While I understand the value of First Generation programs, which are sweeping the academy, they often don't capture the complexity of socioeconomic class. My mother had a college degree, graduate credits, and specialized training in a professional position (medical technology), and I understood how college worked. I knew all the unspoken rules. My dad dropped out of college to join the Navy in WWII, and although he finished high school after the war, he didn't use the GI Bill to get a degree, like all of his working class Norwegian immigrant buddies did, and people's heads have always exploded when I tell them what my father did for a living (Roto-Rooter service). Then again, he had a white collar job when he met my mother (ship's purser). On my mom's side, my sister, currently obsessed with genealogy, has found out just how far back Brown University degrees go in my mom's paternal line, and yet her father dropped out of school early, seemingly a rebellious response to family rupture (parents divorced, mother died), even though his sister graduated from Brown. Then again, without even completing elementary school, he became a stock broker, basically apprenticing with his uncle, and that wealth bought our house and paid some of my for my Seven Sisters college education, and some was still left for me to inherit when my parents died.
Mar 24, 2023·edited Mar 24, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
I see what you’re getting at. “First-gen” is used as a proxy for certain experiences that not all first-gen students have and that some students who aren’t first-gen may have (e.g., students who are estranged from their college-educated parents). But in general the correlation is strong enough that it’s a workable label.
Well, a lot of that is just proper definition of what "first gen" means. It's about experiences and abilities, and more, not lineage.
We need to distinguish the skilled use of terms/concepts from the unskilled. But the fact that even "experts" often fail to do that is itself a discourse.
Interesting -- are you suggesting that you would now be identified as a first-gen student, despite your mother's degree? Or just that the picture is more nuanced?
Two of my aunts and two of my uncles (one each on both sides of my family) were college graduates. But those on the Schertel side never used their degrees meaningfully because marriage and religious calling were so strong. And my father's brother and sister lived too far away to impact my life much as a child. Their realities felt terribly remote from my own. For all of those reasons -- because my parents knew nothing about college, because we lived below the poverty line, and because I often felt I was flying blind -- I have called myself a first-generation college student.
The divergence of fortunes between Anna Johanson (Max's wife) and Nils Johanson is also pretty striking. Nils came to America penniless, married into wealth while working hard to earn a medical degree, and leveraged those resources to build an affluent life in Seattle. His only child, Kitty, then married into the Nordstrom fortune. Anna and Max lived comfortably enough, and their eldest sons seemed to have enjoyed middle class careers. But Rupert raised a family of seven on seasonal wages with the Forest Service -- and, according to some family rumors, passed up better paying jobs because they would have required desk work. He wanted to keep working outdoors, but his children grew up with narrower horizons as a result. Some of those obstacles seem unnecessary to me in hindsight.
There are loads of nuance in these considerations. Do 18-year-olds with college-going parents ‘learn about college’ from them? Do first-Gen students learn nothing about college (from older peers, media, etc)?
What makes social class? What impact does any one variable have? Many Americans no doubt have a complicated ‘social class’ picture.
Perhaps this is not universally true, but there is one vector for first-generation students that is less variable. If a young person grows up in a low-income family that is also devoutly religious, that combination creates a strong prejudice against higher education. I lacked a lot of basic knowledge: how to study, how to build professional networks. But the biggest obstacle for me was cultural. It was the sense of becoming a "pencil pusher," as one relative disparagingly referred to people who worked in offices. And it was a sense of betraying my cult-like church community. I recognized something similar to this in Lori Arviso Alvord's memoir The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, when she describes why it is so difficult for Navajo youth to attend college outside of their homeland, Dinetah. The mountains are their protective borders -- venturing beyond them feels like a betrayal of others and a betrayal of self. I suppose I've never lost that defensive posture toward academe, even after it became my life's work. And so I think people who have that combination of working class and religious fundamentalism (or a very strong bond with a cultural community that exists outside of academe) have unique obstacles to overcome, even if they have learned some things about college from the movies.
It sounds like you're talking about the past. You are a Baby Boomer, and what you describe just isn't the experience of Gen-X, especially younger Gen-X, and it got much worse with millenials and later. Us younger folk are living in a different economy.
Much of the nuance comes from the "socio-" in the "socio-economic" in that the social factors are not reducible to economic factors and vice versa. When I want my students to really "get" this, I show them economic data rendered on a map ... and they can see that being born and raised in a poor area vastly stacks the deck against such persons. Me? I beat the odds, but no one should have ever bet on me in the abstract.
Yes, I'm a boomer, but the very tail end. And my point was more broadly about the nuance of class in the U.S. I had no need of a first gen program to learn the unspoken rules of academic. I knew the rules. And yet the ideas about social class that sometimes are part of the first gen discourse don't capture much nuance.
Very interesting! Such a tangle of mystery and silence. You have much to chew on here.
As for the ending quote... how we tell our own stories while living do, I believe, impact how our stories are told when we’re gone. Most folks never think about the narrative of their life, however, and that perhaps has a profound impact on how their narrative is told.
Great points, Jan. My grandfather gave quite a bit of thought to this, actually, and it was why I felt such disapproval from him. His influence was so strong that it has impacted not only his children, but also many of his grandchildren, who have often sacrificed career opportunities or material wealth for religious devotion. The university was particularly suspect as a breeding ground of liberal ideology. And so I think the way my grandfather would tell his story would follow the hymn "Amazing Grace." Once he was lost, but then he was found. Washed in the blood of the lamb. And so on. There was not room for much else in that story.
Ah yes, I understand. Hence, the value of biography. Our personal narratives may be grounded in truth-certainly our own truth - but are not the whole truth.
Mar 21, 2023·edited Mar 21, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
My own Dutch grandfather wouldn't teach me Dutch because he felt it was unpatriotic to not speak English. And Bruce's German grandfather fled the country (to Hawaii) and changed his last name in the early 1900s because there was so much anti-German sentiment. He and his grandmother (who was English) even got divorced. I imagine your grandfather was ashamed to be a German professor and afraid for his family. We learned of some of this when a half-sister in Hawaii contacted Bruce's dad when he was on his 80s.
Also, adorable photo of your grandmother. She looks like your daughter, don't you think?
My grandfather was not the professor -- it was my great grandfather. And I doubt that he felt ashamed of his work. Otherwise, wouldn't he have given it up rather than leaning into it even after he had four children? Anti-German sentiment would have been strong all through the 1920s and 30s, when he was completing his degrees, and he went right on teaching German through WWII. My grandfather might have been ashamed of his father for that -- but Max doesn't seem to have been, from the scanty evidence I have.
We were "Schrock" in 1870 when my grandfather and his brother literally went out the back door as the Kaiser's conscription agents came in the front--they ran all the way to Galva, IL Two generations later the descendants of this draft-dodger, in the winds of anti-German sentiment, changed it to "Shreck". Go figure.
My Dutch immigrant grandparents also refused to allow their four sons to learn or speak Dutch for fear it sounded too German! My grandfather was a Reformed Church pastor and my father and his brothers suffered through two two hour services each Sunday, most of which was conducted in Dutch!
Very well written, I enjoyed reading this article and miss Grandpa Schertel often. I wish I could find more information on our relationship to Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach.
Also I heard our name means something like “dear little battle axe” in barbaric German
And alternative meaning "he who cuts off heads in battle"
Interesting thoughts, I don’t know if they are accurate definitions.
Thanks, David. I don't know anything about those ancestral German connections; in my experience, it requires some help from a professional genealogist, because birth/date records are handwritten in the original language, which presents a two-part challenge.
"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."
I had no idea I'd be a bona fide weirdo for getting an education that makes me care about public health, food health, mental health, and the environment. My husband and I get so many eye rolls and backhanded comments because we limit our kids' sugar intake, take covid precautions, and try not to use plastic, to name a few. I thought changing social classes was about money but it's so much more than that. There's nowhere to truly fit in except for with others who know this exact experience.
Great points. COVID really inflamed some of these cultural/political differences. Although some of what you're describing could get an eye roll from wealthy Floridians, just as much as from my relatives in rural Montana. Would you agree that some of these conventional class differences have now become differences between political tribes? Maybe I'm oversimplifying.
Another layer of nuance is how scarcity mindsets, and accompanying cultural attitudes, can linger even after financial stress is gone. I see some of this in my family, too, among those who grew up with little and now have more than enough, but still see the world through the lens of scarcity. This was common in the Depression-era generation, but it can be true for anyone who experienced prolong precarity. Others who grew up poor and now live comfortably find it difficult to restrain their spending at all, because scarcity was so painful. What I'm saying is that when you grow up poor, you think that having money will somehow take money concerns off the table, that if you make it into the professional world or into the next socioeconomic bracket, that you won't feel so close to the brink all the time. But there is no objective definition of financial security, and I suppose part of being middle class or upper middle class is understanding how complex the psychology around money is.
For my grandfather, I think the professional success of his uncle and the material trappings that came with it were simply unappealing. He didn't want any part of that kind of striving. In a way, he went "back to the land" before the hippies did -- only he went back to the pasture and the sheep corral. After his religious conversion, I think money came to represent sinfulness, and so there was a kind of righteousness in poverty that he enjoyed, but that my mother and her siblings suffered from and that I also grew up feeling burdened by. My grandfather was a health fanatic, despite his social class, and he eschewed sugar, too. So I came to associate my grandmother's kitchen with carob chip cookies and other "health food store" items that I saw as markers of asceticism, but that might look more like bougie trappings now? Definitely some ironies on this subject...
Oh that’s very interesting that he was into health too! Yes, so many of these people I’m referring to have gained wealth through what I see as a combination of White privilege and having good trade jobs. However, they have not gained knowledge. Many also vote for democrats but our circle near my hometown is more politically diverse than our social circles in Boston. I have mostly attributed the differences in attitudes to: 1) wholeheartedly buying into capitalism (opposite of asceticism), 2) not understanding how to evaluate information sources, 3) not having a liberal arts education that teaches some biology. The first requires a sort of denial attitude where you never “look under the hood” of something that gives you pleasure. For example, the joy of consumption (e.g., a ton of plastic water bottles at parties) is too good to spoil by learning about risks to the environment (perhaps driven by your description of a reaction to scarcity). The second is the notion that “those experts out there” always change their minds. There’s no skill on evaluating information beyond being told by an authority. For example, without a sense of statistics and the scientific process, it looks like scientists changed their minds too much over the course of the pandemic because people don’t understand science as an iterative process. The third is just the high level of abstraction required to imagine something like microbiology. If you have no idea what a gene or a virus is and how it works, you make assumptions based on higher level information. For example, “John has five people in his house but only two got Covid.” Understanding this outcome requires knowing that immune systems are diverse or even knowing the basics of an immune system.
Oh man. That is the truth. I understand why my mother always used whole milk, real sugar, and no lowfat anything after growing up with those deprivations. It was an interesting dynamic in our house, because we had a different version of asceticism based largely on subsistence living -- wild game, freezers and shelves full of garden produce, wild berries, etc. But I always had all the elk steak I could hold, generous helpings of homemade raspberry jam, and real butter melted on my mashed potatoes. I grew up poor in terms of income, but I was rich at the dinner table!
Fascinating. “even publishing his dissertation on Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann and the Genealogical Novel).” I would love to read that. I read The Magic Mountain with my parents last year. We listened to it on Audible, all 37 hours. Brilliant.
Very intriguing family history. Thanks for this. My family is German/English. I need to dig deeper into my own family history. I knew both grandparents on both sides but they died when I was a teen. My mom has told me a lot about her side, and she has documents, but my dad is harder to get talking about his father etc.
I was fortunate that my parents married young, and their parents married relatively young and lived long lives. I have one living grandmother. This meant that for years, my students were writing about losing their grandparents and all of mine were still living. Even with that amount of time, stories were not always forthcoming. I'm hoping to leave a deeper trove of family lore for my own children.
Fascinating! I wish you so much luck with your journey of discovery. With respect to academic pursuits, I am fortunate in that my family, on both sides, valued intellectual development and became educated people -some highly educated. Early on, many educated themselves less formally. And most certainly, less value was placed on higher education for women than men. This later fact directly lead to a response that even I didn't anticipate at the conclusion of doctoral defense. My advisor asked, what, after taking several years between my coursework and my dissertation, was the compelling reason I chose to finish. I surprised myself, and, I am sure, shocked my advisor, with a totally honest first response. I said I did it because my mother so desperately wanted to study and achieve. She was accepted to the University of Iowa, but bullied out of going by her grandfather who said her duty was to home and family. She had re-enrolled in college and finished several courses by the time she turned 60 and succumbed to cancer a year later. Certainly, I pursued my own passions as well through my studies but hers is a legacy I treasure. A reminder to listen to the interests and passions of our children and to guide them with an open mind and heart.
Yes. I ended up at Central largely because my older sister went there. We didn’t live in the same state as either set of my grandparents. My parents understood the importance of education and I believe they wanted something better for us than they had. Perhaps they felt that they had not lived up to the same standards of living that their own parents did. I didn’t feel that way because they instilled in us a love of learning. We spent a lot of time at the library and my dad’s newspaper office which was filled with wonderful Apple Macintosh machines, printers, printing presses, notebooks, pens, pencils, and light-up layout tables.
My own is somewhat similar, at least the idea that the family almost never talks about its history while simultaneously obsessing about its lineage. And then two generations back they retreated to the deep woods. My grandfather did it after a career in the navy. And my father did it after the Army. We're Scottish highlanders with some English Puritans.
There is a difference though. As a notable Scottish clan, we published a 500-page volume of genealogy about a century ago that is still in print on Amazon. So, we have so much storied history ... that disappears when it gets to specific individuals.
A personal note about family. I am the last of my line, the eldest of the eldest (in a clan where that still matters somewhat). I almost didn't have children, but aside from what my wife thought about it, my branch would die out. She is getting used to the idea of becoming a matriarch; we recently received a two century old lace hanging that practices the alphabet... There is a peculiar burden of being the last of the line of a large family, of having generations of history and artifacts trickling down going back centuries. We have a rack of military firearms going back centuries, as we are also a military dynasty, and back in the day you could legally take your weapon home.
I sometimes wonder what its' like for people, as in most Americans, to have to search for their immigrant status. We have had our family history to the person back a thousand years (when a church with vital records burned). There's a splendor to it, but also a kind of burden. It's been lightening with the recent generations, but some of that is because they are no longer conservative and they don't bear the family name.
And finally, like Josh, there are notable people in the family, but that wealth never persisted or was passed down. And with such large families, the wealth was split too many different ways to accumulate, especially since it was colonial land and not cash.
I'm envious of those extensive genealogies! Although I suppose the gaps in my own family history give me some space for "perhapsing" :). I try not to delude myself with those fictions too much, but I'm sure I'm getting some things wrong.
Primogeniture and patriarchy affected inherited wealth for many immigrant families, too. My ancestors were largely middle children who did not stand to inherit anything and so were effectively starting over. That was true for my father's family -- land lost during the Depression. I would not be surprised if my grandfather did not inherit his father's property in Seattle (Sigmund, the eldest, likely did). My mother did not inherit the acreage my grandfather had purchased near Libby, either -- her brothers did. So these things are often complicated.
By which I do not mean to minimize stories about redlining or other racial disparities. But I think there are some nuanced stories to tell about white privilege that are often elided.
Extensive genealogies, especially those kept long prior to it being a recent fad, also come with fictions of palpable force that have been passed down for generations. It's something people who discover their past don't feel.
Yes, I mentioned primogeniture because I suspected that it existed in your family, and I was inviting you to discuss it. Add conservative + European background, and it's likely to be there.
In my family, though I don't know all the details personally, the paternal side were all bannermen to the Bruces, the Scottish nobility, which made us all potential dead men when we finally gave up fighting the English. That's intermingled with the English Puritan separatists in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Maybe the inheritance is what sparked the break in your family?
A family feud is a large reason I know less of my extended family four generations back. My maternal grandmother fell in love with a childhood cabin and spent the rest of her life harassing her siblings until they gave up their claims so she could own it. I only met the Greats once, and went to an extended reunion of the clan once. And then when she finally had it ... she eventually turned around and donated it to a natural cemetary where she wished to be buried. She then again alienated the younger generation who planned to keep the retreat in the family. They talked her down to keeping the cabin.
In other stories, there was a LOT of inherited silver and gold measuring in the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. It's really interesting that all that stuff vanished and none of the older generation are talking about it; my mother confided that our branch didn't get it.
Ooopps. Spilling the family secrets!
I'd probably be more respectful if I didn't live in poverty for 14 years despite being the heir. Ya know, the whole academic and adjunct thing. Inconvenient time for primogeniture to lose its grip. ;P
Redlining and racial disparaties? That appears to be a non sequitor?
A very rich family story, I see the blueprint for a novel here. I don't think I could write about my family history with such freshness unless I fictionalized it. The end quote is very true as well, and probably the sole reason people write autobiographies, which in many cases are forms of "individual" propaganda.
Gonna up the subscription sometime in the near future so I can read about your Moravia pilgrimage: lived in the Czech Republic for awhile until recently, including Moravia for a time. Left a piece of my heart in that country, though I wish they weren't so indifferent to the fabulous modern literature they've created. Their indifference made me want to pull my hair out.
Ah, I'd love to hear more! I'd be honored by the upgrade, of course, but I'd also be glad to share those links with you privately, perhaps in exchange for some of your own memories of Moravia? Happy to follow up by email: dolezaljosh@gmail.com
Moravia seems to be the center of Czech folklore, and Brno is a kind of capital of Czech identity (from what I heard last summer). But of course Bohemia has its own discrete legacy. I am still a novice in much of that history.
Just sent an email now! Letting you know here in case it goes into spam.
While I think there's considerable disagreement about the center of Czech identity, both Brno and Olomouc are equally important cultural centers for Moravia. I imagine that Moravians have their own preferences when it comes to choosing one over the other, my impression in Olomouc was that people were a bit meh about Brno. For Czechs as a whole, Prague is the best candidate, objectively speaking, and is certainly the case for Bohemia: but Moravians will certainly disagree. In any case, I think both Bohemia and Moravia have contributed an equal amount of great Czechs after accounting for Moravia's smaller size, and there are locales important for Czech history spread across the countryside too which isn't always the case for countries like CZ where so much is centralized in the capital city.
Since I just wrote about them, I should add that for the third region - Slezsko - Opava is regarded as the cultural capital, even though it's not the administrative capital of Moravskoslezský kraj.
Thanks -- saw your email, and it will take me a little while to respond. Bear with me! I'm really glad to be in conversation, though. I'm fascinated by your post today and by what you've shared here and in the message. Dekujeme!
Beautiful I love this. I have engaged in a lifelong quest to find my family’s roots also. What I found was inspiring and stranger than fiction. And neither I nor my family knew this story in my formative years. And yes, very complicated - like a three dimensional game of GO.
Thanks, KW :). Even more complicated because we are still living out that three-dimensional game, and watching new threads emerge in our children. Dizzying!
While I understand the value of First Generation programs, which are sweeping the academy, they often don't capture the complexity of socioeconomic class. My mother had a college degree, graduate credits, and specialized training in a professional position (medical technology), and I understood how college worked. I knew all the unspoken rules. My dad dropped out of college to join the Navy in WWII, and although he finished high school after the war, he didn't use the GI Bill to get a degree, like all of his working class Norwegian immigrant buddies did, and people's heads have always exploded when I tell them what my father did for a living (Roto-Rooter service). Then again, he had a white collar job when he met my mother (ship's purser). On my mom's side, my sister, currently obsessed with genealogy, has found out just how far back Brown University degrees go in my mom's paternal line, and yet her father dropped out of school early, seemingly a rebellious response to family rupture (parents divorced, mother died), even though his sister graduated from Brown. Then again, without even completing elementary school, he became a stock broker, basically apprenticing with his uncle, and that wealth bought our house and paid some of my for my Seven Sisters college education, and some was still left for me to inherit when my parents died.
I see what you’re getting at. “First-gen” is used as a proxy for certain experiences that not all first-gen students have and that some students who aren’t first-gen may have (e.g., students who are estranged from their college-educated parents). But in general the correlation is strong enough that it’s a workable label.
Well, a lot of that is just proper definition of what "first gen" means. It's about experiences and abilities, and more, not lineage.
We need to distinguish the skilled use of terms/concepts from the unskilled. But the fact that even "experts" often fail to do that is itself a discourse.
Interesting -- are you suggesting that you would now be identified as a first-gen student, despite your mother's degree? Or just that the picture is more nuanced?
Two of my aunts and two of my uncles (one each on both sides of my family) were college graduates. But those on the Schertel side never used their degrees meaningfully because marriage and religious calling were so strong. And my father's brother and sister lived too far away to impact my life much as a child. Their realities felt terribly remote from my own. For all of those reasons -- because my parents knew nothing about college, because we lived below the poverty line, and because I often felt I was flying blind -- I have called myself a first-generation college student.
The divergence of fortunes between Anna Johanson (Max's wife) and Nils Johanson is also pretty striking. Nils came to America penniless, married into wealth while working hard to earn a medical degree, and leveraged those resources to build an affluent life in Seattle. His only child, Kitty, then married into the Nordstrom fortune. Anna and Max lived comfortably enough, and their eldest sons seemed to have enjoyed middle class careers. But Rupert raised a family of seven on seasonal wages with the Forest Service -- and, according to some family rumors, passed up better paying jobs because they would have required desk work. He wanted to keep working outdoors, but his children grew up with narrower horizons as a result. Some of those obstacles seem unnecessary to me in hindsight.
There are loads of nuance in these considerations. Do 18-year-olds with college-going parents ‘learn about college’ from them? Do first-Gen students learn nothing about college (from older peers, media, etc)?
What makes social class? What impact does any one variable have? Many Americans no doubt have a complicated ‘social class’ picture.
Perhaps this is not universally true, but there is one vector for first-generation students that is less variable. If a young person grows up in a low-income family that is also devoutly religious, that combination creates a strong prejudice against higher education. I lacked a lot of basic knowledge: how to study, how to build professional networks. But the biggest obstacle for me was cultural. It was the sense of becoming a "pencil pusher," as one relative disparagingly referred to people who worked in offices. And it was a sense of betraying my cult-like church community. I recognized something similar to this in Lori Arviso Alvord's memoir The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, when she describes why it is so difficult for Navajo youth to attend college outside of their homeland, Dinetah. The mountains are their protective borders -- venturing beyond them feels like a betrayal of others and a betrayal of self. I suppose I've never lost that defensive posture toward academe, even after it became my life's work. And so I think people who have that combination of working class and religious fundamentalism (or a very strong bond with a cultural community that exists outside of academe) have unique obstacles to overcome, even if they have learned some things about college from the movies.
While you are right about the need for nuance....
It sounds like you're talking about the past. You are a Baby Boomer, and what you describe just isn't the experience of Gen-X, especially younger Gen-X, and it got much worse with millenials and later. Us younger folk are living in a different economy.
Much of the nuance comes from the "socio-" in the "socio-economic" in that the social factors are not reducible to economic factors and vice versa. When I want my students to really "get" this, I show them economic data rendered on a map ... and they can see that being born and raised in a poor area vastly stacks the deck against such persons. Me? I beat the odds, but no one should have ever bet on me in the abstract.
I’m Gen X! My parents are boomers.
I was replying to Homestead in case that wasn't obvious.
Yes, I'm a boomer, but the very tail end. And my point was more broadly about the nuance of class in the U.S. I had no need of a first gen program to learn the unspoken rules of academic. I knew the rules. And yet the ideas about social class that sometimes are part of the first gen discourse don't capture much nuance.
Very interesting! Such a tangle of mystery and silence. You have much to chew on here.
As for the ending quote... how we tell our own stories while living do, I believe, impact how our stories are told when we’re gone. Most folks never think about the narrative of their life, however, and that perhaps has a profound impact on how their narrative is told.
Great points, Jan. My grandfather gave quite a bit of thought to this, actually, and it was why I felt such disapproval from him. His influence was so strong that it has impacted not only his children, but also many of his grandchildren, who have often sacrificed career opportunities or material wealth for religious devotion. The university was particularly suspect as a breeding ground of liberal ideology. And so I think the way my grandfather would tell his story would follow the hymn "Amazing Grace." Once he was lost, but then he was found. Washed in the blood of the lamb. And so on. There was not room for much else in that story.
Ah yes, I understand. Hence, the value of biography. Our personal narratives may be grounded in truth-certainly our own truth - but are not the whole truth.
My own Dutch grandfather wouldn't teach me Dutch because he felt it was unpatriotic to not speak English. And Bruce's German grandfather fled the country (to Hawaii) and changed his last name in the early 1900s because there was so much anti-German sentiment. He and his grandmother (who was English) even got divorced. I imagine your grandfather was ashamed to be a German professor and afraid for his family. We learned of some of this when a half-sister in Hawaii contacted Bruce's dad when he was on his 80s.
Also, adorable photo of your grandmother. She looks like your daughter, don't you think?
My grandfather was not the professor -- it was my great grandfather. And I doubt that he felt ashamed of his work. Otherwise, wouldn't he have given it up rather than leaning into it even after he had four children? Anti-German sentiment would have been strong all through the 1920s and 30s, when he was completing his degrees, and he went right on teaching German through WWII. My grandfather might have been ashamed of his father for that -- but Max doesn't seem to have been, from the scanty evidence I have.
We were "Schrock" in 1870 when my grandfather and his brother literally went out the back door as the Kaiser's conscription agents came in the front--they ran all the way to Galva, IL Two generations later the descendants of this draft-dodger, in the winds of anti-German sentiment, changed it to "Shreck". Go figure.
My Dutch immigrant grandparents also refused to allow their four sons to learn or speak Dutch for fear it sounded too German! My grandfather was a Reformed Church pastor and my father and his brothers suffered through two two hour services each Sunday, most of which was conducted in Dutch!
Very well written, I enjoyed reading this article and miss Grandpa Schertel often. I wish I could find more information on our relationship to Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach.
Also I heard our name means something like “dear little battle axe” in barbaric German
And alternative meaning "he who cuts off heads in battle"
Interesting thoughts, I don’t know if they are accurate definitions.
- David Schertel
Thanks, David. I don't know anything about those ancestral German connections; in my experience, it requires some help from a professional genealogist, because birth/date records are handwritten in the original language, which presents a two-part challenge.
This is so real:
"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."
I had no idea I'd be a bona fide weirdo for getting an education that makes me care about public health, food health, mental health, and the environment. My husband and I get so many eye rolls and backhanded comments because we limit our kids' sugar intake, take covid precautions, and try not to use plastic, to name a few. I thought changing social classes was about money but it's so much more than that. There's nowhere to truly fit in except for with others who know this exact experience.
Great points. COVID really inflamed some of these cultural/political differences. Although some of what you're describing could get an eye roll from wealthy Floridians, just as much as from my relatives in rural Montana. Would you agree that some of these conventional class differences have now become differences between political tribes? Maybe I'm oversimplifying.
Another layer of nuance is how scarcity mindsets, and accompanying cultural attitudes, can linger even after financial stress is gone. I see some of this in my family, too, among those who grew up with little and now have more than enough, but still see the world through the lens of scarcity. This was common in the Depression-era generation, but it can be true for anyone who experienced prolong precarity. Others who grew up poor and now live comfortably find it difficult to restrain their spending at all, because scarcity was so painful. What I'm saying is that when you grow up poor, you think that having money will somehow take money concerns off the table, that if you make it into the professional world or into the next socioeconomic bracket, that you won't feel so close to the brink all the time. But there is no objective definition of financial security, and I suppose part of being middle class or upper middle class is understanding how complex the psychology around money is.
For my grandfather, I think the professional success of his uncle and the material trappings that came with it were simply unappealing. He didn't want any part of that kind of striving. In a way, he went "back to the land" before the hippies did -- only he went back to the pasture and the sheep corral. After his religious conversion, I think money came to represent sinfulness, and so there was a kind of righteousness in poverty that he enjoyed, but that my mother and her siblings suffered from and that I also grew up feeling burdened by. My grandfather was a health fanatic, despite his social class, and he eschewed sugar, too. So I came to associate my grandmother's kitchen with carob chip cookies and other "health food store" items that I saw as markers of asceticism, but that might look more like bougie trappings now? Definitely some ironies on this subject...
Oh that’s very interesting that he was into health too! Yes, so many of these people I’m referring to have gained wealth through what I see as a combination of White privilege and having good trade jobs. However, they have not gained knowledge. Many also vote for democrats but our circle near my hometown is more politically diverse than our social circles in Boston. I have mostly attributed the differences in attitudes to: 1) wholeheartedly buying into capitalism (opposite of asceticism), 2) not understanding how to evaluate information sources, 3) not having a liberal arts education that teaches some biology. The first requires a sort of denial attitude where you never “look under the hood” of something that gives you pleasure. For example, the joy of consumption (e.g., a ton of plastic water bottles at parties) is too good to spoil by learning about risks to the environment (perhaps driven by your description of a reaction to scarcity). The second is the notion that “those experts out there” always change their minds. There’s no skill on evaluating information beyond being told by an authority. For example, without a sense of statistics and the scientific process, it looks like scientists changed their minds too much over the course of the pandemic because people don’t understand science as an iterative process. The third is just the high level of abstraction required to imagine something like microbiology. If you have no idea what a gene or a virus is and how it works, you make assumptions based on higher level information. For example, “John has five people in his house but only two got Covid.” Understanding this outcome requires knowing that immune systems are diverse or even knowing the basics of an immune system.
P.S. Poor carob chips will never live up to the taste of chocolate. :D
Oh man. That is the truth. I understand why my mother always used whole milk, real sugar, and no lowfat anything after growing up with those deprivations. It was an interesting dynamic in our house, because we had a different version of asceticism based largely on subsistence living -- wild game, freezers and shelves full of garden produce, wild berries, etc. But I always had all the elk steak I could hold, generous helpings of homemade raspberry jam, and real butter melted on my mashed potatoes. I grew up poor in terms of income, but I was rich at the dinner table!
Very thoughtful discourse -- thank you.
Fascinating. “even publishing his dissertation on Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann and the Genealogical Novel).” I would love to read that. I read The Magic Mountain with my parents last year. We listened to it on Audible, all 37 hours. Brilliant.
Very intriguing family history. Thanks for this. My family is German/English. I need to dig deeper into my own family history. I knew both grandparents on both sides but they died when I was a teen. My mom has told me a lot about her side, and she has documents, but my dad is harder to get talking about his father etc.
I was fortunate that my parents married young, and their parents married relatively young and lived long lives. I have one living grandmother. This meant that for years, my students were writing about losing their grandparents and all of mine were still living. Even with that amount of time, stories were not always forthcoming. I'm hoping to leave a deeper trove of family lore for my own children.
Yeah, I think of a lot Depression-era people were tight-lipped
Fascinating! I wish you so much luck with your journey of discovery. With respect to academic pursuits, I am fortunate in that my family, on both sides, valued intellectual development and became educated people -some highly educated. Early on, many educated themselves less formally. And most certainly, less value was placed on higher education for women than men. This later fact directly lead to a response that even I didn't anticipate at the conclusion of doctoral defense. My advisor asked, what, after taking several years between my coursework and my dissertation, was the compelling reason I chose to finish. I surprised myself, and, I am sure, shocked my advisor, with a totally honest first response. I said I did it because my mother so desperately wanted to study and achieve. She was accepted to the University of Iowa, but bullied out of going by her grandfather who said her duty was to home and family. She had re-enrolled in college and finished several courses by the time she turned 60 and succumbed to cancer a year later. Certainly, I pursued my own passions as well through my studies but hers is a legacy I treasure. A reminder to listen to the interests and passions of our children and to guide them with an open mind and heart.
What a powerful legacy, Louise. How sad that your mother was discouraged from studying by her grandfather.
Neither of my parents went to college. They met in the Army at Ft. Knox. But my maternal grandfather and all of his Alvarado brothers graduated.
Fascinating, James. Did you consider yourself first-generation?
Yes. I ended up at Central largely because my older sister went there. We didn’t live in the same state as either set of my grandparents. My parents understood the importance of education and I believe they wanted something better for us than they had. Perhaps they felt that they had not lived up to the same standards of living that their own parents did. I didn’t feel that way because they instilled in us a love of learning. We spent a lot of time at the library and my dad’s newspaper office which was filled with wonderful Apple Macintosh machines, printers, printing presses, notebooks, pens, pencils, and light-up layout tables.
There were many first-generation students at Central. It was one thing that made it a great fit for me.
It is a beautiful story.
My own is somewhat similar, at least the idea that the family almost never talks about its history while simultaneously obsessing about its lineage. And then two generations back they retreated to the deep woods. My grandfather did it after a career in the navy. And my father did it after the Army. We're Scottish highlanders with some English Puritans.
There is a difference though. As a notable Scottish clan, we published a 500-page volume of genealogy about a century ago that is still in print on Amazon. So, we have so much storied history ... that disappears when it gets to specific individuals.
A personal note about family. I am the last of my line, the eldest of the eldest (in a clan where that still matters somewhat). I almost didn't have children, but aside from what my wife thought about it, my branch would die out. She is getting used to the idea of becoming a matriarch; we recently received a two century old lace hanging that practices the alphabet... There is a peculiar burden of being the last of the line of a large family, of having generations of history and artifacts trickling down going back centuries. We have a rack of military firearms going back centuries, as we are also a military dynasty, and back in the day you could legally take your weapon home.
I sometimes wonder what its' like for people, as in most Americans, to have to search for their immigrant status. We have had our family history to the person back a thousand years (when a church with vital records burned). There's a splendor to it, but also a kind of burden. It's been lightening with the recent generations, but some of that is because they are no longer conservative and they don't bear the family name.
And finally, like Josh, there are notable people in the family, but that wealth never persisted or was passed down. And with such large families, the wealth was split too many different ways to accumulate, especially since it was colonial land and not cash.
I'm envious of those extensive genealogies! Although I suppose the gaps in my own family history give me some space for "perhapsing" :). I try not to delude myself with those fictions too much, but I'm sure I'm getting some things wrong.
Primogeniture and patriarchy affected inherited wealth for many immigrant families, too. My ancestors were largely middle children who did not stand to inherit anything and so were effectively starting over. That was true for my father's family -- land lost during the Depression. I would not be surprised if my grandfather did not inherit his father's property in Seattle (Sigmund, the eldest, likely did). My mother did not inherit the acreage my grandfather had purchased near Libby, either -- her brothers did. So these things are often complicated.
By which I do not mean to minimize stories about redlining or other racial disparities. But I think there are some nuanced stories to tell about white privilege that are often elided.
Extensive genealogies, especially those kept long prior to it being a recent fad, also come with fictions of palpable force that have been passed down for generations. It's something people who discover their past don't feel.
Yes, I mentioned primogeniture because I suspected that it existed in your family, and I was inviting you to discuss it. Add conservative + European background, and it's likely to be there.
In my family, though I don't know all the details personally, the paternal side were all bannermen to the Bruces, the Scottish nobility, which made us all potential dead men when we finally gave up fighting the English. That's intermingled with the English Puritan separatists in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Maybe the inheritance is what sparked the break in your family?
A family feud is a large reason I know less of my extended family four generations back. My maternal grandmother fell in love with a childhood cabin and spent the rest of her life harassing her siblings until they gave up their claims so she could own it. I only met the Greats once, and went to an extended reunion of the clan once. And then when she finally had it ... she eventually turned around and donated it to a natural cemetary where she wished to be buried. She then again alienated the younger generation who planned to keep the retreat in the family. They talked her down to keeping the cabin.
In other stories, there was a LOT of inherited silver and gold measuring in the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. It's really interesting that all that stuff vanished and none of the older generation are talking about it; my mother confided that our branch didn't get it.
Ooopps. Spilling the family secrets!
I'd probably be more respectful if I didn't live in poverty for 14 years despite being the heir. Ya know, the whole academic and adjunct thing. Inconvenient time for primogeniture to lose its grip. ;P
Redlining and racial disparaties? That appears to be a non sequitor?
A very rich family story, I see the blueprint for a novel here. I don't think I could write about my family history with such freshness unless I fictionalized it. The end quote is very true as well, and probably the sole reason people write autobiographies, which in many cases are forms of "individual" propaganda.
Gonna up the subscription sometime in the near future so I can read about your Moravia pilgrimage: lived in the Czech Republic for awhile until recently, including Moravia for a time. Left a piece of my heart in that country, though I wish they weren't so indifferent to the fabulous modern literature they've created. Their indifference made me want to pull my hair out.
Ah, I'd love to hear more! I'd be honored by the upgrade, of course, but I'd also be glad to share those links with you privately, perhaps in exchange for some of your own memories of Moravia? Happy to follow up by email: dolezaljosh@gmail.com
Moravia seems to be the center of Czech folklore, and Brno is a kind of capital of Czech identity (from what I heard last summer). But of course Bohemia has its own discrete legacy. I am still a novice in much of that history.
Just sent an email now! Letting you know here in case it goes into spam.
While I think there's considerable disagreement about the center of Czech identity, both Brno and Olomouc are equally important cultural centers for Moravia. I imagine that Moravians have their own preferences when it comes to choosing one over the other, my impression in Olomouc was that people were a bit meh about Brno. For Czechs as a whole, Prague is the best candidate, objectively speaking, and is certainly the case for Bohemia: but Moravians will certainly disagree. In any case, I think both Bohemia and Moravia have contributed an equal amount of great Czechs after accounting for Moravia's smaller size, and there are locales important for Czech history spread across the countryside too which isn't always the case for countries like CZ where so much is centralized in the capital city.
Since I just wrote about them, I should add that for the third region - Slezsko - Opava is regarded as the cultural capital, even though it's not the administrative capital of Moravskoslezský kraj.
Thanks -- saw your email, and it will take me a little while to respond. Bear with me! I'm really glad to be in conversation, though. I'm fascinated by your post today and by what you've shared here and in the message. Dekujeme!
Beautiful I love this. I have engaged in a lifelong quest to find my family’s roots also. What I found was inspiring and stranger than fiction. And neither I nor my family knew this story in my formative years. And yes, very complicated - like a three dimensional game of GO.
Thanks, KW :). Even more complicated because we are still living out that three-dimensional game, and watching new threads emerge in our children. Dizzying!
Yes indeed. I spend quite a bit of time comparing where we are at now with historical realities. Certainly makes us think.