The 78-year-old actor could hardly hold back his sobs. He had just been told about a tragedy that happened once in his family. Grandfather and great-grandfather Dustin Hoffmann were shot by the Bolsheviks, great-grandmother was repressed. He learned about this while participating in the American TV show Finding Your Roots (“In Search of the Roots”).
The legendary Hollywood actor lived to a ripe old age, knowing absolutely nothing about his paternal ancestors – not even the names of his grandparents. The actor grew up in Los Angeles, where his parents Harry and Lillian Hoffman moved in 1933, during the Great Depression, from Chicago. Harry dreamed of becoming an actor, but, not having succeeded in this field, he took up the furniture trade. Hoffman compares his father to Willy Loman, the character in Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman, in which Dustin played in the 1985 film adaptation: a small man who failed to realize his “American dream.” Harry never talked about his parents and more distant ancestors. The son didn’t ask.
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And yet, now the actor has accepted an offer to become a guest of PBC’s Finding Your Roots, which explores the pedigree of famous Americans. Most of its heroes know their roots very approximately or do not know at all, and often real genealogical discoveries await them on the program, made on the basis of archival documents and other sources, as well as DNA analysis. By the way, discoveries are not always pleasant. For example, Ben Affleck, who participated in the program in 2015, was horrified to learn that among his ancestors were slave owners. Since the program is being taped, Affleck demanded that the producers cut out everything related to this part of his family history from it. But information about this still leaked to the press.
And Dustin Hoffman looked like a man who experienced a real catharsis during the show. Although the history of his family turned out to be truly tragic. His grandparents, Frank and Esther Hoffman, moved to Chicago in the early 1917th century from Belaya Tserkov, near Kiev. After the 1921 revolution, Frank went to his homeland to take his parents who remained there to America. But they didn’t have to see each other. In 5, Frank was arrested and died in the dungeons of the Cheka. A few months later, Frank’s father, Samuel, also ended his days. The great-grandmother of the actor Libb, after spending 1930 years in prison, somehow managed to emigrate to Argentina, and in XNUMX – to move to her daughter-in-law in the United States.
The host, Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates, presented Hoffman with a medical examination of 62-year-old Libba at the Ellis Island immigration center, talking about how much she had to endure: amputated left arm, wears a prosthesis, almost lost her sight …But in spite of everything, she reached her goal. “Here is the real hero of your family,” Gates told Hoffman.
The actor could not hold back his tears. “I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t survive,” he said. “It’s so hard for me to get in touch with this, because I grew up in a family where they didn’t maintain any family ties and didn’t seem to need them.” He admitted that he had a strained relationship with his father and it was simply impossible to ask Harry about his childhood – there was a wall here.
During the program, Dustin Hoffman tried to take a fresh look at his father, to understand the reasons for his silence: “Maybe everything was explained very simply:“ My wife and children should not know this, because it is too terrible. It’s not something to talk about.” He tried to imagine what his father had experienced as a child, when Frank was leaving for distant Russia … And he added: “My poor dad!”
This episode of Finding Your Roots turned out to be so emotional that it became a kind of sensation, many publications and even other television channels responded to it.
See more at Forward editions.
Comment by psychoanalytic psychotherapist Elena Ratner: “In my opinion, this is a story about a family secret and about the transfer of psychological trauma between generations of one family. What is trauma? This is some kind of event in the outside world that makes such a strong negative impression on a person that his psyche is not able to cope with this experience on his own, that is, to process, integrate it. So that a person can continue to live, his psyche tries to protect himself from these experiences, removing this experience to such backyards of consciousness, where neither memory nor any associations penetrate. This takes a lot of emotional energy. What happens to this person’s child? He is not told anything about this difficult experience, but on an unconscious level, he feels that there is some kind of “skeleton in the closet” in the family. Such a “default figure” can cause a lot of anxiety in a child, he can build his own fantasies around it, identify with it. And he can pass this trauma on to his child. In therapy, we often see that a person unconsciously lives through experiences that were not processed by previous generations of his family. If during therapy he manages to realize this, then these constrained, repressed emotions are released – catharsis occurs. He can already work out, express these feelings. And the emotional strength of the family trauma is waning.”