Part X -- Filling in the Gap

The Bea Blog – Excerpts from My Grandmother’s Diaries

The Bea Blog consists of excerpts from the diaries my grandmother Bea Cohen (1899-1985) kept for 38 years, starting in 1913. For more background, see Part I -- Intro and 1913 (under Blog Archive).

Part X

Filling in the Gap

Though Bea stops keeping a diary soon after her marriage to Milton in 1920 and doesn’t take it up again until 1951 (just before she and Milton separate), I have some sense of what Bea and her family’s life was like during the 30 years she and Milton were together, though I don’t know much about Bea’s emotional life during this long period.

I spent a great deal of time with Bea from the time I was born in 1961 until I left for college in 1979 (she died in 1985). But because I sensed that the subject of Bea’s life with Milton was off-limits, and because my mother (Bea’s daughter) Ande died when I was six (in 1967), my conversations with Bea about the “olden days” were mostly about my mother’s life, not Bea’s.  Bea told me some anecdotes about her own girlhood, but it was only from her early diaries that I learned how spirited Bea was as a young woman -- and how mismatched she and my grandfather were from the start of their relationship. And Bea’s later diaries do not reveal much about the “gap” years (1920-1951), aside from two significant details: namely, that Bea suffered from what sounds like postpartum depression after my mother’s birth in 1926, and that my mother began to suffer from a variety of physical and emotional ailments around the time of her freshman year in 1943.

The only photos I have of Bea and Milton together during their marriage 

Circa 1926 and 1930

Circa 1927 (Bea, Milton, Jean, Ande)

A summary of family life during the Twenties, Thirties and Forties

Bea and Milton are married in April 1920. In August 1923, my aunt Jean is born. In March 1926, my mother Edna (nicknamed Ande) is born. Bea and Milton and their daughters live on the Upper East Side; their last apartment as a family is at 1120 Park Avenue. Jean and Ande attend the Horace Mann School for Girls (as Bea and Marion did before them). The family travels to Europe before the war, they spend summers in Ossining, NY, and they own a Cocker Spaniel named Ebony and a horse named High Hat.

Jean goes to Wellesley, then to Columbia for degrees in law and social work. Ande attends Wellesley for two years, then transfers to Barnard.

Milton runs the business his father started, American Silk Mills. ASM has its corporate headquarters in Manhattan and mills in New Jersey and (as of 1929) in Orange,Virginia. Eventually ASM moves all mill operations to Orange.  In 1943 ASM is awarded the Army-Navy E Award for excellence in production of parachute silk.

Bea remains close to her parents and her siblings Marion and Kenneth (Bea’s father Sollis dies in 1929 and her mother Pauline dies in 1949.) Marion becomes a secretary to a prominent psychoanalyst and later to a wealthy family in the hops business; Kenneth attends Columbia and, after serving in the Army, joins the staff of ASM. (Neither Marion nor Kenneth ever marry.) Milton (whose father Edward dies in 1939) also is close to his family until 1949 when his brother Harold dies. Harold’s will precipitates a lengthy legal battle between Milton and his siblings relating to Harold’s shares in ASM.  (Milton eventually reconciles with his siblings around the time of my mother’s death in 1967.)

And over these three decades Milton grows close to Jeannette, Bea’s Horace Mann friend who was widowed in 1943. At some point Milton and Jeannette begin an affair of which Bea is aware when she takes up her diary again in 1951.

Stay tuned for further installments of The Bea Blog