How many first-generation students were not the first?

Reading the silences in my grandfather's life

My grandfather, Rupert Schertel, circa 1940.

Soon after I left academe, I found myself probing my family roots. It was a way of feeling less alone, imagining my journey as a kind of emigration that echoed my ancestors’ major life transitions. That search paid off in my pilgrimage to Moravia last summer. 

But the deeper you get into genealogy, the more complex the story becomes. Understanding your parents is mystery enough, but then there are four grandparents. And eight great grandparents. And all of the siblings, aunts and uncles, and cousins who shaped everyone’s story along the way. A friend recently told me that there are more than 17 quintillion possibilities in a March Madness Bracket, and teasing out a coherent narrative from a family tree is not unlike trying to guess the perfect bracket.

The story I want to tell today about myself and my maternal grandfather, Rupert Schertel, is riddled with guesses. But that is because he withheld so much of his story – first from my mother, and later from me. I may never understand why my grandfather chose not to tell me, during my own college years, that his father was a professor of German at the University of Washington or that his uncle founded the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. Like many first-generation students, I faced financial disadvantages. But the greatest burden of my academic journey was a sense of isolation – from family members who either could not understand my intellectual life or actively disapproved of it and from my classmates, who seemed to feel more at home in academe than I did. 

The story we tell about privilege in America might suffer from a willful silence like my grandfather’s. The master narrative assumes that once wealth and power are won, they are never lost. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! follows this conventional arc, from the broken-down John Bergson, a failure at farming and nearly everything else, to his visionary daughter, Alexandra, whose buoyant spirit is ostensibly reborn in “the shining eyes of youth.” But on both sides of my family the second generation struggled more than the first. And by the time I went to college, I had nearly as much in common with the ancestors who sailed to America in steerage as I did with those who had fought their way out of poverty into the middle class. How could this possibly be? 

As William Wordsworth famously said, “The Child is father of the Man.” Wordsworth meant this in the best sense – that we can rediscover delight and wonder by recalling our younger selves. But the same principle can work in reverse with inherited trauma or estrangement. So when I think back to those stiff conversations I had with my grandfather during my summers home from college, and later during graduate school, I wonder if he was responding to me, his grandson, or if we were reenacting scenes that he had lived with his own father, the one he never told me anything about. 

My great grandparents, Max and Anna, with my mother (center) and two of my uncles.

I don’t know much about Max Schertel, my great grandfather. He was born in 1880 in Augsburg, Germany, and must have emigrated to the U.S. in his twenties, though I have not yet uncovered his documents. He married Anna Johanson, originally of Lund, Sweden, and they lived most of their lives in the Seattle area where Max taught German at the university. He seems to have been very active, teaching at all levels of the curriculum, writing book reviews for The German Quarterly, even publishing his dissertation on Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann and the Genealogical Novel).

Max and Anna had four children together – Sigmund, Max Jr., Annabelle, and my grandfather, Rupert. Sigmund was born in 1909, when Max Sr. was completing a bachelor’s of education at Colorado State Teachers College (now Northern Colorado University). Max Jr. was born a year later in Cortez, Colorado, some seven hours to the south. Some big holes in the story emerge here. Annabelle was born in 1916, back in Washington. What happened during those six years? And why was there a three-year gap between Annabelle and my grandfather, who was born in 1919? 

Max Sr. seems to have started over after my grandfather was born. He completed a B.A. at the University of Washington in 1923, at age 43. He was roughly my age when he finished an M.A. in 1928, and he was 58 when he completed a Ph.D. in 1938. It seems like a difficult life, supporting a family of six while being a full-time student. But the family did not seem to be poor. According to the 1940 census, Max made $2,000 a year as an instructor, about $42,000 per year in today’s money. That was enough to purchase a $3,250 home within walking distance of the beach.  

I don’t expect that Max was always available to his children, but his letters to my grandfather during WWII reveal him to be warm and funny. In one letter to Rupert from 1943, Max recalls his grandson Norman saying asking to “play button”: “That means he gives me a big button and I say in a bass voice, big button. Then he gives me a little button and I say in a high pitched piping voice, ‘wee little button.’” Max apologizes for boring his son with long lists of his garden plants, after having given an exhaustive catalog in a previous letter (30 tomato plants, 20 peppers, onions, beets, bush beans, Danish squash, peas [“completely annihilated by a flock of quail”], potatoes, kohlrabi, spinach, and broccoli). Max also seems to have encouraged Rupert to have some fun now and then. “It is not so easy to strike the right balance between work and play” he wrote. “It is a serious question in mental hygiene.” In the same letter, he even tries to spare my grandfather some hurt, reporting that there was a letter from a girl named Emely, who my grandfather appears to have been courting. “Rupert,” Max writes, “I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but you will find out anyway sooner or later and we hoped that you would find out from some of your friends instead of from us that Emely is not free any more to accept gifts from you and I would not write to her any more.”

Max was in his early sixties as he wrote these letters, and my grandfather was 23, serving in the Merchant Marines. I have none of my grandfather’s replies – if he replied at all – and so the letters are an unreliable indication of how things were between father and son during Rupert’s formative years. Was Max always warm and funny with his children, or was he cold and aloof while trying to feed his family and complete his university degrees? Are his letters an indication of his wit at the dinner table, or do they suggest that he was trying to repair his relationship with his son before he died in battle? 

I have always imagined that my grandfather’s reserve – the way he would wear a freshly pressed shirt when I came to visit during my summers home from college – was an echo of his own father’s formality. My grandfather was a slow reader and left the letter writing to my grandmother. Did he feel ashamed for lacking the literary and scientific talents that his father and elder brothers enjoyed? Did my own intellectual aspirations remind him of disappointing his own father? 

Or Rupert might have felt his father could have been doing more meaningful work, that Max’s passion for German literature marked him as effete during a time when the square-jawed soldier defined American masculinity. My grandfather might have suffered from bullying during the 1920s, after the first world war, when anti-German sentiment plagued many immigrant families. With a name like Rupert Schertel and a German scholar for a father, he would have been an easy target. But I have no way of knowing how much these larger cultural forces shaped my great grandfather’s life in America and my grandfather’s upbringing. 

Source: History

Despite the many silences on the Schertel side of my family, I can say with some certainty that my grandfather grew up in comfort and that his primary models – his father, his uncles, and his elder brothers – were all professionals. Perhaps the most notable of these was my grandfather’s uncle, one Dr. Nils August Johanson, founder of the Swedish Hospital in Seattle. When my great grandfather Max completed a draft registration card in 1942, as part of the “Old Man’s Draft,” he listed his brother-in-law Nils as the person who would always know his address. 

Source: Ancestry.com

Nils Johanson came to New York City penniless, married into a wealthy family in Denver, Colorado, where he completed his medical degree, and later moved to Washington, where he raised money from other Swedish families to open the Swedish hospital that continues to thrive today. Nils enjoyed riding horses with his daughter, Kitty, as she recalls in My Father’s Legacy, when there were still many grassy paths throughout the Seattle area. Kitty was eight years older than my grandfather and may not have known him well, but she recalls her Uncle Max and Aunt Anna visiting for holiday dinners. I grew up hearing vague rumors about distant relatives who owned the Seattle Seahawks, and Kitty’s book proves these rumors to be true. She married into the Nordstrom family, and her husband Elmer held a majority ownership share of the football team for six years. It is jarring to read of Kitty’s friendship with players I grew up rooting for, like Steve Largent, knowing now that she was not such a distant relative after all. I’m not sure why the family seemed unaware of Elmer’s death during my senior year of high school, when his passing made the national news. Was it that my grandfather's cousins snubbed him, or that Rupert left his life in Seattle behind the way some immigrants never looked back after sailing for America?

I may never understand why my grandfather gave up a life of relative privilege in Seattle for a hand-to-mouth existence in rural Montana. But there was a great deal that he chose to forget, and this silence contributed to the isolation I often felt in academe. As a memoirist now, I carry the feeble torch of research into this darkness with the icy wind of ignorance all around me. 

Left to right: Rupert and Annabelle, circa 1920; my grandfather as a ranch hand in Idaho, circa 1950, my grandfather holding my mother outside his childhood home, circa 1955.

Some of the most vivid memories I have of my Grandpa Rupert are from Christmas Eve, when we visited for a family dinner. He and my grandmother, Dorcas, lived for more than fifty years in a two-bedroom house in Libby, Montana, where they raised five children. Each year, before our Christmas dinner, my grandfather read from Luke, Chapter Two, where Joseph and Mary lay the Baby Jesus in the manger, because there was no room for him in the inn. His voice often thickened with emotion as he read about an angel announcing the good news to shepherds who left their flocks to honor the Christ child, and who thereafter spread the tidings throughout the land. Sometimes he had to gather himself, wiping his eyes as my grandmother rubbed his back, before finishing the passage. 

I do not know the story of my grandfather’s conversion, but I do not believe he was raised a Christian. Max’s letters to him make no mention of religion whatsoever. My mother once gave me a Swedish psalm book (Psalmbok) that belonged to her grandmother Anna, but the Johansons seemed to follow the more liberal branch of Lutheranism – the kind that found no quarrel with material wealth or secular interests. One of my cousins, who heard more stories from our grandfather than I did, claims that he began attending church while working as a ranch hand in Idaho because he was lonely and wanted to find a wife. If that was so, the plan worked – he married my grandmother at the church where they met, near Caldwell. But it seems that he found a deeper purpose in church, a place where he belonged for the rest of his life. He began a letter to my grandmother in 1963, when he was exploring job opportunities in Montana, with “Dearest Sweetie Bun; In Jesus Name.”

The most prominent decoration in my grandparents’ home was a world map. It occupied a good share of the kitchen wall, above the table where we shared our holiday meals, and it was filled with colored push pins marking places where missionary families they knew and supported were serving. The wall beneath the map held photographs of those families, along with larger images of Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan. It did not occur to me then, but the image strikes me now as a kind of shrine. It was a home where ceramic praying hands would have fit right in. 

I understood from an early age that church and hard work were the things my grandfather cared about. He did not allow my uncles to play competitive sports, in part because he feared that they might suffer a disabling injury that would prevent them from earning a living. But I think it was the worldliness of sport that repelled him more. My paternal grandfather was a staple at all of my high school basketball and football games, even following my summer league baseball team to all of our road games. I was a good athlete, and I remember being puzzled by the fact that my Grandpa Schertel was not impressed by home runs or touchdowns. The thing he wanted to know, above all, was that I was still saved. Everything was tangential to that. 

My grandparents, Rupert and Dorcas Schertel, at my high school graduation, 1993.

We bonded briefly over my work with the Forest Service. Grandpa was a USFS employee, himself, for most of his life. And he loved hearing about my wilderness work in Idaho, where I often helped care for the mules that packed our groceries to the remote station every ten days. Perhaps this reminded him of his own days working with sheep and horses around the time he met my grandmother. I never saw him light up the way he did when I told him that mules were more intelligent than horses and that they had a bad rap for stubbornness, when they often had good reasons for refusing a rider’s commands. 

But I knew that I could never talk Plato with him, that my honors thesis on Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger would have shocked him. Even though I still considered myself a Christian as a college senior, I had left Billy Graham’s simplistic theology far behind. I was fascinated by Twain’s exploration of hypocrisy in religion, how his character Satan functions as a kind of revisionist historian, recalling the torture and execution of alleged heretics. And I wondered what Ronald Reagan might have said to a work like “The War Prayer,” which reveals that hidden within prayers for American troops are also prayers for the destruction of opposing soldiers and their families. I now know that I might have had a rich conversation about Twain with my great grandfather Max, but I feared that if I breathed a word about my research, I would incur my Grandpa Rupert’s wrath.

Despite his political conservatism, my grandfather had no fondness for war. He told me almost nothing about his military service except to say, once, that he had witnessed a kamikaze plane while sailing in the Pacific. Whether the plane attempted an attack on his ship or another I cannot recall. But he described a feeling of helplessness, of freezing in place with nowhere to run. I have wondered in the years since if his reclusiveness might have been a symptom of post-traumatic stress, if he might have left Seattle behind because he felt safer in the mountains, where he could disappear beneath the timber canopy, or in a sheep corral, where the animals might help him heal even as he tended to their needs. 

If this is so, then there might not have been a serious rift between Rupert and his father Max. It might be a simpler story – one often omitted from modernism – of a young man who saw the world being broken apart and fled from the city and the sea, where he had seen the blood of other young men spilled, into the pastoral setting that offers rebirth in so many of Shakespeare’s plays. During those vulnerable post-war years, when he sought solace in the simplicity of the pasture and the corral, he also found love – and the gospel story that became his guiding light. 

Part of me still wonders why my grandfather kept so much knowledge of his father from me. Did the coldness between us echo a chill that he felt from Max? Maybe by following the path that his father, his uncle Nils, and his brothers had followed, I reminded my grandfather of how out of place he felt in an intellectual family. I’m not sure how much it would have changed my student experience to know that one of my ancestors had also been a literary scholar. But it might have eased the guilt I felt about leaving my blue-collar heritage behind. In fact, it might have helped me understand that there is nothing necessarily more admirable in being a logger or a farmer than there is in being a teacher or a writer. Many people in my family worked with their hands because they chose to, not because that was their only option. But the puzzling truth about my grandfather’s story is that his choice to give up privilege meant trading that birthright for generations to come. 

It is harder to build wealth and opportunity than it is to abandon them. For much of my childhood, I did not believe I belonged among my classmates – or in the wide world beyond Troy, Montana. I am still trying to prevent that boy from being father to the man I am. 

This is not the story that my grandfather would have written about his own life. And it could be that my own children will identify more with the choices he made than with my own journey. Lin Manuel Miranda’s line applies equally to us all, with particular resonance for the memoirist: “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”