I come by this honestly

My father, Alexander Mintz, died over thirty years ago. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease when I was very young. I never really knew him. But I know something about his life.

My father was born in Russia, before the Revolution. He came from a social class most people don''t know existed. His family were rich Jews. The apartment building they lived in had the first elevator in all of Russia. Servants put polishing cloths on their feet and skated on the marble floors.

It wasn't a great idea to be either rich or Jewish in 1917, so his family left Russia after the first Bolshevik Revolution. As I understand the story-- and he didn't like to talk about it, so I could be wrong-- they went first to Poland, then to Germany, then to France. He went to college in Germany and got his Ph.D. there.

In the early 1930s, one of his favorite professors got a job in the U.S. and took my father with him. It was pure luck. The rest of the family didn't survive the war. Some died in the camps, some in the ghettos. I was named after his only sister. My father was a psychologist, famous enough that I studied him in Psych One. Given the fact that his life was overturned not once but twice by two of the greatest cataclysms of the 20th century-- the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust-- it is not surprising that his specialty was crowd psychology.

My mother was born in Minneapolis to a midwestern haute bourgeois family. A sickly child who taught herself to swim to overcome serious asthma. Her mother learned that her daughter wasn't an invalid by seeing her photograph in the newspaper, standing in a frigid lake holding a chunk of ice the size of her head. She got a Master's Degree in English Literature from the university where my grandfather taught, then moved to New York City. She started out as a writer; women's magazines from the late 1930s and 1940s have A New Story by Betsy Emmons on the cover. They were good, too. She married my father, which outraged her parents. Nice Midwestern girls did not move to New York City and marry Jews. Then, she got a Ph.D. and became a psychotherapist. In the 1950s, mothers did not have Ph.D.s

I've been known to observe that my mother was from Minneapolis, my father was from Moscow so naturally, I'm from New York City. My father had reinvention thrust upon him. My mother chose it. I come by my ability to reinvent myself honestly.