My grown daughter, Veronica, recently was going through some boxes of pictures, looking for old frames, when she came across an old sepia-tinted photograph I had long forgotten about. The photo depicted my grandmother, Edna, my great-grandfather, Henry Weidenhammer, and my great, great grandfather, whose name I do not know, all standing in front of Henry’s grocery store in Amsterdam, New York, circa 1885. Veronica was very curious about this photo, having shown an interest recently in all things genealogical. “Who are these old-fashioned people?” she asked me intently. “These ‘old-fashioned people,’ my dear, are responsible for who we are.” She stared intently at the picture, looking for a way to identify who these people were. Henry Weidenhammer, we were able to find out, was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1858. He boarded the transit ship Rhein out of Bremen, Germany, and arrived in New York’s Ellis Island July 10th, 1880 Edna, my grandmother, about five when the photograph was taken, was born in 1891, dating the photograph around 1896. The photograph also shows my great-grandmother (name unknown), and my grandmother’s brother, Arthur, and the “hired man,” wearing an ankle length apron, and, oh yes, the horse, Dan, hitched to some sort of flatbed.
The photograph sparked a conversation about heritage, culture, and identity, and created not a little introspection on my part, especially in view of my swiftly approaching 60th birthday next June. My grandmother, Edna Weidenhammer Gilde, was, and still is, a powerful influence on the way I see the world. She was a wonderfully open-minded and intelligent woman, educated in the nineteen’s at Wellesley College (the college in Mona Lisa Smile) in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Neither my daughter nor I could be described as religious people, but we both agreed that’s not necessarily what makes us who we are, though I have been exposed to religion. When I was about twelve, my parents were going through an amicable divorce, and I went to live with Edna for about six months. Neither of my parents were particularly religious; my father less so than my catholic mother. Edna’s husband, Morton Gilde, immigrated from Germany at the turn of the century with his family. They were all Jews looking for a better life in America like millions of others. When Edna married Morton, she moved from her all-German community of Amsterdam, New York, to Scarsdale, New York, now a bedroom community of New York City, but then a small, affluent town of successful business owners. Morton wasn’t much of a practicing Jew. I think that fact was his attempt to break away from his heritage to better facilitate assimilation into American society. The goal of my grandparents was to be defined, without shame, as American, and to instill that pride in their only child, my father, and that did not include practicing Judaism. Both of my grandparents were bicultural and bilingual; there were two languages in their families, German and English. I never knew my grandfather (he died soon after the Great Crash of 1930), but when I went to live with Edna, she was not the least bit hesitant to share her German culture, cooking, language, and religion with me. She was bilingual as well, teaching me German phrases as a part of a game we often played. The Depression was particularly tough on my widowed grandmother; having to raise my father on her own was not an easy task, certainly far more difficult then than it is now. She was not from a Jewish background, but was a devout Presbyterian. While I was living with her as a child, Edna devotedly took me to church every Sunday during the six months I lived with her. This was the first time I had ever gone to church regularly. So while those values were missing from my parents, my grandmother insured that I was exposed to them while living with her, giving me, in part, a new sense of cultural identity that I would otherwise not have. For my daughter, who has always easily made up her own mind about such things, she could see an identity in the images of this family standing in front of Henry’s grocery store with a certain amount of pride.
Edna, Bimmy, and Morton, Atlantic City, 1930’s
My father, the man who influenced my identity the most, was a complicated man. His father, my grandfather, was a successful business man, and the family lived in Scarsdale, New York, in a beautiful, old Victorian mansion, befitting a man of my grandfather’s stature, or so I was told. They made monthly trips to the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk in Queens, New York. When my grandfather died of a heart attack, my father was a teenager and didn’t take his death well. As hard as my grandmother tried to soften the blow, the fall from their former grace was difficult. They went from a life of Nannies, pony-carts, and Model T’s, to a single-room apartment in an old brownstone in Syracuse, New York.
The war changed everything again. My father joined the Navy in 1941, at the age of nineteen. When he got out of the Navy after the war was over, the GI Bill helped put him back on track by paying for his tuition and expenses so that he could attend Syracuse University, probably the best thing that ever happened to him. During the war, he met my future uncle, Norm Coleman, and they became fast friends. Norm was a long-time upright bass player and a love of swing music. He was able to get jobs after the war in local Syracuse jazz clubs, and my father would hang out with him. Uncle Norm managed to scrape money together to buy his own club in downtown Syracuse and called it The Coda. Norm brought in many of the hottest jazz groups on the East Coast in the late forties and introduced my father to the great Charlie Parker. Jazz became an all-consuming passion for my father. Eventually, Norm and Joe Gilde met the Herb sisters, Marilyn, my mother, and Betty, my aunt, and they got married. Joe earned his degree at SU and moved the family to Chicago to pursue his Ph.D. at U of Chicago and an academic career.
Growing up as an only child, I was surrounded by jazz and books and conversation. The culture of my family was a curious mix of language, music, and education. As a high school student, though like my father not an academic achiever until college, my interests were very much along the line of my parents and grandmother. I would emphasize Nieto’s comment that “Language is one of the most salient aspects of culture” (84); it was because my parents were so educated that I was immersed in language at a young age and learned to recognized its importance. My love of jazz and language led me to pursue a life-long interest in teaching and teaching. I teach literary American culture through jazz. Tapping into students’ prior knowledge about their own culture, to me, is of primary importance, often learning to recognize the importance of their own culture by empathizing with a totally different culture, knowing that teachers who connected learning to students’ backgrounds were much more likely to be successful in their efforts. I cannot teach literature without teaching culture; I choose texts that best expose students to different cultures. It seems to me that the nature of learning is a process of slowly defining who you are by learning what matters the most to you
Call and Response 