PHOENIX HOUSE FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Mitchell S. Rosenthal Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2014 - 2015 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Mitchell Rosenthal conducted by Sue Kaplan on June 11, 26, and July 10, 2014, and by Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux on February 19 and April 15, 2015. This interview is part of the Phoenix House Foundation Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 3 Audio Transcription Center Session #1 Interviewee: Mitchell Rosenthal Location: New York, NY Interviewer: Sue Kaplan Date: June 11, 2014 Q: This is Sue Kaplan, interviewing Dr. Mitch [Mitchell S.] Rosenthal at Phoenix House on June 11th, 2014. I wanted to start by asking, back in the mists of time, about your childhood. Where you grew up and what that environment was like. I know you came from a family of doctors. If you could talk a little bit about where that all began and some of the influences that shaped you and your professional life much later. Rosenthal: As a psychiatrist, an analytically-oriented psychiatrist, I appreciate the question. I was born in Brooklyn, but really grew up in Queens. I think we were out of Brooklyn early enough that I have no recollection of living in Brooklyn, or even in the first home in Queens. The house that I remember was a house I basically lived in from childhood until I went away to college. That was in Flushing, New York, not the Flushing of today’s Chinatown and Main Street, but the Flushing of Cunningham Park and Jamaica. I went to Jamaica High School. But the important thing about that household, which I think is relevant to future life, was that my dad was a doctor, and a general practitioner. He took out inflamed and infected appendixes. He did gallbladders, delivered babies, made house calls, made hospital rounds. There was an office attached to our house, so that having a sense of patient care and the way he was responsible for his patients. The whole mindset. Q: Very different style than we see as medicine today. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 4 Rosenthal: Very, very different. He was taking care of third-generation patients. He had taken care of the grandmother, and then the mother, and then the daughter. He had comprehensive knowledge of those families and the stresses, the job stresses, the marital stresses, the illnesses. A visit was not a three-minute affair. Then, you saw people over long periods of time. Family practice, in those days, was really taking care of people like they were a member of your family. Q: Right, and in the context of their own families, understanding. Did that shape your view of how people are helped and cared for? Was that something, or when you look back on it now? Rosenthal: I think it gave me a sense of being comprehensively caring. If there’s something that’s true about the values of Phoenix House, it’s that we are comprehensively caring, and think about generations, and don’t look at drug abuse—we understand drug abuse as a symptom of the moment, if you will, but it doesn’t tell the life story. So understanding life stories was really very important. My father’s father was a physician, who had come to America at age twelve by himself. Q: From where? Rosenthal: From Russia. Then, as a candy-maker, put himself—in fact, he had one finger that had gotten burned off in a sugar vat. It was very noticeable to a kid, when you see a grandparent missing part of a finger. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 5 Q: Was he very much part of your life growing up? Rosenthal: He was very much. I was the first grandchild, so I was now the first grandchild of this immigrant family. He had retired from his medical practice in Borough Park, Brooklyn. I saw my grandparents, on both sides, almost weekly. They were part of our life. They visiting us, we visiting them. Then my father’s two brothers were physicians. In this day and age, his sister would have been, too, but in that day and age, the sisters didn’t get the same break. My father was the first child of this immigrant family, and then he was the first doctor in that new family. It was all— Q: Kind of a mantle being handed down. Someplace, I had read that you talked a little bit—but I’m interested more in the influence of your family’s Jewish heritage on your outlook. Rosenthal: You saw an article that was published in Lifestyles, which is, essentially, a Jewish publication. That’s why it had as much of a twist. My father was an agnostic. His father, who came to this country early, was a religious Jew for a short time, and then became a scientific agnostic. When the youngest son, Dr. Charles Rosenthal, who was an ophthalmologist, died of subacute bacterial endocarditis, just on the cusp of penicillin becoming available—and had this all happened a year later, he would have probably lived on and on—that threw my grandfather just totally out of any religious consideration. But there wasn’t very— Q: So not a strong influence in your thinking and your philosophy. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 6 Rosenthal: No. Now, my mother’s family kept a kosher home, went to the synagogue on holidays. I sometimes accompanied my maternal grandfather in that. So I had a sense of it. I was bar mitzvahed. But maybe more important, really, was the fact that my mother was a volunteer, and that a lot of her volunteerism was around women’s—she wasn’t religious, although she went to temple on holidays, in part because it was her family’s expectation. She worked at good causes connected to the temple. The other thing that the— Q: So are you saying, from her, you got somewhat of a sense of service? Rosenthal: Oh, yes. She was definitely a service provider. Her family had extensive contacts, more than my father’s family, of people who were still coming in from Europe. Cousins and so forth. The transient housing. They were helped in those early months and early years to get employment, to get places to live. I grew up in a full service family. Q: That’s a wonderful way to think about it. Rosenthal: There’s one other element. One other element. I think, more important, there was always, from the time I can remember, a housekeeper who lived with our family in Queens. There were two in particular, who may have covered the time from when I was a very young child until I went off to school. We’re talking almost twenty years, and only two women had those posts, and they lived in the house. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 7 Q: Oh, interesting. What was their background? Were they Eastern European or were they—I’m curious why you mentioned them. Rosenthal: I’ll tell you why, because it has to do with a later insight about this. They were both, by the way, great cooks. My mother, a thoughtful, loving person, was not physically affectionate. She wasn’t a toucher and a feeler and a hugger. I think I missed some of that from her. I was close to these two women. They provided a lot of— Q: The physical caretaking. Rosenthal: —physical. My mother, although she appreciated good food, and we always served good food in the house, these women were the cooks, and good cooks. I’m a foodie now, of course, and a cook. That all came from them. The next part, though, is that I was always a little—embarrassed is too—sensitive to the fact that they were the help, and that they didn’t enjoy all of the benefits. That, in a way, they were part of the family, but they were underclass. Q: Carrying that forward, kind of an appreciation or sensitivity to shared humanity across class lines, or the need to break down those— Rosenthal: Very much so. Very much so. I think that part of my passion in helping people in Phoenix House is definitely connected with those women. Rosenthal – Session 1 – 8 Q: Did either of them, or anyone in that household, have substance abuse problems or mental health issues? Rosenthal: Miriam Escalante, the woman who was the first one, did not. Sedonia, who came from—I’m trying to think. Did she come from New Orleans or Atlanta or both? She definitely had Creole, because that cooking was Creole. She was not an alcoholic, but alcohol was a part of her life, and as she grew older even more so. Q: That wasn’t something that motivated you in this field? Rosenthal: No. The alcohol wasn’t a part of it. It was really in wanting to see those lives better. Q: And valued. Rosenthal: I remember clearly going to high school and feeling—my father drove a very nice car. I used to get out of the car a couple of blocks away so that I— Q: It wouldn’t be revealed about your family’s resources. Again, in one of the wonderful things that Caitlin [Deighan] has supplied, there was some reference to your sense, in your talking about your family life, of being quite private, and that one of your interests in psychiatry was kind of in unlocking some sense of—or understanding better—your family.