Day 03 -- Your parents

My father: Irving Fineman (1893-1977) was the one of five children (the first born in the U.S.) of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He went to MIT and became a civil engineer, then a novelist, and then a screenwriter, while continuing to write for publication. At the time I was born, he was a professor of literature at Bennington College and lived on a farm in Shaftsbury, VT, which he kept for the rest of his life, tho he also lived in a variety of places. In late life he had a de facto marriage with a Yiddish poet. He was on his feet till the day he died.

My mother: Helene Hughes Fineman (1908-1985) was one of eight children of a lawyer and his wife in the middle west. She went to Illinois Wesleyan and then the University of Chicago, studying classics. She was married as a "beard" by a gay sociologist, and after escaping that fended for herself in Chicago. She later had a lover who was an German Jewish biophysicist. She met my father in 1935, and he took her to Vermont. After breaking up with my father, she had a variety of teaching & editorial jobs. When she retired, she took a trip around the world. For a few years she was a member the commune I belonged to in Virginia. In her last year, she was in a nursing home near me after a debilitating stroke.

My parents were on bad terms for as long as I can remember, and during childhood I resisted efforts to make me take sides between them. They separated about the time I started high school. My relations with both of them were uneven.