The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890–1940

Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis

Caroline Zilboorg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000414875
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890–1940: Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis is the first volume of a meticulously researched two-part biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and chronicles the period from his birth as a Jew in Tsarist Russia to his prominence as a New York psychoanalyst on the eve of the Second World War.

Educated in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, Zilboorg served as a young physician during the First World War and, after the revolution, as secretary to the minister of labour in Kerensky's provisional government. Having escaped following Lenin's takeover, Zilboorg requalified in medicine at Columbia University and underwent analysis with Franz Alexander at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. His American patients ranged from wealthy and artistic figures such as George Gershwin and Lillian Hellman to prison inmates. His writing includes important histories of psychiatry, for which he is still known, as well as examinations of gender, suicide, and the relationship between psychiatry and the law. His socialist politics and late work on Freud's (mis)understanding of religious belief created a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, from members of the Warburg banking family to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

Drawing on previously unpublished sources, including family papers and archival material, The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890–1940: Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis offers a dramatic narrative that will appeal to general readers as well as scholars interested in the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Jewish diaspora, and the history of psychoanalysis.

Chapter 1

Family and childhood

1890–1909

DOI: 10.4324/9781003190936-1

In 1932, the year that Gregory Zilboorg with three other psychoanalysts founded the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in New York, Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones discussed with Freud concerns about an American periodical in competition with the journal of the International Psycho-Analytical Association:

Your inference that the Americans do not feel related to England I should modify by saying this is only true of the foreigners recently arrived in America, who have lost their own civilisation and not acquired any other. Zilboorg, who is a completely wild Russian, is the real centre of this piece of activity. I admire his energy, but wish it could be somewhat directed and controlled.¹

This ‘completely wild Russian’ had not entirely lost his own civilisation nor had he failed to adapt to his new environment, but he had certainly come a long way from the world into which he was born. No one could have predicted that the Jewish boy born in Tsarist Russia would make an international name for himself or even that his name would become Gregory Zilboorg.

My father was born in the Podil district of Kiev on 23 December 1890. Eight days later he was circumcised following religious ritual. Because the city had no synagogue, the ceremony probably occurred in his parents’ apartment at 32 Kostiantynivska Street. The rabbi recited the traditional Hebrew words as he began to cut: ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and hast given us the command concerning circumcision.’ My grandfather, cradling his first-born on his lap, then recited, ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and hast commanded us to make our sons enter the covenant of Abraham our father.’ The male voices in the crowded room responded, ‘Even as this child has entered into the covenant, so may he enter into the Torah, into the nuptial canopy, and into good deeds.’ Finally the rabbi, dipping his finger into sanctified wine, gently touched the baby’s lips and formally named him in Hebrew ‘Hirsh’ or ‘Girsh ben Moses’. The first-born child of Moses and Anna Zil’burg would be known, however, throughout his youth in a curious amalgam of Yiddish and Russian as Girsh Moseevich Zil’burg, but it is unlikely he spoke much Russian before he started school, for his first language was Yiddish, the language spoken by both of his parents and by Jews throughout the Podil community.²

After the ceremony, Anna would have served the many guests an extravagant kosher meal. The menu would likely have included a rich beet and potato borscht, moist rye bread, kasha made with an egg, herring with onions followed by a savoury pirog, and for dessert sweet blinis with jam. The men would have finished the consecrated wine at the end of the bris, but there would have been black tea from the large samovar and kvass for everyone. It was, after all, a celebration.

At such moments it might have been almost possible to forget that 1890 was not a good time to be born a Jew in Russia. Historically Jews had even been denied residence in Kiev, although the city had been within the Pale of Settlement since 1835. Indeed, Jews had been denied residence in Russia from the 1400s, but the empire’s extension into Eastern Europe after the annexation of Poland in 1772 meant that it had had to accept a large Jewish population within its borders. In the 1790s laws were passed that allowed Jews to continue to live where they were already settled and, to encourage colonisation, in underpopulated areas of Ukraine annexed from Turkey. By the 1850s the Pale of Settlement included most of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Crimea.

The conditions for Jewish residence shifted throughout the nineteenth century. At times Jews were forbidden to reside in agricultural communities or specific cities and were forced to settle in provincial villages. Soon after he ascended the throne in 1855, Tsar Alexander II initiated reforms. He freed the serfs in 1861 and relaxed restrictions on Jewish residence, allowing certain categories of Jews to settle in previously restricted cities, including Kiev. Its Jewish population then grew rapidly.

Concentrations of Jews in designated areas – in shtetls or towns that grew up outside restricted cities or in districts like the Podil – made them easy targets for anti-Semitic pogroms. From the beginning of the Pale of Settlement, attacks against Jews were frequent, but they increased in number and intensity after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. His son, Alexander III, was much more conservative and in May 1882 introduced new restrictions on Jewish movement and settlement. Intended at first to be temporary, what came to be known as the May Laws remained in effect until the revolution, with further restrictions added throughout the decades just before and immediately after my father’s birth. A numerus clausus limiting the number of Jews in schools and universities was introduced, and by 1887 quotas allowed only 10 percent of Jews within the Pale to attend university, while outside the Pale the number fell to 5 percent; in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the restriction was 3 percent. The proportion of Jewish doctors in the army was limited to 5 percent. In 1891, most of Moscow’s Jewish population was expelled. In 1892 Jews were prohibited from participating in local government, even within the Pale. The May Laws led to a period of widespread pogroms particularly intense between 1881 and 1884.

Such civil unrest was likely an important factor in my grandfather’s decision to leave his native village. One of 12 children, Moses was born in 1862 in Romanovo (today Lenino), a shtetl 200 miles east of Minsk and over 350 miles north of Kiev in a region that is now in Belarus. His father, my great-grandfather Pesach, was a blacksmith in the small town where by the end of the nineteenth century Jews made up two-thirds of the population. Until Russian law required Jews to take surnames in 1844, Pesach had probably only been known as ‘Pesach ben Girsh’, the son of his father, but since his father was likely also a blacksmith, the family then took the name Koval, ‘blacksmith’ in Ukrainian. Only sons were technically exempt from service in the Imperial Army, but having several brothers, Moses would have been subject from the age of 12 to military conscription for a period of 25 years, a virtual death sentence. The neighbouring Zil’burgs, however, according to family history, had an only son who died in an attack on Jewish workers at the local mill. To avoid conscription and before their first-born son, whom his parents had called ‘Isaak’, reached the age of 12, Pesach bought the dead man’s papers, and Gregory’s father became Moses Isaakovich Zil’burg.³

Status as purportedly an only son would not necessarily have protected him, however, for the Russian authorities exploited the May Laws to round up Jews and press them into the army regardless of technicalities, but military service was the least of the threats facing Belarussian Jews. The pogroms of the early 1880s hit the region hard. In large numbers Jews left the countryside for the big Ukrainian cities. At the age of 14 or 15, Moses joined the exodus. He might have walked to the rail station 40 miles to the northwest at Orsha; if he had had the money, he could then have bought a train ticket or looked for work on a boat going down the Dnieper River. But if he had had the money, he would have saved it. As a Jew in flight he headed directly south from Romanovo on foot and walked the 350 miles to Kiev.⁴

My grandmother Anna grew up in slightly more secure surroundings. She was born to Mikhail and Berta Bren in April 1871 in Berdychev, a large town with a rich cultural life 110 miles southwest of Kiev. After Odessa, Berdychev was the largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire with seven synagogues and a high level of literacy – by the 1880s, approximately half of the city’s Jewish men and a third of its Jewish women could read the language they spoke – that is, Yiddish. During the pogroms of the early 1880s, however, Jews began leaving Berdychev for Kiev and Odessa. Anna and her family likely moved to Kiev at this time.

It is also likely that Moses met Anna through a Podil matchmaker. Anna had been raised to take on the role of the traditional Jewish wife and mother, while Moses by the age of 28 was a clerk in Kapnik’s wholesale grocery and able to offer a wife a measure of financial stability. Furthermore, he was literate: He was able to read and write Yiddish and, with effort, Russian. He was also an observant and philosophic Jew and could read Hebrew – his few years of formal schooling had been with a provincial rabbi and Talmudic in both matter and manner. They might have seemed a good match.⁵

But family life in the apartment where the bris had been celebrated was far from happy. Only 19 when Gregory was born, Anna would give birth to three more children before she turned 27: a second son, Yakov, on 2 September 1892; a daughter Basia in 1894, and another girl, Fera, on 7 October 1897. Affable enough but never a strong character, Anna had her hands full; as the household sapped her energy and limited her conversation to the children and the complaints of local women in the market, Moses distanced himself from involvement in daily matters.

Unlike his wife, Moses was made of tough fibre. Remarkably energetic and amazingly versatile, he set high standards for himself and his children. His character was stern and difficult, but he loved his family and was capable of great kindness and generosity. His apparent hardness was a result of his scorn of vanity and impatience with superficiality, his refusal to accept anything less than perfection. Not a preacher by nature, he would later restrain himself from preaching to his children, but he did lecture them when they were young. He was a philosopher, reflective and concerned about propriety and morality. With the curtains closed against the night, he would read the Talmud by dim candlelight in an attempt to protect his family from notice by outsiders, a fact that the young Girsh would remember all his life. Traditional and deeply religious, Moses had ritualistic propensities and went his own way ‘neither too happy about life nor too perplexed about death’. Despite a wide circle of relatives and acquaintances, he was finally close to no one. Gregory would remember him as ‘a stranger in his own family’.⁶

Moses Zilboorg, about 1900

In contrast, Anna was very much present but almost completely unreflective, concerned exclusively with what Gregory would later call ‘minutia’. Petty matters about which little could be done dominated family life, and an atmosphere of ostentatious tragedy prevailed. By the time he finally began school, Gregory was eager to escape the ‘volatility, irascibility, tense self-assertive “I told you so” and peremptory smallness of mind’.⁷

Anna Zilboorg, about 1900

Like many Jews in Kiev at the turn of the century, Gregory would have few pleasant memories of his early years. In her autobiography Golda Meir, born in Kiev in 1898, recalled the ‘terrible hardships’, specifically poverty, cold, hunger, and above all fear. She described ‘the rabble that used to surge through town, brandishing knives and huge sticks, screaming “Christ killers” as they looked for the Jews’. Her father attempted to barricade the entry to their building with wooden boards, small protection against enraged attackers. Beyond their vulnerability was the awareness that ‘There was never enough of anything, not food, not warm clothing, not heat at home.’ She quickly came to feel ‘that life was hard and that there was no justice anywhere’.⁸

Gregory experienced his first pogrom in 1896 and five more between the ages of 6 and 17. He had, like Meir, good reasons to be fearful; pre-emptive tactics and a defensive posture became his response to threats of violence, disenfranchisement, and deprivation. Gregory’s interest in psychology and morality as well as his attitudes towards food and dress and money certainly had their roots in these difficult early years. On weekends during my childhood, my father would begin each lunch with a bowl of kasha. He explained to me how to cook it: You beat an egg in a pan, then poured in buckwheat groats and sautéed the coated grains before adding water and boiling the cereal. ‘If you are poor and don’t have an egg’, he said, ‘you can do it without.’ He paused. I could not imagine being so poor as not to have an egg. He concluded, ‘But it’s always better with an egg.’ Throughout his life he preferred his meat well done; any meat he was lucky enough to get as a child needed to be thoroughly cooked because it was likely to contain worms – perhaps like the meat in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, in which the maggots in the meat are the last straw that provokes the sailors to revolt against the tsar in 1905. There were occasionally no eggs at 32 Kostiantynivska Street; sometimes there wasn’t even any kasha. He was always hungry.⁹

By 1897, the year after young Gregory’s first memory of a pogrom, there were 32,000 Jews in Kiev, approximately 13 percent of the population. Most were poor; some of them were middle class, like the Zil’burgs, while a few were prosperous, able to build the city’s first synagogues in 1895 and 1898, but all of them were under increasing threat from the Russian Orthodox majority populace. While the Pale itself limited Jews’ geographical mobility, the numerus clausus intended to limit their social mobility was now officially enacted. Earlier reforms, whose intention had been to integrate Jews into Russian society, had portrayed secular education as the path not only to Russification but to progress and modernity. By the 1890s, the imperial government’s policy had changed to one of containment, suppression, and even elimination. For Gregory, as he came up to school age, the partially open door seemed about to close.

Despite and in part because of his firm religious convictions Moses would have wanted the best possible education for his children, but financial constraints as well as the quota system reduced the possibilities. Gregory probably began his formal education in the Talmud Torah, the traditional Jewish cheder just a few doors up the street. He would later declare that he had had a Jewish education; certainly his father and the local rabbi would have overseen his religious instruction up until his bar mitzvah.¹⁰

He began his secular education not at the age of seven, the normal age for entering school in Tsarist Russia, but a year later, having been rejected despite his aptitude because of the limited places available for Jews...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1 Family and childhood: 1890–1909
• 2 The struggle for education: 1909–1914
• 3 War: 1914–1916
• 4 Revolution: 1916–1917
• 5 Escape: 1917–1919
• 6 Embracing the New World: 1919–1922
• 7 ‘The Great Columbia University’: 1922–1923
• 8 ‘Complete moral independence’: 1923–1926
• 9 Bloomingdale and Berlin: 1926–1931
• 10 Private practice: 1931–1933
• 11 Alternatives: 1933–1935
• 12 Divided attention: 1935–1937
• 13 ‘World affairs’: 1937–1939
• 14 Other affairs: 1939–1940
• Works cited
• Abbreviations and notes
• Index