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Philip Boris Uninsky, "Invented Lives from Troubled Times: A Jewish Family’s Forms of Resilience after Surviving Pogroms, Revolution, and the Holocaust" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Philip Uninsky
So good, so good, so good.
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Philip Uninsky
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- [00:43]
Philip Uninsky
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- [01:32]
Philip Uninsky
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Hi, and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here today with Philip Uninsky, author of Invented Lives from Troubled A Jewish Family's form of Resilience After Surviving Pogroms, Revolution, and the Holocaust. Welcome.
- [01:59]
Philip Uninsky
Thank you. Nice to meet you.
- [02:01]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So we always begin the same way. Rather than me read your bio. We always give our guests a chance to introduce themselves. So tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the book.
- [02:13]
Philip Uninsky
I am what. What I think a lot of my colleagues call a recovering academic. And I was a social historian and a historical sociologist and then moved on to becoming an attorney, a public interest attorney. I've been fighting for the rights of children and families who are vulnerable for a long time. I set up a not for profit in 1996 called the Youth Policy Institute and do a lot of work on implementing and sometimes evaluating evidence based models for children and families. And I'm also not only working in the United States. But I spent the last, since 2008, 18 years working in Malawi, Africa, doing similar kinds of work. I wrote this book because I had many strong feelings about this family, this diverse family, that were, in a way, a counter narrative to a lot of the work that I'd done on trauma. As someone who was intervening with therapeutic services for a long time, what I found was that the trauma discourse, which dominates a lot of the literature, the trauma discourse, which tells us that
- [03:26]
Rabbi Mark Katz
for
- [03:27]
Philip Uninsky
those who have been subjected to and surviving extreme and serial trauma, their lives become flattened in a way. They lose their ability, their vibrancy, their agency. They quite often become chronically depressed, sometimes suicidal. And this kind of defines, in the context of the trauma discourse, defines their lives in a way. And what I saw in my family and my extended family was something completely different. A wild, vibrant diversity of being, a capacity to live in the present in a vibrant way. But also their resilience was extraordinary, given what they had survived. I also saw this as a way not only of remembering them, but also. And it's not a collective biography, nor is it an autobiography. I want to come back to that in a minute. But I also thought it was really important because not only is there not enough emphasis on resilience in this particular area of literature, but also much of the work that's done on exposure to trauma is really over short term. And I had the extraordinary privilege of following this family, this extended family, maternal and paternal side, for over 40 years. And so that I could see, to the extent that anyone could see, the line between trauma and its effects. And what I discovered over time was that there is no straight line. And the way one deals with tragic loss and horror, and is very distinct, but has many different avenues of capacity for re establishing themselves and for reinventing themselves. Hence the title of the book. They're constantly reinventing themselves and also inventing their memories. And the last reason I wrote this book, I think, is because all I had, for the most part, was their memories, their recollections, their remembrances, which is very common for millions of people who have survived total war and intense persecution and have fled with nothing but the clothes on their back because of immiseration or because of other horrors. And so I had to reconstruct what I thought was the sources of their resilience from their memories without any having any real documentation. And that's very common. But it's also very common that when people come to a new world, have fled several times from persecution, their lives are, in a sense, Tabula rasa, there are no anchors to who they are because there is literally no substance, no substantive documentation of who they are. And it's that tabula rasa, that ability to embroider a new life for themselves, is part of their resilience. It's a way of creating a new sense of who they are. But what's fascinating to me was that the line from trauma to how they accounted for themselves, who they were, who they chose to be, how they dealt with their children, all of that was extremely tenuous. The line, the linkage between the two, something that was to a certain extent, quite surprising to me because I. A lot of my life, I've been a positivist. I've always wanted to know, collect data, know, and be able to show the relationship between cause and effect. And this was something else completely different. And the reason for that tenuous connection had to do with the very way they behave and the way. The very way they. They provided their memories to me.
- [07:06]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So I want to delve into a comment that you made as you were talking just now about the nature of the book that you actually wrote, because for those who haven't read it yet, who are our listeners, there's. There's a lot in the book that defies characterization, right? It's part memoir, part biography, part character study. And it's really just. It's about a family who survives the Holocaust, comes to America or to other places in the world with all of the baggage, and tries to make a new life for themselves. But you skipped around in time, chapters that dealt with one character suddenly jumped to another character. And I have to imagine that all. All of this was a kind of decision to paint a sketch rather than tell a linear story. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about basically, how would you categorize the book that you wrote?
- [08:00]
Philip Uninsky
Well, I call it creative nonfiction, because I didn't have a good category. You're right. One of the reasons why it's so thematic and moves in time is their very recollections were asynchronous. They themselves never deposited their memories in the past, leading from the past being a prologue to the next step in their lives. They never talk about the sources of their resilience in the way that I, someone who studied resilience and has and implemented programs of resilience, would have studied it. I would have expected the sources of resilience to come popping up. The way they dealt with their parents, their parents protected them, their education, their friendship networks, their senses of community. None of that existed in their recollections. So as a result, I had to go back and go through different phases of my understanding of their memories and collect themes that I thought were instrumental in their ability to reinvent themselves, to survive and to develop their own personalities. And it had to do with context that they lived in. It had to do with their particular experiences that I could identify certain elements of how they became who they were. My uncle. My uncle Tola Anatole, who went from being a bohemian that was, and somehow managed to end up in the Resistance, controlling a lot of the Resistance activities in Brittany and then ending up becoming a grifter, a flim clamber, a criminal, someone who lived a life of unceasing escapes compared to my father, who was a very famous pianist, or his older brother, who started off as a gifted painter and ended up being something completely different, but all managing to survive in extremely, I'd say, competent and creative ways. And so although being a criminal, competent, criminal, is not necessarily an asset for society, there is, there's a lot to be said for how and why they decided to be who they were as a matter of resilience. Not. I couldn't, however, draw a clear link because their common experience was always the same trauma, their outcomes were very different. And so instead of trying to do cause and effect, I hope this is becoming clear, I started to pick apart the different kinds of resilience that they had in common, patterns of resilience they had in common those that were very distinct. And so the chapters move back and forth as puzzles, I think, because the way they portrayed their memories, which was full of confabulation. That's another reason why I call the book Invented Lives. They often made up stories. There was often magical thinking involved, where instead of addressing a subject, they addressed it by saying something happened that was clearly impossible or should have been impossible. And the question was, should I have discounted that as a lie, or should I have decided that that was important, that they were saying something important about their assimilitude or about the necessity of not delving too much into the past, especially not too much into the horrors of the past. So there are certain common characteristics of these people. Polyglottis and humor, sometimes the efforts to be didactic, a variety of discussions of the importance of wiliness, the importance of the notion of the guilt, gift and talent and how it's used and how it's portrayed. All those are subjects, but they have variations, but are all part of their general sense of how they survived and maintained their humanity. And to me, that's the most important part. So I went back and looked at each one of those themes. Their attitudes towards religion, their attitudes towards the gift, their attitudes towards language, their attitudes towards the arts and so on, as a way of finding what made them both distinct and common. And it is confusing. It's a puzzle, because there is no. There is no beginning and end between what they experienced in their childhood, which were pogroms, Russian Civil War, religious persecution, perilous flight with nothing, illness, total war, the Shoah McCarthyism. I mean, that they survived at all is truly amazing. And you may ask, why didn't I talk about all those different horrors? Well, that wasn't the point. The point was I wanted people to understand that the cumulative effect of trauma did not eviscerate their ability to become per. To become full human beings.
- [12:43]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So before we get into specifically trauma and what you learned about trauma from writing this book, I want to just take us a little bit on a journey to understand the two main characters of your book, though one might call you a main character as well, even though you're not so in the book. And we'll get to that in a bit. But I'm wondering if you can introduce us first to Alexander and then the same to Lucy. But let's start with Alexander, just generally, like, what is his biography? Take us through from where he grew up till coming to America to becoming a famous pianist. Just kind of help us understand who your dad was, and then we'll move to Lucy, your mom.
- [13:21]
Philip Uninsky
My father was born in Kyiv in 1910. The family fled in 1924 to Paris. Why they fled and when they fled we'll never know, but I posit several theories about that. He, as a child in Kiev, at the age of seven, entered the Kiev Conservatory of Music and was a student of a great teacher, Tarnowski. He was clearly a prodigy. When he got to Paris, he immediately entered into the Conservatoire de Musik at a very young age, 14, and he embarked on his career at the age of 17. In 1932, he won the Chopin prize, which is really the summa of piano competitions. And it launched him on a meteoric career which was astonishing. He was performing hundreds of concerts, more than a hundred concerts a year. He joined the French army in 1939, managed to survive what we think was the Maginot line, Escaped at least the story. This is part of the story of bravery that goes beyond any comprehension. He apparently bicycled his way as a hunted man, all the way way to Spain and Portugal, managed to make it to Argentina, and then started his career immediately afterwards in Latin America, became very famous again, recorded many, many records, and was a very distinguished member of an elite group of pianists who was a friend of Prokofiev, the great composer, and Strabinsky and Ravel. He was performing usually nine months out of the year. So he was, in many ways, as I grew up, an absent father. Except those intense three months when he was at home and telling us his history to some extent, and also showing us what it took to be a great artist, which meant he worked all the time. My mother was a childhood friend of my father's. What they had in common was a brother, her brother, who was a polymath and a brilliant person who dies in the war. I talk about that death a lot in the book, but it's my mother, Lucy was the daughter of an extremely affluent textile magnate from lodges who emigrated to Paris in 1919. And she was educated in the Fenelon, which was the first high school for girls in Paris, and it had an illustrious group of classmates. She escaped with her sister and made it to Porto during the war, which in and of itself was extraordinary. And managed to get to the United States penniless, reunited with my father, and had two children. And her sense, while my father was always a distinct artist pianist, and his personality, while undergoing some changes, was always that of the pianist in the family, the great artist. My mother at first became his manager and was a grande dame of music. She knew an awful lot of music, about music, and she knew how to arrange my father's career. But when she started having children, she made that very dramatic shift to sort of bourgeois domesticity. They tried to live in Paris after the war. They found that impossible, I think. And this is part of my mother's form of survival as well as my father's, but my mother's more so. It's this sense of constant marginalization, sense of wariness, sense that the world was a very dangerous place which characterizes all the members of the family. But how they dealt with that marginality was very distinct.
- [17:14]
Rabbi Mark Katz
And then there's you. I mean, we'll get to your. Your uncles and your aunts and, you know, I'm curious. There was a. The best way to put it, I guess, is that there was almost a scholarly distance. Like there was clear admiration in the way you talked about your parents. At the same time, you try to keep the focus on your family members as opposed to yourself. And I'm curious if that was intentional and what that means about Your relationship to the story?
- [17:44]
Philip Uninsky
Well, I. I'm in the story a lot, but it's only to explain why I feel that my memories are changed and my interpret of my memories are changing. So I try. It is clearly not a personal memoir. It is clearly not a family history in the sense that I couldn't write a family history. There really isn't enough evidence to do that. It's all been wiped away by the whirlwinds of war, for the most part, and migration. But my presence is a way of explaining how contingent memory is that. I began to understand very early on that the memories that I was receiving, the recollections, the reminiscences in the behaviors as well, had an understanding when I was a teenager or a child and a teenager. But that they developed my sense of how I cataloged them, how I understood them, how I appreciated all of them changed as I changed. And I think that's a very important part of understanding about memory. That we shouldn't think that all memory is some sort of fixed set of facts that relates to the past. In fact, their use of memory was always instrumental, which became something very clear to me. They were communicating things. They weren't necessarily providing memories. There was a lot of invention, a lot of change. The fact that they kept telling stories that weren't based in time, that would move back and forth, that they were sometimes contradictory, sometimes they were didactic, sometimes they were just humorous, sometimes they were shock. All those things made it very difficult to interpret. And I had to keep myself, my place and my efforts to try and understand them, at least at some distance, but also to explain why I was interpreting without becoming too scholarly. And I might add, I intentionally did not make this a scholarly work. Maybe my vocabulary makes it somewhat up that way, but my hope was that this would have a readership that would interest people in understanding what makes people resilient after they've experienced these horrors and how it's not a flat line of. Of certain kind of experiences. It's not always negative, and it's very complicated, I think.
- [20:00]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah, when I'm. When I meant scholarly, I wasn't talking necessarily about, you know, like, as a code word for hard, which, by the way, like, a lot of times, scholarly is scholarly. Is scholarly in terms of, you know, one's subjectivity to the subject matter and an understanding of the fact that, you know, that one is careful to say this is conjecture, as opposed to this is fact. And all of that which you did when you didn't know something you claimed you didn't know something, or when you thought that you might be imagining something, you claimed that you were imagining something.
- [20:39]
Philip Uninsky
So someone who's been trained like I have been, both as a lawyer, which has a kind of a dyadic view of the world, you either win or you lose, you're either right or you're wrong, or as an academic, where you're collecting data to try and show relationship between cause and effect, for example, or to show as an evaluator that something that people are proposing to do actually does what it does and has a positive or a negative effect. That was really hard for me to do in this case because I was looking initially for what did all this trauma do to them? And instead what I really. What I really could only do was talk about their methods of resilience. They would never talk about the trauma. I. There was no factual basis for me to say this is how much, how horrifying it was. Of course it was horrifying. And what I tried to do in the book was to say there was a common knowledge of the trauma that they experienced. As a child growing up in New York, as a young Jew in New York, surrounded by survivors in our very building, were many survivors and refugees of the Holocaust. There was common discussion of what it meant that they were in the United States. But it was never based in the horrors they experienced. No one was ever going to tell us anything about that. We knew the number. We knew. We saw fog war and, you know, fog and night and fog. We saw films. We had an understanding of the horror. And what I'm trying to explain is for people like me, I didn't want to create another history of trauma. What I wanted to do is create a history of people. Well, history may be the wrong word, a contemplation of what those who we knew suffered from horror could do with their lives and that they could do some things that were distinct from what we normally think of as resilience.
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- [23:28]
Philip Uninsky
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- [23:45]
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Rabbi Mark Katz
There were a lot of really interesting anecdotes and touches in the book. One of them, for example, is your uncle's desire to always give people Jaffa orange juice as a way to kind of subtly show his Zionism, especially to people who aren't Zionists. But I actually found the anecdote that I found the most affecting in the book was actually about you, not about them. And I'm wondering if you can speak about this and maybe how you were in conversation with it in the book itself, which is you spoke about this project that you had to do for school where basically you came in and you told your dad's story and nobody believed you. And I'm wondering if you can say a word about that, both what happened to the readers and also kind of, what does that teach you about all the themes that you're beginning to explore in this book?
- [25:33]
Philip Uninsky
I don't really have a strong response to that. And that's such a dim memory, frankly. Now I think that most people thought I was having them on and that, remember that what I was describing seemed impossible. Their lives and the diversity of their lives seemed impossible. And I never doubted that it was true. And so I think. I think it's more important. Well, I'm eliding from your question because I don't really have a good answer, but I find that what I had to struggle with was. And for me, the most important, I think the most interesting anecdote in the book was to what extent was I a product of being lied to as a human being? And I met with. And I think. And maybe this is the anecdote you're actually referring to. Let's see. I went to a remembrance of my father soon after he died in New York, and there were all sorts of progressives, leftists, people who had admired him as an artist, but also as a progressive. And two psychoanalysts took me aside and said, do you know that what do you think of your father's and your mother's memories and your father's in particular? And I said, I kind of demurred. And they said, you know, that he invented most of this. This is. You don't have the truth of their lives. And they, as good Freudians, decided that I should engage in a family romance, which I rejected. But no one had ever said that to me before I knew it because I had begun to notice the inconsistencies a long time before they mentioned it to me.
- [27:24]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Can you tell me a little bit about the process of research for this book? Because I imagine it wasn't just based on conversations with your family. So where did you go for information?
- [27:35]
Philip Uninsky
Well, that was part of the different phases of what I consider to be my reckoning with their memories was to try and verify, you know, this is something that academics do. And I was doing research in France for many years, and on and off, going in and out of France, going to archives, and I had the obvious pleasure of looking for more about them, only to find very, very little. And that's partly because of the Fact that a lot of those archives were closed for a very long time. And then when you, When I went and looked into those archives, when they opened up, I didn't find anything. What I found were the things that I already knew that were common knowledge. My father was very famous and there were a lot of reviews, but there was nothing about the education of my mother, the education of my father. There was nothing that I could find about much that mattered to me except how they died, how my relatives died, which was a shocking moment. I knew that they died at Auschwitz because that's where most of most French Jews died. What I didn't know was when I didn't know where they'd lived, I didn't know their names. And so when it came to research, because so much was hidden and what was left that they did have, my family was also hidden. They never wanted to show it to me, not even the pictures of my, my, the, the dead members of the deceased members of my family. So the research only just fortified what I call a rabbit hole of banality. You know, there was. I found out that yes, one of my, my maternal grandfather was a. Was a textile magnate in Lodz. Took a long time to find that, but I didn't learn much else other than he turned out to be very wealthy. But the facts that really mattered to me, for example, the fact that he allegedly wrote a 13 volume manuscript tracing the family back to the prophets. Well, that's fascinating. Of course, my mother conveniently always said, well, they were destroyed by the collaborators in Paris. And so we have no record of it. These are the kinds of traces that research ended up not showing anything because I could never find, and I'm a fairly experienced historian, I could never find what I wanted to find. So I had to do, I had to rely on memory and behavior. And I want to repeat that. One of the things that's really distinct about this, and that makes it perhaps more of a puzzle solving enterprise than a scholarly one, is the fact that I could see these people all their lives until they died, and I could follow them. I could see whether or not their sense of who they were evolved, whether the trauma emerged, whether they even spoke about it, and so on. And that to me was a fascinating opportunity because quite often we don't have that in life. To be able to follow a group of people who were not only extraordinary in their own distinct ways, but could survive that many horrors and still be, and still be creative, empathetic, lovely human beings. It's really quite extraordinary.
- [30:53]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So you spoke at the beginning about the different responses to trauma that they had and the different ways that you talked about their views of religion, the way they used language. I'm curious. This is a bit of a hard question because you really are only looking at one family. But if you had to parse out which aspects that they had in common were specific to just the family they grew up in and who they were and what specifically were the specific trauma responses that they had, what of those chapters really could you credit to trauma? I'll give you an example. Right, so like struggling with God as an example. There are some families that are just really have a hard time with the God piece, and there are others that would have had an easy time with the God piece had it not been for the trauma that they lived with. And so I'm. I'm curious, kind of like number one, how did you. How did you flesh out what the traumatic responses actually were as opposed to family dynamics? And second, what were they when you did flesh them out?
- [31:57]
Philip Uninsky
So let's. First of all, I have worked with a lot of people who have been traumatized in their lives and spend a lot of my life working on trauma. So their responses are to some extent a product of their upbringing and their particular experiences. For me to draw the line between trauma and their secularism and their actually their extraordinary forms of secularism, I think I can probably do for a few of them. But again, it was conjecture. So if you take my uncle Shura, he was certainly the most highly trained in religious studies in Kyiv, from what we know. Course, we don't know that for a fact, but I assume it to be true. From all the stories I heard, he came to France and within, I'd say two or three years had become a secular entity in a personality. A painter no longer expressed any interest in religion. Apparently his paintings were completely secular. He and like. And my mother. My mother obviously grew up in an Orthodox family, but one of the first things she did as soon as she became an adult was change her name to a non Jewish first name, interestingly. And as she kept her Ashkenazi lessening. So I think my father would only say what all people that I grew up with in New York City who were not religious would say, which was our entire building, which is that it would be fine if they could believe in God, if they could understand why God had allowed this to happen, if God had allowed this kind of horror, this kind of violence, this kind of persecution of Jews to happen, and they could understand why, but they couldn't understand why? For them, God was and was omniscient, benevolent, omnibenevolent. And they rejected any notion that they could believe in God, and they rejected any notion of any religion. It wasn't just Judaism, it was all religions. They became. I wouldn't say atheists. They became people who resented what religion had done in the sense that being religious allowed these. This persecution to occur, if that was their thought. Remember that in the book, wariness about antisemitism is a dominant theme. And it's fascinating that. That it didn't increase their religiosity, which I know is an undertone of your question. And I think that is more a product of how much persecution they. They had to endure in their lives, how much they had. They had, you know, I mean, McCarthyism, for example, had a profoundly anti Semitic quality to it. The kind the. The hopes that they had as children, according to what my father seemed to imply. That somehow the Russian Revolution would eviscerate antisemitism and create a world of equality was deeply disappointing to them. And their disappointments went from one to another about being Jews, that they were constantly being hounded. And so they decided very early in their lives to pick secular identities. Whether they saw themselves as Jewish or French or American is very complicated. I would say that they, and I try and make this argument in the book Lucy and Alexander, saw themselves as Jews, but only in a very special way. They saw themselves as the inheritors of a tradition, a tradition that demanded alertness to the arts, awareness, alertness to education, awareness of the unjust, awareness of inequity, awareness of racism and injustice, and an obligation to do everything that they could to make the world around them a better place. And that was their form of Judaism. They never went to synagogue, or when they did, it was only during Yom Kippur. And it was only they would say to hear the music. They were clearly thinking about lost family. And I could intuit that to some extent, but it was never explicit. And it's that lack of explicit religiosity in all the members of the family that characterizes them. And I can't explain it other than to say it was of a generation who suffered immeasurably and the amount of their loss is incalculable. And what they did, you know, depending on different members of the family, was to protect their children from that kind of persecution. And they saw that as their obligation. I'm not sure that's a satisfactory answer, but that's the best I can do.
- [36:50]
Rabbi Mark Katz
It's good I mean, I'm about to ask you a very difficult question which might actually be unfair. Look, I mean, I give eulogies for a living, right? So I talk about people who have died, and I try to give as realistic of a picture as I can. And I always wonder if they could see a realistic picture of themselves and actually know what people thought about them reflected back. Like, would I be offending the person who died because I tried not to give a hate hagiography and that your book is not a hagiography of your family. Your book is as realistic of a picture as you can create. So I'm curious, if your parents could read your book, what do you think their reaction would be?
- [37:26]
Philip Uninsky
So I have two answers to that question. The first one is, I waited till they all died because I thought the book would be extremely hurtful. Not because I didn't show respect to them, but because I violated a privacy. There was a private relationship that those memories entailed that were for nobody else. When the public asked them questions, those. The kinds of things that I relate in the book never came out. I think there's one episode where my father actually created a private discourse about the death of his parents with the press as a way of stopping the questions. But it's clear to me that they would not want have someone not only not to violate their privacy, but also to dwell on the kinds of things that I dwell on in the book. About their inability to talk about their past, the desire never to go back, their sense that they could wave away loss, and so easily. I'm talking about loss of status, loss of family, loss of wealth, loss of fame. That they could do that and continue to survive in a way I think they would have thought diminished them. And of course, I don't mean that. Instead, I saw it as a sign of strength that they could. That they summoned the ability to not live in the past, which is essentially what their resilience was all about. They could control their loss, sometimes in a very profane way, that they could control the discourse about them by using polyglotism, humor, and all sorts of techniques that made it very hard to understand their relationship to trauma. That's a violation of who they were, in a sense. I was revealing, I think, what they were really doing. And I don't think they ever would want that.
- [39:23]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So there's a number of minor characters we could explore. I wonder, actually, if we could explore Lola for a second. And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about her and her family, because I Found her to be a very interesting, much more of a side character than some of your other aunts and uncles. But she had some profound things to teach also about many of the themes you explore in the book, especially as she then had a family afterwards.
- [39:51]
Philip Uninsky
Right. And one of the techniques that I use in the book is to show how each one of these personalities had a typology. You know, one aunt was. Was called a butterfly because she could float obliviously over all the tempests that surrounded her. Lola, always called Lolita by my father for obvious reasons in reference to Nabokov, was the antithesis of all the typology. She was menacing. She was a violator of fundamental principles, even if they weren't religious. To convert to become a converso in the middle of the war was seen in the stories of the family were portrayed, I wouldn't say with hate, because they didn't. They didn't. They never expressed any hate, but were clearly seen as the antithesis of everything that was good about who they were, even though. Well, in part because of when she did it, in part because of the way she married. She married a police psychiatrist, according to them. Whether that's true or not, I'll never be able to know. Well, she refuses to talk to me. She refused to talk to me while she was alive. And what she did, what she allegedly did, were the antithesis of everything that the family stood for. She stole the family fortune, she converted. She. She fled in a way that people found to be too convenient and that they. They didn't believe she was really religious, but that she did it as a. As a. As a way of saving herself as opposed to being more concerned about others. So that character plays a role in a sense, that she had children and one of them reappears late after my father died. And what is important here is about the whole role of how memory concealed can be revealed. Uh, it's. My mother was incapable of revealing anything she didn't want to reveal. She. She was, as the psychiatrists who knew, psychoanalyst in yours, they called her a rock. She was a woman of extraordinary strength. But she never spoke about this period of her time when she fled France with her sister Lola. And some of the, Some of the details of what actually happened and who her niece really was had to come out. And it showed that unless there was some pressing personal moment of deceit that she. That needed to be confronted, especially deceit that was accompanied by anti. Semitism, my mother would never reveal anything. But what happened was the daughter of Lola who Was raised as a Catholic in a relative, obviously and somewhat anti Semitic environment appeared and she knew nothing about who she really was. So my mother was compelled to reveal it in a very brief period, which changed their relationship and changed this woman. And then my mother went back to being who she was. Marginal, you know, establishing herself as a primarily French speaking person, living for the arts and doing all the things that she normally would do without any reference to the past.
- [43:06]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah, that moment when she. When she essentially cursed out your cousin was interesting in the sense that it was surprising to me. I'm sure it was also surprising to you in the moment that, you know, it didn't feel befitting to who the picture you had painted of her, which I think is actually true. Right. That's not who she was. And then suddenly she does it. And then. And then you say, oh, I guess some of her past just kind of leaked out in that moment.
- [43:37]
Philip Uninsky
A traumatic past and a past that, that. So that's. It's just the one moment of her life that she reveals real trauma. And instead. And what she does is she uses it purposefully, she uses it to shock. I think she took some of that from my father. My mother never used those kinds of. She never. She never descended from a sort of not of sacred, but nearly sacred temperament to the profane. And my father certainly used it to great effect because it was so at odds with who everyone thought he was.
- [44:10]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So I have one final question for you, which is, you know, I'm sure there were lots of sources you wish you had because you had. Because you wish you had access to all of these people. What is a question that if you could bring anyone back to have dinner with you from any of the cast of characters, you would make sure to ask because you would have made this even stronger of a memoir, which it's
- [44:38]
Philip Uninsky
not to me the most important question given what we're living through now. Again, so my sense of memory is always contextual, is when do people choose to leave and when? Why did they choose not to leave? The thing that I never understood, I mean, there's lots of mysteries that I love solved, but I never understood. My father was a marked man. His brothers were at war. One captured another one in the resistance, and my grandparents didn't leave. My father knew to leave, but they didn't leave. They had left the first time when they left in 1924. They fled the Russian. The Russian Civil War. Maybe for a variety of reasons. But I only asked this question about why do people decide to leave and not Leave. Because I think it is one of the pressing great questions of the 21st century and the 20th century. I can barely talk about my paternal grandparents. My maternal grandmother is another story. But my paternal grandparents were essentially saviors of their children. And the way my father portrayed their decision to protect their children at the end was a classic story of heroic script, which was false. That he. That they said they were being arrested by the M. The fascist police. And they see their two son. Two of their sons show up and they say in Russian, pretend like you don't know us going to their fate. That was the only time that my father revealed anything about that he knew what had happened to them. But, you know, what is really interesting to me is how people, people of great strength who have survived all that they survived, decided not to leave. It's a decision that I think a lot of people are asking themselves. People in Israel, people in areas of war, people all over the world who are facing now increasing trauma and danger. And so if I could go back and I could find out more about my grandparents. That's the sad part about this book, I think, really in many ways, is that I have to accept that they live in a haze. It was a haze that was created by their children. That was one of the common factors of all of them, that they didn't want me to know much more about them other than what I could intuit. They would never even use their names. I mean, honestly, that's the one thing that I found that many people find very surprising about this story, is that this. This account is, how could you not know their names? And the answer is because they were never spoken. It was as if it was a duty not to speak about them, to use their names. They were to be remembered in a certain way, a way that could not have been endurable. Honestly, I cannot understand how any of them, these are all lovely, human, caring, empathetic people. They endured this memory without ever revealing it. And that's part of what this book is really about, is the fact that they could do that, that they could survive that loss and not pass it on and refuse to pass it on. But I still want. The answer to your question is I would love to know why they made those decisions, why they chose to leave when they did and not others.
- [48:04]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Well, thank you very much. So again, I've been in conversation with Philip Uninsky about his book Invented Lives From Troubled A Jewish Family's form of Resilience After Surviving Pogroms, Revolution and the Holocaust. And again, I'm your host Rabbi Mark Katz. I look forward to the next conversation. Thank. You. Foreign.
- [48:37]
Philip Uninsky
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Philip Uninsky
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