Therapist Preserves Family Memories with Recorded Stories

The Times Leader –
When Esther Gutin’s father left Russia as a boy, he looked behind the carriage and saw the family’s faithful dog was trailing its owners, who, sadly, knew they could not take the animal along on their journey to the United States.

“The dog followed them all the way to the river,” Gutin said.

The family boarded a ferry, and the dog swam after them until it apparently sensed, midstream, it wouldn’t be able to go the distance.

“The dog turned around and swam back,” Gutin said. “They never saw him again.”

That memory is somewhat bittersweet, but Gutin, a psychotherapist from Wilkes-Barre, cherishes it because she believes passing along such family stories “pulls together the threads of our lives, like weaving.”

She wants her grandchildren to hear about her experiences growing up in New York City, how she met and married her husband, and how her father, who immigrated to America in the early 20th century, told her the first thing he did in his new country was go to the library and take out a book.

“Someday they’ll be ready to listen and absorb,” she said.

To make sure her family stories are available for future generations, Gutin recorded her oral history with help from her friend and fellow psychotherapist Ann Smith, who has started a business called Life Stories Remembered, LLC©.

“My goal is just to get the information,” said Smith, who prompts clients’ memories with gentle questions and preserves the answers in CD, DVD or verbatim document format.

“It’s amazing how one memory triggers another and their lives kind of come alive,” she said.

“Some people tell me, `Oh, I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say,’ but that is never the case,” Smith said.

The inspiration for Life Stories Remembered, LLC© came to Smith after she talked to the late Judge Max Rosenn about his life.

“I met him once a week for six months,” she said. “Instead of `Tuesdays with Morrie,’ we had `Wednesdays with Max.’ He was 95 and had a fabulous memory.”

Rosenn told Smith his parents owned a small store where he, as a boy of 5, would sit on the counter and “read” to the customers – “until his mother saw that he was `reading’ upside-down.”

A few years later, Rosenn was tending cattle in Plains Township when a speeding car hit one of them.

“He didn’t have a writing instrument with him, so he picked up a stick and wrote the license plate number in the sand,” Smith said. “When his father saw that, he said he knew his son would grow up to be a lawyer.”

Rosenn’s sons were so delighted with the memories Smith had saved, she decided she’d like to do the same thing for other people.

“I cannot overstate how precious and fascinating the tapes and transcripts are to me and my family,” Dr. Daniel Rosenn of Boston told Smith.

As for Gutin’s DVD, she and her husband, Stanley, thoroughly enjoy watching and listening to her stories. Stanley Gutin sometimes finds himself getting choked up.

“It’s hypnotic,” he said. “I’m so glad she did this.”