December 16, 2021 • 45 mins
Sherry Turkle grows up surrounded by mysteries—her own identity included. Her mother is full of unknowns, especially when it comes to her relationship with Sherry’s elusive and absent scientist father…whose science experiments were nothing short of unsettling.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart radiom. My
mother kept secrets and spoke to me in a kind
of code. Nothing was straightforward. From childhood. I had to
figure out how to read her mind too intuite the
contours of her reality. If I developed empathy at first,
(00:24):
it wasn't so much a way to find connection as
a survival strategy. My parents gave me burdens in childhood
that I honed into gifts. That's Sherry Turkle. Sherry is
a professor at m I T, where she is also
founding director of the m I T Initiative on Technology
(00:44):
and Self. Her most recent book is The Empathy Diaries,
a memoir. Sherry's is a layered story of many secrets
and swumming at the center of them all, a massive
secret she is asked to keep from the time she's
a a small child, one that slices to the core
of her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(01:19):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
There were two landscapes of my childhood. There was a
Brooklyn landscape and a Rockaway landscape. We lived in Brooklyn,
(01:42):
in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which were wonderful streets
with grocery stores and hardware stores and five and dimes
and richly textured urban environment. We lived near Prospect Park, Okay,
so there was a playground and great grounds. And Brooklyn
(02:06):
of my youth was a wonderful place for children. We
bounced balls and played Jack's on the sidewalk, and there
were hardly any cars, and it was really a very
idyllic street life, a kind of urban street life. It
made me love the texture of city life. But in
(02:30):
the house, the boundaries of our home, it was a
life where no strangers were allowed in the house. On
the other hand, at Rockaway, where we went in the summer,
we had the beach Um. Rockaway was very close to Brooklyn.
We went to the end of Church Avenue, and very
(02:52):
soon you were crossing a bridge and you were in
this state of land that was a world away from Brooklyn,
a kind of summer retreat for lower middle class of
working people in New York City. I think we paid
eighty dollars a season for our bungalow. In this bungalow colony,
(03:15):
you'd have eight or ten bungalows, five facing each other,
with a court that had three cement pavers that made
up this courtyard. And the social life of the summer
was organized around these ten bungalows in this court. And
there would be fireworks on the boardwalk on Wednesday, and
(03:35):
there would be maybe a party in the court once
a week, and that you played with the children in
the court. There was a generational thing where the older
people in the court watched the babies, you know, and
the teenager babies that for the younger children, and everybody
played majong, and everybody played cards. We amused each other
(03:59):
by singing to each other. It was really quite another time,
and this would have been in the in the fifties.
Again we had a court, we had neighbors. It was
a much more social world. But my grandparents were intensely
private and the life of our family was really enclosed
(04:21):
in the world of our family. So even though we
lived in a beach setting, we knew all the people
in that little court. No one came onto our porch
or into our home. We spoke porch to porch. So
my childhood was a combination of seeing people in social
(04:43):
spaces on the street, but really understanding that my family
was very turned inwards and lived a life of secrets
and privacy and almost kind of hyper vigilance, as though
we had secrets to hide, and we were just in
(05:05):
our family and didn't let people in. This not allowing
strangers in or anyone else in and staying on your
porch and talking to other people from that distance, was
that particular to you. I always knew that we were
special because we were keeping secrets. The secrets in Sherry's
(05:28):
family started out relatively small. The lies seemingly innocuous and silly,
stuff like her mother lied about her height or her age.
One time, her mom tried to pass off a store
bought knit beret a gift to Sherry, as something she
had knit herself. Even as a child, Sherry had the
(05:48):
sense that something was off. She knew she couldn't totally
trust the things her mother said or did. My world
of secrets begins with my mother's character and my mother's ability,
which I understood in so many ways, um to live
in the truth that pleased her. So for example, she
(06:10):
was five eleven or perhaps six ft tall. She was
very tall, and she didn't make her peace with that
until she found out that said Teris was five eleven,
and then somehow she admitted to me that she was
five eleven. She explained to me that when she was
a single woman, every time she went to get her
license renewed, she would explain to the women at the
(06:34):
Bureau of Motor Vehicles that she needed to shave some
inches off her height, because a single woman shouldn't be
five eleven. It's easier to get a husband if you
were five ten, or five nine or five eight. I
never quite understood that, but she had gotten herself down
to five seven, which was preposterous. By the time she died,
(06:57):
I actually looked in her handbag. I mean she was
down to five seven, which, as I say, was preposterous
because she was a beautiful, tall, magnificent woman. And she
had also gotten her age down to kind of a
permanent twenty nine. She was twenty nine when she married
my father, and she was twenty nine six years later
when she when she married her second husband. And again
(07:20):
the way this was done, which was kind of by
just explaining to the women at the registrate for motor vehicles,
you know that she just needed to be younger to
catch a husband, or to not far to make her
husband feel more comfortable with her age. I don't know
how she did it, but she aged very little. According
(07:42):
to the records the New York Records Department, the film
she told about the hat is particularly interesting, and there
was I have a very clear memory of her coming
to pick me up. I was at my grandparents house
and she shows me this white hat that she's this
little knit hat that she said she had knit for me,
(08:03):
and I had seen it in a five and ten
store near my grandparents home, and I knew she hadn't knitted,
and I didn't know what to do. I was kind
of paralyzed because I didn't understand, you know. I think
I said thank you, but it upset me for years
and years and years, this lie and seeing her as
as somebody who would tell lies that I couldn't understand.
(08:25):
I couldn't understand their meaning or why. I kind of
understood why she wanted to be shorter or younger, but
why this hat, Why the hat. Indeed, what Sherry couldn't
have realized at the time when she was given that
hat at the age of eight, was that her mother
had been coming from a doctor's appointment at which she
(08:46):
had received a scary diagnosis. So when she was coming
home from the doctor to pick Sherry up from her
grandparents house, she saw the knit cap at the five
and dime and decided to bring her daughter a gift.
But what came out of her mouth when she presented it,
perhaps as a way of connecting with Sherry during a
worrying time, was I made this for you. I'm so
(09:10):
struck by your mother's fantasies and her aspirations, but more
than anything, her ability to bend the world to her will.
She wanted to be a mother who would have knit
that cap for you, So she became that in that moment.
(09:33):
My guess is that she was not aware at all
that she was lying. In that moment, she just decided
that that was so, the same way she decided she
wasn't five eleven, or that she was twenty nine. Yes. Yes,
in these moments, she was taken up by how she
wanted the world to be. I think that's exactly right,
(09:55):
that she was capable of becoming house she wanted to
could be, and being the person she wanted to be.
You know, in technical terms, they say that you know
the neurotic style of hysteric is that they believe their wish,
the lies they tell is the deepest possible wish. And
(10:16):
I think that these wishes really structured her, her character,
These wishes for herself, these wishes for me, really became
who she was, really became who she was. It's striking
me too that you know, when you were a child,
you lived in a Kosher style um and what that
(10:38):
meant was that in the home there wasn't work, and
there wasn't shrimp, and you know, there wasn't seafood and
milk and dairy and meat would be I suppose not
eaten together. But when you would go out, particularly on Sundays,
the Jewish ritual of going out for Chinese food on Sundays,
that you know, all bets were off, like apparently in
(11:00):
Chinese restaurants, pork was okay. Yes, these were my grandmother's
ways putting the world together. But the Kosher laws meant
was what you did in your home is where these
kosher laws applied. And then what you did outside that
(11:21):
was a completely different story. None of the rules needed
to apply there, so pork on the outside didn't count
as breaking the rules. And again it's making the world
fit the way you want the world to be. It's
very my family. In my family, certainly people constructed the
(11:46):
world the way they wanted it to be. Beyond knit
hats and secret pork, the greatest secret at the center
of Sherry's childhood was her her own identity, her very name.
My name was Sherry Zimmerman, and I hadn't seen that
name or heard that name really until I started school,
(12:10):
and legally that name had to be on a piece
of paper. But I was just part of the Bonnerwits clan,
which was my family name by my grandparents name. My
mother had divorced my father, whose name was Charles Zimmerman,
and when she went back to live with her parents,
Robert and Edith Bonnowitz, I was just Erry. I was
(12:31):
told that I was never to mention my father or
his name. They were constructing a world in which, because
your mother was divorced when you were very young, and
divorce was quite uncommon in that milieu, that somehow simply
you didn't have a father, and you weren't allowed to
(12:55):
speak or even know anything really about this mysterious person
and who had been your father and had briefly been
your mother's husband. His name was never said. I knew
not to say it or ask anything. It was one
of those things that it was completely foreclosed. It was
not you know, it was not like you could ask
(13:16):
a question and be told we're not talking about that.
You just knew not to ask. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Sherry's mother remarries a
(13:41):
man named Milton Turkle, and together they have two children.
These kids think that Sherry is their biological sister, while
Sherry silently carries the truth of where she comes from.
So often when secrets are kept, there are times when
one is asked to become a secret keeper, and you're
at child, you're being told you must keep something as
(14:02):
fundamental as your name a secret, and you live in
fear of slipping up. There are a few incidents, were
a few moments when I do slip up. Not many,
but there's one in particular when I do. And it's
at a girl scout meeting and we're going around, and
you know, we're asked to say our name, and I
(14:25):
say that my name is Sherry Zimmerman, and my mother
is stricken. She clearly doesn't know what to do. I mean,
it isn't that she's angry. Of course she is angry,
but more than angry, I've outed her. She doesn't know
what to do. Looking back, I have pity on myself
(14:46):
actually because I realized the terrible weight that I was holding,
because when I slipped up, the pain that I caused
was terrible, and the pain being uttering your real name. Yes,
I mean that the gesture was so tiny, it's so
natural that I did it. I meant no harm. You know,
(15:08):
I was tired. It was an evening to meeting, and
i'd all day. I had been Sherry' Zimmerman at the
school that was kind of out of the way, and
you know, I was sort of sent to a school
as far away as possible from from where our social
life was. And yet at this meeting, I don't know.
I just said the truth, and the truth was it
(15:30):
was an impossible truth. It was truly a secret. I
mean it wasn't like a little secret. It was a
secret that would fracture this family that was built on
a lie. And I really have such pity and compassion
for myself and for her, who couldn't make a life
(15:53):
where this could be known, who felt that she couldn't
do that. It's so interesting too that you did have
that slip. It was in front of your mother. Could
it could have been somewhere else, It could have been
in some other circumstance where your mother hadn't been in
the room, But it happened when your mother was in
the room. Yes, and many psychoanalyzes later. I mean I thought,
(16:18):
on some level, was that an act of rebellion. I'll
never know, but there's there's obviously some part of that
could have been wanting to somehow have some moment of
truth with her. But what happened, Danny, what happened and
was so telling, was that she didn't yell at me.
(16:40):
She didn't speak of it. We didn't speak for I
think two weeks. And this was a woman who was
talking to me all the time. I you know, we
were talking and talking in our you know, our way
of relating was to tell stories and talk. I mean,
I got my love of language from my mother. She
couldn't to me for two weeks, and it wasn't really
(17:04):
in anger. It was really because she didn't know what
to say. This was so fundamental, this secret was so fundamental.
I mean, she i don't think she knew how to
handle it. In her circle. She was my troop leader.
She was the leader of this girl's got true. And
I think it really raised the question for her as
(17:26):
to whether or not she was going to start to
tell people or And I think what happened was that
people sort of start, you know, put two and two together,
and they sort of I think this was a secret
that many people knew about. But she just let people
assume what they wanted to and never confronted him. After
(17:46):
Sherry is not so Freudian slip, Milton and Sherry's mother
decide it's time to pursue Sherry's official adoption, for her
to take Milton's name. That will make things simpler, right,
But there's this all matter of Charles Zimmerman, who objects
to the adoption and insists on seeing her. Sherry visits
(18:06):
her biological father a few times until her mother puts
a stop to the visits. Of course, Sherry yearns to
know him. At the custody hearing, the judge turns to
her and asks the question, do you love your father?
I was afraid to say no, I don't love my father.
I mean I didn't want to never see him again.
(18:28):
So I said, yes, I love him, and then I
immediately saw my mother turn her face away since this
was just it was like the worst thing that I
could have said. And so the judge then says, go
over and kiss him. And I made to kiss Charles Zimmerman,
(18:48):
and that I look again at my mother, who's again
averting her eyes, and I'm taken out of the room.
This was actually one of the for me, most terrible
incidents of my childhood, because what had taught me is
that you have a decision. Any choice is the wrong choice,
(19:12):
because if I had said I didn't love Charles Immerman,
I would never have seen my father again. And if
I said I loved him, well, my mother was stricken.
And it turned out that I didn't get to see
Charles Zimmerman much. I saw him maybe once or twice again,
and then my mother found another way to put a
stop to it. I mean, my mother was determined that
(19:36):
I would not see him very much. She had her
own reasons to be frightened at him, which I learned later.
Remember how Sherry's mother had received a frightening diagnosis just
before buying her that knit hat, Well, that was yet
another family secret, the secret of her mother's cancer. It
(19:57):
was very common in those days to hide illness from
children and even other family members. Doctors and the medical
establishment believed this was for the best. Sherry's mother receives
a mass ectomy and undergoes treatment. The Cherry doesn't know
or see. You write something that I was particularly taken with,
(20:18):
which is when we don't want to know the truth,
we don't hear the truth spoken to us, or we
don't see what's playing as a day in front of
our eyes because we can't afford to yes. That whole
story of my mother's cancer and how it unfolded, which
really was over a nine year period from her diagnosis
(20:38):
to her death, is really a story of my being
given a tremendous We're having access to a great deal
of information and not putting it together. She didn't want
me to know because she wanted me to go away
(20:59):
to college. This was her focus. She knew. But if
I knew that she was as ill as she was,
I wouldn't have gone away to college. I would have
lived at home, and I would have wanted to commute
to a college in New York City. I mean, I
just would have That was the nature of my relationship
with her. Sherry does indeed go away to college, to
(21:24):
Radcliffe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university that has long been
her dream. She's a brilliant student and finally is exactly
where she wants to be. But then in her junior year,
during exam week, she receives a call that changes her life.
I get a you know, a note from the dean,
(21:45):
and they bring it to me in the library. Call home,
go home, Go to Brooklyn Hospital. There's no one at
home to call. Go to Brooklyn Hospital, and I just
go and I talked to a doctor, and as we
have a kind of miscommunication, I realize he's telling me
my mother has ten days to live. And I realized
I behave as though I'm listening to new information, and
(22:08):
part of me knows that I know. And I've never
forgotten that feeling. I've never forgotten that feeling of almost
pretending that I'm learning something new and not knowing if
I'm pretending I'm learning something new or am I It
was just an out of body experience, and that feeling
(22:31):
has never left me. I can read, I can summon
it even as we speak. I was given so many
clues that she was ill, and yet I didn't know
she was ill. But when I find out, when I'm
told she's ill, I almost have to pretend I'm surprised,
(22:53):
because part of me obviously knows and has known something
was in this, and it only raises that question of
what we know. We can't say you know what's unconscious.
I want to say it was unconscious, because really, if
you would say, as your mom ill, I would have
said no, and I behaved as though she was not.
(23:19):
Sherry's mother dies, and after her death, the dynamic between
Sherry and Milton Turkle grows ever more fraught. He refuses
to do the paperwork that would allow her to have
clearance for her senior year scholarship at Radcliffe. He wants
her to stop going to school so she can stand
in for her mother and care for her younger siblings.
(23:42):
I think he saw no way forward raising these two children.
They were aid and eleven by himself. I think he
thought that was completely beyond him, and he saw me
as the Not only was I to see could keeper,
but I was considered sort of the adult in the family.
(24:03):
I was the designated adult, which was another actually a
great burden, you know, if there was a handyman coming,
if there was a you know, I was sent to,
you know, sort of make sure he did a good
job and pay him and get the receipt. And I
was kind of the person who was most even when
a child, who was considered most most capable to sort
(24:25):
of deal with the outside world. And this was my
family being very insular, the shadow of the Holocaust being
weighing very heavily on them. They're wanting to keep to themselves.
And in this case, I mean, I just think he
felt he could not imagine being in charge of what
was ahead for him. He used the phrase you in
(24:46):
the old country, the eldest daughter would do it. It
just was it was his kind of way of summing
up that there was a way of thinking about this
where it was a natural thing for me to take
this on. I no longer think of it as malevolent.
I think it was deeply selfish. I think it was
(25:06):
him not being able to put himself in my place.
It was the anti empathy moment of it was my
learning empathy by having someone behaved there's no empathy towards me.
But I don't know if he wanted to be cruel
to me. I think he felt bereft. I think when
(25:27):
people feel bereft, they just behave in a crazy way
and what they see as their self interest. And I
think that's what's happening with with Milton and his response
to me, and so he kind of pulls the ultimate
power play and I just leave. In fact, I dropped
out of college, but I don't come home to take
(25:48):
care of my sister and brother. I go to Paris.
There's kind of running through your story something that I
relate to, which is that it's really a story of survivor,
of you know, sort of ultimately, you might have gone
home and taken care of your younger brother and sister,
and that would have completely altered the course of your life.
(26:11):
And you don't you do what's necessary to survive and
to thrive. Yes, we'll be right back. Sherry does eventually
(26:38):
end up finishing her undergrad and soon after attends graduate
school at Harvard, where she studies sociology and psychology. This
is where she first encounters the seminal concept gname duper
name of the father, as developed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacom.
(26:59):
Like you when people say to me will psychoanalysis is
so passe, the notion of the unconscious? Why do you
become a psychoagonal? Why do it psycho one of the training?
What's the use of it? I always say, well, there's
no way for me to experience the story of my
life and not believe in the unconscious, because I was
(27:21):
working through all my life, including yesterday, the fact that
I was not allowed to know the name of my father,
and yet I never made the connection until deep into
my life. That the first serious topic that I study
(27:43):
in graduate school when it's time to write a thesis
a dissertation is a psychoanalyst whose theory is based on
the importance of the name of the father who Jacques
dot Com and I never made that connection. Thesis was
not particularly on the CON's theories on the infatuation with
(28:04):
Freud and France and why after May sixty eight did
everyone want to become a psychoanalyst. So it was really
kind of sociological study. It was kind of an intellectual
history mystery. Was a very exciting thesis of you know,
why certain ideas take hold at different times. I never
put together that I was studying somebody who studies names
(28:27):
of fathers. And then, of course I'm in Paris, I'm
listening to this lecture about names of fathers, and I
find myself weeping, and it hits me that I'm hearing
about my own life. You know, it's hard to believe
how the unconscious works. Well, of course I'm weeping. I'm
(28:51):
there in Powers studying the most important question of my life,
and I sort of had to collect myself and it
was a transformative moment. And Lacan is someone who I
mean to briefly state this theory. He basically saying that
accepting the name of the father is the moment when
(29:11):
you take in the social world. That psychoanalysis is not
just about the family romance, you know, mommy, Daddy, you
It's about taking in the rules and the structure of
language and the way in which that captures the rules
of the social structure in which you live. And that
(29:33):
happens by entering into this order that he calls the
symbolic order. That's where language and society and the social
world comes into with your taking on the father's name.
And really, when he means the father's name, he means
not just the name, but the structure. Let's say that
(29:54):
patriarch society that we live in. You know, that was
going to be pretty complicated for me if I wasn't
even allowed to say my father's name, or if there
was some confusion if there was a father or a
father who had to be erased. Sherry's now in her
late twenties, living in Cambridge, still attending Harvard, but she
(30:17):
makes frequent trips back to Brooklyn to care for her
ailing grandmother. It's during these trips, perhaps spurred on by
her graduate studies, that her absent father begins to haunt
her and she begins to actively look for him. On
every trip, I would stop at the airport and go
(30:40):
through the Manhattan telephone book because we didn't have a
Manhattan telephone book in our home, but there was one
at the airport, and I would get to the flight early,
or remember one time the flight was delayed, and I
would spend as much time as I could copying down
Charles Zimmerman's from the Manhattan telephone book. And then of
(31:03):
course I tried to Queen's telephone book and you know,
whatever telephone books I could find to try to get
the names and addresses of all the Charles Zimmerman's in
New York was trying to figure out who might be
my Charles Zimmerman. And this was the beginning. I mean
I did this obsessively. You know, hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of Charles Zimmerman's. I don't know what I was
(31:25):
planning to do with these names, write them all or
you know, I was going to sift through them, or
it was starting my quest Why do you think why
that moment was it because your grandmother was dying, Why
at that moment did it become the need to know
(31:45):
sort of really just rose up and took hold of you.
My compact with my mother to not find my father.
She had not wanted me to find him, She had
not wanted him in my life, and that promise, that
understanding was with her. And I think that with my
(32:08):
grandmother's death, her mother's death, I felt liberated that I
would no longer be hurting. You know that now I
could now act on my behalf. I could now say
I could answer this question for myself. I think the
(32:28):
death of these two women was very important to me.
And her sister was still alive and I spoke to
her about it, and she didn't like it, but she
helped me. My aunt, Mildred gave me a crucial piece
of information that he had been a teacher in the
New York public schools and that was the key piece
(32:50):
of information and let me find him. But she didn't
know why my mother had left him. She did not
know the secret. She did not know the mystery. It's
not until several years later, when she has a job
teaching at m I T that Terry decides to use
much of her first year's earnings to hire a detective.
(33:11):
Writing random Charles Zimmerman's from the phone book is getting
her nowhere. With the help of the detective and a
key bit of information provided by her aunt, eventually Sherry
does find him and they meet to an epic meeting
because I write him and I you know, I write
(33:31):
him the letter and I say that I believe that
I'm your daughter, and here the circumstances so that we
last connect, and I would very much like to renew
our acquaintance. As soon as he got it, he called
me back. I had given him a number to call,
and we make a date for the following weekend and
I go to his house. At the time, I was married,
(33:54):
and I tell my husband we agree he's going to
stay back at the hotel and I will call him
if I need him, and I go to his houses
in Queen's I'm struck by how he looks like me.
I opened the door in his fos moment when I'm
so I'm so emotionally, kind of just taken over by
the fact that of course I'm looking at someone who
(34:16):
looks like me. It's just just an emotional moment. And
he says to me, did you find me through the
New York Times? At the time, there was like a
set of advertisements in New York subways, like I found
my jobs at the New York Times. And I'm thinking,
did he was he advertising for me all these years
(34:40):
that I was going to the mailbox and hoping to
have like a birthday card or Hanecker card? Or did
I find him through the New York Times? And I
had this moment of warmth and happiness that he'd been
looking for me. And he shows me the ad that
he's been placing in the New York Times, which says
he wells MC squared is not correct. Queen's high school
(35:05):
teacher disproves Einstein and for more information, and there's a
post office box, and his ad in the New York
Times is about him having a pamphlet that disproves Einstein.
He thinks he's he thinks there was a mistake in
Einstein's theory, and then all of a sudden he's talking
(35:28):
about Michaelson Morley and the mistakes and Michaelson and the algebra,
Michaelson Orley. I mean, he's like into his theory of
how he's disproved Einstein, and he's like completely forgotten even
in the room. I mean, he's like into his disproof
of Einstein and giving me, you know, getting copies ready
for me. And it turns out that he was He
(35:50):
was a rogue scientist who had published two books, one
on raw food Vegetarianism and World Peace, where he argues
that only people who were raw food vegetarian should be
able to leave governments because there'll be more peaceful and
this disproof of Einstein has written several books on that.
So bottom line is that as the conversation continues, I
(36:16):
learned that my mother left him because when I was
a baby, the scientific bent of his had expressed itself
by his doing skinner like experiments on me not speaking
to me for a certain amount of time and seeing
(36:36):
what happened, putting me in a dark room for a
certain amount of time and seeing what happened, and all
the different kinds of skinner box experiments that people were
doing at that time. Skinner box experiments, simply put, these
were psychological experiments that studied the effects of positive and
(36:58):
negative reinforcement using rats. Yes, rats, not humans, and most
definitely not babies. And these were secret. My mother didn't
know anything about them, and he did them when she
was out shopping or visiting me, whenever she was not
with me. He did them private. And then once she
(37:21):
came back early from going shopping and she found him
at an experiment where he had left me alone in
a dark room and was trying to extend the amounts
of time that I would tolerate them. So they were
deprivation experiments at that point, I was one year old
(37:44):
when she found him at this experiment. She called her
sister to pick her up and to pick me up,
and she packed some diapers and a few pieces of clothing,
and apparently in some eggs from the supermarket, and we
went back to my grandparents house and never returned and
(38:07):
that's the story of our departure and the end of
that marriage. And as your father is telling you this
story during this meeting that you're having with him for
the first time in many years, he's telling it to you,
it sounds like, you know, somewhat sort of proudly. Yes,
he's very proud of these experiments. I would say I
(38:30):
went into a sort of dissociated state where I sort
of could see myself sitting there at the table, listening
to him, watching myself trying to be present to him,
as I sort of sad at someplace else, maybe across
the room, watching these two people talk. Because it was unbearable.
(38:53):
You know. I wanted to keep this conversation going. I
wanted to not stop him from talking. I wanted to
hear this story desperately. I wanted to hear about these experiments,
but I couldn't bear to. So I sort of had
(39:14):
this experience of removing myself and kept a piece of
me sitting at the table with the coffee cup, letting
him talk to that sherry as part of me just
drifted away. It was an experience that I had never
really had before. And he tells me the story and
(39:38):
then actually I protected myself because I immediately then called
my husband because I wanted him to hear all this.
You need a witness. I needed a witness, and I
wanted to hear this whole thing over again because I,
you know, I just was by this point, I'm in
an altered state. And my husband was a computer scientist
(39:59):
and trying to a great mathematician. And my husband showed up.
And now my my father, Charles Zimmerman, uh, now he
has a bona fide m i T. Mathematician in the
room who understands he can read his equations and the
Michaelson Morley experiment and the mistakes. And they're sitting there together,
(40:25):
and Charlie is so excited, and he's going through the
mistakes and the and I can watch them together as
Charlie is explaining how he's right and Einsstein is wrong,
and Charlie is getting all excited about how he's going
to be famous with these disproof of Einstein. And I understood.
(40:50):
And over the next many years, my understanding would deepened
of why my mother had feared the man and had
just wanted me to never see him. And I I
learned to feel a deep and deepening and deepening empathy
(41:16):
and compassion and understanding of how she had fled. She
had wanted to protect me, she had felt frightened and ashamed,
and she never wanted to talk about this. She did
(41:39):
not want this to be part of her story and
my story. Actually, Rabbis who have spoken to since have
said that some might have shunned me as being the
child of such a person, as though I might carry
his madness. It's even been suggested to me that I
would have been unmarriageable in some Jewish beliefs. She might
(42:05):
have even have grown up with that kind of background,
from a more traditional background than I'm from. I think
there was just a lot to it. She was in
over her head and this was something that she had
to completely erase. Yeah, it makes so much sense. This
(42:26):
is the secret. This secret was not shared with my grandmother.
The secret was not shared with her, my grandfather, or
my aunt. None of them knew this secret. This story
of the experiments was something that when I went to
(42:46):
my aunt and tell her about Charlie and what I found,
this is new to her. You know, she knows that
he's bad, she knows that he's crazy. But my they're
told her family that she was unhappy in this marriage.
But this was a secret she bore alone. She was
(43:08):
so frightened at this secret. So this was her secret too.
So I was a secret keeper, but she was a
secret keeper as well. It took me a while to
find a way to tell the story of who Charles
Zimmerman was because it was a lot to talk about
(43:30):
the experiments that he had done on me, because I was,
you know, in psychoanalysis, and I was working through what
that meant to me. You know, we'll never know, I'll
never know really what that meant to me, but I
was certainly talking a lot about it, and it was
(43:52):
you know, it didn't come trippingly off the tongue to
talk to people about those experiments because I didn't want
to say something that style about them. It was a
lot to talk about. It took many years, and I
think my psychoanalytic work and therapy to be able to,
(44:13):
you know, to kind of talk about and write about
what the discovery of Charles Zimmerman had been like as
an experience. But I could talk about that I kept
the secret and that it had been corrosive, and I
was done with that. Family secrets is a production of
(44:43):
I Heart Radio. Molly z a Core is the story
editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you
have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave
us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
upcoming episode. Our number is one Secret zero. That's the
number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at
(45:05):
Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about
the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir
Inheritance m M. For more podcasts for My heart Radio,
(45:33):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart radiom. My
mother kept secrets and spoke to me in a kind
of code. Nothing was straightforward. From childhood. I had to
figure out how to read her mind too intuite the
contours of her reality. If I developed empathy at first,
(00:24):
it wasn't so much a way to find connection as
a survival strategy. My parents gave me burdens in childhood
that I honed into gifts. That's Sherry Turkle. Sherry is
a professor at m I T, where she is also
founding director of the m I T Initiative on Technology
(00:44):
and Self. Her most recent book is The Empathy Diaries,
a memoir. Sherry's is a layered story of many secrets
and swumming at the center of them all, a massive
secret she is asked to keep from the time she's
a a small child, one that slices to the core
of her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(01:19):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
There were two landscapes of my childhood. There was a
Brooklyn landscape and a Rockaway landscape. We lived in Brooklyn,
(01:42):
in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which were wonderful streets
with grocery stores and hardware stores and five and dimes
and richly textured urban environment. We lived near Prospect Park, Okay,
so there was a playground and great grounds. And Brooklyn
(02:06):
of my youth was a wonderful place for children. We
bounced balls and played Jack's on the sidewalk, and there
were hardly any cars, and it was really a very
idyllic street life, a kind of urban street life. It
made me love the texture of city life. But in
(02:30):
the house, the boundaries of our home, it was a
life where no strangers were allowed in the house. On
the other hand, at Rockaway, where we went in the summer,
we had the beach Um. Rockaway was very close to Brooklyn.
We went to the end of Church Avenue, and very
(02:52):
soon you were crossing a bridge and you were in
this state of land that was a world away from Brooklyn,
a kind of summer retreat for lower middle class of
working people in New York City. I think we paid
eighty dollars a season for our bungalow. In this bungalow colony,
(03:15):
you'd have eight or ten bungalows, five facing each other,
with a court that had three cement pavers that made
up this courtyard. And the social life of the summer
was organized around these ten bungalows in this court. And
there would be fireworks on the boardwalk on Wednesday, and
(03:35):
there would be maybe a party in the court once
a week, and that you played with the children in
the court. There was a generational thing where the older
people in the court watched the babies, you know, and
the teenager babies that for the younger children, and everybody
played majong, and everybody played cards. We amused each other
(03:59):
by singing to each other. It was really quite another time,
and this would have been in the in the fifties.
Again we had a court, we had neighbors. It was
a much more social world. But my grandparents were intensely
private and the life of our family was really enclosed
(04:21):
in the world of our family. So even though we
lived in a beach setting, we knew all the people
in that little court. No one came onto our porch
or into our home. We spoke porch to porch. So
my childhood was a combination of seeing people in social
(04:43):
spaces on the street, but really understanding that my family
was very turned inwards and lived a life of secrets
and privacy and almost kind of hyper vigilance, as though
we had secrets to hide, and we were just in
(05:05):
our family and didn't let people in. This not allowing
strangers in or anyone else in and staying on your
porch and talking to other people from that distance, was
that particular to you. I always knew that we were
special because we were keeping secrets. The secrets in Sherry's
(05:28):
family started out relatively small. The lies seemingly innocuous and silly,
stuff like her mother lied about her height or her age.
One time, her mom tried to pass off a store
bought knit beret a gift to Sherry, as something she
had knit herself. Even as a child, Sherry had the
(05:48):
sense that something was off. She knew she couldn't totally
trust the things her mother said or did. My world
of secrets begins with my mother's character and my mother's ability,
which I understood in so many ways, um to live
in the truth that pleased her. So for example, she
(06:10):
was five eleven or perhaps six ft tall. She was
very tall, and she didn't make her peace with that
until she found out that said Teris was five eleven,
and then somehow she admitted to me that she was
five eleven. She explained to me that when she was
a single woman, every time she went to get her
license renewed, she would explain to the women at the
(06:34):
Bureau of Motor Vehicles that she needed to shave some
inches off her height, because a single woman shouldn't be
five eleven. It's easier to get a husband if you
were five ten, or five nine or five eight. I
never quite understood that, but she had gotten herself down
to five seven, which was preposterous. By the time she died,
(06:57):
I actually looked in her handbag. I mean she was
down to five seven, which, as I say, was preposterous
because she was a beautiful, tall, magnificent woman. And she
had also gotten her age down to kind of a
permanent twenty nine. She was twenty nine when she married
my father, and she was twenty nine six years later
when she when she married her second husband. And again
(07:20):
the way this was done, which was kind of by
just explaining to the women at the registrate for motor vehicles,
you know that she just needed to be younger to
catch a husband, or to not far to make her
husband feel more comfortable with her age. I don't know
how she did it, but she aged very little. According
(07:42):
to the records the New York Records Department, the film
she told about the hat is particularly interesting, and there
was I have a very clear memory of her coming
to pick me up. I was at my grandparents house
and she shows me this white hat that she's this
little knit hat that she said she had knit for me,
(08:03):
and I had seen it in a five and ten
store near my grandparents home, and I knew she hadn't knitted,
and I didn't know what to do. I was kind
of paralyzed because I didn't understand, you know. I think
I said thank you, but it upset me for years
and years and years, this lie and seeing her as
as somebody who would tell lies that I couldn't understand.
(08:25):
I couldn't understand their meaning or why. I kind of
understood why she wanted to be shorter or younger, but
why this hat, Why the hat. Indeed, what Sherry couldn't
have realized at the time when she was given that
hat at the age of eight, was that her mother
had been coming from a doctor's appointment at which she
(08:46):
had received a scary diagnosis. So when she was coming
home from the doctor to pick Sherry up from her
grandparents house, she saw the knit cap at the five
and dime and decided to bring her daughter a gift.
But what came out of her mouth when she presented it,
perhaps as a way of connecting with Sherry during a
worrying time, was I made this for you. I'm so
(09:10):
struck by your mother's fantasies and her aspirations, but more
than anything, her ability to bend the world to her will.
She wanted to be a mother who would have knit
that cap for you, So she became that in that moment.
(09:33):
My guess is that she was not aware at all
that she was lying. In that moment, she just decided
that that was so, the same way she decided she
wasn't five eleven, or that she was twenty nine. Yes. Yes,
in these moments, she was taken up by how she
wanted the world to be. I think that's exactly right,
(09:55):
that she was capable of becoming house she wanted to
could be, and being the person she wanted to be.
You know, in technical terms, they say that you know
the neurotic style of hysteric is that they believe their wish,
the lies they tell is the deepest possible wish. And
(10:16):
I think that these wishes really structured her, her character,
These wishes for herself, these wishes for me, really became
who she was, really became who she was. It's striking
me too that you know, when you were a child,
you lived in a Kosher style um and what that
(10:38):
meant was that in the home there wasn't work, and
there wasn't shrimp, and you know, there wasn't seafood and
milk and dairy and meat would be I suppose not
eaten together. But when you would go out, particularly on Sundays,
the Jewish ritual of going out for Chinese food on Sundays,
that you know, all bets were off, like apparently in
(11:00):
Chinese restaurants, pork was okay. Yes, these were my grandmother's
ways putting the world together. But the Kosher laws meant
was what you did in your home is where these
kosher laws applied. And then what you did outside that
(11:21):
was a completely different story. None of the rules needed
to apply there, so pork on the outside didn't count
as breaking the rules. And again it's making the world
fit the way you want the world to be. It's
very my family. In my family, certainly people constructed the
(11:46):
world the way they wanted it to be. Beyond knit
hats and secret pork, the greatest secret at the center
of Sherry's childhood was her her own identity, her very name.
My name was Sherry Zimmerman, and I hadn't seen that
name or heard that name really until I started school,
(12:10):
and legally that name had to be on a piece
of paper. But I was just part of the Bonnerwits clan,
which was my family name by my grandparents name. My
mother had divorced my father, whose name was Charles Zimmerman,
and when she went back to live with her parents,
Robert and Edith Bonnowitz, I was just Erry. I was
(12:31):
told that I was never to mention my father or
his name. They were constructing a world in which, because
your mother was divorced when you were very young, and
divorce was quite uncommon in that milieu, that somehow simply
you didn't have a father, and you weren't allowed to
(12:55):
speak or even know anything really about this mysterious person
and who had been your father and had briefly been
your mother's husband. His name was never said. I knew
not to say it or ask anything. It was one
of those things that it was completely foreclosed. It was
not you know, it was not like you could ask
(13:16):
a question and be told we're not talking about that.
You just knew not to ask. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Sherry's mother remarries a
(13:41):
man named Milton Turkle, and together they have two children.
These kids think that Sherry is their biological sister, while
Sherry silently carries the truth of where she comes from.
So often when secrets are kept, there are times when
one is asked to become a secret keeper, and you're
at child, you're being told you must keep something as
(14:02):
fundamental as your name a secret, and you live in
fear of slipping up. There are a few incidents, were
a few moments when I do slip up. Not many,
but there's one in particular when I do. And it's
at a girl scout meeting and we're going around, and
you know, we're asked to say our name, and I
(14:25):
say that my name is Sherry Zimmerman, and my mother
is stricken. She clearly doesn't know what to do. I mean,
it isn't that she's angry. Of course she is angry,
but more than angry, I've outed her. She doesn't know
what to do. Looking back, I have pity on myself
(14:46):
actually because I realized the terrible weight that I was holding,
because when I slipped up, the pain that I caused
was terrible, and the pain being uttering your real name. Yes,
I mean that the gesture was so tiny, it's so
natural that I did it. I meant no harm. You know,
(15:08):
I was tired. It was an evening to meeting, and
i'd all day. I had been Sherry' Zimmerman at the
school that was kind of out of the way, and
you know, I was sort of sent to a school
as far away as possible from from where our social
life was. And yet at this meeting, I don't know.
I just said the truth, and the truth was it
(15:30):
was an impossible truth. It was truly a secret. I
mean it wasn't like a little secret. It was a
secret that would fracture this family that was built on
a lie. And I really have such pity and compassion
for myself and for her, who couldn't make a life
(15:53):
where this could be known, who felt that she couldn't
do that. It's so interesting too that you did have
that slip. It was in front of your mother. Could
it could have been somewhere else, It could have been
in some other circumstance where your mother hadn't been in
the room, But it happened when your mother was in
the room. Yes, and many psychoanalyzes later. I mean I thought,
(16:18):
on some level, was that an act of rebellion. I'll
never know, but there's there's obviously some part of that
could have been wanting to somehow have some moment of
truth with her. But what happened, Danny, what happened and
was so telling, was that she didn't yell at me.
(16:40):
She didn't speak of it. We didn't speak for I
think two weeks. And this was a woman who was
talking to me all the time. I you know, we
were talking and talking in our you know, our way
of relating was to tell stories and talk. I mean,
I got my love of language from my mother. She
couldn't to me for two weeks, and it wasn't really
(17:04):
in anger. It was really because she didn't know what
to say. This was so fundamental, this secret was so fundamental.
I mean, she i don't think she knew how to
handle it. In her circle. She was my troop leader.
She was the leader of this girl's got true. And
I think it really raised the question for her as
(17:26):
to whether or not she was going to start to
tell people or And I think what happened was that
people sort of start, you know, put two and two together,
and they sort of I think this was a secret
that many people knew about. But she just let people
assume what they wanted to and never confronted him. After
(17:46):
Sherry is not so Freudian slip, Milton and Sherry's mother
decide it's time to pursue Sherry's official adoption, for her
to take Milton's name. That will make things simpler, right,
But there's this all matter of Charles Zimmerman, who objects
to the adoption and insists on seeing her. Sherry visits
(18:06):
her biological father a few times until her mother puts
a stop to the visits. Of course, Sherry yearns to
know him. At the custody hearing, the judge turns to
her and asks the question, do you love your father?
I was afraid to say no, I don't love my father.
I mean I didn't want to never see him again.
(18:28):
So I said, yes, I love him, and then I
immediately saw my mother turn her face away since this
was just it was like the worst thing that I
could have said. And so the judge then says, go
over and kiss him. And I made to kiss Charles Zimmerman,
(18:48):
and that I look again at my mother, who's again
averting her eyes, and I'm taken out of the room.
This was actually one of the for me, most terrible
incidents of my childhood, because what had taught me is
that you have a decision. Any choice is the wrong choice,
(19:12):
because if I had said I didn't love Charles Immerman,
I would never have seen my father again. And if
I said I loved him, well, my mother was stricken.
And it turned out that I didn't get to see
Charles Zimmerman much. I saw him maybe once or twice again,
and then my mother found another way to put a
stop to it. I mean, my mother was determined that
(19:36):
I would not see him very much. She had her
own reasons to be frightened at him, which I learned later.
Remember how Sherry's mother had received a frightening diagnosis just
before buying her that knit hat, Well, that was yet
another family secret, the secret of her mother's cancer. It
(19:57):
was very common in those days to hide illness from
children and even other family members. Doctors and the medical
establishment believed this was for the best. Sherry's mother receives
a mass ectomy and undergoes treatment. The Cherry doesn't know
or see. You write something that I was particularly taken with,
(20:18):
which is when we don't want to know the truth,
we don't hear the truth spoken to us, or we
don't see what's playing as a day in front of
our eyes because we can't afford to yes. That whole
story of my mother's cancer and how it unfolded, which
really was over a nine year period from her diagnosis
(20:38):
to her death, is really a story of my being
given a tremendous We're having access to a great deal
of information and not putting it together. She didn't want
me to know because she wanted me to go away
(20:59):
to college. This was her focus. She knew. But if
I knew that she was as ill as she was,
I wouldn't have gone away to college. I would have
lived at home, and I would have wanted to commute
to a college in New York City. I mean, I
just would have That was the nature of my relationship
with her. Sherry does indeed go away to college, to
(21:24):
Radcliffe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university that has long been
her dream. She's a brilliant student and finally is exactly
where she wants to be. But then in her junior year,
during exam week, she receives a call that changes her life.
I get a you know, a note from the dean,
(21:45):
and they bring it to me in the library. Call home,
go home, Go to Brooklyn Hospital. There's no one at
home to call. Go to Brooklyn Hospital, and I just
go and I talked to a doctor, and as we
have a kind of miscommunication, I realize he's telling me
my mother has ten days to live. And I realized
I behave as though I'm listening to new information, and
(22:08):
part of me knows that I know. And I've never
forgotten that feeling. I've never forgotten that feeling of almost
pretending that I'm learning something new and not knowing if
I'm pretending I'm learning something new or am I It
was just an out of body experience, and that feeling
(22:31):
has never left me. I can read, I can summon
it even as we speak. I was given so many
clues that she was ill, and yet I didn't know
she was ill. But when I find out, when I'm
told she's ill, I almost have to pretend I'm surprised,
(22:53):
because part of me obviously knows and has known something
was in this, and it only raises that question of
what we know. We can't say you know what's unconscious.
I want to say it was unconscious, because really, if
you would say, as your mom ill, I would have
said no, and I behaved as though she was not.
(23:19):
Sherry's mother dies, and after her death, the dynamic between
Sherry and Milton Turkle grows ever more fraught. He refuses
to do the paperwork that would allow her to have
clearance for her senior year scholarship at Radcliffe. He wants
her to stop going to school so she can stand
in for her mother and care for her younger siblings.
(23:42):
I think he saw no way forward raising these two children.
They were aid and eleven by himself. I think he
thought that was completely beyond him, and he saw me
as the Not only was I to see could keeper,
but I was considered sort of the adult in the family.
(24:03):
I was the designated adult, which was another actually a
great burden, you know, if there was a handyman coming,
if there was a you know, I was sent to,
you know, sort of make sure he did a good
job and pay him and get the receipt. And I
was kind of the person who was most even when
a child, who was considered most most capable to sort
(24:25):
of deal with the outside world. And this was my
family being very insular, the shadow of the Holocaust being
weighing very heavily on them. They're wanting to keep to themselves.
And in this case, I mean, I just think he
felt he could not imagine being in charge of what
was ahead for him. He used the phrase you in
(24:46):
the old country, the eldest daughter would do it. It
just was it was his kind of way of summing
up that there was a way of thinking about this
where it was a natural thing for me to take
this on. I no longer think of it as malevolent.
I think it was deeply selfish. I think it was
(25:06):
him not being able to put himself in my place.
It was the anti empathy moment of it was my
learning empathy by having someone behaved there's no empathy towards me.
But I don't know if he wanted to be cruel
to me. I think he felt bereft. I think when
(25:27):
people feel bereft, they just behave in a crazy way
and what they see as their self interest. And I
think that's what's happening with with Milton and his response
to me, and so he kind of pulls the ultimate
power play and I just leave. In fact, I dropped
out of college, but I don't come home to take
(25:48):
care of my sister and brother. I go to Paris.
There's kind of running through your story something that I
relate to, which is that it's really a story of survivor,
of you know, sort of ultimately, you might have gone
home and taken care of your younger brother and sister,
and that would have completely altered the course of your life.
(26:11):
And you don't you do what's necessary to survive and
to thrive. Yes, we'll be right back. Sherry does eventually
(26:38):
end up finishing her undergrad and soon after attends graduate
school at Harvard, where she studies sociology and psychology. This
is where she first encounters the seminal concept gname duper
name of the father, as developed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacom.
(26:59):
Like you when people say to me will psychoanalysis is
so passe, the notion of the unconscious? Why do you
become a psychoagonal? Why do it psycho one of the training?
What's the use of it? I always say, well, there's
no way for me to experience the story of my
life and not believe in the unconscious, because I was
(27:21):
working through all my life, including yesterday, the fact that
I was not allowed to know the name of my father,
and yet I never made the connection until deep into
my life. That the first serious topic that I study
(27:43):
in graduate school when it's time to write a thesis
a dissertation is a psychoanalyst whose theory is based on
the importance of the name of the father who Jacques
dot Com and I never made that connection. Thesis was
not particularly on the CON's theories on the infatuation with
(28:04):
Freud and France and why after May sixty eight did
everyone want to become a psychoanalyst. So it was really
kind of sociological study. It was kind of an intellectual
history mystery. Was a very exciting thesis of you know,
why certain ideas take hold at different times. I never
put together that I was studying somebody who studies names
(28:27):
of fathers. And then, of course I'm in Paris, I'm
listening to this lecture about names of fathers, and I
find myself weeping, and it hits me that I'm hearing
about my own life. You know, it's hard to believe
how the unconscious works. Well, of course I'm weeping. I'm
(28:51):
there in Powers studying the most important question of my life,
and I sort of had to collect myself and it
was a transformative moment. And Lacan is someone who I
mean to briefly state this theory. He basically saying that
accepting the name of the father is the moment when
(29:11):
you take in the social world. That psychoanalysis is not
just about the family romance, you know, mommy, Daddy, you
It's about taking in the rules and the structure of
language and the way in which that captures the rules
of the social structure in which you live. And that
(29:33):
happens by entering into this order that he calls the
symbolic order. That's where language and society and the social
world comes into with your taking on the father's name.
And really, when he means the father's name, he means
not just the name, but the structure. Let's say that
(29:54):
patriarch society that we live in. You know, that was
going to be pretty complicated for me if I wasn't
even allowed to say my father's name, or if there
was some confusion if there was a father or a
father who had to be erased. Sherry's now in her
late twenties, living in Cambridge, still attending Harvard, but she
(30:17):
makes frequent trips back to Brooklyn to care for her
ailing grandmother. It's during these trips, perhaps spurred on by
her graduate studies, that her absent father begins to haunt
her and she begins to actively look for him. On
every trip, I would stop at the airport and go
(30:40):
through the Manhattan telephone book because we didn't have a
Manhattan telephone book in our home, but there was one
at the airport, and I would get to the flight early,
or remember one time the flight was delayed, and I
would spend as much time as I could copying down
Charles Zimmerman's from the Manhattan telephone book. And then of
(31:03):
course I tried to Queen's telephone book and you know,
whatever telephone books I could find to try to get
the names and addresses of all the Charles Zimmerman's in
New York was trying to figure out who might be
my Charles Zimmerman. And this was the beginning. I mean
I did this obsessively. You know, hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of Charles Zimmerman's. I don't know what I was
(31:25):
planning to do with these names, write them all or
you know, I was going to sift through them, or
it was starting my quest Why do you think why
that moment was it because your grandmother was dying, Why
at that moment did it become the need to know
(31:45):
sort of really just rose up and took hold of you.
My compact with my mother to not find my father.
She had not wanted me to find him, She had
not wanted him in my life, and that promise, that
understanding was with her. And I think that with my
(32:08):
grandmother's death, her mother's death, I felt liberated that I
would no longer be hurting. You know that now I
could now act on my behalf. I could now say
I could answer this question for myself. I think the
(32:28):
death of these two women was very important to me.
And her sister was still alive and I spoke to
her about it, and she didn't like it, but she
helped me. My aunt, Mildred gave me a crucial piece
of information that he had been a teacher in the
New York public schools and that was the key piece
(32:50):
of information and let me find him. But she didn't
know why my mother had left him. She did not
know the secret. She did not know the mystery. It's
not until several years later, when she has a job
teaching at m I T that Terry decides to use
much of her first year's earnings to hire a detective.
(33:11):
Writing random Charles Zimmerman's from the phone book is getting
her nowhere. With the help of the detective and a
key bit of information provided by her aunt, eventually Sherry
does find him and they meet to an epic meeting
because I write him and I you know, I write
(33:31):
him the letter and I say that I believe that
I'm your daughter, and here the circumstances so that we
last connect, and I would very much like to renew
our acquaintance. As soon as he got it, he called
me back. I had given him a number to call,
and we make a date for the following weekend and
I go to his house. At the time, I was married,
(33:54):
and I tell my husband we agree he's going to
stay back at the hotel and I will call him
if I need him, and I go to his houses
in Queen's I'm struck by how he looks like me.
I opened the door in his fos moment when I'm
so I'm so emotionally, kind of just taken over by
the fact that of course I'm looking at someone who
(34:16):
looks like me. It's just just an emotional moment. And
he says to me, did you find me through the
New York Times? At the time, there was like a
set of advertisements in New York subways, like I found
my jobs at the New York Times. And I'm thinking,
did he was he advertising for me all these years
(34:40):
that I was going to the mailbox and hoping to
have like a birthday card or Hanecker card? Or did
I find him through the New York Times? And I
had this moment of warmth and happiness that he'd been
looking for me. And he shows me the ad that
he's been placing in the New York Times, which says
he wells MC squared is not correct. Queen's high school
(35:05):
teacher disproves Einstein and for more information, and there's a
post office box, and his ad in the New York
Times is about him having a pamphlet that disproves Einstein.
He thinks he's he thinks there was a mistake in
Einstein's theory, and then all of a sudden he's talking
(35:28):
about Michaelson Morley and the mistakes and Michaelson and the algebra,
Michaelson Orley. I mean, he's like into his theory of
how he's disproved Einstein, and he's like completely forgotten even
in the room. I mean, he's like into his disproof
of Einstein and giving me, you know, getting copies ready
for me. And it turns out that he was He
(35:50):
was a rogue scientist who had published two books, one
on raw food Vegetarianism and World Peace, where he argues
that only people who were raw food vegetarian should be
able to leave governments because there'll be more peaceful and
this disproof of Einstein has written several books on that.
So bottom line is that as the conversation continues, I
(36:16):
learned that my mother left him because when I was
a baby, the scientific bent of his had expressed itself
by his doing skinner like experiments on me not speaking
to me for a certain amount of time and seeing
(36:36):
what happened, putting me in a dark room for a
certain amount of time and seeing what happened, and all
the different kinds of skinner box experiments that people were
doing at that time. Skinner box experiments, simply put, these
were psychological experiments that studied the effects of positive and
(36:58):
negative reinforcement using rats. Yes, rats, not humans, and most
definitely not babies. And these were secret. My mother didn't
know anything about them, and he did them when she
was out shopping or visiting me, whenever she was not
with me. He did them private. And then once she
(37:21):
came back early from going shopping and she found him
at an experiment where he had left me alone in
a dark room and was trying to extend the amounts
of time that I would tolerate them. So they were
deprivation experiments at that point, I was one year old
(37:44):
when she found him at this experiment. She called her
sister to pick her up and to pick me up,
and she packed some diapers and a few pieces of clothing,
and apparently in some eggs from the supermarket, and we
went back to my grandparents house and never returned and
(38:07):
that's the story of our departure and the end of
that marriage. And as your father is telling you this
story during this meeting that you're having with him for
the first time in many years, he's telling it to you,
it sounds like, you know, somewhat sort of proudly. Yes,
he's very proud of these experiments. I would say I
(38:30):
went into a sort of dissociated state where I sort
of could see myself sitting there at the table, listening
to him, watching myself trying to be present to him,
as I sort of sad at someplace else, maybe across
the room, watching these two people talk. Because it was unbearable.
(38:53):
You know. I wanted to keep this conversation going. I
wanted to not stop him from talking. I wanted to
hear this story desperately. I wanted to hear about these experiments,
but I couldn't bear to. So I sort of had
(39:14):
this experience of removing myself and kept a piece of
me sitting at the table with the coffee cup, letting
him talk to that sherry as part of me just
drifted away. It was an experience that I had never
really had before. And he tells me the story and
(39:38):
then actually I protected myself because I immediately then called
my husband because I wanted him to hear all this.
You need a witness. I needed a witness, and I
wanted to hear this whole thing over again because I,
you know, I just was by this point, I'm in
an altered state. And my husband was a computer scientist
(39:59):
and trying to a great mathematician. And my husband showed up.
And now my my father, Charles Zimmerman, uh, now he
has a bona fide m i T. Mathematician in the
room who understands he can read his equations and the
Michaelson Morley experiment and the mistakes. And they're sitting there together,
(40:25):
and Charlie is so excited, and he's going through the
mistakes and the and I can watch them together as
Charlie is explaining how he's right and Einsstein is wrong,
and Charlie is getting all excited about how he's going
to be famous with these disproof of Einstein. And I understood.
(40:50):
And over the next many years, my understanding would deepened
of why my mother had feared the man and had
just wanted me to never see him. And I I
learned to feel a deep and deepening and deepening empathy
(41:16):
and compassion and understanding of how she had fled. She
had wanted to protect me, she had felt frightened and ashamed,
and she never wanted to talk about this. She did
(41:39):
not want this to be part of her story and
my story. Actually, Rabbis who have spoken to since have
said that some might have shunned me as being the
child of such a person, as though I might carry
his madness. It's even been suggested to me that I
would have been unmarriageable in some Jewish beliefs. She might
(42:05):
have even have grown up with that kind of background,
from a more traditional background than I'm from. I think
there was just a lot to it. She was in
over her head and this was something that she had
to completely erase. Yeah, it makes so much sense. This
(42:26):
is the secret. This secret was not shared with my grandmother.
The secret was not shared with her, my grandfather, or
my aunt. None of them knew this secret. This story
of the experiments was something that when I went to
(42:46):
my aunt and tell her about Charlie and what I found,
this is new to her. You know, she knows that
he's bad, she knows that he's crazy. But my they're
told her family that she was unhappy in this marriage.
But this was a secret she bore alone. She was
(43:08):
so frightened at this secret. So this was her secret too.
So I was a secret keeper, but she was a
secret keeper as well. It took me a while to
find a way to tell the story of who Charles
Zimmerman was because it was a lot to talk about
(43:30):
the experiments that he had done on me, because I was,
you know, in psychoanalysis, and I was working through what
that meant to me. You know, we'll never know, I'll
never know really what that meant to me, but I
was certainly talking a lot about it, and it was
(43:52):
you know, it didn't come trippingly off the tongue to
talk to people about those experiments because I didn't want
to say something that style about them. It was a
lot to talk about. It took many years, and I
think my psychoanalytic work and therapy to be able to,
(44:13):
you know, to kind of talk about and write about
what the discovery of Charles Zimmerman had been like as
an experience. But I could talk about that I kept
the secret and that it had been corrosive, and I
was done with that. Family secrets is a production of
(44:43):
I Heart Radio. Molly z a Core is the story
editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you
have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave
us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
upcoming episode. Our number is one Secret zero. That's the
number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at
(45:05):
Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about
the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir
Inheritance m M. For more podcasts for My heart Radio,
(45:33):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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