I’d prefer to just let the interview evolve, and to be as honest as I know how to be. I have tried to get some family history, and I know it’s not easy to get at the truth. This is even more difficult. There’s a desire to paint an image of who you are, as opposed to who you are. I have no desire to paint a picture. I’m interested in hearing what evolves, and hope to know myself better through that.
My work involves preoccupations, which are with me almost continually, many of which first emerged in Detroit during the summer of 1943. I very quickly became aware of something that Jimmy Cliff summarizes in a song I love “There is suffering in this world.” All of a sudden, I learned about the enormous suffering going on in the world. I was about nine years old at a very formative time in my life.
Before coming to Detroit, we had lived in a small town—Steubenville, Ohio. My father was earning fifteen dollars a week loading trucks for a wholesale grocery. He had been going from one job like that to another. My mother was from Detroit, where her family still lived. One of them told her there was work for my father there. We moved to Detroit so he could take that job.
In Ohio my first school had just three rooms. All of a sudden, I’m in an inner-city school in Detroit. My memory of my first day in school in Detroit is as sharp as any memory. I had trouble finding the place, and got there late. I’m making a racket trying to lift up the top of the desk to put my books underneath, like we did in Ohio. But these were different desks. You slid your books in from the back. The teacher comes over and lets me know she was annoyed with me.
Then comes the part that’s indelible in my mind. The teacher starts reading the roll. She calls my name. “Marshall Rosenberg?” I say “here” and two kids looked around at me like their necks were on a swivel, and one said to me “are you a kike?” I had never heard the word before, but I could tell from the tone of voice that I was in bad shape with these people. After school, this kid came right up to me and asked again if I was a kike. Meanwhile, his friend snuck up behind me and he pushed me over him—a trick that we often used. I got up and started to fight with them.
I learned about suffering that day. I started to learn first-hand the painful lesson that I could be hated because of a characteristic of myself that I had no control over and not much knowledge of. My life was hell for the years we lived there. I used to wish that I could get to and from school without so much fear.
At the same time, my relatives were telling me how lucky I was to be living in the United States. If we had been living in Russia, where most of our family came from, we could be put into gas chambers, into a concentration camp. My grandparents and aunts and uncles would tell me horror stories of life there—about the Cossacks and the pogroms. But I’m experiencing this misery, and I’m being told that I’m lucky.
I realize now, through my own work, how difficult it is to be with somebody in pain you care for, to not let your own need to “chicken-soup” them or take away their pain get in the way of their getting the help that they need. I feel badly for my family because they didn’t know how to deal with my pain, except by telling me ‘you think you have it bad’ stories. I’m sure that came out of their anxiety.
Another theme that I would frequently hear particularly from mother was ‘they’re just jealous of you.’ This is common for Jews to think—we’re the ‘chosen people,’ and so we are persecuted because people are jealous. Well, this just didn’t jibe—why would anybody be jealous of me for what I’m going through in this minority position? [laughs] I had no feeling for heritage or history. Because my father was kind of a migrant worker, moving many times in the early years of my life to get work, we never were part of a Jewish community. So I had no sense of what it was to be a Jew until I got to Detroit, and then it meant to be persecuted.
When I said I became aware that there was suffering in the world, the experience wasn’t like feeling for other people, it was just feeling very terrible for myself that I had to live in a world like this. This was a theme for me for years. Growing up as a kid, I just couldn’t stand to see people torment other people. I’d want to scream and say, “my God, why? Don’t do that!” So it was more than that kind of awareness of suffering – why do people do this – and particularly, why does it have to happen to me?
What I was also learning at the time, which is very valuable to the work I’m doing now, was to hate myself. I learned to be this despised minority person. I didn’t buy that I was a ‘chosen person’. I bought that I was an inferior creature, and that Jewishness brought to me a scar. For the next twenty years of my life, I would often lie about my name, particularly in dating situations. I would dread introductions. I envied people with nice Anglo names. I would almost always lie amongst certain of my peers about my ethnic background and my religion. What better learning for the work that I’m trying to do, than to have had some real first-hand feeling of what it is like to despise oneself. To know how you can internalize hatred and rejection from your culture is a potent stimulus in my work.
I hated my family and its Jewishness. I would be mortified when my family’s Jewishness would show. I’d want to crush my mother’s skull when she’d speak Yiddish in front of my friends. I’d be mortified when my uncles would kiss me on the mouth. I grew up to become absolutely, virulently anti-Semitic, and to hate myself. Yet I was loved immensely by my family. I was the first child and the first grandchild. My family was very affectionate. I got heaps of love, and had it not been for that, the effects of this self-hatred could have been much harder to deal with. But it was a powerful learning to spend twenty years hating myself for a part of my identity, trying to deny it, and becoming anti-Semitic myself. I don’t think my parents knew I felt this way. I was too ashamed of them to let them know it. If I tried to express even a little piece of it, it would trigger off violent emotional responses. My mother was very tough in arguments, and she would get extraordinarily guilt-inducing. I learned real quick that this was something to hide from them.
Now, it’s important to realize that race riots of 1943 occurred within a very short time after we moved to Detroit. A riot broke out at an amusement park in 1943, in the middle of the war. As I understand it, some whites and blacks were on a bridge in a park and somebody got pushed into the water. Detroit was ready to go up before this anyway, because of an incendiary mixture of whites who had come up from the south for work in the war industry, as my family did, and then a lot of blacks. They had to live in the same neighborhoods. Forty-five people were killed in about three days. There was fighting in the streets, gunfire, fires, streetcars overturned. The National Guard was brought over.
We lived right in the middle of it. I’m getting exposed to violence directed at me because of being Jewish, and here we’re locked in the house for three days. I can see down across the street Mr. Swain, a racist gentleman from Alabama, loading his gun, getting ax handles, and heading down to the laundry at the corner waiting for some of the blacks to come in for work. I’m looking out the window seeing all of this, feeling again there’s suffering in this world, people want to hurt each other for being Jewish, black, white.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was dying in the dining room. She was incontinent and couldn’t speak, and my mother and Uncle were providing the nursing care, because we had no money for it. My mother’s father was senile, and running out on the street naked. And my mother, because of some attachment or guilt she felt toward her retarded older sister, chose this time to take her out of an institution. So my mother and father didn’t have much that they could give me. I could see they were totally engrossed in the horrendous care that they had to provide every day to my grandmother, grandfather, and aunt.
That was another reason why I kept so much of this to myself. There was just too much pain in the house already for me to want to burden them with more. Whenever I did, I didn’t like the response I got. My way of handling this was to learn to be invisible. I spent a lot of time looking for hidden places, like under the porch, where I could go just feel good to be invisible.
My brother and I have been estranged for most of the 44 years he’s been alive. We decided to rectify that, and earlier this year I went to visit him, and we had a very good talk. It was helpful to talk about this period with him, because he had real insights as to why I always rejected him. He was the most outgoing, gregarious kid you ever saw, and he came along at the very period in my life in which I saw my survival as depending on being invisible. So to have this very extroverted kid calling attention to us was awful for me. He was six years younger, and very precocious. He started at the University of Chicago when he was fourteen. So quite aside from the Jewishness, the other kids would pick on him because he was so different. I felt called upon to defend him, so it increased the number of fights I had to put up with. I never liked fights. I always hated them. I’d know some people were out to get me, and I’d dread it for days. I’d know the fight was coming, and I had trouble sleeping nights.
My brother is like my mother is like my wife Gloria. They stir things up everywhere they go. Now I love that characteristic in all of them, but it’s taken me years not to hate my mother and my brother because of their characteristic of calling attention to us in public.
One of the best things that happened to me in Detroit was going to a camp for poor inner city kids. That was a godsend for me because the city subsidized most of the cost. I could really be invisible at this camp. I found all kinds of places where I could hide. The woods and the water took on associations which last to this day. I feel very safe when I can be near water with trees around. My safety requires a high density of trees and a low density of people.
I felt then, and to a large degree now, that I was not only living in a war zone, but within a minority within a war zone. I’ve always felt strongly the Christian-ness of this society. I feel very emotional about the issue of having prayer in schools. I’ve been pushing for that old Supreme Court to stand against this. I know the pain that comes from feeling that you’re within a culture that is not yours, where you’re really a stranger. As a kid, I envied people who were Christians, I just thought they had everything in the world! [laughs]
From this time, a strong, innate desire got started in me, in a vague form to be sure, of wanting to figure out why people caused each other to suffer, and to have some control over it, something I could do in the face of it. One thing I often joke about in workshops is that I eventually learned that I could run, cry, and bleed, and these things seem to work better in dealing with the world rather than lying, deceiving or being invisible. If you get found out, it’s better to bleed.
Along about that time, I also learned that if I could be more vicious than anybody else, if people believed that I might hurt them worse than they had ever been hurt before, well, that was another way I could get people to leave me alone. I learned the growling, the looks, the walk. I learned that if a group of people was coming toward me, not to appear scared at all, even though at that moment, my heart would be pounding, and I would just dread the fight—that in just a minute I’m going to be pounding the hell out of someone, and maybe he’s going to be hurting me. I learned that it was better if I just got real tough. So these were all the strategies that I was developing. I’m still trying to unlearn some of this.
My mother is a tough person. I admire her immensely. At 67, she set out from Detroit to a new city, and within 24 hours had a new job. My mother is a powerhouse of a person. She would have been so different if she had been raised when there was a women’s liberation movement. I think she would have been a leader in it, but instead she spent her entire life feeling guilty that she wasn’t like other women. She was a professional bowler, and extraordinarily good one, and she would be out of the house five nights a week in bowling tournaments. She is a very powerful competitor, and a great gambler. She had a very exciting life. I use to walk into our house when I was a child in Detroit and see piles of money on the table. The Purple Gang, the Detroit Jewish Mafia, would back my mother in high stakes card games against out-of-town high stakes players. She had nerves of steel. She lived among gangsters, prostitutes, gay people, lesbians, because she didn’t like the role of traditional housewife. I had a very ambivalent reaction to this. On one hand, I couldn’t have been prouder of her. I have been thankful my whole life to have a mother so unlike the image of a weak, dependent, docile woman. I was proud that she could come out on the street and play ball and do it well, and that was a very physical, very risk-taking person. On the other hand, I was resentful that I didn’t have a mother who would set the table every night like other kids seemed to have. My father wanted a traditional kind of relationship, and he took it as kind of a rejection that she didn’t want to stay home, and that she found it so distasteful to cook. They didn’t fit together, and had a lot of pain about it. They were divorced twice, once when I was three, and then again when I left home.
My mother is very resourceful. My mother gave me tremendous rewards over the years. I picked up a message real quick from her: “Marshall’s a real boy!” She took real pride in how many bones I broke, and in how many times I was in the hospital. I did, too. I was very proud of my war wounds. I was in the hospital a lot, although from sports, violent sports that I was good at, probably more than fights. My father is just the opposite. My mother was the one who told me “you got to hit them first, you got to show them that you’re not going to take any more!” Everything for her was “they’re jealous, don’t take anything from them, hit them back.”
Now I want to unlearn the invisibility that I managed so successfully for so many years, because it keeps me from showing my feelings. I’ll be in a situation, and people have no way of knowing if I’m bored or angry or what. I’ll get feedback later that confirms that people were very frightened of me because of my stone face. It’s unconscious—I could be really enjoying myself. On the other hand, I’ve been really thankful over the years for how frightening I could be, and what a good actor I must have been, to have been seen by many people as very tough and frightening. I loved that I had the reputation as someone not to be messed with. But then I started to live up to it, and it got to the point that I would have hurt somebody bad if I were threatened.
I hated fighting and dreaded it, but there were certain situations when I couldn’t help myself. I could stand getting hurt, but I couldn’t stand people laughing at me, or making fun of me. One of the worst moments I had was being surrounded by kids laughing at me, enjoying my suffering. I couldn’t let myself cry—that would have been a total loss—and whatever fear I might have had about fighting just evaporated, and my adrenaline took over. I probably could have avoided a fight, but I initiated it out of the sheer pain of being tormented.
I didn’t realize how deep my response to humiliation was, and how much pain was still left because of it, until much later in my life, a gentleman in a group I was doing said something that for a split second I took as humiliating. I had him up against the wall, and was almost ready to hit him before I got control of myself. And as recently as the Memorial Day before last, I almost did serious injury to a gentleman I saw humiliating my friend Gilbert, a black man from San Francisco. All this gentleman did to set me off was to indicate sarcastically that Gil hadn’t properly used one of the skills I was teaching. I knew the kind of pain Gil had gone through as a black person, and I saw the pain in his eyes. Well, I say this for myself, I saw the signs coming on, and I took a deep breath and told myself that Gil doesn’t need help. Gil tried again and this guy repeated himself. I just got up and said, “I’m not going to take anymore of this shit,” and I should have just kept going. Dottie Sanburg saw me starting to leave and she said, “Marshall, stay, don’t leave,” and I started throwing stuff around. If I hadn’t done that, I would have taken it out on the guy. I was just beside myself to see somebody ridiculed. [cries] It was the theme of people’s cruelty based on a prejudice. The feelings are still there, left over from being a victim of that.
I don’t think that I’ve ever been frightened that my violence would land me in jail. I’ve been more worried over the years that I wasn’t better equipped physically and a better fighter. A good thing about being in fights is that you lose your fear of them the more you are in them and survive them. It’s a freeing thing.
So that was a very important time of my life—and obsessive concern with people’s cruelty and what makes people cruel and feeling the pain of that myself. It is not surprising to me that when I came to think about a career, I know never really thought beyond something that would deal with healing. I didn’t, of course, know how, but I knew that that was it. I remember when I had to pick a term paper for high school, I picked the topic of criminal psychology. Why do people behave in a criminal-like way toward other people? I was interested in going into that field, but I decided against that after spending a few days in Ionia reformatory. I did an honors program as an undergraduate, and my professor’s father, who was a warden, got me an opportunity to see what psychology was really like in prison.
Next: A Model of Compassion