An Orphan Has Many Parents

An Orphan Has Many Parents is a memoir of their childhoods by two graduates of the Pride of Judea Home in Brooklyn, paying tribute to the caring parental figures they encountered, and the administrators who made it work. Readers will be touched by the profound impact of this home on the lives of its residents. It also breaks new ground in the study of orphans and orphanages.

A vulnerable, honest and deeply personal guide to finding your way through grief. Flora Baker was only twenty when her mum died suddenly of cancer. Her coping strategy was simple: ignore the magnitude of her loss. But when her dad became terminally ill nine years later, Flora was forced to confront the reality of grief. She had to accept that her life had changed forever. In The Adult Orphan Club, Flora draws on a decade of experience with grief and parent loss to explore all the chaotic ways that grief affects us, and how we can learn to navigate it. Written with the newly bereaved in mind and packed with practical tips and advice, this book guides the reader through every step of their grief journey and opens up the death conversation in an honest, heartfelt and accessible way. Whether you’re grieving your own loss or supporting someone else through grief, The Adult Orphan Club will show you that you’re not broken, and you’re not alone.

A guide to understanding and coping with grief and all of the disorienting emotions that accompany the death of our parents Losing our parents when we ourselves are adults is in the natural order of things, a rite of passage into true adulthood. But whether we lose them suddenly or after a prolonged illness, and whether we were close to or estranged from them, this passage proves inevitably more difficult than we thought it would be. From the recognition of our own mortality and sudden child-like sorrow to a sometimes-subtle change in identity or shift of roles in the surviving family, The Orphaned Adult guides readers through the storm of change this passage brings and anchors them with its compassionate and reassuring wisdom.

Dropped off at an Orphanage and separated from my siblings at age seven. I was always being called BAD by the sisters that cared for us. I was able to make it through it all with lots of prayers and Faith in my Jesus. After leaving the home, I moved on into an abusive marriage thinking it was normal, it was all I knew, it was one tough struggle after another. I was able to come out on top.

Through the diary of 10-year-old Victoria Cope, we learn about the arrival of ragged Mary Anna, one of the thousands of impoverished British children who were sent to Canada at the beginning of the century. Mary Anna joins the Cope family as a servant and is treated well, but she has to cope with the initial apprehension of the family members and the loss of her brother, Jasper, who was placed with another family. Victoria vows to help Mary Anna find her brother, so they can be a family once again.

This thoughtful exploration of a neglected subject explains the emotional impact of losing parents in the midst of midlife--and why many underestimate it.

To quote from E.M. Nathanson (author of THE DIRTY DOZEN and numerous other works and fellow alumnus of the HNOH) who wrote the FOREWORD to the book: The title of the book - DEJA VIEWS... - is itself a meaningful play on the French phrase deja vu - meaning, roughly, the startling feeling that strikes you that what you have just experienced you have experienced before. To anyone who shared those times, DEJA VIEWS OF AN AGING ORPHAN will be an exciting time travel adventure, comprehensive, varied, textured and evocative. To those who lived in those times but had no knowledge then of the milieu of the books real life characters and stories - and to those in the generations that followed, such as the children and grandchildren of the Home boys - the book will be a voyage of discovery. Many of the anecdotes and people profiles in the book, though not all of them, were written as columns that appeared over the years in THE ALUMNUS, the monthly publication of the Alumni Association of the Hebrew National Orphan Home and its successor institutions, Homecrest and Hartman-Homecrest. They are word pictures that have ripened and matured and been revised over the years by more acute memory and input from others. Some of these stories and brief biographies have even achieved the status of myths and legends. In addition, sowed amidst these pages of real persons and event, as a sort of literary seasoning and entertainment, are some short stories, identified as fiction, but which illuminate with their own truths. The index alone is a cornucopia of memories. The variety of people and themes that are remembered and summoned into the book is impressive. Some evoke nostalgia for a time that we didnt know was that good when we were living it; some bring a laugh - or a tear. And the focus is always on the boys - and the adults they became. In addition to the foregoing, I believe the best description of my book is contained in my INTRODUCTION, which is therefore reproduced here in its entirety. My older brother Al, myself and my younger sister Henny all became half-orphans upon the death of our mother in February 1929. Our father had to place us in orphanages when he found himself unable to provide the care required by a 9 year old boy, his 7year old brother and 2 year old sister. A1 and I were placed in the Hebrew National Orphan Home on Tuckahoe Road in the outskirts of Yonkers, NY while Henrietta was put into the Israel Orphan Asylum on East Second Street NYC. This separation was necessary because the HNOH accepted only boys, ages 6 to 16 (later HS graduation) whereas the IOA accepted boys and girls, ages 2 to 5. It was while I was in the HNOH that I became a "full-fledged" orphan, when my father died in 1938. And Ive been a "full-fledged orphan" ever since--although I didnt start "aging" until just a few months ago when I turned 78. But some years before that, my then new daughter-in-law, Susan was describing my wife and myself to her mother, including the fact that we were orphans (my wife having been raised in the Pride of Judea Childrens Home on Dumont Ave in Brooklyn where I worked after I had left the HNOH). To which Susans mother replied, matter-of-factly: "Well, so am I. And so is your father!" Momentarily surprised, Susan then elaborated: "No mom. I mean they were orphaned as children and raised in orphanages." Her mother hesitated and then said: "Oh". This anecdote illustrates the fact that ultimately we all become "orphans". But that is not the focus of this work. Its focus is the child who lost one or both parents at a young, tender age and subsequently was placed in an institution--the orphanage. So when I titled this work "...OF AN AGING ORPHAN. I wasnt focusing on an older person who had been orphaned as an adult, but on an orphaned child who, fortunately, has been aging nicely. I say "fortunately" because I

“I had more or less resolved not to write a book about my parents. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it amounts either to waste or a conscious act of evasion.” So begins award-winning satirist Christopher Buckley in the most personal and transcendent work of his life, the tragicomic true story of the year in which both of his parents died. In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York’s most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: “They were not — with respect to every other set of loving, wonderful parents in the world — your typical mom and dad.” As Buckley tells the story of their final year together, he takes readers on a surprisingly entertaining tour through hospitals, funeral homes, and memorial services, capturing the heartbreaking and disorienting feeling of becoming a fifty-five-year-old orphan. Buckley maintains his sense of humor by recalling the words of Oscar Wilde: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” Christopher Buckley offers consolation, wit, and warmth to those coping with the death of a parent, while telling a unique personal story of life with legends.