A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's college classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. He wrote:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

This was an open secret, but no one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia Schober, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD. The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again. And never did.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents do live-in childcare. From their births Aurelia supported her children's education and growth in every possible way, was positive and honest with them: Aurelia was a talented mother.

Aurelia Plath couldn't become a writer but seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

 

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.

I Am the Jew

Family photo, 1920; the baby is my future stepfather.

After proving that Sylvia Plath was not a Jew -- her maternal ancestry is 100 percent Central European Roman Catholic -- it turns out I was the Jew.

Found out my maternal great-grandmother's surname was Goldmann.

Of course I am not a real Jew unless my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother practiced Judaism. Grandma and Mom were so Polish Catholic they pinned hankies on our heads. In 1886 Josepha Goldmann in Prussia married a Polish Catholic, the church wedding record giving her maiden name as "Josepha Goldmann alias Wlodarczyk." "Alias" is so very unusual in such records, and the handwriting so cramped, that a searcher before me transcribed Josepha's name as "Goldmannalias." [1]

My mother had once said we were really Jews and I rolled my eyes because European immigrant families, including the Plaths, often tell of a Jew in the family, just as longtime U.S. residents claim Cherokee Indian blood. Furthermore Mom said that her father's older brother, resentfully serving in Russia's army, stole the Czar's horses. Nearly every family has its horse thief.

Genealogy is a hobby. I've been at it about a year, taking lessons in the software, learning as I go, and I know that Jewishness is passed down through mothers.

Then I looked up online why a Jewish girl might get a Polish alias and marry a Polish Catholic named Ludovicus Ziolkowski and have two kids and then emigrate to Chicago and have ten more kids before disappearing from official records. Maybe she ran away. Ludvik, an iceman, then remarried, siring a total of two sons and 14 daughters, two named Josephine. My grandmother was the one born in 1896, according to pages I tore from the family bible.

I told my sister we had a Jewish female ancestor, and she told her daughter, who thanks to other people's research can now also qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution because her father's 6X great-grandfather was a captain in the Revolutionary War. My father's family records were destroyed in World War I, but new databases of World War II Nazi Persecutees and Displaced Persons let me follow his progress from camp to camp to Ellis Island. Dad had us raised as Eastern Orthodox Christians, whose priests blessed us with herbal incense and holy water, and we had all sorts of rituals, some cognate with Jewish ones.

What was different now that I was Jewish? Earlier in life I might have cared more. I respect Judaism and Jewish authors, the latest Sylvia-Plath-related book I read being Alfred Kazin's lyrical depth-charge A Walker in the City (1951) about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. Kazin was Sylvia's teacher. She had to have read the book. Her memoir "Ocean 1212-W" has similarities.

But back at the family tree some days later I saw I had identified the 1896 daughter named Josephine Ziolkowski with her father Ludvik through the 1900 U.S. census. Polish baptismal records show my genuine grandmother was born in 1893, to Francizek, not to Ludvik, and no Ludvik, no Jew. I had also confused Francizek's wife Mary Kotwica (b. 1864) with another Mary Kotwica (b. 1865), both emigrants to Chicago and both buried in the same cemetery.

I cleaned up my family tree, merging and purging and trying to match genuine great-grandfather Francizek, b. 1858, with the 30 or so "Francis" "Franz" "Franciscus" and "Frank" Ziolkowskis born around then. Not finding him I couldn't find his parents so couldn't ascertain whether Ludvik who married the Jew might be Francizek's relative.

Then I double-checked the name Goldmann and learned that "Goldmann" with two "n"s is a German name denoting a goldsmith or gilder. The Jewish version of the name is Goldman.

So Josepha was not a Jew who masqueraded as Polish -- as some girls did -- but a Germanic woman who assumed a Polish alias so as not to be mistaken for a Jew. Which is what Sylvia Plath's immigrant grandparents did when they anglicized their surname, Grunwald, to Greenwood.

I spent hours, having once again to learn: Guesses are always wrong.

I make mistakes. But this one -- the very idea -- confirmed for me that I could use a vacation.

[1] "Alias" in Polish names sometimes signifies a pseudonym chosen to disguise political activity.

Aurelia Plath's Political Group

On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit the science courses she so dreaded that she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:

subjects questions for political discussion group

1. religion

2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.

3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.

4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?

5. heredity or environment

6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.

7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.

8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.

9. communism and how it affects us.

10. current events

11. the American negro [1]

 

Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.

 

Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes, written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.

 

Most of the discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life.  Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most with her own answers implicit -- yet open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.

 

Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof, and "Republican" back then didn't mean the insanity it means now. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed [in] every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered" and voted Republican ever after. Why? Possibly because of Roosevelt was “the only candidate in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” said the German-American Roosevelt League. [2] Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered to vote as Progressives in 1912 when Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election on a very liberal platform.

 

Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted in Aurelia’s household: Her mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and became suicidally depressed.

 

[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.

[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years, Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.

Most Popular Posts of 2024

1955

The most popular AureliaPlath.info post of 2024 was "Warren," about Sylvia Plath and her brother, some readers responding that they never knew Sylvia had a brother. Glad they now know that Sylvia grew up with a kid brother just as exceptional as she, and for 14 years -- from Warren's birth until he went to boarding school in 1949 -- Sylvia treated him as a usurper and a rival. 

As far as I know Sylvia never wrote a poem about her brother.

I'll be more opinionated in 2025 because the next most popular posts were the two book reviews, for Sylvia Plath Day by Day, by Carl Rollyson, and Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne. Next most-read were "Poems About Aurelia Plath" and "Atlantic City Waiter" about Sylvia's African-American grand-uncle, Christopher Nicholson. I continue to seek information about Nicholson, having found his family of origin in Warsaw, North Carolina. And don't forget the Aurelia Plath video and audio recordings available through this site.

Out of 45 posts my personal-favorites were of primary materials: The never-before-seen photos of Sylvia Plath's mad grandmother, Ernestine, young and old; and, for amusement, Aurelia's list of "Bones to Pick with Dick Norton."

This was also the year I enjoyed traveling to Winthrop, Mass., and Wellesley, Mass., to see the settings the Plaths saw every day. Happy New Year from your researcher.

When Aurelia Plath Said Something Good About "The Bell Jar"

Aurelia Plath loved the November 1975 review of Letters Home that novelist Erica Jong wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Aurelia quoted the sympathetic review in notes and letters, savoring in particular the words, "Had Sylvia lived, she would have created many mothers, many daughters, and written in a voice other than that of the raging adolescent crying out in The Bell Jar." [1]

Aurelia gave an author's talk about Letters Home soon afterward. Part of this talk was recorded on tape. Aurelia told the audience The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971) was a hurtful book, but then said something she never otherwise said: "It's a wonderful book from many points of view. I was talking to the psychiatrist a few days ago and she said Sylvia has done a great service because she has explained so accurately what goes on in the emotions and in the mind of a person throughout depression. [The psychiatrist] said the same thing about Erica Jong's book, Fear of Flying. People criticize that there's four-letter words on practically every page. I've read it too, and it treats subjects that uh, certainly don't fall into the class of gentility. . . but is of invaluable importance to psychiatrists."

Sylvia Plath researcher Harriet Rosenstein, then in her early 20s, heard this tape shortly after it was made. While it was playing, another tape machine recorded both Aurelia's tape and Rosenstein's response to what Aurelia had just said.

Rosenstein [incredulous]: Fear of Flying?

Aurelia Plath: [some words inaudible] a great deal across the spectrum gone when a person is distressed.

Rosenstein: In Fear of Flying? [2]

So Rosenstein had read the Jong book, a bestseller in 1973. Like many high-literates she did not think it great. Yet "the psychiatrist" (female; identity unknown) was not wrong to compare the novels.

The narrator of Fear of Flying is an American woman who came of age in the 1950s, so frustrated sexually and otherwise that she can't believe in herself. Analyzed by six male psychiatrists and married to a seventh, she runs off on a road trip with another psychiatrist she has just met. Like The Bell Jar, Fear of Flying is semi-autobiographical but more graphic, and Jong's protagonist is an upper-middle-class New York Jew, age 29, more Sex in the City than owlish Esther Greenwood could be.

After re-reading Fear of Flying this week I'd say The Bell Jar was Fear of Flying's template. Quotations and phrases from Sylvia Plath's poems dot the text, and the voice is comparably first-person and contemporary. Both protagonists, well-educated, wanting to be writers, believe they must choose between "happy homemaker" or "intellectual nun." For them, any one choice cancels out the rest. 

In hindsight we can see the novels were not as useful to psychiatrists as they were to readers who began questioning what psychology and psychoanalysis said about women and did to them. Aurelia Plath had a front-row seat on that, seeing a radical difference in her daughter before and after electroshock and psychotherapy. Ultimately neither treatment seemed to do Sylvia any favors.

Fear of Flying (1973) sold more than 20 million copies; what I have is its 50th-year anniversary edition. Its story is dated and overlong -- unlike The Bell Jar, which is tidy and timeless -- but they were the right books at the right moments -- thus, bestsellers -- when Second-Wave women's liberation was new and questioning everything.

[1] "Letters Focus Exquisite Rage of Sylvia Plath," Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1975.

[2] Rosenstein Papers, Stuart Rose Library, Emory University, Collection 1489, tape v7b4x, side B.

Holiday Break

Did you have an aunt like mine? Mollie Albrecht (1920-2024). (Dig her rosary.)

I am on a one-week holiday break. Actually I'm researching my own family tree, using the genealogy website FamilySearch.org. Yesterday it found me a great-grandmother with a name, and as the default keeper of the family albums I have uploaded photos of each family member who has died. For privacy reasons, people still living cannot be added to the family tree. If you add yourself, only you can see that.

The Mormon church in 1894 set as a goal a family tree of all humanity, so to register on FamilySearch.org is free, and the site will not send emails or other bother. Familysearch is also rich with digitized historical documents. Anglos, you are in luck; your tree has probably already been researched and posted by distant relatives back to the 1400s. My own family of origin was barely represented, so I'm on it.

God rest ye merry!

This is Not a Nazi Salute

Pledge of Allegiance in 1941

Sylvia Plath wrote an essay in January 1963 about her "rowdy seaside town where I picked up, like lint, my first ten years of schooling," intending to sell the work to the British humor magazine Punch; she was at her most desperate for money and lived only three more weeks. Titled "The All-Round Image" and published as "America! America!" it is a lyric essay: loosely autobiographical and low on dialogue and anecdotes. Although Plath took nothing lightly, she provided the type of humor she knew: satire, meaning "ridicule with intent to improve." The Bell Jar is satirical, and approaching the novel as such reveals how much Plath was making fun of her avatar Esther.

So in writing about her "first ten years of schooling" in her hometown, Plath exaggerated, simplified, belittled, and undercut ("the lot of us" at school were "a lovely slab of depressed American public"), to amuse. She wrote, "Every morning, hands on hearts, we pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, a sort of aerial altarcloth over teacher's desk." I love the spot-on phrase "aerial altarcloth." Except Plath and her classmates never did "hands on hearts" in school in seaside Winthrop, which she and her family left in autumn 1942. In a detail too horrid to be funny, and that I'd never seen or heard of, from the time the Pledge of Allegiance was imposed on U.S. public schools (around 1890) an extended-arm salute went with it. 

Pledge of Allegiance with full Bellamy salute

This was the "Bellamy salute," standard with the Pledge of Allegiance until December 1942, when Congress for good reason replaced the gesture with "hand on heart." Charles Lindbergh was photographed in 1941 giving the Bellamy salute, and with the flag cropped out of the photo looked as if he was saluting Nazi Germany. His reputation never recovered. I mention this because Aurelia and Sylvia Plath both did this, and I expect, in the U.S., the Bellamy salute's revival.

(Note: I wasn't wrong. The salute happened in Washington, D.C., on 20 January 2025. Twice.)