Read Online Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Adam Gopnik
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don't think he finds it intolerable.”
“You are wrong.”
Then, at our next meeting: “Your resistance to my discussion of Volestein's name at our last session is typical of your extreme narcissistic overestimation. You continue to underestimate the damage a name like that does to the human psyche.”
“Doctor, surely you overestimate the damage such a name does to the human psyche.”
“You are wrong. His family's failure to change this name suggests a deep denial of reality.” He pursued Volestein's name through that session and into the next, and finally, I exploded.
“I can't believe we're spending another hour discussing Moses Volestein's funny name!” I said. “I mean, for that matter, some people might think my name is funny.”
He considered. “Yes. But your name is merely very ugly and unusual. It does not include a word meaning a shrew like animal with unpleasant associations for so many people. It is merely very ugly.”
And then I wondered. My name—as natural to me as the sound of my own breathing? I had volunteered that it might be peculiar, out of some mixture of gallantry and point-scoring. But my hurt was enormous. My wife, who had kept her own name when we married—out of feminist principle, I had thought—said, “Yes, when we met, I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't go out with you for a week because of it.” It was a shock as great as any I had received, and as salutary. Had he obsessed on Volestein with the intention of making me face Gopnik, in all its oddity, and then, having faced it, grasp some ironic wisdom? I had a funny name. And then the corollary: People could have funny names and go right on working. They might never even notice it. Years later, online, I found myself on a list of writers with extremely funny names—I suppose this is what people do with their time now that they are no longer in psychoanalysis—and I was, amazingly, happy to be there. So that was one score. Even your name could be absurd and you wouldn't know it. And the crucial addition: It didn't matter. Indifference and armor could get you through anything.
S ometimes Dr. Grosskurth would talk about his own history. He was born in Berlin before World War I, at a time when German Jews were German above all. His mother had hoped that he would become a diplomat. But he had decided to study medicine instead, particularly psychiatry; he was of that generation of German Jews who found in Freud's doctrines what their physicist contemporaries found in Einstein's.He had spoken out against the Nazis in 1933 and had been forced to flee the country at a moment's notice. One of his professors had helped him get out. (He was notably unheroic in his description of this episode. “It was a lesson to me to keep my big mouth shut” was the way he put it.) He fled to Italy, where he completed medical school at the University of Padua.
He still loved Italy: He ate almost every night at Parma, a restaurant nearby, on Third Avenue, and spent every August in Venice, at the Cipriani. One spring, I recall, I announced that my wife and I had decided to go to Venice.
He looked at me tetchily. “And where will you stay?” he asked.
“At this
pensione,
the Accademia,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You wish to stay at the Monaco, it is a very pleasant hotel, and you will have breakfast on the terrace. That is the correct hostel for you.”
I reached into my pockets, where I usually had a stubby pencil, and searched for a stray bit of paper—an American Express receipt, the back of a bit of manuscript paper—to write on.
“No, no!” he said with disgust. My disorderliness was anathema to his Teutonic soul. “Here, I will write it down. Oh, you are so chaotic. Hand me the telephone.” I offered him the phone, which was on a small table near his chair, and he consulted a little black book that he took from his inside right jacket pocket. He dialed some long number. Then, in a voice even deeper and more booming than
“You are wrong.”
Then, at our next meeting: “Your resistance to my discussion of Volestein's name at our last session is typical of your extreme narcissistic overestimation. You continue to underestimate the damage a name like that does to the human psyche.”
“Doctor, surely you overestimate the damage such a name does to the human psyche.”
“You are wrong. His family's failure to change this name suggests a deep denial of reality.” He pursued Volestein's name through that session and into the next, and finally, I exploded.
“I can't believe we're spending another hour discussing Moses Volestein's funny name!” I said. “I mean, for that matter, some people might think my name is funny.”
He considered. “Yes. But your name is merely very ugly and unusual. It does not include a word meaning a shrew like animal with unpleasant associations for so many people. It is merely very ugly.”
And then I wondered. My name—as natural to me as the sound of my own breathing? I had volunteered that it might be peculiar, out of some mixture of gallantry and point-scoring. But my hurt was enormous. My wife, who had kept her own name when we married—out of feminist principle, I had thought—said, “Yes, when we met, I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't go out with you for a week because of it.” It was a shock as great as any I had received, and as salutary. Had he obsessed on Volestein with the intention of making me face Gopnik, in all its oddity, and then, having faced it, grasp some ironic wisdom? I had a funny name. And then the corollary: People could have funny names and go right on working. They might never even notice it. Years later, online, I found myself on a list of writers with extremely funny names—I suppose this is what people do with their time now that they are no longer in psychoanalysis—and I was, amazingly, happy to be there. So that was one score. Even your name could be absurd and you wouldn't know it. And the crucial addition: It didn't matter. Indifference and armor could get you through anything.
S ometimes Dr. Grosskurth would talk about his own history. He was born in Berlin before World War I, at a time when German Jews were German above all. His mother had hoped that he would become a diplomat. But he had decided to study medicine instead, particularly psychiatry; he was of that generation of German Jews who found in Freud's doctrines what their physicist contemporaries found in Einstein's.He had spoken out against the Nazis in 1933 and had been forced to flee the country at a moment's notice. One of his professors had helped him get out. (He was notably unheroic in his description of this episode. “It was a lesson to me to keep my big mouth shut” was the way he put it.) He fled to Italy, where he completed medical school at the University of Padua.
He still loved Italy: He ate almost every night at Parma, a restaurant nearby, on Third Avenue, and spent every August in Venice, at the Cipriani. One spring, I recall, I announced that my wife and I had decided to go to Venice.
He looked at me tetchily. “And where will you stay?” he asked.
“At this
pensione,
the Accademia,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You wish to stay at the Monaco, it is a very pleasant hotel, and you will have breakfast on the terrace. That is the correct hostel for you.”
I reached into my pockets, where I usually had a stubby pencil, and searched for a stray bit of paper—an American Express receipt, the back of a bit of manuscript paper—to write on.
“No, no!” he said with disgust. My disorderliness was anathema to his Teutonic soul. “Here, I will write it down. Oh, you are so chaotic. Hand me the telephone.” I offered him the phone, which was on a small table near his chair, and he consulted a little black book that he took from his inside right jacket pocket. He dialed some long number. Then, in a voice even deeper and more booming than
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