gum-chewing working-class kid with the New York accent—was invited to an elegant ball by a real count. She looked so much like Greta Garbo in some early photos that I could well imagine her being led around the dance floor by royalty. On being introduced to Duchess So-and-so and Viscount So-and-so she was so amazed and so sure it must be a joke, she said, that at the next introduction she gave a winning smile, put her hand inside her jacket, and said, How do you do. I’m Napoleon.

Of course, growing up with such a woman for a mother was not always easy. She was a dominating presence, with an intense energy, and endlessly stimulating. While she was at home with physical affection and a wide range of emotions, and was so absolutely and totally unconditional in her love that it sometimes still takes my breath away, she could also be remote and lost in a world of her own. And for two crucial years of my childhood she was exactly that drowning person of whom Saul Levitt spoke—invisible, asleep, deeply depressed, diving down so far that she almost went under. She even attempted suicide after her marriage to my father collapsed.

But mostly she was exciting and embarrassing, just like Auntie Mame. In fact, Freyda carried herself in the same theatrical manner as Rosalind Russell did in the title role in the film, used her voice almost as dramatically, and dressed with equal flair, although she never possessed the funds Auntie Mame did.

My mother believed not only that life should be lived with zest, but also that American citizens had inalienable rights, including the right to get the appropriate money due one, by an insurance company for example, even if it meant lying a little. These shoes cost thirty dollars, I remember her telling an insurance agent who had come to inspect a leak and some water damage. I squirmed inside, since they were my blue silk graduation shoes and I knew they had cost seven dollars. You have to do this, my mother told me patiently. They only give you a portion of the money anyway, and this way, what you get may come nearer to the damage you actually suffered. I was mortified.

My mother also believed that an American citizen had the right to call the president of a company if, for example, a department store wasn’t giving the proper service which all citizens deserved. I remember, as a twelve-year-old, standing with my mother in either Bloomingdale’s or Lord and Taylor, as she tried to complain about a coat that was torn. Always go to the top, was her motto. And it was appallingly effective. Soon the manager had come to the floor and I had hidden myself behind a rack of clothes, determined not to be seen and certainly not to be associated in any way with this crazy, demented woman who was too loud and too demanding, and, God help us, was getting everything fixed exactly as she wanted it. To this day, I squirm when anyone at my table in a restaurant calls the waiter and sends back their food. And my husband tells me that I have an irritating tendency to always side with the merchant whenever he tries to bargain.

Another of my mother’s mottoes was Always go to the source. She was a natural reporter. In 1943 she told her students to look up the original pre-Disney version of Bambi. She was elated when her students preferred the German original by Felix Salton, a sad story, without that dopey love stuff. Still another motto: Always act like you belong. This is one of her lessons I’ve really tried to live by. Once, at the age of twenty, while selling housewares in Bloomingdale’s, I wandered by chance into the executive Christmas party. I ate and drank with the rest, just assuming that it was a party for all employees. Later the manager of my department, who had seen me, told me I wasn’t supposed to be there. He laughed, amazed that I had just walked in and started stuffing myself with pastries. But of course, that is the very deep secret my mother taught me; if you act as if you belong, everyone else will think you do.

And perhaps the best motto of all: It’s only once around the merry-go-round. So do it now. Live life to the hilt. And she generally did. Of course, that motto carries with it a great restlessness—that was part of her too.

Some of my mother’s greatest performances took place before I was born, and during my childhood they had achieved the status of legends. In the summer she would become very