Astor Orphan by Alexandra Aldrich; Harper Collins, 2012, 259p
By David Strom
CHULA VISTA, California — Recently, I read an interview with Alexandra Aldrich published in the Forward. What interested me in the interview was that Aldrich, a member of the famous Astor family, was a Jew, an ultra-orthodox Jew. She had just written a memoir, The Astor Orphan, which stimulated my inquisitiveness as to why would she became a Jew. After reading her autobiography, the question remains.
Aldrich grew up on her famous parents’ family’s ancestral estate. Her father, an Astor, was educated at private boarding schools and was a Harvard graduate. Despite the opportunities afforded him through his elite education, he dedicated himself to maintaining the very rundown family manor, Rokeby, a riverfront mansion in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Rokeby was a largely deserted, 43-room, 200-year-old house on 420 acres in the Hudson River Valley, complete with woods, animals, interesting outbuildings and bohemian tenants. As a child, Alexandra built a fantasy world around the stately mansion’s elegant demeanor. She played dress-up in evening gowns that her grandmother had worn to high-society events and wound a hand-cranked gramophone that was a personal gift to the Astor family from Thomas Edison.
They were the poorest members of the Astor family living at Rokeby. Alexandra’s father, Richard, took in many “stray” people to work or to do nothing and simply sponge off others. Although Richard attended boarding school and went on to Harvard, he possessed “too strong a sense of entitlement to do a single job day after day and take orders from others.” But he “didn’t inherit the money to support that attitude.” Many of the “temporary” guests stayed for months, others for years.
Alexandra Aldrich portrays a colorful cast of characters among her family members, including aunts, uncles, cousins and sundry hangers-on clinging to the family legacy long after the money was gone. Rokeby was a large home with many rooms. Her aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in another part of the house. They were richer, as the uncle had a paying job, which gave him a pretext for looking down on Alexandra and her father. The richer aunt, uncle and cousins had regular times to eat meals not like Alexandra and her family. While the Aldrich family members ate TV dinners discarded by the pie factory nearby, Alexandra longed for the stability and orderliness she saw in her uncle’s family. She was anxious to escape the chaos of her personal family life.
Her grandmother Claire, an Astor, was a alcoholic and her father’s sexual affairs were also a destabilizing factor in Alexandra’s childhood. Grandmother Claire lived at the mansion too. She was a woman that didn’t get out much, was distrustful of the “free-loading” boarders. When Grandma Claire drove Alexandra in her car, it was definitely a “white knuckle” ride. Alexandra often suffered embarrassment because of her grandmother’s outrageous behavior at family outings, at Alexandra’s school events and in many other social situations.
Alexandra was bewildered by her father’s behavior towards one of the women living on the estate. She was jealous of the woman. She wondered why that woman sat next to her father while riding in the family truck. Why wasn’t it her mother? Eventually, the pregnant girlfriend gave birth. Was her father’s bastard child going to carry the Aldrich family name?
Despite the chaos of her “landed gentry” family life, Alexandra was a studious scholar and loved playing the violin. Her indulgent and self-centered parents found it difficult at times to attend her musical recitals and other school events. And if the father came, he was often filthy and “smelly” from his work. The clothes he wore were usually dirty and torn.
The Astor Orphan, is a peculiar tale of an anxious child’s longing for security. “I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV and functional cars.” She hated her life at Rokeby and hoped to escape from Rokeby, through fantasy as a child and physically as the opportunity to pursue a boarding school education presents itself through the generosity of a sympathetic Parisian aunt. Her mother is outraged: “Someone could come up with twelve thousand dollars for boarding school tuition, while all these years we’ve gone hungry!” she wails. “Because boarding school is more necessary than food in this family?”
The book is an honest portrayal of a family that can no longer live on its inherited wealth. It is gone. How some of them cope is fascinating. Without wealth and the privilege and stability it brings, it is amazing to see that a strong sense of entitlement remains as family members still think they are not obligated to work or earn money to support themselves or for the upkeep of their decaying family manor.
The book ends when Alexandra leaves the family estate for boarding school, so the reader is left to wonder why she became an Orthodox Jew. Maybe she will write about it in her next book, and why she eventually returned to Rokeby. Nonetheless, with many unanswered questions about a turning point in Alexandra Aldrich’s life, my attention did not flag while reading this memoir.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at david.strom @sdjewishworld.com