This is the week between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. This is a time when all Jews are supposed to reflect on past actions and move on to a better time. , In that spirit, my brother sent me the letter cited here. The self delusional content here is obvious and very sad. While I am not a psychiatrist, his behavior makes me fear that he has a form of paranoid personality defect characterized by beliefs that others are persecuting him and by manufactured memories that border on delusions. The story begins fifty four years ago when I left home. My brother, Hugh, was then seven years old. Other than summer vacations while I was in college, we have had very little time together, When I was seventeen and Hugh 7, I left for Harvard, a big deal in a Jewish family and especially for my Dad, a superb family doctor deprived by the Depression of the opportunity to attend a major college. I know that, in some ways, my father saw me as fulfilling his own ambitions. Later, after going on to medical school, I entered an academic career as a research scientist that has been very successful. My Dad was always very proud of this. Hugh’s career has been different from my own in ways that I suspect earned him less respect from my father. My brother attended my own Alma Mata, Boston Latin School. He enrolled into BLS when he was 12 and I, at 22, was in medical school. BLS was followed by Brandeis and Columbia Business School . Since then, Hugh has had a moderate career in the corporate business world working for Procter and Gamble, Mars Candy, and other firms. Later he worked as a free lance consultant, including work for an Israeli defense firm, “Impulse Dynamics.” Despite what should be a satisfying career, Hugh has bitterly told me that I look down on this career. He embellishes this with stories of my father hating me. Nothing I have tried to do seems to help. He makes up fantastic stories of my having once been a good brother, for example teaching him to read Latin or do photography. The sad truth is I always hated Latin and certainly would not have been around during medical school to tutor my younger brother in anything beyond “amo, amas, amat,” As for photography, I did not begin to take a serious interest in this until I came to Seattle. Sadly, there are also more adversarial memories he recounts. None of this makes much sense. At my Dad’s request and on my own, I have tried to tell Hugh that I am proud of his career and, when things were less tense, made a point of calling him for advice on financial matters. Nothing helps. His behavior has been bad enough that his wife, Janet Linn, called me to try to get him to seek psychiatric help. This call happened when we were on better terms. I tried, I remember one night where he and I talked for hours, making what seemed to me to be good progress. I even told Hugh about the excellent help I has gotten myself and was able to get a colleague here to offer names Hugh could consult in Westchester. Hugh refused, saying that information about his seeing a psychiatrist would get out and harm his career .
Sadly I was not to be in my family home for much of the following five decades. and was unaware that my career had caused a huge problem for Hugh’s ego. For example, while he has manufactured memories for his time in secondary school, by the time he entered Boston Latin School (my alma mater as well), I was in medical school and married during most of that time. Hugh’s memories are fantasies. He has other fantasies about that time that simply could not have happened because for most of his childhood, that is after he was seven, I was not there. Now that we are adults he has created a series of delusional images of people, including me and members of my family stealing things from my Dad’s estate.
Letter from my brother.
The background is a brutal fight over my father’s estate. Because of Hugh’s business background, my Dad made Hugh executor of that estate. My father discussed this with me because he was worried about Hugh and litigation. Hugh had previously created litigation problems by intervening in my Dad’s management of my Grandmother’s estate. This cost us all, according to my Dad $30,000 in wasted money. My Dad asked if I wanted to be co executor. I said no, explaining that I felt it would create an ego conflict with Hugh’s image of himself as the businessman in the family.
What my father could not envision was Hugh’s great hatred of my step sister Max. This hatred has led him, as executor, to spend over $500,000 in legal fees to assure that nothing from the estate goes to Max even in the way of monies needed to support my father’s second wife. He also refused to talk with me except through $500/hr attorneys he hired using estate money. This cost me another large amount of money.
As executor, Hugh has also done other things my father would have hated, including improperly disposing of my father’s patients’ medical records rather than following the simple rules described under HIPAA. Hugh’s excuse was that the presence of these records in the house would force my step mother and step sister to vacate the house so that we could sell it. Sadly Betty and Max wanted to leave, but Hugh would not even agree to involve an elder care consultant so the family could determine how Betty, could be supported financially. Ultimately, after spending more than the $500,000, we got this into arbitration and Hugh traded over $100,000 of estate money, not his own, so that Betty would give him a collection of autographs that under the law were now hers.
Worst of all has his been demeaning treatment of Betty, Before she died, my mother, Millie, encouraged my Dad to marry Betty and he did. My stepmother is an amazingly sweet and simple person who supported my father for 27 years. Hugh has called her names, demeaned Betty’s daughter, and tried to force Betty out of the house my father left to Betty for her lifetime. My father would be enraged.
The latest contest, referred to in Hugh’s bizarre letter , is over my discovery in that house of a trove of pictures that prove that my father Robert Schwartz, was the first physician into Buchenwald, arriving before General Patton. I discovered these with help from my step sister’s boy friend, Harvey, after Hugh had refused to work with me to go the house, with Betty’s permission, to review my Dad’s papers. This refusal went on for three years. Finally, under Betty’s rights as holder of a life estate, I worked with Harvey and we fund these amazing pictures taken by my Dad in Buchenwald. Harvey and I did what we could to assure that these were preserved, and I again contacted Hugh to do something. He refused again, claiming that doing so would abett my step sister’s claims to estate money. This was absurd. Worse, because of his actions as executor, a large number of other materials have now been destroyed including most of the WWII correspondence between my parents during WWII. Sadly, these letters were stored in my mother’s hopechest along with my wife;s wedding dress … now also destroyed.
Sadly, Hugh continues to create unnecessary issues. He wants the WWII materials to go to his alma matter, Brandeis. I would like to support him in this, not the least because Brandeis is also my wife’s alma matter. Hugh has created unnecessary obstructions, misrepresenting his authority, to Brandeis as well as to the US Holocaust Museum. He is now interfering n my effort to assure that the materials are fully available to all family members as well as for academic research.
The letter is bizarre in other ways I will not mention. Let me leave it at this, the only reason that these materials have not gone to Brandeis is Hugh.
Letter from Hugh
Rosh Hashana is to supposed to mark a new beginning. It is supposed to be a time when things in the past are left in the past and the slate is wiped clean. I was truly hoping that this Rosh Hashana could be this for our family. Sadly it won’t be, because some (not all) among us refuse to work with one another to bring the past to a close.