Before we were able to leave Germany, we needed a sponsor who could guarantee us housing and would promise to employ my father so that we would not become public charges. My parents put an advertisement up at the camp, as well as in the Forward, the Yiddish-language daily newspaper in New York, in the hope of finding relatives. My mother provided her name, her maiden name, where she came from, and the names of both sets of her grandparents.
The name Bronstein caught the eye of someone in New York. It turned out to be the uncle of my mother’s older half sister, Lifsha. Concerned that he might not want to sponsor her should he understand that she was not actually Lifsha but, rather, her half sister and not a blood relative, my mother wrote to him. His reply said, “It doesn’t matter. Family is family.”
My mother eventually connected directly with two of her Weinberg aunts in Washington, D.C. The story I have been told is that my childless great-aunt, Jean, whom I had always thought of as my “fancy” aunt, wanted to be the one to sponsor us. Unfortunately, that plan didn’t work, because she had never bothered to become a U.S. citizen.
Ultimately, the husband of my mother’s other aunt, Mime Chia (mime means “aunt” in Yiddish), became our official sponsor. Vigder Shereshevsky, also from Kolki, was not only Chia’s husband—my mother’s uncle by marriage—but he was also my mother’s father’s first cousin. If this seems confusing, all you need to know is that in Kolki, we were family in an infinite variety of ways.
The document, filled out on February 9, 1948, promised that Uncle Vigder, a U.S. citizen, would sponsor my mother, Etel (Etka), twenty-eight years old, and her family, including husband Leib Safran (Lejb), thirty-eight years old, and daughter Ester (me), two years old. Called “Individual Assurance by Relative,” it further promised that, if admitted, my father would have employment as a watchman at the Barnaby Construction Company, “at not less than the prevailing rate of wages…and will not displace some other person from employment.” Uncle Vigder had to further promise that “the principal applicant and the members of his family, who accompany him…shall not become public charges…and will have safe and sanitary housing at 5013 3rd St. NW, Washington, D.C., consisting of spare room in 9-room house occupied only by affiant & wife without displacing some other person from such housing.”
We were met at the docks in New York by a representative from HIAS, who gave each of us our five dollars and a set of train tickets to Washington, D.C. Our HIAS document says the volunteer gave us each fifteen dollars, but my mother was certain it was only five each, for a total of fifteen. In matters like this, I trust her memory. My mother also remembered that the first person she saw when she got off the train in Washington was Uncle Vigder. He was wearing a white suit, and she thought he was a cab driver. He had brought an entourage with him—aunts, uncles, cousins, and a few relatives of our relatives—people we had never met and most of whom we didn’t know existed.
What I doubt we realized is that we were walking into a terrible personal tragedy. This American family of ours had just lost the only child in their next generation—my almost-four-year-old cousin Mark, who would have been close to my age. My mother’s first cousin Lottie, daughter of Chia and Vigder, had given birth to Mark Joseph Bennett on June 4, 1945, after several miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy. An otherwise-healthy child, Mark died after what was supposed to be a routine tonsillectomy just months before we arrived.
We spent our first days in America at Mime Chia and Uncle Vigder’s attached row house on 3rd Street NW, the one described in our supporting documents. Who knows what they thought of having me around after just losing their only precious grandchild, but they nonetheless welcomed me into their home. I was a small Yiddish-speaking immigrant, oblivious to the fact that I was stepping into the vacuum created by the recent death of their grandson.
In my archives is a box marked “Shereshevsky,” which contains all of Mark’s pictures. I don’t know if there is anyone else who has them. Years later, as I studied his photographs and tried to reconstruct these memories, I felt the sudden compulsion to visit the cemetery and see his grave. I have been to that same cemetery, Beth Shalom, in Capitol Heights, Maryland, many times before, for the burials of Mark’s grandparents, his aunt and uncle, and his parents, Lottie and Abe Bennett, who rest on either side of their only child. His aunt, Bea Shereshevsky, was the last to pass away. Unbeknownst to me, she made me her guardian toward the end of her life. I was the one to make all of the arrangements for her care and eventually for her funeral—there was no one else. In all the times I was at the cemetery, I had never really looked at Mark’s headstone, probably because I never knew him, even though I had been to the funerals of every other member of the family that surrounded him. When he died on May 7, 1949, he became the first in this line of seven to be buried in this plot. I am now the keeper of Mark’s memory and that of his parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle.
Chia and Vigder’s son, Izzy, used to say that my mother was saved from the Holocaust so that she could take care of her American family. She did, and then so did I. We had no ancestors left in Europe, and they had no descendants in America. All we had was one another. They came to my mother’s family dinners and to my large, all-inclusive Passover seders, and we helped take care of Cousin Bea when she was struck with Alzheimer’s.
Soft drinks and fresh fruit were just the beginning of many American wonders. Now there was this thing in a can called tuna fish. My mother remembered her first meal at her Mime Chia’s house, which included tuna fish. She had no idea what it was. We had a lot to learn in America, and among the necessary skills was how to flush toilets—but not too often, since we needed to keep an eye on the water bill.
I also needed to learn English. But for the time being, Yiddish, my first language, seemed to suffice. Asked if I would like a gift, I requested a shlafende lyalke, a doll that opened and closed its eyes, something I did not see in the DP camp. I soon received several.
My parents were well taken care of during our first few weeks in America, but there were few questions about what they had endured in Europe and how they survived. This was typical of survivors’ post-Holocaust experiences in the United States and probably around the world. Survivors were urged to move on, and in so doing, they internalized the horror of their experiences. The general silence in my family about the past suggests that we were no exception.
In her 2007 book, Case Closed, Holocaust historian Beth B. Cohen examined the difficulties faced by the 140,000 survivors who ultimately made their way to the United States between 1946 and 1954. Using case records of Jewish social-service agencies, as well as interviews with survivors, she learned that immigrants were actually told not to dwell on the past. They were urged to find jobs and housing and to learn English. Actually, they weren’t yet called survivors—they were greeners, or immigrants, or refugees, and they were regarded by some of their fellow Jews with embarrassment. Cohen notes that a Gallup poll in 1945 showed that 37 percent of Americans felt the number of European immigrants admitted to the United States ought to be fewer than that admitted before the war. Some members of Congress tried to cut quotas by 50 percent.
I suspect my parents didn’t need this sort of advice from any social workers. They just got on with things as best they could. Fifteen months after our arrival, on November 9, 1950, my mother gave birth to my brother. He was named, in Hebrew, for our two grandfathers, Israel Srulach Bronstein and Yosef Safran. That was an easy decision, but my parents didn’t know what to call him in English, so they entrusted an American relative, one born in the States, to come up with a name. The only requirement was that it be easy for my parents to pronounce, which is how Israel Yosef more than a little incongruously became Julian Edwin Safran.
I remember visiting my mother in the hospital for my brother’s bris, eight days after his birth. Back then, new mothers were kept in the hospital for more than a week, and therefore the bris was in the hospi
tal. This was the longest my mother and I had ever been separated. She wore a dark blue velvet robe, which she had brought from Europe, and to me she looked absolutely regal.
Oddly enough, given all of the pictures I have of our small family from Lodz and then later from the DP camp, there are very few documenting our early days in the United States. It’s only now that I can look back and see that, the barbed wire in the background notwithstanding, the DP camp might have been one of the happier interludes in my parents’ lives. They were young, surrounded by friends, and looking toward a brighter future. Once that future arrived, there was a whole new set of hardships—adjusting to a new life in a new country while trying to put their unspeakable losses behind them.
There are, of course, photographs from our time in America, but they are generally of a more formal vein: the occasional elementary school pictures of me, and a picture of my brother as a toddler. I also found what looks like a typical table shot at a bar mitzvah, probably taken shortly after we arrived. My parents both look young and handsome; I am seated between them, a little bewildered.
As far as I can tell, the first time the Leica was used in America was when I excavated it from my father’s possessions and used it to photograph Frank after his birth, then, later, Jonathan and Josh, and my nephews, Ben and Jeremy—all of my father’s grandchildren.
The other photograph of my father in America is attached to a document of intention to file for U.S. citizenship, dated November 1949. He made it all this way but never became a citizen; my mother and I did, in October 1954, three months after he died.
At least the document gives me a good physical description of him: He was short, five feet five inches, and weighed 140 pounds, with hazel eyes and black-and-gray hair. One characteristic not mentioned is what we call “the Safran ears.” My father had protruding ears. When I was little, after we came to America, my Aunt Jean thought I had protruding ears, too, and would Scotch-tape them back. Whenever my sons or one of my nephews was born, protruding ears was one of the first things we’d check for.
One reason that I know my father must have found a way to smuggle currency to the United States is that we evidently arrived with enough cash that one relative immediately asked to borrow half. My mother tells me that we got to this country with about $10,000, the equivalent of $106,036 in 2019. There was also money for my mother to shop. Cousin Bea took her to Mazor Masterpieces, one of the fancy furniture stores on 7th Street. Back then, this area on 7th Street, above Pennsylvania Avenue, was known as D.C.’s furniture row. Oddly enough, my thrifty, coupon-cutting mother had her heart set on a rather pricey bedroom set. She found one that she liked but wasn’t sure whether to buy it. Seven hundred dollars was a steep price tag in 1949. Apparently, as she was hemming and hawing, Cousin Bea snapped at her. “Whose approval do you need?” she asked. “The president’s?”
Why she spent so much I don’t know. Perhaps she didn’t realize there were cheaper places to buy furniture. Or maybe she just wanted to feel like a proper American, which to her involved a nice bedroom ensemble. Either way, she used this bedroom set for more than sixty years, so you might say it amortized well.
* * *
—
I’m not sure what I remember about my father and if what I remember is real. Although I have spent a lifetime trying to determine what happened to him during the war, the aftermath and the difficulties he faced in America are something I have actually tried to block out. Even now it is difficult for me to talk about him, and it has been hard to find the right words for this book.
There are many pleasant, colorful memories, of course. Some real, some probably patched together from stories. I definitely remember going with him on his rounds to buy wholesale groceries for his store. He would take me with him to Union Market on Florida Avenue. This is now a chic D.C. shopping area, but back then the neighborhood was a mishmash of vendors selling everything from cigarettes and bubble gum with baseball cards to canned goods, fresh produce, and live chickens—all to independent grocers like my father. We’d hop into his jeep, or maybe it was some kind of station wagon, and go from vendor to vendor getting what we needed and also buying goods for another grocer, who had just emigrated and didn’t have a car.
Sometimes my mother would come with us so she could pick up a live chicken for our own meal. We’d select the one we wanted and watch the kosher butcher slaughter it and pluck the feathers. At home my mother would have to finish plucking and cleaning the chicken.
Where the Italian grocer and scruffy kosher butcher once stood, there is now a gourmet food hall, with a bookstore and specialty retailers. Instead of live chickens, you can find gelato and olive oils from around the world.
I know little of my father’s education or even of his life before the war, or what dreams he might have once had. One of his closest friends, Sol Aleskow, a fellow immigrant, told me many years later that my father was smart and that he hated the grocery business and wanted to do something else. One of his ideas, according to this friend, was to manufacture bumpers for automobiles, and the two of them went to New York to research opportunities. According to Sol, “He could have done anything.”
Even if he wanted out of the business, my father kept moving forward, selling, and then buying a new store. Now I marvel at how he was able to do this, to wheel and deal so successfully in a new country, in a new language, especially now that I understand what an incredibly heavy weight he carried. The home I remember best, and where we lived the longest, was at 1822 North Capitol Street. The store was downstairs, and upstairs were two apartments. We lived in one, and the other was rented to an older couple who lived there with their teenage grandson. At some point, they left and we moved into their apartment, just before we were supposed to relocate to our new store on 15th Street—the one in a better neighborhood and with more potential, or so my father thought. It turned out the owners of the promising 15th Street store had cooked the books and presented my father with false numbers. He had already given them $10,000, and he could not get it back. After my father’s death, the owners would not give the money to my mother, either.
Driving down North Capitol Street after a meeting just a couple of years ago, I noticed that, like much else in this neighborhood, our old store was being converted to upscale condos. I parked and went in and asked the architect, who happened to be on-site, if I could walk through the building. The store was smaller than I remembered, but I was able to see where the butcher block had once been, where my father had stood, cutting meat for customers. The same butcher block where I once left my brown-and-white-spotted-dog piggy bank unattended for a few minutes. When I returned, the money was gone. My father was angrier than I had ever seen him. He yelled at me and said that I didn’t understand how hard it was for him, by which I presumed he meant how hard it was to earn a living.
With hindsight, this was my father, under pressure, moving toward the end.
All these years later, I walked upstairs through the newly configured spaces and was able to find the place where my brother and I once slept, the room where we were on that Friday morning, July 30, 1954. I have a vivid memory of the light streaming in from the apartment window above as I sat on the floor next to my brother, who was then three and a half. We had a gray metal lunch box with a red lid. It was full of clay, and I was making petals, putting them together to form a rose.
My Mime Inda, my mother’s father’s sister, a nervous woman who’d spent much of the war in hiding with her husband and son in Paris, suddenly appeared. There was a lot of commotion. I have blocked out much of these events, but I believe someone may have told me that my father died. Perhaps they told me then. Perhaps they told me later. Another relative came to take my brother and me to a cousin’s house. We didn’t go to the funeral.
No one talked about my father or what had happened to him. Somehow I understood, even as a young child, that I wasn’t supposed to ask. His death became pa
rt of the family canon of unspeakable stories that were to remain buried in the past. Years later, as an adult, I saw a death certificate, or some kind of official document, that clearly specified the cause of death: suicide. My brother independently went and got a copy, but he never discussed it with me. I’m not even sure how I know that, but I do. He told his wife, Sandy. And Sandy told their sons. And years later, one of his sons evidently told Jonathan—after he had already written a scene involving the suicide of a grandfather in his novel. But I never discussed it with anyone, not even my husband. When asked how my father died, I always said that it was war-related. I suppose it was, but not in the way that my answer implied.
I was about sixty years old the first time I spoke about my father’s death explicitly. Reading Amos Oz’s 2005 memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, in which he chronicles his own difficulty coming to terms with his mother’s suicide, was a turning point for me. He had never spoken with his father about her death. Before reading this book, I had not even been able to use the word “suicide.”
My father had a Jewish companion on the Nazi work detail that saved both of their lives, Srulach Zilberfarb. This is who he had been with when both of their families were murdered while they glazed windows at a distant train station. In November 2009, I met with Srulach’s family in a café near my hotel in Tel Aviv. Srulach had already passed away, and, sadly, his son was dying of cancer, but his daughter-in-law, two grandsons, and one grandson’s wife and baby came to the café. They brought pictures of Srulach, and although he lived a long life in Israel, he was described by his family as a man who was always haunted, who was bitter. “His eyes always looked down,” they told me. “He could never really find joy in his new life in Israel. Even with his children it was difficult for him to express emotion and love.” In the words of his daughter-in-law, “He never finished suffering.”
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