Our Child, Carla

Our Child, Carla

(Read by our son, David, at the Memorial for Carla Wofsy on Sunday, September 21, 2003 at the University of New Mexico.)

Roz and I want to sketch some memory vignettes of the child whom most of you first got to know as the woman, Carla.

Our picture is drawn by the poets in these lines (adjusted for gender):

The childhood shows the [wo]man,
As morning shows the day
Milton

The child is [mother] of the [wo]man
Wordsworth

Only David can remember the early years with us, and he came along when Carla was almost 3. We remember the effervescent joy in Carla’s face as she ran to greet Roz and the new baby on the way out of Sydenham Hospital in Manhattan. Most of you have seen that same face of the woman, so open, so genuine, so warm and embracing.

Generalizations don’t always apply, but with Carla, the poets require no license. They are on the mark. She grew, she blossomed for all her 59 years, but the wonderful three year old never was left behind.

Roz and I marveled at how much a very young child can gather in, can grasp and understand. The values of sharing, of empathy, of love and respect for others — which some psychologists say are not to be found in a very young child — were never alien to Carla. Even the concepts of justice and injustice moved her as soon as she could put thoughts into words.

Carla was soon aware that our family was somewhat “different”. We were Jewish (and non-believers) in a largely Irish (Catholic) neighborhood. We had many friends of color in an all white, working-class neighborhood that was overtly hostile to blacks. The Cold War was underway, as was the witch-hunt intolerance that would culminate in McCarthyism. And Carla’s parents and loving grandparents were dissenters, “reds”. The family was in for hard times. Nevertheless, we were happy and outgoing, Carla most of all; she always had good friends.

Carla always, as child and adult, was very sensitive about not hurting someone’s feelings. The four year-old whispered to us at a public swimming pool, with more blacks than whites waiting in line, ‘is it all right if I call us vanilla people?’ Gentle as she was, she always had the courage to speak up for what she believed was just. In elementary school, she objected to the teacher’s choice of “Little Black Sambo” for class reading. Neither the teacher nor the principal took kindly to that: ‘your parents must be reds, like the ones giving poor Judge Medina a bad time at the Smith Act trials.’

One morning, when McCarthyism was in full cry, I remember bending down to kiss Carla as I left her off at school. I rose to be confronted by two FBI agents who threatened: “You love your children, don’t you? Do you want to be able to stay with them?” At that time I was a national organizer for the Labor Youth League. We expected subpoenas and arrests under laws that were some years later to be ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. There were periods when I had to be away from home for several months at a time. I remember another morning when I said good-bye to Roz and the kids on a street corner in New York. Carla knew I’d be away, maybe for a very long while, and she burst into tears. David, who was four years old, hugged her and told her not to cry.

Carla and David loved songs and family sing-alongs, sometimes with grandparents chiming in. I remember the glow on both children when we walked into a friend’s home and found an unexpected visitor also there. “Is that Paul Robeson?” Yes it is. I think Carla, the woman, remembered every song she ever sang as a child. We were big fans of Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and later on, the Beatles. A few weeks before she died, Carla asked if we could get her the “six songs for democracy” recorded by volunteers of the International Brigades who fought for Republican Spain against Franco’s fascists. One day during her last week, we sang “Freiheit” in German along with the anti-Nazi volunteers who left their native Germany to defend Madrid.

Carla’s feelings about justice were always personal. Once, on a vacation, we ate one evening in a too expensive restaurant and the next day, to balance the family budget, in a cheap one. Carla was angry about the tips being based on the percentage of the tab: why should we leave less money for the hard-working waitress in the second joint than for the waiter in the first? As a mathematician, Carla never stopped asking questions of logic and never forgot to think about people.

When Carla was 12, we moved to New Haven, Connecticut. That’s where the teen-ager emerged. She was an adolescent mix of sweetness and brains, confusion and anxiety, soon as boy-crazy as all her new girl friends. Once she made Roz cry, something she dwelt on with uncalled for chagrin for all her years. Roz had bought tickets for Carla and a girl friend to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”. It was Roz’s birthday. After the first act, though, Carla and her friend left to go socialize at the Community Center.

Then there was another memorable episode of “generation gap”. Carla hosted a co-ed party in our living room one night. My mother was visiting at the time and sat herself down in the middle of things. Carla came to us for help. We tried, but we failed. When we suggested to Mother that she come into the kitchen with us, she said: “Oh, I don’t mind being with Carla’s friends. I’ll stay here.”

In high school, Carla did extremely well. At graduation, she won the first prize in English, Math, and French, and became both a Merit and a General Motors Scholar. She was thrilled, but also embarrassed by the attention. She just wasn’t competitive and was sorry for the girl who came in second. The academic achievements of our children were always a bit of a problem for us. We always felt we put no pressure on them to succeed, but they complained that the pressure was in our obvious pleasure and pride.

Then again, if Carla had a fault, it was in the cultivated gender ethic that makes girls feel they should not appear to boys as too smart. That trait, on top of Carla’s sensitivity about putting anyone down, made her hide her light too often. It hurt to see her sacrifice her own self-confidence to build up another’s self-importance. I don’t think she overcame that until she teamed up with Byron. The remarkable mutual respect at the heart of their love for each other was something rare and wonderful. She never lost the charm of her sensitivity, her caring for others, but she knew who she was and how much she was appreciated and loved. Being Danielle’s mother was also a big part of coming fully into her own. She and Byron gave Danielle unstinting love and support through good years and painful ones, and Danielle has been in turn an incredible source of strength and loving support to Carla and Byron.

Carla, our child, was over the years, Carla, our friend. We loved being together, and she visited often. The phone calls became more and more frequent, longer and longer during these last years. We talked about world happenings and political fall-out, about movies, books, friends, music, and cancer. Carla did so much for us. She and David gave us our experience and incalculable joy as young parents. They have made us feel worthwhile in our old age. Carla had a way of drawing us both out, wanting to know what each of us was thinking, making us realize that each of us was part of her life.

One of the things she said in that last week, as Byron, Danielle, David, Roz and I were gathered round: “I like to hold hands.”