by Ann Huber
Lost and Found
Lost and Found
Surviving Displacement, Finding Love, Uncovering Secrets
a memoir
Ann Avram Huber
In Memory of
My Grandmother, SARA MARCUS
My Mother, NETTY GLEIZER
My Mother-in-Law, PESCHE HUBER
Lost and Found. Text Copyright © 2017 by Ann Avram Huber All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Contact Mishpucha Books, 54 Maple Ave., Madison, NJ 07940
The names and identifying characteristics of certain persons have been changed, whether or not so noted in the text.
ISBN: 978-0-9883544-6-3
eISBN: 978-0-9883544-70
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017905741
Interior Design by Adept Content Solutions
Cover Design by Meg Souza
Published by Mishpucha Books
Madison, NJ 07940
www.Mishpuchabooks.com
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter One: GALATI
Chapter Two: HAIFA
Chapter Three: MONTREAL
Chapter Four: BECOMING CANADIAN, EH?
Chapter Five: THERE IS NO GOING BACK
Chapter Six: RESILIENCY
Chapter Seven: SUMMER CAMP
Chapter Eight: ATLANTIC CITY
Chapter Nine: LONG DISTANCE
Chapter Ten: THE COURTSHIP CONTINUED
Chapter Eleven: SEPARATE, BUT EQUAL LIVES
Chapter Twelve: SPRING/SUMMER 1967
Chapter Thirteen: VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE
Chapter Fourteen: MORDY, POLAND
Chapter Fifteen: NEU FREIMANN, MUNICH
Chapter Sixteen: PHILADELPHIA
Chapter Seventeen: HARRY’S MARKET
Chapter Eighteen: AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY
Chapter Nineteen: A WEDDING
Chapter Twenty: ISRAEL, AT LAST
Chapter Twenty-One: KEEPING SECRETS
Chapter Twenty-Two: O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Chapter Twenty-Three: FAMILY PILGRIMAGE
Chapter Twenty-Four: FAST FORWARD
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Herm (exasperated):
“Where were you when God was giving out patience?”
Ann (feisty):
“I was in the intelligence line for the second time!”
Ann to Herm:
“Sometimes I love you so much I think my heart will burst.”
PREFACE
MADELINE ALBRIGHT and I share a similar history. I too was born abroad, left Europe as a child, became a lawyer, and got involved in politics. Like her, I learned only late in life that significant truths about my heritage and, indeed, who I was, had been kept from me. Why did I not become Secretary of State? To what extent was it talent or luck or the result of some other forces? To what extent was my path shaped by other people’s choices or mine? Or the tumultuous forces of history? Or was it fate?
Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
William Jennings Bryan
Chapter One
GALATI
AS A CHILD, I often tried to imagine my parents’ wedding day. My mother did not want to discuss her wedding and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask my father. We never talked about the past. My fantasies drew heavily on what I’d seen in romantic movies like “South Pacific,” because I had so few facts to go on. The only clues were the few worn, professional wedding photos among the family pictures kept in a shoebox. Perhaps I spent so much time with this box of old sepia photos because, apart from a china doll and a jar of buttons, it was the only thing I had to play with. I spent hours in our tiny apartment in Haifa, Israel, sorting, studying, and labeling the wedding pictures. Somehow, perhaps because of the way my mother brushed off the subject, I sensed a mystery. I was hungry for more information.
In those photos, my mother Netty wore a magnificent, long-sleeved gown. A veil descended from a headdress into a long train and she carried a large bouquet of flowers. “They were white,” was all my mother was willing to say. My father Sandu was dressed in a fashionable, immaculately tailored suit with a white bow tie, white gloves and black top hat. They made a lovely couple, elegant, beautiful—and so young! Netty was 16, Sandu 24. It was 1939 in Galati, Romania, three months before Germany attacked Poland, launching World War II. The carefree, innocent faces I saw in those photos would soon be lined with worry.
Netty and Sandu’s Wedding, 1939.
My mother was born in 1923 in Galati, (pronounced “Galatz”), a large seaport about 150 miles east of Bucharest on the banks of the Danube River. She was named after her paternal grandmother, as were four of her cousins, according to the Jewish custom of naming children after deceased kin. The family kept the cousins straight with nicknames—Netty the Eldest, Netty the Shortest, Netty the Redhead. I was never certain of my mother’s nickname, but I think it would translate as something like Netty the Cunning. This made sense to me: she was smart, and a survivor who navigated through a difficult and complicated life. In her later years, when I devoted a great deal of time to her care, she should have been called Netty the Cranky. If I arrived late because I was tending to my children or grandchildren, she was always unhappy. She was expert at sucking the joy out of seeing her. “Annie, they’re taking advantage of you. You spoil them too much.” One of my grandchildren nicknamed her Great Netty, perhaps an ironic name, or perhaps simply a contraction of Great Grandma Netty. Unfortunately for both of us, I remained the center of Netty’s life well into my adulthood. She insisted she did not need friends and relied exclusively on me. Yet, until she was so old she began to fear her own death, she revealed precious little about herself: she held her emotions in check and her full story a mystery.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Galati was a thriving seaport with a population of about 100,000, including 20,000 Jews whose ancestors could be traced back to the 16th century. Galati had survived successive occupations, beginning with the Romans and later by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. During the Ottoman occupation of the nineteenth century mob attacks against Jews were not uncommon in which Jews were either killed on the spot or driven into the Danube to drown.
By the time of my mother’s birth, anti-Semitism was less prevalent than during the Ottoman rule, though always lurking. After World War I, Galati became the center of Romanian Zionism. When my mother was a young child, Galati had 22 synagogues.
Films documenting life in Galati around 1944 show tram tracks, but it seems most things were moved by horse and wagon or by women balancing large woven baskets on poles across their shoulders. Yet, my mother boasted to me that Galati had a beautiful railroad station with daily service to Bucharest. She always said the stone building with slate tiles at the Madison, New Jersey train station reminded her of Galati. A picture of Galati’s old train station circa 1890 shows an appealing stone building with pitched slate roof. It could have been transplanted from a quaint Swiss village and built to survive forever. When my mother talked about Galati’s trains, I did not yet have any notion of the role they had played in her life.
My grandfather putting on “tefillin;” Mamaia, 1953.
My grandparents settled in Galati shortly after they were married. My grandfather, Carol Marcus, born in 1897 in the nearby village of Tecuci, and my grandmother, Sara, born in 1901 in the village of Podu Turkului, were first cousins who married around 1920. It was not uncommon among that culture at that time for cousins to marry including first cousins.
>
Although he was already quite old when I was born, I remember my grandfather well, as a gentle, kind, soft-spoken man who loved to laugh. Each morning until he passed away when I was six, I observed him begin the ritual of morning prayers by wrapping the small leather boxes called phylacteries (containing prayers from the Torah) around his arm, hand, and fingers and on his forehead. Short and portly, he resembled my grandmother, the family matriarch whom we called Mamaia, a childish contraction of the Romanian counterpart of “Big Momma” which my cousin Mircea, the first grandchild, could not manage to pronounce. My grandfather became Tataia.
Netty (left) and her sister Lontzi, late 1920s.
Mamaia carried on the traditions in the home, lighting Shabbat candles every Friday night and decorating the house with tree branches for Sukkot, the Jewish celebration of the harvest.
Having lost their son, Isaac, before he reached the age of one, Carol and Sara doted on my mother and her younger sister, Lontzi. In a framed photograph my mother kept prominently on the wall near her bed until her death, she and Lontzi, then five and two years old, are sitting on a stone railing. They have matching short haircuts, the hair curling up from pearl stud earrings to full bangs topped with big fabric bows, and wear similar outfits. My mother is wearing a dark velvet dress with a round lace collar, her feet politely crossed at the ankles showing off freshly polished white shoes. Lontzi has on a print dress with the same round lace collar, a long string of white pearls and black patent shoes. While my mother holds a small purse, Lontzi is holding a child-size umbrella on her lap that stylishly matches her dress. Neither child is smiling. My mother looks worried. Lontzi’s light eyes are piercing and determined. “Lontzi would not sit still for the photographer,” my mother told me. “She was jealous that I was holding a little purse; so she was given a string of pearls to wear because she was crying. Lontzi always got her way.”
Netty in secondary school.
My mother was a bright, pretty child who developed early into a beautiful woman. She was pale skinned, like the china doll I played with as a child, and had dark wavy hair, a round face with a small nose and full lips. I inherited her hazel eyes and her smooth silky skin, but otherwise I thought I more resembled my father. I even had his widow’s peak. Scouring my parents’ photographs, I found one of Netty in her teens, a studious girl wearing a beret who bore a stunning resemblance to the serious girl in my own third-grade school photo.
Like most other girls from well-to-do Jewish families in Romania, my mother was given a liberal arts education. She studied French and English, mathematics, embroidery, and needlework. I still have some pieces of beautifully embroidered linen tablecloths, towels and wall hangings she prepared for her own trousseau before her marriage. Although proud of her ability to do computations in her head, she never studied any kind of science and was always terrified of insects. While she could read, write and speak Romanian, English, and French, my mother always worked as a saleslady. Lontzi, on the other hand, who studied business administration and was also good at computation, never worked outside the home. All my life, Netty and Lontzi lived continents apart. On the rare occasions when I saw them together, my mother would lament the irony of their education. “Lontzi, you were the one who was supposed to go out to work and I was supposed to stay home,” she accused. My mother often spoke in accusations.
My father, Sandu Avram, was born in 1915 in Bacau, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in the Moldova region of Romania, where the surname “Avram” was recorded as far back as 1772. His mother died giving birth to her fifth child, Lily, when Sandu was seven years old. I was given her Hebrew name of Hanna. Sandu never spoke about his childhood, but according to my mother, his father remarried a young, selfish woman who didn’t want anyone else’s children. Lily, Sandu and their other siblings were eventually separated, and sent to live with different relatives. Somehow, Lily and my father maintained a remarkably close bond. I never met any of the other siblings, though I once found a picture of a strange family that I thought might include my mysterious aunts and uncles. My mother explained that the only relative in the photo was a brother of Sandu’s who had made his way to Israel with his wife and children after the War. “We lost touch with them after a short time,” she said. Apart from this brother, Sandu and Lily were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust.
One of Sandu’s brothers who made his way to Israel
before/after the Second World War.
While Lily was sent to live with an elderly couple on a farm, Sandu went to Galati to stay with an uncle who ran a gambling hall, where Sandu worked in exchange for his room and board. My father never learned to read or write, but he was intelligent, and I think, courageous as he tried to make his way in a strange city despite his painful shyness. Though he had no marketable skills, he was young, strong, and extremely handsome with very dark eyes and dark curly hair that cascaded back in waves from a widow’s peak. He was a dead ringer for Clark Gable in my favorite movie, Gone with the Wind. But the resemblance was superficial. The gambling hall never suited Sandu, who was always shy, quiet and hardly a risk taker.
Sandu in Israel.
I believe, however, that when 17-year-old Sandu met my grandfather, Carol Marcus, in Galati, he saw hope and opportunity, and followed through on developing a relationship. Carol might have seen a reflection of his own shy, charming smile in Sandu’s broad smile and frequent blush, and almost certainly responded to his intelligence, street smarts, and willingness to learn. Carol decided to take the young man under his wing. My grandfather had by then become a well-to-do member of the Jewish community, and owned a shoe store called the Cocusul de Argint (Silver Rooster). He taught Sandu the shoe business, brought him to his home for family meals and even arranged for him to have a bar mitzvah since Sandu’s family had taken no interest in the boy’s education, religious or otherwise.
My grandfather’s store in Galati on the corner of Tecuci and General Berthelot
(streets no longer exist). My grandfather, Carol Marcus, in doorway, Netty in front of
him, Sandu second from right.
Over the next seven years, Sandu became a loyal part of the Marcus family. Their connection is evident in a 1931 snapshot that depicts Sandu, then seventeen years old, standing to one side of the main entrance of the store in a suit and tie with hands by his side, and his head held up proudly, looking very satisfied to be there. My grandfather, also in a suit and tie stands in the main entrance, potbelly jutting out—potbellies run in the family. My mother, then nine years old, is in the picture as well, with her hands at her hips and her head cocked to one side with a sly smile. They’re all standing below a regal sign bearing my grandfather’s name, Carol Marcus. I have often wondered, what were they thinking? They were so young.
Sandu was always deferential to both Carol and Sara as if they’d been his own parents, and as Netty grew into a young beauty, he fell deeply in love with her; when she was sixteen, he asked Carol for his daughter’s hand in marriage. It was no great surprise that Carol consented. Marriage into the family provided status, acceptance, and financial security—much sought after by Sandu and willingly shared by Carol. Both my grandfather and father were engaged in the general culture and the vibrant Jewish community—a community that maintained the high school from which my mother graduated, and also created institutions such as a hospital, aid for the poor, and orphanages which served Jews and Christians alike with the financial support of the Romanian authorities.
I can still picture my father, leaning on one knee as he assisted a client who was trying on shoes, as I saw him do thirty years later. He taught me to appreciate a shapely, leather shoe. He loved a stylish shoe and would hold it up on one hand like a treasure, supporting it with the other hand from below. Whenever we bought new shoes, he would examine them to offer his stamp of approval.
My mother was 24 when she and Sandu left Galati, but she always spoke of it proudly and fondly, forever remaining loyal to the city of h
er birth. By then, she, my father, and my grandparents were already waiting with hundreds of thousands of other Romanian Jews for visas to Palestine. They all wanted to escape a repeat of the Holocaust and the tyranny of the Russians who had supplanted the Germans as World War II ended.
Chapter Two
HAIFA
THREE MONTHS before Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, Netty and Sandu married. Soon my father was conscripted into the Romanian Army. Due to his affiliation with my mother’s family, he could afford a fine uniform and his own horse. A surviving military portrait showed my father looking very distinguished in his uniform. The Romanian army looked very good in their uniforms but was defeated quite quickly.
Romania, which traditionally considered itself more aligned with France than with its geographic neighbors, tried to remain neutral before World War II. However, by 1940, Romania’s King Carol II had no alternative but to abdicate to ultra-right forces, led by Ion Antonescu. Antonescu was a pro-Nazi politician who passed numerous anti-Semitic laws such as those defining who is a Jew; laws requiring mass firing of Jews from various positions; government supported massacres, looting, pillaging and pogroms in Bucharest, Iasi and other substantial population centers. The Jews suffered terrible atrocities, but he was not interested in mass deportations to German concentration camps. Romania joined the Axis nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Sandu in his military uniform, 1939.
In Romania alone, 270,000 Jewish souls died during the holocaust. As World War II ended, an Iron Curtain descended across Europe separating Russia (then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR) and its occupied territories including Romania and Poland from Western Europe. Millions of Jewish people, who had survived Nazi persecution only to find themselves behind the Iron Curtain, were desperate to leave. Most wanted to go to Israel. Yet, the USSR was loath to let anyone leave. A reduced population was inconsistent with its plans for world domination.