The End of My Addiction

depression, or another mood disorder. My doctors, for example, diagnosed me as suffering from “alcohol dependence with comorbid anxiety.”
    It is certainly true that addiction generates its own cycles of anxiety and depression. But as I always thought, based on my own case and my observation of others, and as the best recent scientific evidence has confirmed, there is usually an underlying disorder, a preaddiction morbidity, that sets the stage for addictive behavior. To put it more directly: the anxiety, depression, compulsiveness, or other underlying disorder comes first. 1 I was troubled by anxiety long before I became an alcoholic. Yet everyone who treated me for alcoholism turned out to be deaf to that fact, no matter how often I repeated it.
    I told all my doctors, “I use alcohol as a tranquilizer. If you rid me of anxiety, I’ll stop drinking.”
    My doctors all told me, “You’re anxious because you drink. Stop drinking and your anxiety will subside.”

    There may have been no alcoholism in my extended family in Europe and America. But there was a streak of anxiety and nervousness in my mother (with good reason, given her experiences) that became part of my nature and nurture.
    Both sides of the family were of Polish Jewish origin. My father, Emmanuel (“Maniek” to my mother and his closest friends), hailed from Kraków. When he was a teenager, his violin teacher wanted him to go to Berlin to train as a concert violinist with one of the great masters of the time. But my father, a true walking encyclopedia with a passion for learning about everything from ancient Greek to opera, from astronomy to zoology, chose to study engineering.
    In 1932, at the age of twenty-four, he went to the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (the Grenoble Institute of Technology), as it is now called, the French equivalent of MIT. He arrived not speaking a word of French but was soon fluent in the language, although he always spoke it with a slight accent, and he completed his studies with distinction. Then he went to Paris, where he looked up his father’s brother, who had changed his name from Edward Ameisen to Edward William Titus. It was a strange act for a Jew to adopt the name of Titus, the Roman emperor who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. But Edward Titus made a habit of defying convention.
    In 1908, in London, Edward William Titus had married Helena Rubinstein, and begun helping her grow what would become one of the great cosmetics empires. Only four-foot-ten, Rubinstein was notorious for her tyrannical ways. Yet after going to work for her, my father gained her trust with his engineering expertise and management skill, and rose to a senior position in her French operations (despite the fact that she would divorce Titus in 1937 because of his many infidelities).
    At the start of World War II, my father volunteered for the French army, although he was still a Polish citizen. After seeing combat in northern France, he was captured in 1940 by the Germans and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Pomerania. Within a few days he was identified as a Jew and sent to a forced labor camp. When the labor camp was liberated by General George Patton’s troops in the last months of the war in Europe, he returned to Paris and set about rebuilding Helena Rubinstein’s French business, becoming the company’s managing director.
    When the war began, my mother, Janina (“Yanka”) Schanz, then only seventeen years old, was already at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, in the same philosophy class as Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. Her father had a successful textile factory in the southern Polish town of Bielsko-Biala. Samuel Schanz was under no illusions about Nazi Germany’s view of the Jews. His brother had already emigrated to Palestine, and Samuel went and bought land there. But his wife, Anna, refused to leave her familiar surroundings. Like so many others, she could not believe that what was happening to Jews elsewhere would soon happen in Poland.
    Displaying her characteristic strength of will, my mother managed to secure visas to Argentina for her parents, herself, and her younger brother, Zev. But my grandmother again refused to leave, insisting that all would be well. Escape soon became impossible. Arrested by the Germans in the Kraków ghetto after having survived the Warsaw bombardment, my mother and her family were taken to the concentration camp at Plaszów, where they found my