IT BEGAN, AS for many psychologists of my generation, when I first read Sigmund Freud. I was thirteen years old, and my sister came home from the University of Rochester for her summer vacation. Beth was my exuberant and affectionate mentor from the time I was six. When I was seven she taught me what a factorial was. Showing off to my second-grade class may have been my first display of academic hubris. When I was nine, she read Flatland aloud to me,1 unveiling the marvels of geometry. At twelve, I confessed to her that I had never read a whole book and merely bluffed my way through seventh-grade book reports. So she locked me in my bedroom with The Count of Monte Cristo and did not let me out until I had read all of it. Eighteen hours later, I emerged, peed copiously, and passed her quiz. I have never been without a novel since.
In the summer of 1955 she brought home Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.2 So I lay in the navy surplus hammock that stretched between two emaciated pine trees outside our little camp in Lake Luzerne, New York, and I could not put Freud down.
Counting forward from the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I was born almost exactly nine months later. My conception, I surmise, was a declaration of optimism about the future by my parents, Irene and Adrian. Both of them had lived troubled lives, and optimism did not come at all naturally.
My mother, Irene Brown, was born in 1905 in Nagyvarad (meaning “big town”), Hungary—now Romania. She changed her birthdate to 1906 when she married my father in 1931 since it was unseemly for the bride to be older than the groom. Nagyvarad was a center of fashion and culture and Jewish life until the Nazis “cleansed” it of Jews in 1944. My grandmother (Elsa Bet Weinstock) died giving birth to Irene. It was December 1905 in the Carpathians, and Irene, premature, was incubated in the family oven and nursed to health by my grandfather. With the death of his wife, Marten Brown lavished all his affection on tiny little Irene. Bathed in such love, the first three years of my mother’s life must have been idyllic. But scarring events would soon cast her out of paradise.
Marten was a tailor who designed women’s clothes, and he was ambitious. This was the height of the Belle Époque, and Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was the center of the intellectual and artistic universe. This was the Vienna of Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, and the Strausses—it was the place to be, but it was also a place of rising anti-Semitism. Marten, in his mid-twenties, must have yearned for Viennese life and applied to the Academy of Fine Arts to study haute couture. Just a Jew from the countryside, he was summarily rejected (as was Adolph Hitler, twice). So he packed up Irene and decided to try his luck in Berlin.
But not before acquiring a second wife. I knew her only as “Granny Brown.” Petite, solid, outspoken, determined-jawed, fiery … and jealous, she was a stepmother right out of Cinderella. The love that Marten lavished on his firstborn daughter his wife should have instead, and she let him know it. Marten withdrew from Irene, and even in her late eighties, Irene teared up when she spoke about this rejection, a rejection that no three-year-old could possibly understand, a rejection that any three-year-old would only attribute to herself.
Berlin proved no more promising than Vienna, and Marten’s haute couture hopes were again dashed. So in 1911 he took his five-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife to New York. They settled in the town of Tuckahoe, a few miles north of the Big Apple, and Marten opened a tailor’s shop. Irene’s first day of school was bittersweet. This was the age of the welcomed huddled masses coming to America, and her class was full of newly landed kids. The kindergarten teacher called on the children to share songs from their homelands, and a Scottish girl sang. Irene knew exactly what was going on and bursting with excitement waved her hand to be called on. She so wanted to sing a Hungarian song. But since she spoke no English, the teacher passed over her for the Irish girl on her right.
As she grew into a teenager, she was not passed over any more. She was gorgeous—there is no other word: five-foot-one, full-figured, blonde, and blue-eyed. She was well-spoken but reserved and very sympathetic of manner—a girl you could pour your heart out to. But poverty took its toll. Marten’s tailor shop burned to the ground. Irene dropped out of high school to help support the family as a legal secretary. In the early hours of the morning, she often heard Marten sobbing in his bedroom in despair over their dwindling finances.
But all her suitors during the Roaring Twenties may have been ample compensation. One of them, a most persistent young law student, she brushed off repeatedly. Not to be deterred, he sat mooning on her porch steps all evening, waiting for Irene to return from her dates. By now she was engaged to a wealthy dentist (there are family rumors of six engagements), and the Great Depression had begun. One evening Adrian must have finally caught her in the weak moment he was waiting for. He pounced, and their romance began.
Persistence was only one of Adrian’s strengths. He was handsome, but not head-turningly so like Irene: five-foot-nine, blonde, barrel-chested, and blue-eyed, with the deepest dimple in his chin. He was also dazzlingly clever, ingratiating of conversation, and extremely quick of mind. His parents, Sigmund and Matilda (née Beringer), had emigrated from the Dutch border of Germany and from Alsace, respectively, in the 1890s and married in New York City on the very last day of the old century. Their firstborn, Bert, Adrian’s big brother and my uncle-to-be, was a strapping, ruddy, and domineering lad. He became a millionaire in his twenties on the eve of the Great Depression and founded a Wall Street trading firm. In a family scandal, he changed his name to Sinclair upon marrying a Catholic—a cause for ostracism by the Seligmans. Adrian, in contrast to Bert, was a sickly child, prone to hiding at home from school when things got too rough. He had a childhood lump in the throat that impeded swallowing, likely an anxiety condition known as globus hystericus. It was quite prevalent in the days of Freud but is rarely seen today. (If I think too hard about my own Adam’s apple, I can almost feel the lump arising. I will refrain and put off a discussion of heritability until later in this book.)
But Adrian skipped four grades in school, zoomed his way through City College, got his bachelor of laws degree from New York University School of Law and then a Juris Doctor from Columbia, when the D in “JD” meant that you wrote a real doctoral dissertation. His was about Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. He courted Irene successfully, and they married in 1931, honeymooning in Atlantic City, then a classy destination.
And then came the crucial decision of his life.
He was a brilliant young lawyer, armed with a doctorate from Columbia Law School. But it was the second year of the Great Depression. Lawyers were not out of work, but much of the rest of America was, and clients were having trouble paying up. Lawyers were still drawing salaries, but many of them were poor. He was newly wed, and he and my mother both saw potential disaster looming more readily than they saw opportunity.
So he chose a secure path: civil service. Low pay, steady work, no chance of ever losing your job, but also no chance of scaling the heights of money or power. No chance of standing eye to eye with Bert.
Adrian took a job reporting judges’ decisions at the Court of Appeals (New York State’s highest court) and moved with Irene from the center of power—Manhattan—to the provinces: Albany.
Albany in 1931 was not a boomtown and, in fact, hadn’t been since the building of the Erie Canal more than a century before. Its population had held steady at 130,000 for those one hundred years. While it was the capital of New York State and domicile of politicians on the rise—Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, soon to be president, to name just two—the brightest lights escaped every weekend on the express train back to Grand Central Station in Manhattan.
Albany was settled by the Dutch in the 1620s, and the prominent wealthy families were still named Ten Eyck, Schuyler, VanDerZee, Pruyn, and Van Renselaer, with a couple of Townsends and Livingstons thrown in for diversity. The decaying estate of the patroon still stood high o’er the Hudson River. But the old families eventually lost their political power to the Irish, who had come en masse as laborers after the 1845–1852 potato famine. By 1920 Dan O’Connell’s political machine—a machine so all-powerful as to make Jersey City and Chicago look like democracies—ran the city. O’Connell passed out twenty-dollar bills from the living room of his unpretentious row house in Colonie to voters in need, and the machine’s front man—Mayor Erastus Corning IV—lent it all a veneer of gentility.
Albany was as grubby as it was corrupt, and the Great Depression made it worse. Large numbers of “bums,” looking for any work at all, roamed the streets during the day and slept in cardboard boxes on the banks of the Hudson River by night. The bums were white, and beneath them on the social scale were the black community, who were even more miserable and drew even less public sympathy and attention. This was in good weather. In the winters, when snow could pile up to four feet and the temperature could sink below zero for a week, life was brutal, fragile, and cheap.
Civil servants and merchants made up the middle class, some of whom hailed from Albany’s sizable enclave of Jews. There were the old Jewish families: the Sterns, Nathans, Mendelsons, and Barnets, the Jewish upper crust. They had come to Albany in the mid-1800s, founded Reform Judaism in America, owned the factories, and become prominent pillars of the community—although they still could not join the Fort Orange Club. Then there were the nouveau riche Jewish families, newer arrivals, who ran very prosperous businesses. They were the upper middle class, and they could join the Colonie Country Club—but not Wolfert’s Roost. And then there were the rest of us, the civil servants and just-hanging-in-there merchants, who could not join Colonie but could join the synagogues.
Adrian and Irene joined T’Firith Israel, the conservative synagogue. I came to know, under tragic circumstances, that my father was an atheist, but my mother was very strongly attached to Judaism. Marten had been pious (as well as a loyalist admirer of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who had given a medal to his second wife for her apple strudel). My father’s attachment to Judaism was political. A mover and shaker, he became president of the synagogue and was instrumental in transforming it into Temple Israel, which became the largest and most powerful of the Jewish institutions in Albany.
The Seligman family in 1945 at the Fulton Chain of Lakes in upstate New York: Martin (three), Adrian, Beth (ten), and Irene. Courtesy of the author.
SO YOU NOW know the world as I found it when I arrived one gestation period after Pearl Harbor.
“Just in time for lunch,” were the first words my mother heard on August 12, 1942, after the delivery at 11:58 a.m.—an exclamation we will soon hear William James make under more momentous circumstances. I came late, and Irene was forced to walk and walk and walk to induce labor. It must have been traumatic, because after that I was never late again: a compulsion to get stuff done and show up early is an emblem of my life that I am proud of.
There was no doubt that I would be named for my saintly grandfather, Marten, who had died of a sudden heart attack in 1940. Elias was chosen as my middle name to honor Irene’s Weinstock grandfather. But all this upset my naming-deprived six-year-old sister, who was then given naming rights. So I acquired a second middle name, Peter.
Martin Elias Peter Seligman.
Somehow the unmyelinated oblivion of childhood blanketed World War II right up to its close, and my first memory, no less disturbing, dates from the very end of the conflict. It was April 1945, and a blue-eyed boy with ringlets of platinum blonde hair was playing on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. All the photos from that era—and my father took hundreds of them—show me to be unfailingly merry and beaming.
I heard heartbroken sobs and gasps from the next room and soon found my mother on the second step of the stairs under the newel post, her head in her hands. I tried to comfort her but could not. She would not stop. She sobbed and sobbed.
What had happened? The thirty-two-month-old boy was mystified, and he knew only that the person at the center of his universe was in the throes of grief and that he was helpless to do anything about it. Many years later, my mother explained that she must have just heard that President Franklin Roosevelt had died or, even worse, that she had just found out about all the Jews—much of her family abandoned in Hungary—murdered.
Or both.
I can’t say for sure if the sunshine went out of my life just then, but the photos of me as a young child—merry and beaming—do look different from those taken in later childhood, and they look very different still from those of my teenage years. The smiles are a shade or two less bright after age three, and by late childhood I am usually tight-lipped and unsmiling. When that beaming two-year-old looks up at me from the old photos, I do not recognize him. But I do recognize myself in the teenage photos. By then I look serious. Considering my lifelong skirmishes with my own depression and the fact that my early work in psychology centered on helplessness and depression, this must have been a turning point in my life.
Martin in 1946, the blue-eyed boy with ringlets of platinum blonde hair. Photo by Adrian Seligman.
I was indeed a serious student once school started. My parents first tried nursery school when I was four, but the moment my mother left, I wailed and did not stop until my parents retrieved me. So school was postponed until I was five.
School 16 was only two blocks from our house on South Main Avenue. The ten-minute walk took me first for a long hug from Milton, the crippled and basset-eyed newsboy peddling the Times Union outside Mack’s corner drug store; then past Stittigs, where the cherry parfaits at thirty-five cents were Beth’s highest reward for me; then past the Madison Theater, where every Saturday morning Hopalong Cassidy outgunned Peg Leg and his gang of seedy Mexicans; across Madison Avenue under the watchful eye of the huge, merry policeman in black leather; and onto the packed-dirt playground of the school yard, where two hundred scruffy kids stood awaiting the rattle of the morning bell.
What awaited us on the inside of School 16 was … well, not much. Teaching kids in the public schools of Albany was the female extension of the O’Connell machine’s hiring dozens of men to plant tulips in slow motion in Washington Park. In addition to legions of unemployed males in need of featherbedding, there were legions of unemployed spinsters to pay off as well. These were my teachers.
We spent countless hours singing about Ireland.
And if there is going to be a life hereafter
And somehow I am sure there’s going to be
I will ask my God to let me make my heaven
In that dear land across the Irish Sea.
(It makes me sick even now that my seventy-five-year-old mind is still cluttered with this junk rather than with Shakespeare or the Gettysburg Address or even the Bible.) Irish songs were broken by an occasional song about America. We had dancing lessons next to the monstrous coal-blackened furnace in the basement.
Papa loves Mambo
Mama loves Mambo
Swings like a gate with it
He loses weight with it
Uhh
We memorized times tables and practiced penmanship. “Duck and Cover,” diving under our desks and covering our heads with our hands to survive a Russian nuclear attack, was a fun break in the otherwise mindless school day. Try as I might, I cannot recall a single intellectual moment until the fourth grade.
I soaked up a storehouse of knowledge through this period—but not from going to school. I had a stamp collection from which came unbidden the geography and political makeup of the world. I could feel the German inflation of 1920 as I glued in the stamps overprinted with 1 million marks and then 1 billion marks. The dignified visage of a youthful King George VI on British colonial stamps told me of a vast empire that stretched across the globe, an empire that kids who went to better schools learned about from Rudyard Kipling. Without any effort I absorbed a lot of American history from the president series (Woodrow Wilson on the one-dollar stamp, Warren Harding on the two-dollar stamp, and Calvin Coolidge on the five-dollar stamp). I had a drawer full of comic books, including Classic Comics, from which came, again unbidden, rudimentary space science, the plots of the great novels, and countless portraits of what it is to suffer and what it is to be a victim and what it is to have courage.
“AND NOW FOR the finals. The fourth grader who gets all of these right will be Albany’s Quiz Kid,” said the announcer to the expectant audience of about two hundred parents, teachers, and students assembled in the Madison Theater.
“There are only two of you left. Martin Seligman, you have ten seconds. What state ends in ‘ut’?”
“Connecticut,” I snapped back.
The heroes of the Seligman household in 1952 were not Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, or even Mohandas Gandhi. Not Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, though they were runners-up. Rather, the big names were Joel Kupperman, Joan Alizier, and Dickie Freeman. They were Quiz Kids. Once a week Beth and I sat in the kitchen on the edge of our chairs, glued to this popular radio show from Chicago. Five kids, chosen for IQ, poise, and quick wit, competed to answer listener-sent-in questions. “President Truman must fly over eight states to go to Washington from his home in Independence, Missouri. Name five.”
I raced the Quiz Kids, often winning to Beth’s cheers. The Chicago celebrities, it was announced, were chosen from local playoffs. Imagine, Martin, that you can win a playoff in Albany and get to Chicago.
The moment actually arrived. “Connecticut is right, Martin. Now, Rocco, your question. How many Little Peppers are there?”
Rocco Giaccomino, from somewhere in lower Albany, a place my family wouldn’t even drive through, pondered.
“Five,” he ventured. I was sure he was guessing. I didn’t know why, but I too would have guessed five.
“Correct!”
And so it went through six more rounds.
“Martin. Who wrote ‘Flow Gently Sweet Afton,’ and where is it?” I’d never remotely heard of this. The Afton must be a river. In Ireland? But not in any song we sang in School 16.
“England,” I blurted out right before the bell.
“Incorrect! Rocco?”
“Scotland. ‘Flow Gently Sweet Afton’ is a poem by Burns … Robert Burns,” said Rocco with finality.
On the way out of the theater, Beth said disconsolately, “How can they expect an eight-year-old to know Robert Burns?”
I took home a Mickey Mouse watch with a fire-engine-red wrist-band. Rocco, unfairly all of nine and taught by Scottish spinsters, went to Chicago.
HEBREW SCHOOL WAS held in the basement of the Federal Street Synagogue. Mrs. Mordkoff, four-foot-six, hair dyed orange-red, with disfiguring scars on her cheeks, taught Jewish history. Neatly crayoned drawings of ancient Jewish conquests—the sword-wielding Amalekites, the Phoenicians tending miniature sailing ships, and the giant be-skirted Philistines fallen under Jewish spears—adorned the walls.
Albany Quiz Kids final, 1950. Rocco Giaccomino wins. Photo courtesy of Adrian Seligman.
The heat of the ovens of Bergen-Belsen was palpable in this basement. Our teachers were refugees from Hitler, and they were militant Zionists. The phrase “never again,” though unspoken, was omnipresent. As in School 16, there was never an intellectual moment. We memorized the twelve tribes of Israel—they were up there in crayon if we forgot. Manasseh was huge and purple. We recited Hebrew we didn’t understand and sang songs in Hebrew and English.
Israel, Israel lives again
For the greatness and courage
Of her men …
Beth interjected loudly
And Women
IF WE MEMORIZED enough Hebrew, we got promoted to memorizing Rashi, a rabbinic commentator of the fifteenth century whose Hebrew was in a different script, and obediently we read Rashi aloud still minus understanding. I was reading Rashi aloud and recovering from a bug that had kept me home the week before. The teacher, a grizzled ancient in a threadbare black suit with a pocket watch on a silver chain, towered over me, glaring. I read on. I came to a word I had not seen before and sounded it out: “Yee … yaw.”
Lifted by the scruff of my neck into the air and tossed out the door, I landed on the polished wooden floor outside. Much later, I was told that I had sinned by saying the name of the Lord out loud. My class had learned the previous week that this was forbidden.
The best moment of Hebrew school was right after it ended. Like released prisoners, Howie Berkun, David Grand, and I shot out the double doors and raced up to the greasy spoon at the corner of Federal and Delaware. A deep fryer redolent of boiling pork fat dominated the tiny room. For a quarter it produced the most delicious fries I had ever tasted. The secret was smearing them with catsup and salt and eating the potatoes immediately out of the fryer.
Adrian, elected president of the synagogue, had sold the old building to the Jehovah’s Witnesses (as a child I hadn’t the foggiest idea what they were) and merged the congregation with one of the other conservative congregations; he was now running for president of the newly minted Temple Israel. The internecine rivalries were fierce, and dinner conversation was all about what a “dope” Kibby Koblenz, his opponent, was and how Adrian’s young handler, Leo Pfaff, was bringing the Lorvans around. My bar mitzvah was scheduled for October 1955 in the spanking new building.
But my little world was about to be turned upside down.