Growing up in Connecticut
It’s a small state, but a very choice one. I was born in Stanford, Connecticut. Then we moved around quite a bit. I was born in 1930, the beginning of The Depression. My father was chasing jobs. Luckily, he always found them. They weren’t the best jobs all the time, but he did put food in our mouths. But sometimes he would have to go off by himself and work and we would live somewhere else and he would come home weekends.
We moved shortly after I was born. We moved to Yonkers, New York. We moved over to New Jersey. And we fetched up in New Haven, Connecticut, where my mother’s mother and her family lived and some of my father’s family, as well. And some of my memories have to do with this large extended family. No one had very much money. They were immigrants. There was a great warmth, a lot of Yiddish speaking — which they kept from me — because it was the secret language that grownups could communicate with.
Two grandmothers whom I just adored, my grandfathers didn’t live as long, aunts and uncles that I worshiped and that I was the oldest of the little cousins in one part of the family and so I was their pet. They sang. One uncle had a Dixieland band. Another uncle was the only one who was really going straight through Yale on scholarship and was the real intellectual and shared a lot of his books of poetry, etc. with me as a little girl and I just worshiped him.
And when I went back to Yale in my fifties to work on a doctorate in English Lit., I shared his house in Stratford with him and his wife and it felt as if I was going back to my little girlhood again because we’d talk about the same things and he was my mentor again. So it was really wonderful. With all the different things that have happened, I realize that the very strong love I have for family and the way I’ve incorporated it into many of my books — even books whose theme was not precisely that — but in the end, it does come through.
And it all has to do with this very loud, raucous, opinionated family, chattering around in various languages and just drinking tea in glasses with cherries in them. That was what they did around the kitchen table. And I, sitting there wanting to understand what they were talking about and not always succeeding, but just feeling very good to be a part of it. Yes, I loved that very much.
