Like the most recent installment I posted here from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress, this one takes place during my 10 months in Toronto (1995-96), after my return from Nova Scotia.
When I responded to the ad for my first voice class with voice coach David Smukler, I was still living on Toronto's Thelma Avenue with Fred. I called on it because I thought it was a singing class and I’d always wanted to be able to sing well.
It wasn’t a singing class at all. It was a voice class for actors.
“Not interested,” I was about to say. But something stopped me. And before I knew what I was doing or why, I was signing up.
It turned out to be a life-changing experience.
As our final exercise in that first of three classes I would take with David over the next few years, we were assigned a Shakespeare sonnet and asked to memorize and perform it for the class using a Method-like technique. In other words, we were to find our own life and experience in Shakespeare’s words and speak it from that place. Mine was Sonnet 43...
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form from happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
As I read and reread those centuries-old words of longing and absence, it didn’t take long for the connection with my father — with my fathers — to surface.
I had three fathers, if you count my stepfather. And yet I had none.
Sydney, through a combination of ill health and impotence, had distanced himself from me soon after I was born. He died when I was 13. Sydney was my mother’s husband, the Gerson whose last name I took, the man I assumed to be my father. I'd assumed it until, soon after my mother had become the final player in this drama to have died, her oldest friend Sophie revealed the truth as she knew it: My natural father was George Wior, a family friend with whom my mother had had an earlier affair and the man she’d turned to when she wanted a second natural child. Her first, with Sydney, had been a Down’s child who had died at 10. Their second, my sister Susan, had been adopted. If George knew me to be his, he refused to claim me. Perhaps my mother had forbidden it. Perhaps, having lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he feared any deep emotional attachment. Regardless, he was another absent father.
Jack, my mother’s second husband, had never tried to be a father to me. In my mid-teens by then, I probably would have refused the offer.Three fathers...yet I had none.
As I worked with the sonnet, I saw that the only way I’d been able to conceptualize the father I never had was to “wink,” to close my eyes to that which remained “unrespected” in the “living day.” Only then could I see the fully present father I so longed for: the “bright days” available to me only in dream.
Method actors are trained to harvest their emotional life in ways that bring authenticity to their roles. They’re also trained to not let that connection get in the way of the acting job.
“Feel what you feel,” David said, “but those feelings are there to fuel you, not to take over your performance.”
They took over mine. Even though my solo rehearsals were as on-the-mark as a non-actor could make them, the moment I opened my mouth in front of the class, the dam broke. It took all the control I could muster to make it through the fourteen lines, let alone speak them without sobbing.
For years, I had claimed emotional detachment from the circumstances surrounding my paternity. Why would I mourn a father I’d never experienced?
A decade after I learned that Sydney wasn’t my natural father, I found a letter he’d written to me one summer while I was in camp. I was 11 or 12; he was in a long-term-care facility. Whether he had distanced himself from me the day I was born or some time later, the man who signed that letter was not the father a child longs for. It wasn’t signed with “love,” the way I sign cards and letters to my 10-year-old daughter. It was signed “yours sincerely.” I wept when I read his shaky scrawl, not for the father I missed, but for the father I’d missed having. Yet those tears were nothing to the ones I tried to hold back as I recited Sonnet 43.
Somehow, telling my story through Shakespeare’s words brought me closer to an emotional truth I had never truly touched. I knew I wasn’t in David’s class to learn how to act. I didn’t know I was there because I needed to learn how to feel.I’ve always believed that it must have been some long-ago word or act that had shut me down emotionally and creatively as a child. But what if it had been an absence of something that did it, rather than a presence? Can an absence of loving words be as numbing as a presence of harsh words?
I’ve always wondered why I remember so little from my childhood. I’ve never sensed that physical or sexual abuse caused my amnesia, despite popular theories to the contrary. But what if abuse, too, can show up as an absence, rather than a presence? What if that absence absented me from myself? What if in feeling devalued by two fathers, I devalued myself so completely that I erased magic and memory from my being?
I didn’t make that connection fifteen years ago in the converted warehouse where Actors Equity then held its Toronto classes. I didn’t even make the connection when I began writing this story earlier today. But every day’s writing about the past brings with it more revelations about the present. And every day’s surrender to the page reminds me that what I’m writing about is now, not then.
That’s the gift of this book, a gift that renews itself with every chapter.
Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Journey of Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.
Gerson family photos: #1, me at 13 or 14, with my mother; #2, my parents in the foreground, likely taken in the early 1940s; #3, my mother at 18 or 19. Photo of Camp Wooden Acres, Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard, Québec (source unknown). Sonnet jewelry by Loepp & Nagai
.
, in which survivors of the Holocaust abandon their Jewishness when they come to America and hide their past from their son, I kept meeting people who told me even more dramatic stories of discovering they were Jewish. And then more recently on tour in Germany, listening to Germans tell me privately, and with great pain, about Nazis in their family made me find myself glad to be the son of Holocaust survivors because I didn't have to deal with their kind of legacy. My own had always seemed a burden, but by comparison, it seemed far lighter.
Posts
