JERUSALEM — I was thinking lately about my grandparents. They
were Austrian Jewish refugees; they fled Vienna for New York City
soon after the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938. They were smart
enough to get out on time; else I wouldn’t be here typing this.
I was thinking about how, even though both their marriages were
troubled, they stayed together till the end. These days, among the
secular-liberal people I consort with, to speak of lasting
marriages and low divorce rates in an earlier era automatically
prompts retorts about suffering, oppressed women kept prisoner for
life by despotic husbands.
But of course it wasn’t that simple. In one of my pairs of
grandparents, it was, indeed, the man who was the difficult
character and made the marriage a challenge. In the other, it was
the woman. Our minds are so infested with politically correct
clichés that I was surprised to remember that.
They stayed together, both pairs of them. Money certainly played
a role. As immigrants in the New World with limited command of
English, they struggled; I still remember their humble Manhattan
apartments with their Old World air and ambience of German. And it
was partly their ethos and values. In those days, even among people
like my grandparents, who weren’t particularly religious Jews,
marriage was a binding commitment.
Having been divorced myself for seven years, I can’t help but be
struck by the contrast between our time and that old, lost time. My
divorce occurred here in Israel, a country where the divorce rates
are considerably lower than in the U.S. but, still, quite high,
from 25 percent to 33 percent depending on different statistics
I’ve seen.
It is only a quantitative difference. Divorce Israeli-style is
basically the same phenomenon as in other Western countries, and
experiencing it is quite sufficient to teach you about the
phenomenon in general.
The world of divorce is a world of people who are adrift,
confronted with a fundamental void that they try to fill with
involvements that usually turn out to be transient. Yes, some
divorced people successfully — that is, lastingly — remarry. But
studies of divorce tell us that those cases are a minority. In the
U.S., the divorce rate for second marriages is even higher than for
first marriages, and considerable numbers of divorced people never
remarry at all. And to this picture must, of course, be added the
many people who, these days, never get married in the first place
— of which, even here in “family-oriented” Israel, there are
plenty as well.
Considering how strong the disintegrative forces are even for
people who are still in marriages with children, it’s not
surprising that once people are divorced things are pulled with
even greater force. We live in a mall culture; there’s an endless
array of products out there, ever-new and varied. Pairs of divorced
people may hope to achieve something lasting, but more often they
end up going steady for a while like teenagers; once the thrill
wears off, or something more intriguing comes along, there’s little
reason to persist.
People at ages that, in more traditional cultures, were seen as
appropriate for reaching wisdom and demonstrating wisdom to the
young, are busy exercising, dieting, tending to the minutiae of
their personal appearance in the hope of luring and maybe even
keeping someone, for a while, through physical charm.
It’s a world of chatrooms for unattached adults in their
forties, fifties, and even sixties, of cyberflirting, of all-night
instant-message sessions with people who may live in the same town
or at other ends of the earth. A world of singles bars where
middle-aged people dance to the same rock songs they danced to 30
and 40 years ago, with the same boyish or girlish hopes of maybe
meeting someone tonight.
And beneath the froth of gaiety and adventure are new
dimensions, newly discovered continents, of human loneliness. No,
divorce and singlehood are not modern inventions; but never before
have there been so many people afraid to turn off the computer at
night, cut off contact with the cyberfriend or cyberlover, and face
the void.
I don’t know much about how my grandparents felt about the
marriages they were in, about their respective spouses. I don’t
know whether, or how much, they wished things could have been
different, if they could have given each other up and looked for
new pastures. My memories are enough to tell me that the difficult
person in each marriage remained (as is generally the case)
difficult to the end, causing exasperation and pain to the partner
that probably didn’t lessen much with the years.
But I also have distinct memories of the affection they
expressed to each other, these elderly immigrants in their dusty
apartments, the profundity and depth of the attachment between
them. To their children — my parents, my aunts — they modeled
constancy despite hardship, devotion transcending temperament. In
the end they were buried next to each other; their graves are
peaceful places that I still visit.
