I have run into the name Deborah Tannen many times over the years. She has written several well known books about interpersonal connections – mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. That sort of thing. Her academic field is linguistics, and obviously linguistics and interpersonal connections and communications are closely related. She has written 10 books and many articles, and she has been on the faculty of Georgetown University for 47 years as a Professor of Linguistics. She is only a few years younger than I am. I have never met her, or seen her.

And I have never been interested in any of her books, which always seemed to me to be self-help books. This may be a good characterization of them, or it may not be. But that is what I always figured them to be. So I ignored them, and I ignored her.

But a few weeks ago, when I was wandering through books at a library sale, I came across her most recent book, Finding My Father: His Century-long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow. That sounded interesting and I decided to read it. I just finished it.

I can’t say that I would recommend it wholeheartedly. The writing style and the organization of the book are, to me, a bit clumsy. But, on the other hand, there are some very interesting things in the book. I will tell you what they are, so you don’t have to read it yourself.

Her parents were both immigrants, her father from Poland, her mother from today’s Belarus. They were married for 71 years, and both lived long lives. Her father died at 97. For the majority of her life, she was much closer to her father than to her mother. In addition, her father was constantly putting thoughts (often autobiographical thoughts) on paper; her mother, on the other hand, did not like talking about the past at all.

She was raised in New York, and has two older sisters. Her father had a night school law degree, which he received during depression years, but needed to take other jobs (over 60 of them throughout his life) to make enough money to help his widowed mother and, eventually, his own family. They were never wealthy.

Her father was born in Warsaw into a family of Gerer Hasids. The Gerer Hasids. Gerer Hasidism was the largest branch of Hasidism in Poland and is today the largest branch in Israel. His American name was Eli Tannen, and he was raised by his mother; his father had left the family when Eli was only two and had died of tuberculosis when Eli was only 6. Eli’s mother had been a Kornblit, the daughter Chaziel Kornblit. If Deborah can be believed (and I assume she can be) her mother had 13 siblings who lived to adulthood, and at least four more who died at birth or as a child. For the most part, this large family split from their parents’ hasidism, and set out to pursue modern, often quite secular lives in early 20th century Warsaw. The idea that there was such a break from tradition in what clearly a very traditional and religious family surprised me.

Deborah’s grandmother, Sarah, for example, was the founder and the head of school at a Jewish school for Hasidic girls, the very first such school in Warsaw, where daughters in Hasidic families were generally given very limited education. Her sister Eva became the first female dentist and periodontist in Newark New Jersey. Her sister Dora became a Swiss educated physicist, who was a student in Switzerland of Einstein’s and had a close relationship with him both there and the United States (whether that relationship was an intimate one, and whether Dora aborted Einstein’s baby, is subject to speculation, but Deborah likes to believe that this, indeed, was the case).

As far as I know, Eva’s dentistry practice was a successful one. Other than that, in spite of their education and their modernization, things did not usually workout the best for the Kornblit kids. Eva was not a physicist in the US and Dora did not run a school. Ruchcia had 5 children of her own, but died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Bronka died of TB in the Caucasus. Rivka committed suicide, jumping off a balcony. Dina died at 14 in a kitchen fire. Joshua and his family were killed at Auschwitz. The three male Kornblits made it to the U.S. Two worked for HIAS, and one worked in a bank in Philadelphia. Magda, the youngest sister, became a communist, was jailed because of her political beliefs, and after her release and the communist takeover of Poland became a high ranking Polish government official.

Deborah’s father, as I said, went to law school at night. Because he was very bright, very verbal, always writing, and because he was working full time while attending law school, Deborah assumed he was a very good and very serious student, and was surprised to find out this was not true. One year, he almost flunked out of the school, he often did not read the assigned cases, and sometimes opted for a movie instead of a class. This really surprised her, it seems.

Maybe so, but what surprised me is what she wrote about her surprise: “…..But I assumed he studied hard, too. Then I think of how surprised people are when I tell them that I got C’s and D’s in college. It was a point of pride. I wouldn’t memorize anything, because I believed, with the hubris of youth, that memorization is not education, and I didn’t want to waste time learning anything I was not interested in. I wanted to get A’s in courses that I cared about, but was happy to get D’s in those I didn’t — or in those in which grades depended upon memorization.” Tannen went to what is now the University of New York at Binghamton for her undergraduate degree.

Tannen’s relationship with her mother (until her mother’s last years) was different. Her mother was depressive and, in Tannen’s words, manipulative. She cried and cried when young Deborah was about to join the Peace Corps, and young Deborah reacted by withdrawing from her Peace Corps assignment in Thailand the day before she was to get on the plane. She told 22 or 23 year old Deborah that it was okay if she moved in with her Greek boyfriend, as long as they told everyone she was engaged; otherwise it would be embarrassing, and they could always at some point announce that the engagement was called off, as this happened all the time. But after a few months, her mother told her that she had been engaged long enough. When was she going to get married? And Deborah and boy friend got married, although they didn’t stay married very long.

Her sources in writing this book were a combination of long talks (some recorded) which she had with her father in his later years, and access to all of his writings and journals and letters, which enabled her to put a lot together (although there are gaps that she tries to fill in by speculation). These includes the story of her parents’ courtship (which really wasn’t a courtship; her mother was the younger sister of her father’s best friend and they were just always together, and as her mother outgrew her early teens, she began to fixate on her father and, again, her mother’s apparently ability to manipulate showed up in Tannen’s narrative).

In fact, Eli had another girlfriend up until virtually the time that he got married, whom Deborah calls Helen, although is a made up name to protect the innocent. Eli had kept letters he received from Helen and copies of those he sent her, and they are laid out in some detail in the book. In addition, Deborah speculates about her parents’ pre-marriage sexual relationship, and her father’s relationship to his real girl friend Helen. I found all of this a bit over-the-top and a bit rude. Whether or not her father wanted Deborah to write this book (which she says he did), I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that he wanted Deborah to write this part of the book.

There is no question but that Eli Tannen led an interesting life, and came from an interesting Old World family, and that it worth recording and preserving. Whether it had to be presented in the way Deborah Tannen presented it is a question that I won’t try to answer, except to say: It didn’t.