Crossing borders : ambiguities and convictions

Abstract

Most formative in my life were the moments that were strung together as my childhood and adolescence—in a milieu that was thoroughly multicultural. I had the great good luck to be born, grow up and go to school in New York. My parents had migrated to the US from a small town in the part of Poland that was occupied by Russia until the end of World War I, now part of the Ukraine. As young adults, they studied some English and immediately went to work to make enough money to live on. I, on the other hand, had the advantage of excellent free public schools, and a university stipend that got me through to a BA at the age of nineteen. Beyond this, living in New York was an education in democracy and multiculturalism. Regular visits to the 42nd Street public library, with the two welcoming lions on the front steps filled me with awe and joy. Toscanini led the New York Philharmonic every Sunday and I could hear them on the radio. My first experience of the ballet was in the balcony looking down at creations of George Balanchine and Anthony Tudor, among the most respected classics of modern dance. Joining a seemingly endless queue and getting to see a new film together with a stage show at Radio City Music Hall around Christmas time was exquisite. And the people! I knew about WASPs from my school textbooks (nobody bothered about culturally appropriate materials then), but as the daughter of Jewish immigrants I knew exactly what it meant never quite to match the ideal. Now, I think the very definition of WASPs is an ideal type in Weber’s sense—a configuration of traits that is never found among real people, but provides a basis for telling how any given group deviates from the ‘ideal’. When I was growing up, I was not sure that I could even aspire to approach it. But in New York, I was after all a native; I rode the subways daily to and from school, rode the buses for going shopping and spending time with my friends. This meant endless opportunities to hear all the languages spoken in the city, to see faces of all colours of the rainbow, and to internalize the lifelong understanding that diversity is normal. The centre of my world during the week was of course school and the neighbourhood. But other influences were intertwined with these. Because my family was religious, I joined a Jewish youth group at the age of eleven. This was an introduction to being totally foreign. We called each other by our Hebrew names, the names given to us at birth by our families but understood to be inappropriate in a non-Jewish milieu. Our activities in the ‘nest’ of the movement were all oriented to the renascence of the Jewish people in Biblical Palestine, the site of our dreams. We danced and sang Hebrew songs, whose words I then learned by rote because I did not know the language. The girls and boys I met in the movement were my weekend life, a different place altogether. I loved living in a melange of different frames and this enhanced my taste for multiplicity and miscellany. There were also individuals who turned me in directions that have determined the tenor of my entire life. Studying piano from the age of seven added a different kind of language dimension. I spent years learning how to make the little black circles turn into varieties of sounds, and trying to think through what those designs meant. And in school, teachers indeed made a difference. Miss Garrahy, my home room teacher in the sixth grade was a model of the teacher who calmly accepted all her students and patently believed in their ability to make progress; her manner was an inspiration at the time and, indeed, has been ever since. Hunter College High School, now co-ed and then an all-girls school, was where I discovered the magic of serious study. And at Queens College, where I was a freshman at the age of 15, there were at least four professors who made a lasting impression on me: one who never prepared a lecture but always brought the liveliest criticism of political injustice into every class. In a class on the philosophy of science, Carl Hempel (one of the original Vienna group) demonstrated that logical positivism was the reigning truth for reasonable people. But in that class, I learned even more from a mature student, who untiringly raised objections to the positivists’ cold evasion of emotion. There was the professor of English who opened my eyes to the fact that only people with self-confidence are capable of learning from criticism. And there was Mr. Emory, from whose lectures on Ancient Rome, I shored the immortal sarcastic comment: ‘After all, no one really objects to war except mothers.’ Those four years leading up to a BA taught me that even in school one didn’t have to say ‘yes’ to everything someone in authority was saying or doing. That lesson served me well many years later when I was working on a thesis for my MA, and had to find answers even though all the professors were annoyed with my constant questioning. And even better when I did my doctorate with Thomas Luckmann who showed me in a most economical way that an adviser can be completely permissive and democratic but at the same time ready to pounce on any weakness, no matter how cunningly camouflaged. In looking back on what I have written in answer to this question, I found that a word that comes into almost every sentence is ‘but’ (I’ve deleted some). And if I went on and mentioned some more people, and one or two more organizations with which I was associated, I think that apart from the magic of multiplicity, I learned from all of them an ineluctable lesson—there is indeed always a ‘but’—the key to complexity.