My father was a school teacher and he also worked nights
in the post office because he had medical bills to pay. He had
to keep my mother alive, and he had two children to support
as well. I say along with Joseph Chaikin in
emblematic of the System which literally chooses who is to
survive. I renounce my government for its inequitable economic system. ”*1 Others, I must point out to you, had and have less than we did. Others who were not my mother but
* Notes start on p. 113.
who were in her situation did and do die. I too renounce this
government because the poor die, and they are not only the
victims of heart disease, or kidney disease, or cancer— they
are the victims of a system which says a visit to the doctor is
$25 and an operation is $5, 000.
When I was twelve, my mother emerged from her heart
surgery and the stroke that had robbed her of speech. There
she was, a mother, standing up and giving orders. We had a
very hard time with each other. I didn’t know who she was, or
what she wanted from me. She didn’t know who I was, but she
had definite ideas about who I should be. She had, I thought, a
silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I
was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I
had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas
hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t
want to be a mother.
My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of
him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was
the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be
a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,
even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical
course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it
all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,
for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,
instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing
work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be
educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from
him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,
his children would become whatever they wanted. My father
made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing
those children so that they would become whatever they could
become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and
talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi
tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be
nourished and grow—but he did. *
So in our household, my mother was out of the running as
an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose
