While I was cooking up some breakfast for him, the seven-year-old grandson, Mr. O, asked me if I wanted to hear a funny story. "Sure,' I said. "I'm game." Here's his story, just as it came from his mouth. "I was playing Penguins and I clicked on Tour Guide and suddenly my penguin went from being forty-five years old to zero years old." A truly astonishing occurrence, we agreed. Then he added, "Did you ever play Penguins when you were a boy?" I allowed as to how I hadn't, on the grounds that there weren't any computers back then. "Oh yeah," said the boy. He'd heard.
There have been all sorts of changes since I was Mr. O's age, and the advent of computers is certainly one of the most revolutionary. But despite the tv and the dvd and the MRI and the GPS and the frequent flying, young Mr. O. and I grew up in recognizably the same universe. We both come from stable middle-class households and we've always had enough to eat. We're both speakers of English and attended, or attend, secular public schools. Both he and I were pointed toward a college education right from the start. The overarching pattern is similar, even though the details differ. It seems like a long way from the straight pen to the word processor, but it's not, taking into consideration the larger context.
This last week, while marveling at the grandchildren, I've also been reminiscing about my own grandparents and about some of my "elderly" (that is to say, people the age I am now) relatives. There was, back then, let me tell you, a social and psychological gap between grandparent and grandchild that was neither trivial or circumstantial. They, the grandparental generation, had begun life in the Ukraine or in White Russia, not knowing from day to day whether there would be an adequate supply of turnips or radishes to keep them going. They had had to contend with the Easter pogroms and dodge the Cossacks, the draft and, to hear them tell it, the reactionary rabbis.
When I was Mr. O's age, the innumerable members of the E and L Chafetz family circle gathered once or twice a year in someone's crowded apartment over the store. To this destination, scrubbed and polished, I was semi-annually dragooned and put on display. Who was this band of strange people? They were all homely (or at least appeared so to my juvenile eyes), they were no larger than seventh-graders, and they were almost uniformly childless; they smelled of overcooked chicken and mothballs, and they spoke a language or languages that I couldn't understand. Uncle Joe and Uncle Nahum and Uncle Usha and Aunt Becky and Aunt Lifscha. All of them had come to America, one after another, in the first years of the last century. I, of course, was indifferent and impatient. I had no interest in them nor could I understand their interest in me. And they were intrusively curious. They wanted to know everything -- school, play, friends, interests, hobbies, sports, lessons. Conversations were stilted and halting and I fled from them as quickly as I could. It was uncomfortable, inexplicable, and boring.
It took years before I came to understand why they inspected and prodded me so. It was for me that they had left the Pale of Settlement and the Czar, left behind their farms and land (though technically they were not allowed to own any land), left behind their businesses and their families, travelled twenty to a room in steerage so that I, the scrawny kid with the outsized ears, could go to public school, find a mate, raise a family, eat three square meals a day, and live a fuller life than any of them had had an opportunity to do. I was their emissary to the future. What they wanted, more than anything, is that some day, I would be in a position to joyfully rustle up some pancakes for young Mr. O, the cheerful, promising child who is their great-great-grandson and heir,