What the Children of American Jewish Communists Needed, and What They Owe

Sometime in the 1970s a social worker in the Montreal Jewish community suggested organizing a counseling group for the second generation—children of Holocaust survivors who might benefit from working through their common trauma. There was much sympathy for this effort. All of us knew children of survivors with high levels of anxiety—the young woman who awoke from her sleep to her mother’s screaming; another whose mother sat in perpetual depression; the children whose father justified his ruthlessness in business as his life’s lesson from his time in the ghetto.

Though aftereffects of the war were very severe, I was not immediately persuaded by the social worker’s recommendation. Among the people I knew, having parents who had survived the war in Europe or even having themselves been born in a DP camp was not necessarily a defining condition of life or a useful focus for treatment. Alcoholics or prisoners may benefit from collective therapy because they share the same condition, but it was the Germans who had forced Jews into their Holocaust, and isolating that event in the lives of their children risked perpetuating and aggravating the damage rather than relieving it. I thought that the Jewish community could help those who sought professional help without reinforcing their identity as the Shoah’s second-generation victims.

Meanwhile, however, I pointed out that another second generation of Jews could benefit from group rehab. The children of Jewish Communists whose parents had freely chosen their path rather than having it forced on them badly needed a therapeutic process to work through the effects of growing up in a political cult that set them against their land of citizenship and against Judaism—all in the name of ideals that had led to mass murder. Children of Communists had either to reject the cause to which their parents had devoted their lives, or else perpetuate a system of lying—a choice itself adverse to mental health. Those parents who had faced up to the consequences of their actions eased the burden for their children, but I had in mind those whose parents had not.