A new dynamic was taking shape between the generations as Holocaust survivors became grandparents, as was evident in our own family. While my mother continued to be reluctant to talk to me about the war, she was surprisingly forthcoming with her grandchildren, not only about what she had endured but also about the shtetl where she grew up. For me, these stories were profoundly tragic. For my children, who had more distance, they were stories of redemption and evidence of their grandmother’s strength and superhero status.
This was a time of changing self-perception for me, as well. I was still trying to find my place and realizing that much of my narrative had been driven by a subtle rebellion. As a child I’d avoided hanging out with other “greeners,” which was slang for new immigrants, for Holocaust survivors and families recently arrived from Europe, who tended to stick together, who were green and didn’t know the American ways. And then later, consciously or not, I married someone who was not from that world. My husband, Bert, an even-tempered intellectual who has spent his career as a prominent, crusading antitrust lawyer, came from a family that had been in the United States for several generations. The Holocaust was something remote when he, a secular Jew, was growing up. He later told me that he learned about the Holocaust only years after it was over, when he went with his mother to the cinema and saw a newsreel from Europe that made her cry. It was a relief to become part of a family where people were relaxed enough to say what they thought, where jokes were told, where there weren’t painful secrets. Bert’s calm demeanor and encouragement, in many ways, enabled me to become who I am.
On a granular level, I also found myself rebelling against my mother’s habits of deprivation. It was more than just the bargain hunting: She cooked everything economically, pinching on ingredients, saving grains of rice. On the occasion of the birth of one of her great-grandchildren, she presented a generous check—along with a bunch of coupons for Pampers. Even in fancy hotels and restaurants where we sometimes took her, she unabashedly slipped the rolls from breadbaskets on tables into plastic bags, which she then tucked into her pocketbook, much to my embarrassment. Who could blame her, this woman who once stole potatoes and hid them in pockets of her pants to survive? And in her later years, once she had moved into our house, I would sometimes find pieces of chocolate among the provisions she’d tucked into a compartment in the walker she used or hidden in her bedroom, just in case.
I, in turn, reacted to her behavior by adding a little too much extra everything. If there’s a way to pay extra, I’m the sucker who probably will. I wanted to embrace life, not to scrape by, not to live in the shadows.
As certain as I was of my desire to live life to its fullest, even if that merely meant adding a little more butter or sugar to the recipe, I was at times uncertain of my role. I wanted to be the good girl—to not bring any trouble to this woman who had suffered so much. But I also wanted to find my own way. I wasn’t trying to run from my past, and I knew I had a role in this story as the biological link between my mother, this strong-willed survivor in every sense of the word, and my children, three boys who came into this world with their own strong voices, with stories to tell. I was the hinge between these generations, but what did that mean?
It was not as though I had lost my way professionally—I had engaged in stimulating and exciting work in politics and public affairs for many years. It’s just that what I was doing did not have much relationship to my central concerns or with these places back in Ukraine that haunted me. Then I was offered the opportunity to run Sixth & I in 2007, a new Jewish and cultural institution housed in a historic synagogue in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C. It was for me a dream opportunity to create and cultivate a new model for Jewish experiences and community that I couldn’t resist, even though it was an unexpected shift into a new career, with a huge pay cut. And it came at a time when I might have decided to slow down a bit: I was already sixty years old and a grandmother.
All of the various threads of my life seemed to converge around this time. I was looking forward and I had the opportunity to circle back to where my family began: Two of the key people I was now in contact with professionally had roots in the same shtetl as my father. The family of Shelton Zuckerman, Sixth & I’s founder and board chairman, was from Trochenbrod. In fact, we were distant cousins. It’s a connection we had made years before, when Jonathan and Shelton’s nephew, David, befriended each other in the same fourth-grade class. Bob Kogod, a major philanthropist and Sixth & I supporter who also happened to be a cousin, had family roots in Trochenbrod, as well. According to a map of prewar Trochenbrod, Bob’s grandparents and mine lived literally across the street from each other—or, more accurately, across the dirt road.
It is only recently that I have begun to understand that finding these links is my calling, and it is only in the last few years, through archival research, through travel and detective work, that I have literally begun to connect the family chain.
With new resources available, both from my mother and from archives and databases and books, I began to seek out family far and wide, poring over old letters and documents, looking for far-flung connections when I traveled, and in later years, as the technology progressed, conducting DNA searches online. The unexpected discovery of one person would inevitably lead to another, with even more information, yet the more I learned, the less I realized I really knew.
While I was searching for family out of a genuine desire to understand and to connect, I had another goal, which in many ways fell into the realm of the fantastic: I hoped to find the family that hid my father, to actually speak to the man and the two women in that tattered picture, which at least represented something concrete that I could search for. I’m not sure that I really believed such a meeting would ever take place, but I wanted to try while there might still be time to find them. Of course, I had no idea where to begin; I couldn’t even make out what was written on the back of the photograph, apart from what looked like the word “Augustine.” And I didn’t even know what Augustine meant: Was this a person or a place or just a random word jotted on the back of the nearest thing handy?
* * *
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As a high school graduation present, my Great-Aunt Jean, the one I thought of as my “fancy” aunt, had taken me on a trip to Israel. With hindsight, I consider this the first step in my journey. She was my mother’s aunt from a small village outside Kolki, and she became my de facto grandmother, as well as my bridge to what I thought of at the time as a more refined world. Jean was a formidable, aristocratic woman. People either loved her or did not; there was not much middle ground. She was a big woman—not heavy but large and well endowed, which was something that was hard to miss given her fondness for wearing revealing blouses, even late into life.
She had immigrated as a teenager, before the war, by sneaking onto a boat with a relative and, according to family lore, hiding under somebody’s skirt. She made her way to Washington, D.C., and wound up creating what seemed to me a glamorous career as the giftware buyer for Kann’s, a now-defunct department store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Accordingly, she knew and taught me about the finer things in life, taking me as a child to buy a pair of white gloves. She wanted me to appreciate quality, and even though she didn’t have a lot of money herself, she had strong opinions on what one should and should not own. When Bert and I married, she insisted we have silver and china, for example, but she had to pick it out herself. “Honey,” she told me, “you don’t have good enough taste yet.”
On one occasion, late in life, she went to New York and came back with a painting of a nude woman that we weren’t quite sure what to make of. It hung over the bed she shared with her second husband, a sweet-tempered, considerate man named Harry Greenberg, whom she had known most of her life. Years later, when she moved into a nursing home and we cleaned out her apartment, we didn’t know what to do with the nude; no one in our family was eager to claim it. I finally took it ho
me and hung it, somewhat warily, in our living room. On one occasion when the rabbi paid us a visit, I was worried; what would he think of me, the mother of three sons, with this weird, risqué painting hanging on the wall? Who knows what he actually thought, but his only comment was to inquire as to whether it had been painted by someone famous. Truthfully, I had no idea.
Her choice in art notwithstanding, Jean opened up worlds to me. It was on the trip to Israel with her that I met, for the first time, close relatives of my father: three cousins who had known him growing up. They were amazed to meet me. They called it a miracle, and it was, in a way—with so few survivors, each family member you find is a miracle. I don’t think I really knew what to ask, but, at least at the time, connecting with them was enough, and I managed to begin gathering tidbits of information about my father and about his mother’s family, the Biskers.
Although I often wish I could have another shot at asking these now long-gone cousins more questions, this trip served as the catalyst for what would become my side career as the family connector, the hub of a network of people who sought out and then maintained contact with relatives far and wide.
Even though this generation was no longer around to mine for memories, in the early 2000s there was suddenly a new means of connecting with family—DNA testing. I had the opportunity to be a participant in genetically tracing ancestors when National Geographic asked to hold an event at Sixth & I for its DNA Genographic Project in 2008. To make their presentation more interesting, they proposed analyzing results for members of the staff, and, unsurprisingly, I stepped forward. I also volunteered a sample of my brother’s spit for the test. The genographic work was aimed at analyzing historical DNA migration patterns rather than individual results, which came later in other testing. We didn’t learn anything particularly interesting other than that, on the male side, our paternal line was heavily represented in the Mediterranean populations, most significantly in the Balkans and Greece and also in Sicily. Our paternal side descended from Africa, but our ancestors had apparently chosen to move north, through what is now Israel, then Turkey, then Greece. This possibly made sense: In Istanbul I had once seen a place called the Safran Bazaar—perhaps that market was owned by relatives. In Hebrew, sefer is the word for “book,” and sofer means “scribe.” And, of course, the name might be a derivative of saffron, the spice, which also has Middle Eastern roots.
Shortly after this experiment, commercial DNA testing exploded, with such companies as 23andMe making it simple to conduct research. It was fascinating, but it was also one more rabbit hole to go down late at night. I ordered kits for me, for my brother, and for Bert, and got the two of them to reluctantly participate. Over time I supplemented my research using tools like Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilyTreeDNA. Bert was pleased to learn that his results from 23andMe showed him to be slightly more Ashkenazi Jewish—97 percent—than my 94.7 percent. It was a meaningless difference, of course, but interesting all the same.
Bert also had significantly more close family matches than I did, which was not surprising given our different family histories. So many of the branches of my family tree were cut off during the Holocaust. Some of my matches were third or fourth cousins, with names I recognized. But an unfamiliar name—Cheryl Kahn—popped up as a second cousin, with a much more significant DNA overlap than any of the others. We connected and she told me that her grandfather, Max Bronstein, was killed in St. Louis in an auto accident in 1947, just before her father was born—or so she’d been told. I had a Great-Uncle Max who never married and died in 1994 of natural causes. We decided to have our parents do the DNA test. My mother tried twice and couldn’t produce enough spit. Cheryl’s father succeeded and tested as a first cousin once removed to both me and my brother, which is to say that my Great-Uncle Max was Cheryl’s grandfather—the father of her father.
I was eager to embrace this new cousin, who is the same generation as my children. Cheryl and her husband, Steve, came from California to meet us. After the visit, I said to Jonathan that she really felt like family, and he pointed out this was because she really is family. And family she surely is—a recent study has found that basically all Ashkenazi Jews are thirtieth cousins, descended from the same 350 people some 600 to 800 years ago. But that doesn’t diminish the bond we have: Cheryl calls me Aunt Esther, and I consider her a niece.
* * *
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I became so good at navigating these sites and making connections that I helped track Bert’s family, as well, and over the years I have forged networks that range from the Midwest to South America, from Poland to Australia. But on one occasion, I hit a wall. The DNA testing kits warn that you might discover relatives you didn’t expect to find, which is to say that you might stir up a family scandal by discovering that someone was the product of an affair. One night, I came across a first cousin once removed from Bert, named Kendra Moore. Bert and I were both puzzled—this was a name we didn’t recognize, and the signs pointed toward something salacious. Bert asked me not to pursue this; he didn’t want to know where Kendra, with this close DNA match, came from. I couldn’t help myself, of course. I tried to contact Kendra Moore through 23andMe, but she didn’t reply. Determined, I googled her, to no avail. After I had pretty much given up, she finally replied, explaining that she was actually Bert’s first cousin once removed—Melissa Roudi, someone we knew well. She had gone on the website just out of curiosity and had used an alias. At the time, she’d been sitting next to a Kenmore air conditioner and decided to use the letters to make up a name: Kendra Moore.
One family scandal averted, I was able to keep my job as the Foer family historian. I even came up with the idea of having a Foer family reunion—something I had always wished for in my own family. Our own nuclear family, which now consists of three children and six grandchildren, is currently the largest branch of Bert’s family tree.
Consider this family that likes to do it up big for every birthday, then multiply that by ten, and you will have a glimpse of what our seders are like. Our numbers may vary, especially as our family grows, but to give a rough sense of the size of our seders—I have hand-painted, from Ikea, a set of thirty-six Passover dishes. It’s been a long project: I worked on the dinner plates one year, then soup plates the next, and finally dessert plates.
For me, Passover is not just a time to gather the family for a meal and a rote reading of the Haggadah; it’s an occasion to bring memory alive. We change up the narrative, we ask questions, we contemporize the story, we personalize it, we even turn it into theater. Storytelling is fundamental to resilience.
Each year we come up with a theme meant to refresh the Passover story. Some years we write plays and put out casting calls.
“Wanna be a star at this year’s Passover?” reads the flyer from one year, which my sons sent out while they were still very young.
To pick a character, just flip through your family’s Haggadah! Some good suggestions are:
Baby Moses
Aaron
Pharaoh (BOOOO!!!!)
An Egyptian at the time of the ten plagues (He’d be pretty upset!)
The pharaoh’s daughter who found Moses in the water
Moses’s sister
Come up with some ideas of your own.
Along with reviews from the previous year’s seder (“Cowabunga!!! It was awesome, dude!!!!!”) was the instruction to call Jonathan Foer, who issued the casting call, to avoid duplicating roles.
* * *
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A somewhat more cerebral year, some fifteen years ago, we sent out questions for consideration that included:
• What is the relation between storytelling and history; between storytelling and memory; between storytelling and drama (reenactment)?
• How does the Exodus story transmit values?
• What is the diff
erence between oral and written storytelling in Judaism?
• What special meaning can be read into the story this year, at a time when our country is at war in the Middle East, Israel’s future is endangered, anti-Semitism is rampant in the world, American liberties are under siege at home?
* * *
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More recently, our youngest grandson, Leo, has become a Civil War buff, so we found a way to integrate that into the seder—admittedly a bit of a historical stretch, but still a story about slavery. We even talked about how Jewish soldiers made seders during the war. Leo came dressed as a Union soldier, and we bought Union and Confederate hats for the other guests; Sasha, Jonathan’s oldest son, was Abe Lincoln, complete with a Lincoln-like beard and top hat. Somehow we even managed to include all of the traditional Passover rituals.
Although it was at one time important to me to be able to seat everyone at the table, now that we have grown into such a large group we have moved the whole affair to the living room, where we sit on pillows scattered on the floor, as though we were having a seder in the desert. This enabled my mother to join us in her later years without having to get to the basement, the only place where we could fit everyone at one long table. It also allowed the younger grandchildren to move around instead of growing restless at the table.
My mother was always the star of our many seders, where she played a central role. One year we focused the seder on the story of her personal exodus from Europe to America.
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