NUCLEAR FICTION NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 6

My Family in Summer, 1943

A Video Time Machine: Two Sisters, Two Family Eras

                Why do some siblings turn out to be so different? Some elements of personality and talents undoubtedly are shaped by our genes (siblings only share 25% of DNA on average), but environment is also crucial. Families can provide very different emotional and parenting environments for different children, especially when one is ten years older, as was my sister. When I wrote my novel, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak, I was imagining how it may have been for my parents, who married at 22 and 19, and then had my sister Michal the next year. I focused a fair amount on the negative, given that the pregnancy was unintended and that my parents lived separately for a few months while my father moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee as part of the Manhattan Project. After the war, when my parents returned to Chicago, my mother was determined to wait to conceive a second child until they could afford to buy a house. Then it took her a while to get pregnant with me, unlike the first time.

                My sister and I both were high achievers in school. She was beautiful and became a successful advertising copywriter in New York City. I was a fat and clumsy child, but luckily slimmed down at adolescence and managed to have a satisfying career as a psychologist. However, as my sister entered her forties, depression and (from my perspective) a personality disorder contributed to destructive choices. I adored her when I was a child, but by the time she died, we were mostly estranged. I often wonder if my mother’s youth and ambivalence about having my sister, as well as the emotionally abusive relationship between my mother and my maternal grandmother Celia, contributed to my sister’s difficulties. In contrast to a somewhat distant and critical relationship with my sister, my mother confided in me too much, so that I had to set limits with her as a teenager, when she put me in the middle of her troubled marriage. By then, my sister lived far away and the financial stress that marred my parents’ early years together had eased considerably.

                After I finished writing Fission, I looked at some old, family films that I had not viewed for a few years. I was very struck by this one, which must be from the summer of 1943, a couple of months before my father left Chicago for Oak Ridge. Although it is grainy and one segment is oriented at right angles, what impresses me is the love in everyone’s eyes, my mother, my father, baby Michal, and even my grandmother, Celia. That sunny day in the park helps me understand why my father, grieving after my mother died, kept calling her, “my sweet Janet.” Although my mother could certainly be loving, for much of my lifetime she was more bitter and angry than sweet. The video makes me wonder if I overestimated the conflict in the family back then. Of course, my novel is fiction rather than a memoir, including a totally fabricated love triangle between the main character Doris, and a possible Soviet atomic spy.

                My sister’s childhood was shaped by wartime stress and the youth, inexperience, and limited finances of my parents, but perhaps their love for each other was purer then than the loyalty mixed with contempt (one of four horsemen of the marital apocalypse popularized by the psychologist, John Gottman, PhD) that I witnessed in my own early years.