An Adopted Woman’s Reckoning with Her Holocaust History
Starting a less-afraid chapter after discovery
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
In 2019 I finally did it: I took a genealogy test. I had been reluctant to taking one; I had amazing parents who raised me, so why should I go searching for my birth parents? But my life at age fifty had become crazy. My husband was in the hospital with prostate issues. When my daughter asked me whether “Daddy (was) going to die,” I panicked. I need an insurance family, I thought, crazily. I took the test, thinking it would solve my problems.
Little did I know I would spend the next few years meeting my birth father, my half siblings, new aunts and uncles and their children, and writing a memoir about it. There were ups, downs, and surprises. My personal investigation into my genetic origins led me to Oswego, NY, to the only Jewish internment camp in World War II where Susan, my birth mother, was born in 1945.
I learned that both my adoptive father and my biological father were Holocaust survivors. Three of my grandmothers were survivors. Both of my paternal grandparents were murdered by Nazis. It destabilized my world. How am I not more traumatized, I wondered? What is my obligation to my ancestors? How can I be a good ancestor? And what of all of this information should I tell my young daughter? How do we transmit this painful history of the Holocaust to our children?
The unexpected and painful inheritances were one thing. But the stories about my birth mother that I unearthed during this journey were even more dramatic and unsettling. For a long time, I had insisted I was a “mom-o-theist” and only had room in my heart for one mother, my mother Rachel who raised me from birth. It was the act of writing that gave me the key to my story.
When I finally wrote the chapters about my birth mother I wrote down these sentences and it changed everything: “Two women left Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach where I was born in April. For one woman, it was the happiest day of her life. For the other, it was the saddest. I’m their daughter.”
I wrote these words and began to cry. It was the first time I had acknowledged my birth mother’s life. Her labor of love. When I learned that she, as a daughter of Holocaust survivors, took her own life in 1974 by gassing herself, I knew I had to go to her grave and pay my respects. I had to show kavod, the Hebrew word for respect, a word that my mother Rachel had taught me. It was at her grave, as I placed a stone on her tombstone, where my Adventures the Genealogy Zone finally achieved closure.
And this marked a huge transition in my life. Rebbe Nachman said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to not be afraid at all.” Before I did the genealogy test, I was always afraid, scared to leap into the unknown. But after, new worlds of possibility opened for me. I recount this in my memoir, The Girl in the Sailor Suit.
I learned that the heart can expand like a womb to contain multitudes. I learned that the divisions we make between life and death, good and evil, nature and nurture, limit who we think we are and who the world is.
Life is a vaster mystery than we can ever know. This was the beginning of my journey into faith, my deepening Emunah, the Hebrew word for faith. This was my spiritual awakening in my fifties as my life was falling apart. I could contain my double Holocaust inheritance. I could live my life not being afraid.
When I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Darl’s line, “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die,” had always bothered me. Well, not everyone comes from two. I came from four. Now, I place four stones on four graves, honoring all my creators, from nature and nurture. I light four yahrzeit candles every fall to remember where I came from, so I can know where I’m going.
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