Margaret Erle, the 16-year-old daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, fell in love with George Katz, 17, the son of two Viennese Holocaust survivors in Upper Manhattan in 1960.
At the time, there was little birth control, no sex education, and abortion, of course, was illegal. Like more than 3 million other young unwed women in America, Margaret got pregnant. Her family pressured her into seclusion at Lakeview, a maternity home on Staten Island run by Louise Wise Services, the go-to adoption agency of the era for Jewish families. New York State back then required that the religion of a birth mother had to match that of the prospective adoptive parents.
Bookworm: Many layers of surprise inside ‘Eleanor’
Be prepared to be unsatisfyingly satisfied with ‘American Baby’
Terri Schlichenmeyer
$35, $47.00 Canada; 698 pages
Life, as they say, is an open book. When you re born, someone else starts writing it for you, but it doesn t take long for you to be your own author. Through the years, you ll scribble ideas, compose thoughtfully, add chapters, and crumple pages. Your life s book might be a series of quick notes, long essays, one-liners or, as in “Eleanor” by David Michaelis, you could build an epic story.
In today s world, we might call Eleanor Roosevelt s mother abusive: Anna Hall Roosevelt never had a kind word to say to her daughter, often mockingly calling little Eleanor “Granny.” It s true that Eleanor wasn t lithe and beautiful like her mother; she was awkward and stern, a Daddy s girl for an often-absent, alcoholic father.
For decades in the mid-20th century, adoptions in the U.S. were shrouded in secrecy.
Millions of expecting, unwed mothers were sent away to hide their babies from the disapproving public eye. Their infants were often given to couples in closed adoptions, which meant the birth mother and child would lose their shared history permanently.
Margaret Erle gave birth to her biological son, Stephen Mark Erle, whose name was later changed to David Rosenberg, in 1961. She was pregnant out of wedlock, an illegal act at the time in New York state, Glaser says.
“Her baby was taken from her by a very predatory adoption system that existed in New York but also existed nationwide,” she says.
Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush. This Book Amplifies the Human Toll.
Credit.Golden Cosmos
By Gabrielle Glaser
Much has been written recently about what went wrong in the adoption world between 1950 and 1975, a period known as the “Baby Scoop Era” when the number of domestic adoptions exploded to, by some estimates, nearly four million. One agency receiving particular scrutiny in the post-mortem is Louise Wise Services, a now-defunct entity that promised to match “blue-ribbon” Jewish babies with “good” Jewish homes in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The 2018 documentary “Three Identical Strangers,” about triplets deliberately separated as part of that agency’s nature-versus-nurture “research,” is the most visible example of the growing realization that old-style adoption was not always what it seemed.