Photoessay #2854 - Horizontal and Vertical

Last night, I read two interesting pieces that somehow intersect in what I'm working myself towards.

A book review in the November 19, 2012 New Yorker, "Little Strangers" by Nathan Heller
and
the book "At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews" by Deborah Dash Moore, 1981

The New Yorker article reviewed David Solomon's "Far from the Tree" a book examining children with substantial handicaps and their parent's efforts.  He introduces horizontal and vertical identities.  Horizontal identities is how we are different from our parents.  In this author's personal case, he has stuttered since childhood, nobody in his family ever has.  All of the children in this book are very different from their parents.

More broadly, many of us have always maintained that we are different from our parents, nothing like them at all.  We share more with our peers, our cohort.

Vertical identity demonstrates the characteristics that we share with our parents and ancestors.

I'm not EVER going to go into adoption here, even though my family is full of it.

The Dash Moore book examines the housing patterns in New York City specifically for the children (second generation) of the Eastern European Jews who came around the turn of the century.  Most of the emigrants lived in crowded slum conditions in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Then as they rose in mobility they raised their children in newer apartments and homes in Brookly and the Bronx.  Later they and their own children would move farther out into suburban areas.  Yet they kept some of their own behaviors and community activity even as they moved (vertical identity).

But, though this immigration pattern is culturally identified with the Jews, I feel no connection with it.  My paternal grandmother's parents did come from 'Russia' (Odessa and Kiev) in the 1890s but their daughter, my grandmother, did not share any of this culture (or she hid it darn well).  My paternal grandfather came from an earlier immigration from Poland; they lived in Rochester., NY.  My paternal grandparents lived in Boston and they reflected the folksways of the educated middle class, refinement.  The most important institution in their (particularly my grandfather's) life was Harvard University.  My grandfather went there on scholarship as a member of class of 1920.  This shaped his life more than anything else.

My mother's family, as I've written about a lot, were the affluent German Jews who came in the middle of the nineteenth century.  They never lived in crowded tenements, never spoke Yiddish.  My grandparents, who had both come from moneyed homes, did have a very tough time during the depression.  Money was lost on all sides.

Look at us now, their descendants, often it's hard to find much in common with them.