Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much.
What a wonderful question to begin with, because it has these kind of two valences, the practical matter of where he came from and the kind of mystifying question of where any human being and all their wonderful specificity comes from. In the case of my father, both answers are a little complicated. His mother had fled the shtetl in Poland when it was clear that the shadow of the
Second World War was kind of creeping ever further across Poland. She came from a family of 12. They had the resources to get one of them to safety, and they chose their youngest daughter, who was my grandmother, and indeed her parents. And most of her siblings subsequently perished in Auschwitz. So she gets herself to Tel Aviv. My father is born.
And then at a very young age, he was sent away from his mother. He was sent to live on a kibbutz and spent a few years alone there. His father vanishes or dies. We don't know. My grandmother remarries. And after the war, their family in a truly unusual trajectory when half of global Jewry in its terrible decimated and refugee status is trying to get to the Holy Land.
My father and his family flee Tel Aviv and go of all places in the world to Germany. So my father left Tel Aviv at about seven, spent from seven to 12 in Germany, and then finally the family obtained refugee visas and wound up in Detroit, which is where he then spent his teenage years.
Just shocking amounts, really. I mean, my father was born in 1941, so all around him, what should have been whole vast branches of family trees are just being hewn off viciously, and whole communities are being leveled and destroyed. So there was this kind of background dislocation attendant upon every Jew born in that
But then quite specifically, you know, he was born essentially a stranger in a strange land. In 1948, when my father's family left Israel, or I should say left Palestine, it was still Palestine, it was effectively a war zone.
And indeed, an uncle who was traveling with him in the caravan to Haifa to leave at the port there was shot and killed in the car with my father in the car in the backseat when it happened.
There was a kind of omnipresent violence and insecurity that characterized his young life that is just shocking for me to contemplate, in part because he then dedicated his adult life to providing for his children the stability he did not have growing up.
My father became the kind of person who you would never guess the quantity of tragedy that lay in his past. You would never guess that his whole family had been decimated by the Holocaust, that he had all of this grief and loss and violence at every stage of his life. My father was brilliant. He was joyful. He was incredibly witty. He was shockingly brilliant.
And my dad spoke, I think, eight languages. But basically, English was the last of his many languages. And I like to think I'm a reasonably articulate person and my father could talk me out of the table. I mean, he just was beautifully gifted with languages. And I guess, fundamentally generous of spirit.
You know, his response to the privations of his life were to live as generous a life as he could, both with material means, but also with his joy, with his intellect, with his energy, his happiness lay in sharing it with the world.
What an interesting question. I've never been asked it before. I suppose I understand his temperament mostly as a great gift. And I'm not trying to deny my father credit he deserves. I know my father made a great many decisions about the kind of life he wanted to live and the kind of man he wanted to be, including in ways that changed over the course of my life.
I saw him actively become a more patient man. Patience did not naturally run strong in him, nor in me, for that matter. And I saw him make choices about equilibrium and patience. But I think in some fundamental way, I don't think my father was ever in denial about the experiences that shaped him. He didn't speak about them in great detail until I was myself an adult. But he certainly never...
pretended away the past. And he didn't conversely speak of himself as who he was because he had been forged in the flames of disaster or whatever. I don't think he valorized suffering as the thing that made him who he was.
Now, I certainly think that he had a very acute sense of what it had meant to be a Jew in the world in the middle of the last century, an acute sense of what it meant to be a refugee in this country.
I mean, look, my father had two brothers and one of them was just a year younger than him and for all intents and purposes shaped by identical forces and could not have been a more different human being. So there is something way deep down below the choices we make or our active will in the world that is inextricable from who we become.
I think that's absolutely right.
Sure, and what is resolving versus what is dwelling upon and what aspects of our life we choose to emphasize versus downplay. You know, there was this sort of greatest generation stoicism, right? And this valorization of never speaking about suffering. And I don't know that that was a perfect solution, right?
I mean, my father was an ebullient character, but his mother, my grandmother, was a deeply, deeply... bitter unhappy volatile woman and heaven knows she came by those qualities honestly right I mean her life had been unrelentingly traumatic and tragic in ways I cannot fathom surviving She refused to talk about it. I tried at various occasions. So did many other people close to her.
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