Becoming Avram Miller

 

This is a very personal blog post.  Now that I am in my 70s I want to share some of the stories that make up my life.  There will be more to follow.

 

 

I was born Arnold Stephen Goldfinger on January 27th at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. I was named after my mother’s maternal grandfather, Abraham Levy and my father’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Banks. It is a custom amongst Jews, to use the first initial if not the whole name, of close  family members that had recently died when naming children.

There were two unusual events that took place at the moment of my birth. The first was the liberation of Auschwitz  which I always think about on my birthday. The second one, was that the moon and the sun were rising in the sky,together.   My mother and her mother had both been born in this same hospital. My mother, Marilyn Jean Harris had just turned 18 three months before my birth. My dad was 21 years old. My mother’s mother was 37 years old. Her mother Bessie, my great grandmother was 68 years old and lived long enough to hold my eldest son, Adin in her arms.  With the exception of my father, Clarence Sanford Goldfinger, they are all gone now. Bessie died at 97 years old. Della was almost 94 when she passed. My mom died when she was 66 years old, five years younger than I am now.  She took her own life, sadly. I am not going to discuss my childhood other than to say it was very difficult.

 

 

My parents had a terrible marriage. They fought constantly. They were such different people it is hard to understand why they ever got together. The only thing that they had in common was that they too, had terrible childhoods and wanted to escape living with their parents.   My father left my mother when I was eight. I missed him very much and remember laying out his clothes on the bed next to me so that I could imagine he was still there. My two sisters, Beverly and Marlene, were younger then me, just six and  three. We did not have a lot of money. My mom, then 26 years old, had to get a job. She became a waitress at a donut store/coffee shop where she met Joel Miller, a student at San Francisco City College located close by. Joel was 24 years old and had just served in the army during the Korean War.  They started dating. Less than a year later , once my parents divorce was final, they married. Joel was just fifteen years older than me.    Beverly and I never considered him our father. We continued to see Clarence who would take us out during in the weekends. For various reasons, Clarence was not really interested in Marlene.  Joel adopted Marlene soon after he married my mother and her last name was changed to Miller.  Marlene also took her life when she was 27 years old.

 

 

As I got older, my relationship with Clarence grew tense. I liked my dad. I found him intelligent and funny. But my dad was very judgemental. I was a sickly kid and a poor student. My dad thought that I would end up a failure and took every opportunity to tell me that. It hurt me a great deal. In the meantime, he married Eleanor, a woman that was very different than my mom. She had graduated from Stanford University, taught grade school and came from a good family.  My dad wanted me to leave my mom and move in with him and Elenore. I could not imagine that. My mom was emotionally unstable.  She was bipolar although I don’t think that term had yet been invented.  I loved her very much. She taught me love, passion, and generosity. There is a hardly a day that goes by when I don’t think of her and miss her.

As I grew into my teens, I became more of an outsider. My interests were poetry, philosophy, and music, in addition to science and history which had been passions since I was a young child.  I probably read a book a day.

During this time, I continued to do poorly at school which was largely due to the fact that I never  went. Fortunately, my mother sent me to a private school which allowed me to test out and gave me a high school degree.  I discovered the Beat Generation and started to hang out in North Beach at the City Lights Bookstore. I would read the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and read the books of Jack Kerouac.   Just a few years later, I would hang out with Ginsburg at the Blue Unicorn, the place where the hippie movement started but that is another story.  I developed a close friendship with Richard Falvey who remains a friend to this day. Richard had a major influence on me in many ways.  Most importantly,  he introduced me to musical composition. It was around this time that I discovered Jazz.

In 1963, I became very ill. I had a spontaneous pneumothorax  involving my left lung.  This was basically tears in the lining of the lung that leak so that that pockets of air form between the lung and the chest wall. Eventually, the lung collapses. This is what happened with me.  It was probably the result of severe childhood asthma. I was in the hospital for weeks. Many procedures were tried  but failed to heal my lung.  Eventually, I had a major operation which resulted in gluing half of my left lung to chest wall. So from that time on I had only 1 1/2 functional lungs.

While I was recovering, I had a visit by my father. It did not go well.The first thing he said to me when he come into my hospital room, was that if I thought he would be paying for my hospital bill, I was crazy.   It would be the last time I would see him for more than 15 years. I was so upset that I vomit up the avocado sandwich I had just eaten and could not eat avocado for years.

 

 

Prior to being admitted to hospital, I have been studying at the Merchant Marine Steward and Cooks School became certified as a Steward. Once I recovered from the operation, I got a job on the President Cleveland and sailed to Asia. I was just 18 years old.  After about six months of sailing back-and-forth between the USA, Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. I decided that being a seaman was not for me.  Fortunately, I had earned a fair amount of money during this period, so I did not have to work full-time for several years. I became very active in the civil rights movement and participated in many sit-in protests which lead to my arrest on a few occasions.

 

 

 

 

 

I was also very involved in the antiwar movement which was beginning at the time.  My name, an unusual name,  Arnold Goldfinger, would end up in newspaper articles much to the dismay of my father. The James Bond movie, Goldfinger had recently come out which assure that my name got attention.

 

 

After he left my mom, my father, went back to school .  He got a BA and then a masters degree in business.  He went to work for a major bank and started what became a very successful career.  My banker father let me know that he was very concerned my political activities as it reflected negatively on him.  We had some very angry phone calls.

 

This continued for some time.  I  spent a year living in Europe studying music and writing poetry.  When I returned in the summer of my 21st year, I was introduced to Shlomo Carlebach, an amazing Hasidic Jewish Rabbi who wrote and sang music. It was during this time that I changed my first name to Avram which is my Hebrew name. I thought about becoming a Rabbi, after all, I had a fully beard, and almost did. However, I decided to become a scientist instead.

 

Around this time, my mother came to my sister, Beverly and I with a proposition.  She told us that since she and Joel never had children together, Joel thought of us as his children and wanted to adopt us.  My mother was very manipulative and I would guess she told Joel that Beverly and I thought of him as our father and wanted him to adopt us.  We didn’t really know how to say no.  I asked my mother if she had talked to my father about this.  She said that she did and he thought it was a great idea.  Later, I found out this was indeed true.  So there I was 22 and my sister 20, and we were adopted.  I don’t remember going to court but I guess we had to do that. My last name was changed officially to Miller. My birth certificate was changed as well.  The fact that Clarence Goldfinger was once my father was erased from all official memory.  My birth certificate said that Joel Miller aged 15, had fathered me.  I did not think to legally change my first name to Avram, although it was already on every document I had with the exception of my passport.  It would not be until 1999 that I officially changed my first name to Avram.  My sister married a few years after the adoption and shed the Miller name for good.

 

 

Now, I going to skip ahead fifteen years to 1982. I was living in Sudbury MA, and working at Digital Equipment Corp.  Over the years, my sister had some contact with our biological father, Clarence, who now had two children from his second marriage.  She told me that Clarence wanted to see me.  While I had been very angry at him, I found that I no longer felt that way and I agreed to meet.  I introduced him to my wife and my three children. Eventually, I met my half brother and sister.  They had not even known that Clarence had a first family. Slowly my relationship with Clarence deepend.  Over the years, he would try to explain the reasons he had acted as he did.  I did not want to hear about them.  I said that I would never forget nor would I forgive but that I was willing to go forward and build a positive relationship.

 

 

 

When my mother died, in 1992, Beverly and I decided that we wanted to undo the adoption that made Joel Miller our father.  I had little to do with Joel although I did look after him as my mother had requested in her last note to me.  Beverly, had nothing to do with him.  We discovered that there is no way to undo an adoption.  Our only choice was to be adopted by Clarence.  But to do that would require a court hearing and Joel Miller would have to be served. The adoption system is setup for young children and not kids in their late fifties us.  I did not want to hurt Joel who was very ill.  A few years later, he passed on at the at 80.  I then arranged for a lawyer to handle the adoption by our biological father.  So at the age of 65, I was adopted for a second time. This time my new legal father was my actual biological father.  The three of us had to appear at court.  The waiting area was full of young couples holding  babies and small children.  I could not help myself,  and I called out, “Daddy, Daddy, pick me up”.  I decided to keep the Miller name since that was how I was known and also I had three children and a few grandchildren with that name.

 

 

 

My father, is now 93 years old.  His memory is beginning fading.  He recently asked me why it was that I changed my name.  I told him this story.  He remembered parts of it.  I told him I wanted to write about it and it would not be very complimentary.  He said that would be ok.  Then recently, in talking with my daughter, I realized that she did not really know the story about why her last name is Miller although her grandfather is Goldfinger.  So this is post is partly for her, and for my sons and their children, all named Miller.

My father has a son from his second marriage and my half brother also has a son.  They and other Goldfinger relatives will carry the name on. Ironically, I will not.