H-Net Review Publication: 'A Family Paralyzed by Polio'


Anne K. Gross.  The Polio Journals: Lessons from My Mother.
Greenwood Village  Diversity Matters Press, 2011.  ii + 272 pp.
$16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-578-06591-5.

Reviewed by Jacqueline Foertsch (University of North Texas) Published on H-Disability (July, 2011) Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

A Family Paralyzed by Polio

Anne K. Gross's _The Polio Journals: Lessons From My Mother_ joins a significant collection of recently published memoirs regarding polio in one's family or one's own life. They include Hugh Gregory Gallagher's _Blackbird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-Bodied World_ (1998),_ _Mary Grimley Mason's _Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery_ (2001),and Marc Shell's _Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture_ (2005). Gross's memoir compares closest to Kathryn Black's remarkably moving _In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History_ (1996); both writers tell the story of a mother profoundly affected by polio, and the ruined marriage and family situation that consequently followed. Black's mother contracted quadriplegic/respiratory polio when Black was a toddler and died a couple of years later; Gross's mother, Carol Greenfeld Rosenstiel, encountered polio while she herself was a toddler, requiring braces and canes or a wheelchair from then on, and lived another sixty years. Black's narrative is concentrated on her mother's life from her marriage through to her death a few years later. Despite its brevity and intensity, it is full of information gaps, as Black was simply too young to have access to her mother during many of her darkest days. A father shamefully absent during most of the crisis and reticent to speak in the years following makes a poor historian, and Black's story--like many of those mentioned above--is as much about the silences, absences, and lost opportunities surrounding the polio experience as it is about polio's devastating and profound effects. Gross's story, too, regards the regrettable failure of not only Carol, but Carol's husband Bob, and mother Evelyn, to openly and productively discuss the details, sorrows and unmet needs surrounding her polio situation. As Gross herself notes on numerous occasions, polio both "infected" and "paralyzed" this entire family, and Gross is yet another victim (and perpetrator) of the tragic tendency toward shamed silence that has hobbled her family for generations.

When Rosenstiel lost her career as a concert harpsichordist, due to the encroaching pain and weakness of post-polio syndrome, she earned a counseling degree and saw patients with disabilities through her home office; likewise Gross became a clinical psychologist and has set herself the challenging task of presenting a story--the story of her very own, rather badly damaged family--with some literary merit and an accurate clinical diagnosis of all that went wrong. As difficult as it is to tell the story of one's own family, it must be equally difficult to achieve the critical distance to discern and analyze this same group's zigzagging motivations, attitudes, and behaviors from an objective psychological standpoint. Gross has a measure of success, but it is possible that this particular story is simply too complex for a writer so closely involved to present in fully coherent, enlightening fashion.

The book's title indicates that what follows is another autobiography--the story of a woman's own life with polio in that woman's own words, dutifully transcribed by her daughter. Yet in fact this is very much Gross's own memoir of her life as well as that of her mother; the journals, chronicling Carol's life from the vantage point of her final decade, turn out to be just one of many sources of information, which also include interviews with family and friends.
Thus the exact relationship between the journals themselves and Gross's final product is unclear. We have no sense of how many pages of Carol's were actually omitted, nor whether each entry provided complete renderings of past events or were more of a narrative seed that Gross independently cultivated. We are informed on the first page that "dialogue was often taken from my mother's journals" but also that "other ... conversations were approximations based either on my memory or those of others" (p. 1). Passages from the journals themselves serve mainly as epigraphs to each chapter, and to a certain degree Gross's work is both a giving-voice to her mother's story, which would have otherwise never come to light, and a taking-over (or even silencing) of that same story, since Gross chose not to publish the journals verbatim but to use them as a basis for her own working-through.

Even without the incursion of polio, Rosenstiel's story is both illustrious and tragic enough to merit a public hearing. She was the daughter of immigrant Jews whose father Isadore (known throughout life as Iz) worked his way up from a Lower East Side childhood of hardscrabble poverty to great prominence in garment manufacturing.
With her father's significant financial backing, Rosenstiel attended excellent schools and found a passion for music that led to a career in performance, specifically on the harpsichord; she was an early popularizer of music on the West Coast, where she moved after marriage. Following her music career, Rosenstiel led an active life of philanthropy and public service; Gross's opening anecdote describes a party hosted by her parents in honor of James Baldwin, on the occasion of his publishing _The Fire Next Time_ (1963). Yet at the bottom of this record of worthy achievement rests the poignant, tragic death of Rosenstiel's elder sister Jane, who succumbed to pneumonia when she was only two following an outing on a frigid day dressed in a light coat. Rosenstiel's failures and triumphs thus intersect in meaningful ways with her religious ethnicity, her parents' immigrant history, her privileged social class, her remarkable talent and energy, and the personal tragedy and familial dysfunction that, properly pieced together, would make for an interesting biography.

After narrating Jane's tragic story in detail, Gross informs us that Evelyn "erroneously" believed all her life that she was responsible for her daughter's death, yet in fact Gross suggests plainly across several preceding pages that Evelyn's vain decision to show off Jane in a frilly cotton dress on a cold winter's day was indeed at least partly responsible for Jane's demise--as indeed it may well have been. With this incident, Gross begins the story of a mother overly fixated on physical appearance, cultural assimilation, and social climbing, and whose enduring guilt over the loss of this first child would damage her relations to her children from then on. Sure enough, the onset of Rosenstiel's own illness, due to polio, at exactly the age at which Jane died of pneumonia, is all the catastrophe needed to send this fragile woman into a lifetime of dysfunctional maternity.
Again she blames herself (much more erroneously this time) for Carol's illness and, as a result of this emotional pain, withholds herself from her daughter during many of her early struggles with illness and rehabilitation. Likewise she institutes an absolute lockdown on discussion of Carol's resulting disability as anything other than a minor impediment best ignored.

While Evelyn stayed home behind closed doors, Carol enjoyed the status of one of the original members of the Warm Springs community; she attended physical and psychological rehabilitation there from November 1928 to April 1929 and returned in subsequent years for additional therapy. Here she shared the buoyant, liberating waters of the warm springs--as well as adjoining cabin properties--with "Uncle Frank" (p. 44), that is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States. FDR did most of his long-term residence on the Warm Springs grounds during the mid to late 1920s. A lifelong admirer of FDR's indomitable aplomb, Rosenstiel even adopted some of his grand gestures-including a ready smile and an expansive wave to onlookers when being carried up flights of stairs. Likewise she copied his tendency to minimize his impairment by almost never referring to it physically or verbally. While a grateful nation may have been glad that FDR put polio behind him in this manner, recent insights generated by the disability rights movement (and its academic wing, disability studies) have called into question the relentless misprision of the truth that those determined to succeed must perpetrate in a society controlled by ableist values. As Gross herself avers on numerous occasions, Carol's failure to articulate her feelings and requirements led to the miscommunications, resentments, and distancing that unfortunately characterized her mother's marriage and Gross's own early life.

_The Polio Journals_ is organized into eleven chapters that relate the main events in the livese of Carol, her parents Iz and Evelyn, her brother Howard and husband Bob; and mid-narrative Gross herself, who is the second of two children, along with Paul, born to Carol and Bob. In a preface, prologue, and epilogue, Gross details her painful encounter with the polio journals and a healing journey taken by herself and her husband Chuck to Warm Springs, to dedicate a column on the Georgia Hall quadrangle to her mother's memory. Each chapter, as noted, opens with an epigraph from the journals themselves, and conveys its chronologically arranged narrative in short vignettes, often only a paragraph or two in length. The presentation of a difficult story in bite-sized increments is a technique surely appreciated by the reader who needs "a break" to digest and assess the physical logistics and psychodynamics of each scene related--three-year-old Carol journeying to Warm Springs with only her aunt, neither parent, as a companion; college-age Carol struggling up two flights of stairs to a campus performance hall where she hears a renowned harpsichordist for the first time; Iz more or less bribing Bob with lifetime financial security if he will marry his daughter; Carol screaming at Bob to not leave the house merely because he wants to enjoy a weekly tennis game with a friend.

And yet the vignette format also tends away from the kind of cumulative analysis the reader seeks but rarely finds in this text.
What, for instance, is there to say about the occurrence of polio in a family enjoying enormous wealth? Should the privacy and isolation (i.e., silence and shame) that the family was able to purchase in its early polio days be compared unfavorably to the public display to which the lower classes are often subjected? Would Carol have been better off had she not been required to undergo every treatment and operation money could buy, and through which her parents hoped fervently to achieve additional mobility and normalcy for her? Would Evelyn have been a more loving and attentive mother had a host of nannies and retainers not been on hand to take her place? Should Iz have let Bob go his own way--friends report to Gross that he would have never married Carol without the monetary incentive--and let Carol take her chances on the open marriage market without offering the means to provide the expensive care his daughter in fact needed?

Similar questions of a more psychological nature go unasked (as well as unanswered), specifically related to the relationship of polio illness and disability to the family's original dysfunctionalism.
Does Gross imply that her grandmother and mother would have been excellent mothers leading happy lives had polio not ruined the situation, or does she imply that there were tendencies toward vanity, manipulation, and emotional coldness running throughout her family's history that polio only exacerbated to a tragic degree? The truth is likely a mix of these, and throughout the memoir one gleans implied responses to some but not all of these questions while there is no sustained analysis. Instead, many of these short recollections hinge around (or clang shut with) some banal observation--her mother "opening the containers of food, [waiting] as my father and I set the table" (p. 3) or being evaluated by a college professor as having been "regular in attendance ... and a cooperative worker" in a Victory Garden farm program (p. 114)--leaving the point of the observation in question. On one occasion as a young girl, Carol gets angry at a friend who cuts her hair and spoils her role as the star of an at-home theatrical performance about a princess with long hair.
Carol's final exclamation, "How could you do that? You have ruined the show!" (p. 72), indicates nothing in particular, since it is exactly what any one of us would have said as a small child in a similar situation. It is thus hardly an anecdote worth relaying, and Gross frequently relies on minor observations to convey larger insights that simply fail to materialize.

Likewise, the portrayals ring with contradictions that the author does not seem to notice, let alone explain. Bob is "a people-pleaser"
who "invest[ed] a lot of time and energy in his relationships" (p.
132) yet also has a "retiring personality" (p. 133) and is drawn to Carol for the "social status" (p. 163) she can provide for him. He experiences an "intense" (p. 109) courtship with Carol, who "was always on [his] mind" (p. 132) but yet also "had shown [no] interest in Carol before their engagement" (p. 136) and on his wedding day is pitied by a friend for taking on "the burden of caring for a woman with such a significant handicap" (p. 138). The strained and anxious faces in the photos from that day reinforce this friend's concerns, and yet according to Gross the rabbi "capture[ed] the sentiments of all in attendance" when he wrote to Evelyn that "he [knows that Carol] and Bob will be very happy" (p. 140). Once married, Carol launches "verbal attacks, becoming more vicious" (p. 152) whenever Bob gets ready for an outing without her, at one point even threatening divorce (p. 189), and "often taking out her frustration on him and demanding that he help her immediately" (p. 166).
Incongruously, Gross's final assessment is that her mother was "voiceless when it came to her relationship with her husband" (p.
220). On numerous occasions, Gross regrets her mother's inability to speak directly about her condition and yet also asserts that she "never gave up her quest ... to confront her past" (p. 224). While I do not doubt that Gross's parents embody, as do all human beings, the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incoherences displayed in this narrative, still the reader must rely upon the writer to notice, organize, and explain these discrepancies, or the story becomes too difficult to follow--or swallow.

Gross often describes bad behavior in calm, nonjudgmental tones, causing the reader to wonder where to stand vis-Ã -vis these characters. For instance, perhaps Evelyn's refusal to tend her daughter should be explained (and excused) by the massive guilt and fear (of doing further harm) she has suffered--until Gross at last gratifies the reader's original suspicion that "my grandmother's behavior was reprehensible and inexcusable" (p. 79). Finally, the necessary perspective has been provided, but long after it would have done the most good. Elsewhere, incidents in Carol's life are framed from obscure angles. A paragraph about her "blossoming" social life ends with a story about two cads in a bar who flee as soon as they see her braces (p. 122). Another that begins in reference to her college friend B. J. should have been cast in terms of the egregious sexism (and ableism) suffered by Carol at the hands of her father:
once again Iz has jeopardized a personal relationship by contracting to pay the girl to bring his daughter her meals. Not only does this arrangement preclude Carol from socializing with the others in the dining hall, but of course it has tainted the girls' bond since "whenever her friend appeared at the door, my mother seemed overly solicitous," and B. J. herself "often confided to a mutual friend of theirs that she resented having to get up early on the weekends" (p.
107). Again, this discussion should be grouped with other offenses committed by Iz, not among stories describing Carol's close friendship with B. J., and a direct condemnation of Iz's actions should lead off such a discussion. Gross is equally reticent on the issues of Bob's alcoholism and Carol's anorexia, both glanced at yet never developed. One eerie, _Grey Gardens_-type closing line describes the "moths and other insects" (p. 188) that take over the harpsichord room once her mother's musical career ends. Is it actually the case that bugs were allowed to infest the Rosenstiels'
multimillion-dollar home, and if so, how can we correlate this odd slippage with the couple's otherwise magazine-perfect lifestyle?

Stylistically, I wish a few other choices had been made as well, specifically Gross's persistence in referring to Rosenstiel as "my mother"--even when she is an infant or small child - that leaves a jarring sense of time out of joint and causes confusion regarding "my mother" and Rosenstiel's own mother Evelyn: for instance, "As my mother repositioned her body in an attempt to alleviate the pain, Dr.
Nathan's nurse held her body in place" (p. 19) and "Cognizant of her mother's silence and tendency to look away from her paralyzed legs, my mother internalized her mother's negative view of her" (p. 22).
These many awkward references to "my mother" at moments when Rosenstiel's maternal status is clearly irrelevant to the situation and/or many years in the future could have easily--and should have surely--been substituted with clearer, more straightforward references to "Carol."

Even more surprising is Gross's repeated use of the now rightly reviled term "handicapped" (pp. 57, 137, 138, 143) to refer to her mother or other persons with impairments, despite Gross's obvious immersion in the disability rights movement and the major insights of disability studies. She also struggles to achieve a consistent attitude with respect to how Carol's disability should have been dealt with. Bob's admirable sense that polio is only one part of "the truly amazing woman of great charm, compassion, and intelligence"
that Carol is gets written off by Gross as "simplistic" (1p. 39); later, however, Gross argues with her father when he fails to place polio in its proper perspective, just as she had condemned him for doing earlier: "'No,' I replied, 'it had nothing to do with polio and everything to do with the choices she made.'... I questioned why he always blamed all of our family's problems on my mother's paralysis"
(p. 223). Regretting her mother's determination to "appear lighthearted" (p. 235) even in the midst of her lung cancer treatment following years of nicotine addiction, as well as in many moments during life when her paralysis created difficulties, Gross then critiques the rabbi's eulogy for "fail[ing] to capture her spirit and determination" (p. 236). While the response to permanent impairment is indeed complex--one must be as honest as one can but not spend life crying over the situation--again, the trouble is less that these contradictory viewpoints are on display than that they are never acknowledged and analyzed for the complexities they present.

As remarked at the outset, Gross's work is worth the read, due to the very interesting, worthy, painful, and ultimately regrettable life her mother led, yet it lacks the facility with language and insight the reader will more readily find in the better skilled Kathryn Black's memoir of her mother.

Citation: Jacqueline Foertsch. Review of Gross, Anne K., _The Polio
Journals: Lessons from My Mother_. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. July, 2011.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.