Shanda! Shameful Family Secrets with Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Abigail Pogrebin

[@amyhariton3391]

I loved this conversation Letty, you are so courageous for sharing. My parents were born in Poland. My father said that, in Europe, if there was sickness in the family, you never shared it for fear that no one would marry you

[@enidjackowitz6895]

Thank you Letty for your awesome book. A Blessing on Your head!

[@Historian212]

I’m an admirer of both women; however, I’m surprised at Letty turning feminism into a self-disclosure movement. (Funny, I always thought it was about equal rights and equal pay, go know.) People have the right to keep secrets. They have the right to write their own story, if they need to, as long as they don’t perjure themselves or lie in legal proceedings. I suspect that Letty doesn’t realize that in this obsession with “truth” she misses another truth: people have always kept secrets, changed names, altered their age, etc. Before computerized records and modern methods of communication, people lied all the time. Today, we find this shocking; a couple of generations ago, it was common. I could write a long list of all the stories I’ve encountered doing research. I invite her to visit a genealogy conference or talk to a professional genealogist. We who do historical research always run into this as we trace families back, even just a couple of generations ago. And it certainly wasn’t just a thing among Jews (I’m also Jewish, of mixed heritage). Socio-economic status had at least as much to do with it as anything else. People imagine their group to be exceptional in various ways, for better and for worse. And they attribute it to being Jewish, or Italian, or Chinese, or whatever they are. Nonsense. Virtually every social group has norms and boundaries, and people tend to bend themselves to fit inside those norms, or suffer consequences. It’s probably as old as humanity, or older. And some people - I’m not talking about pathological liars here - usually at or toward the bottom of the social ladder, but not always, have had to lie to survive. There’s a real issue of privilege around the notion that everyone can just “let it all hang out,” as we said in the olden days. Also, that sort of relentless disclosure hurt a lot of people. And for what? To satisfy someone’s curiosity? To “unburden themselves”? If this catharsis works for her, great. But turning it into a cause and making a fuss over how brave she is, in her privileged little world, ignores the real struggles of many people who choose not to disclose the intimate details of their lives. If my grandmother needed to feel better about herself by claiming she was born in Vienna, rather than in a shtetl, so what? Who was harmed? I used to believe I needed to uncover all the “truths” about the past in order to feel a sense of wholeness. I grew out of it. If we have the right to reinvent ourselves, so did they. In whatever way allowed them to get through their days, barring the illegal or the pathological. After all, in the past, “history” was about making meaning and passing on lessons, not so much about facts, as we define fact today. Memory is fluid, even today, and I wonder, increasingly, if unearthing all the facts about our family’s past is all it’s cracked up to be.