Amid Turmoil, the Past Gives You Something to Hold Onto

Mr. Rosenblatt is the author of “More Rules for Aging,” which will be published in May.

A great-uncle of mine survived Auschwitz. He had been a lawyer in Germany. After the war, he made his way to America and Brockton, Mass., where he took a job as a salesman in a shoe store. One day, the owner, seeing that his salesman had a good deal of education, offered him a higher position in the store. My great-uncle politely refused it. After Auschwitz, he was content to be a shoe salesman. He was content not to be noticed. He was content to be alive.

Why am I telling you this story? Because it comes from my family’s past, which makes it valuable, at least to me. And for that reason, my wife Ginny and I spent some time this past holiday season talking to our young adult grandchildren about the people who led to them, suggesting where they fit in the scheme of things — the gift of their past.

Included in our near and extended family are steamfitters, diplomats, mine workers, steel workers, investment bankers, fur trappers, railroad engineers, machinists (one of whom made valves for bombs during World War II), journalists, doctors, professors, cement levelers, a Wimbledon tennis player, an office secretary, painters, a kindergarten teacher, several lawyers — a cavalcade of jobs that allows one to feel kinship with all walks of life.

Even if we do not like what is happening in America today, hearing of the many occupations of a single family may have allowed our grandchildren to feel more understanding of turmoil, and of difference, thanks to the great roiling mixture that has defined our country from the start.

And hearing about such things, as opposed to reading about them in books, gives a breathing life to the facts, like listening to stories around a campfire. In an age when the study of the humanities is dying off, here is the past with a living voice.

I told our grandchildren of my mother, their great-grandmother, called Mollie because when she first came to school, she was told that Marta, her German name, was not American. I told them of my father holding down three jobs at once as he worked his way through medical school — as a hatcheck boy in a night club, managing a high school basketball team and selling hot dogs in the Polo Grounds. And by the way, what was the Polo Grounds? At least half our terms of reference were unknown to the kids. You mean the San Francisco Giants once played baseball in New York?

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