Irene Pipes

...

I would like to tell you about my mother.

She was born Irena Eugenia Roth in Warsaw on Nov. 28, 1924. Her father was a businessman with I.G. Farben, the largest company in Europe; her mother was a renowned beauty and the first female automobile driver in Warsaw. Her sister Hanna came along two years later. The family lived in downtown Warsaw, close to her maternal grandparents, owners of a leather-goods store.

As this family sketch suggests, Irene had a good life in Poland. Photographs attest to the elaborate skits she performed with her sister. She enjoyed after-school treats with her grandmother at an elegant pastry shop. Her parents attended white-tie parties boasting an elegance we hardly can imagine nearly a century later. When she compared notes with her future husband, Richard Pipes, who lived not far away and whom she later met at Cornell University, they found they had attended the same birthday party.

A 1930s Warsaw party. Both my maternal and paternal relations attended.

Then, of course, it all came crashing down. The Nazis invaded Poland on Sep. 1, 1939, when Irene was 14. Her father was arrested (ironically) as a German citizen and the family fled by car to the northeast. Miraculously reunited with him, they flew together to Stockholm and from there, took a ship to New York City, landing on Jan. 27, 1940. After spending an eye-opening weekend on Ellis Island, they entered the United States.

Thanks to a brother of her father who had the foresight to get out before the invasion, the family had the means to set themselves up, first on Drummond Street in Montreal and then on Central Park West in New York. With astonishing speed, the family learned English and entered American life. To give you a sense of their assimilation, I'd like to read the full text of a telegram sent by my grandfather and two of his brothers on Nov. 6, 1940, a day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency for the third time:

To President Roosevelt, Washington. Dear President, We, victims of the aggressors who were obliged to leave behind us our beloved fatherland Poland, our homes and families, congratulate you on your reelection, seeing in its result a light ray for the whole of humanity. May God bless you and your dear family.

In 1942, my mother entered Cornell University where she studied architecture. The next year, she met my father on a double-blind date. They married in the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue on Sep. 1, 1946 – seven years to the day after the German invasion. Richard immediately started graduate studies at Harvard. I was born in 1949, a stillborn daughter followed, and Steven arrived in 1954.

Although a self-described party girl, my mother fit well enough into the academic life in Cambridge and accompanied my father as he rose over the next decade to full professor. Setting up house successively in Boston, Watertown, and Belmont, they acquired a New Hampshire country house in 1959 and moved into a grand house near Harvard Square in 1964. They owned a house on the Caribbean island of Tortola for two decades and then a small Key Biscayne condo in 2014. The first of four grandchildren was born in 1979; others came in 1985, 1987, and 2000. The first great-grandchild arrived in 2018.

Sabbaticals took Richard and Irene to Paris, London, and Palo Alto. A stint with the Reagan Administration meant living in Washington for two years, 1981-82. Richard retired from Harvard in 1996.

That same year, at a party celebrating my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, I remarked how they kept going and going, keeping up the social life, intellectual life, and travels. I then repeated that same observation on their 60th anniversary in 2006. And then again on their 70th in 2016.

Richard died of old age in 2018 but still Irene gainfully kept things going on her own, maintaining three residences, the magazine subscriptions, and the friendships. But it was not the same without him. Also, as she reached her mid-90s, she showed great frustration at not having the capabilities of someone about 70: "I am not myself today," came her ritualistic complaint, "what's wrong with me?" She tried to assert her independence, an increasingly difficult task. She died peacefully at 98 years this morning: at 10:45am, July 31, 2023.

Some reflections, first about the family and then about my mother:

When I was born, nearly everyone in my family had escaped Poland and the Holocaust. Every adult not only had to become an American and to learn English, but every one of them carried trauma. The elders spoke English with exotic Polish or German accents, the younger ones spoke standard American English with perhaps an exotic hint, but all carried the burden of having come to the United States as refugees.

As the years passed, of course, immigrants died and Americans were born. The death of my mother marks the passing of the very last immigrant who still remembered Poland. Only her first cousin Victor remains, but he left Poland at the age of three. Irene's passing, in other words, marks the end of an era for the extended family.

The successful transition from refugee status to native-born Americans was inevitable and good, but it also marks a moment of sadness with its loss of experience, color, and memory.

My mother came to appreciate her birth country, returning to Poland first in the 1950s and then, in her later years, spending about a month there annually, enjoying friendships and the arts, proud of speaking a distinctively elegant pre-war Polish. She also served for decades as the president and principal patron of the American Association of Polish Jewish Studies. Interestingly, in later years her friends increasingly tended to be found in Poland, as she felt very much at home in her natal town, delighting in the language, food, and high culture. Her wonderful companion and assistant of recent years, Agata Bogatek, is Polish; I thank her for the great service she faithfully provided.

Finally, about Irene the personality, the friend, the wife, the mother and grandmother.

To start, her personality: My mother was distinctly a character. She would not take no for an answer and wore down innumerable gate agents and park rangers to get her way. Against all odds, she insisted that her many excursions to casinos netted large sums. She officially quit smoking about 1970 but carried on clandestinely for over the next fifty years, to the bemusement of the entire household. At the 70th wedding anniversary, she made sure we all knew that she was still pondering if she had made the right choice in marrying Richard.

As friend: She had a talent for friendships, charming strangers and keeping those close to her by her side. Especially with age, she developed an imperious demeanor that we relatives found a bit exasperating but delighted the outside world. Through middle age, she had friends and correspondences on several continents. As she grew older, though she complained about their disappearing on her, she managed to find new friends, especially in Poland.

As wife: Irene and Richard were married 72 years, or three-quarters of their lives. They were very married, intensely involved with each other. But they also spent much time apart, perhaps because their characters were so different, and they needed a bit of relief. I grew up among constant bickering: heat up or down, lights on or off, turn left or right, too salty or not enough? He was the intellectual, she not; she the social butterfly, he wanting to go home, already. That said, they rounded out each other and had an enviably successful marriage.

As mother: Irene was not exactly a helicopter parent. She had us children when young; being extroverted and social, she preferred that we find our own way in the world. Thus, I changed trains on my own traveling in Switzerland at the tender age of seven. I made my own breakfasts. I learned to swim by being thrown off a float. I got my driver's permit one day after my 16th birthday. Busy as friend and wife, motherhood was something of a side-activity – which was fine with us, her children.

Grand-motherhood suited her better, coming when she was older and not demanding her full-time attention. I cannot count the times my mother solemnly announced that my having fathered Sarah, Anna, and Elizabeth was the best thing I ever did in my life. She reveled in her granddaughters, perhaps in part seeing them as compensation for the still-born daughter.

I conclude by recalling her oft-stated wish to be buried next to Richard with the simple epitaph, "His Wife." I never agreed to this, hinting that I had something better in mind, and that will be: "Irene Eugenia Pipes, née Roth.