Born in
Little Rock, Arkansas, she was the only child of Dr. Kurt Adler, and the only grandchild of renowned psychologist
Alfred Adler, a contemporary and associate of
Sigmund Freud’s and
Carl Jung’s in Vienna before the
Second World War. She was also the only child of her mother Freyda Nacque Adler (née Pasternack) who was the daughter of uneducated immigrants, both of whom were dead by the time Margot was born. Freyda was charismatic--Margot likened her to Auntie Mame, beautiful, and a renowned political activist, and beloved mother to Margot. Both parents were Jewish although neither practiced the religion nor observed its religious holidays. In her autobiographical account of growing up in the 1960s, ''Heretic's Heart'', she branded herself, “an alien in America.” Her paternal grandfather had been a personal friend of
Leon Trotsky’s. Trotsky was ruthlessly hunted and ultimately assassinated by
Stalin and his henchmen. Her grandfather had brought his family to the United States to avoid persecution by Stalinist, anti-Trotsky factions in Austria. But he was unable to save his oldest daughter, Valentine, who was imprisoned in Russia.
Albert Einstein, a friend of the family interceded on the Adlers’ behalf and learned that Valentine and her husband had died in a
gulag in 1942. Margot describes herself as “raised by left-wing parents,” a
red diaper baby, in the height of the
McCarthy era. Her father, like her grandfather, was a psychiatrist, who remained a cipher to Margot. He devoted his life’s work to analyzing his father’s theories of
human psychology and drawing parallels to those of Karl Marx’s theories of
economic socialism, although this work remained incomplete at the time of his death. Margot wrote, “The only thing that was beaten in my head was the Adlerian notion of ‘social interest,’ which, while never clearly defined in my youth, seemed to have something to do with being cooperative and merging your individual desires with the needs of society—rather like socialism”. Margot grew up in Manhattan where she attended the liberal
City and Country School in Greenwich Village, “my utopia, and the place that remained whole and intact and vibrant, even when my own family fell apart” . It was here that she fell in love with the stories of the gods and goddesses of myth that were later foundational in her decision to become a Wiccan priestess. There she also discovered her love of singing and performance which would influence her to go to the
High School of Music & Art (later joined with the
High School of Performing Arts to become the
LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts) in New York City. It was her mother Freyda to whom she was closest and with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce. Her mother retained the family apartment on Manhattan’s West Side overlooking
Central Park, which Margot inherited when it was still a rent-controlled apartment and which she and her husband subsequently purchased when the units became condominiums. Margot referred to the apartment as her bit of heaven on earth, high up on the western edge of Central Park with a view of the city. It came with all of the family mementos stored there since Margot’s childhood, including the letters that formed the basis of
Heretic’s Heart. == Education ==