by Ann Huber
As soon as I settled down a little bit, I decided on a course of action. I called my paternal cousin, Anna. As I told her this crazy story, I was surprised that she took it in stride, without judgment. Her first words were, “So, Netty had an affair, eh?” as she chuckled.
“Please don’t say anything to Lily,” I said. “She will always be my aunt regardless.”
“No problem.” I asked Anna to take a DNA test with me. “Just tell me what I need to do,” she responded. “I can’t believe it. You look like Sandu.”
“I can’t believe it either,” I told her.
Two weeks later the results arrived. As I held the report in my shaking hands, heart pounding, I couldn’t understand the words. My mind had become paralyzed. Herm took the document and said gently, “Sandu is not your biological father.” I felt so sad and had to reassess all my experiences and feelings about Sandu.
My father and I in the park in Haifa. I’m
three years old.
As a child, Sandu was always there for me, like a warm comfortable blanket. I have fond memories of him when I was very young, probably about three. They are captured in a photograph of a moment in the park in Haifa. Sandu is crouching down so he can look me straight in the eyes, adoringly, while he holds on to each of my arms with both his warm, soft hands. I have a little smile in return.
I have memories of me, my parents, and grandparents together every Friday night in Israel and then just my parents and I going to the movies on Saturday night. Finding himself in a role he never expected to take on, Sandu and I enjoyed each other’s company. I remember just Sandu and I hanging around together in Montreal. In the first few years, when my mother worked on Saturdays and he did not, we spent time walking and talking.
In retrospect, we should have had a very intense bond, but many things started to make sense—like why my relationship with my mother was so much more intense than with my father. I know he loved and cherished me, but she always interfered with our relationship. I did not understand it then, but it was for her own needs that she ran interference, to protect her secrets. I always believed it was because my father had not wanted children, so she and Mamaia always took responsibility for me. Mothers generally do that anyway.
She shielded me from so much. I never really understood why that was necessary except that my father did seem to get angry a lot, frighteningly angry, though he was never violent with any of us.
A few days later, I called Anna. We agreed that we’d grown up as cousins, felt like cousins, and would always be cousins. But I was determined to look for my biological father, even though I had decided Sandu would always be my father. It was not just a father I was searching for, but siblings, something for which I had always longed.
Once again, I went to my mother’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon when she was usually willing to chat. This time she told me that Marcel was about twenty years older, and had two children, a girl and boy. It was from her cousin Shelley, with whom she remained close, that my mother learned that Marcel had left Romania for Israel shortly after we emigrated. His son, whose name she did not know, was seventeen years my senior and serving in the Israeli military. “He was a commander,” she boasted. She knew nothing about Marcel’s daughter who would be about three years younger than her brother. She thought they were living in Tel Aviv.
I asked her, “Do you know if Marcel is still alive?”
“I don’t know. After we left Israel, I couldn’t keep asking Shelley about Marcel without raising suspicions.”
Exasperated, I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? This is so important to me.” Perhaps perplexed herself, she would only shrug.
So many times throughout my adult life, she’d alluded to a secret. But she retreated whenever I tried to pry out more information. Now, I ached to know why she hadn’t told me sooner. Couldn’t she understand that I would want to meet my father, for God’s sake? Did she not remember how lonely I felt as a child, and how often I had pleaded for a brother or sister? Apparently, she’d never contemplated the wound her story would inflict on me. Pictures or stories could not bring Marcel to life for me, leaving me filled with deep regret. I needed to know who he was, what he was like. Would he have loved me if he had known me? What genetic influence had he had on me? Knowing the effect an entire childhood filled with my mother’s anxieties must have had on me, I was furious. I knew I was loved, but neither my mother nor Sandu were physically affectionate.
Armed with the few details my mother provided, I sought help from Leo, a friend as well as an expert and researcher on the Middle East. Very quickly, he wrote back to tell me that he had found three potential links but couldn’t go further without divulging some of my very private information. He wanted to keep me safe. My friend gave me the email addresses for a Londoner whose daughter-in-law was related to me in some way, a woman in Atlanta who he thought was probably a cousin, and a man named David in Israel.
I drafted an email:
Hello,
My name is Ann Avram Huber and I am the friend of L.W. who contacted you on my behalf, inquiring about family connections.
I was recently shocked to find out from my 81-year-old mother that I was born as a result of an extramarital relationship she had with Marcel. My mother, Netty Avram, Nee Marcus, was from Galatz, Romania, as was he.
I was born in Bucharest in 1950. The only thing I know about my biological father is that he would have been born around 1914….
For me, as I’m sure it is for you, family is very important and I am only looking to locate my step siblings and father, if he is still alive, in order to find out as much as possible about a family previously unknown to me. I certainly do not wish to embarrass anyone or cause anyone difficulty, but the possibility of finding family members would be very fulfilling for me, and perhaps to others.
I am asking for your help in making such contacts. If I could enlist your help, I would be quite grateful. Thank you.
Ann
I obsessed for days over different versions and then, I finally sent it.
The Londoner wrote back that he was the father-in-law of a family cousin living in Great Britain. The woman in Atlanta emailed, very excitedly, that she was a cousin, too. And I waited for an answer from David. Would I finally find him, and my father and half sister?
Chapter Twenty-Two
O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
DAYS PASSED. I checked email every few hours. Nothing. Was this a silly, fruitless endeavor? Was I misguided to think I could in any way ever undo the mistakes of the past?
Then, suddenly, an email from Israel popped up. Tears streamed down my face as I read the email over and over again:
Dear Ann,
I am just as shocked and surprised as you are, since I am the son of Marcel. So I am probably the half brother you are looking for.
I don’t know what to say. Nothing in my life including 30 years of service in the military, has prepared me for such news. Indeed, my father Marcel, my mother, my sister and I, moved from Galatz to Israel in 1950. There is nothing I would like more than exchanging details with you, but please give me some time to digest the news.
One thing which puzzles me is how your mother knows details about us from the time after we moved to Israel (like the fact that I served in the army).
I have many questions and I am sure you must have many too. Please tell me everything you know and let me know what would you want to know.
David
I read it to myself. I read it out loud to Herm and then, almost speechless, I read it out loud again. That sentence still rings in my ears—“I am probably the half brother you are looking for.”
Under cross-examination (I am a lawyer, after all), I extracted more details from my mother, and David confirmed that I had found the right family. But indeed, I had missed my chance to ever meet Marcel—he had died about twenty years earlier.
I was prepared to go to Israel to meet David, but David came to me! I was delighted that he would d
o that. On a business trip to New Jersey, not long after our correspondence began, David and his lovely wife came to our home. He insisted that they travel there on their own, and brought a doll dressed in red velvet for our first grandchild.
The moment I saw him I searched his face for any familiar characteristic I might have noticed on my own, but alas, found none. Soft-spoken, retiring and kindly, he was of average height, slim, with a full head of curly gray hair. He certainly did not look like someone who had defused underwater bombs on the hulls of Israeli ships during his military years.
I found myself strangely scared, awkward, unsure of what to do, to say, how to act. Here was the sibling I always yearned for, hoped for—but what now? I didn’t even know how to greet him. Should I kiss him, hug him, shake hands? To be safe, I did all three.
What feelings did I have for him? Could I love him? I’d never even met him. What would we even talk about after we discussed our histories and families? We had no shared experiences, lived continents apart, not to mention the 17-year age difference. I just hoped nature would take me down the right path.
I had prepared dinner for the four of us, but I hadn’t invited my mother. She hadn’t wanted me to search for him. And, I didn’t really want her with us—her negative attitude would drag down the meeting. As we finished our meal, David brought out of his briefcase a photo history and genealogy of the family, which he had compiled for me. It must have taken him many hours to reproduce photographs and carefully annotate them.
We sat side by side as I went through each of the pages and he explained who was in each photograph, filling in some history. Marcel and his wife were first cousins, like my grandparents. They had many of the same cousins. I was emotionally drawn to David by his openness, and felt grateful for his effort, but was disheartened that I found few familiar features in most of the other family members. I did see some resemblance, though, between one of his daughters, Adi, and me in my younger years.
During the course of the evening, I learned that my half-sister died before I knew she existed. But there was still time for him to meet my mother, which he seemed eager to do. The next day, we went to see her. Her only comment was in Romanian which he clearly understood. In her inimitable, unvarnished style enhanced perhaps by her early dementia, she said, “He is not nearly as good-looking as his father.”
My mother confirmed that the man in the picture of Marcel fifty years earlier, which David had brought, was indeed Marcel. She and David also shared stories of the street where their fathers’ stores had been. Although they were both cordial, I could sense the strain in their conversation. Each reminded the other of disappointment, and although it was unstated, clearly neither wished to see the other again.
I took David’s warmth towards me to mean that he was as interested as I was in developing a relationship. Still, we had trouble relating, getting close. We shared nothing but blood. We had nothing in common save my mother. He’d arrived in Israel as an adult. I was only nine months old and of course, had no memories of Romania.
A couple of years later, laden with gifts and David’s invitation to stay with him, we traveled to Israel. David and his wife picked us up at the airport and provided us with a private room in their modestly furnished apartment. They lived in one of Tel Aviv’s iconic concrete buildings, no more than four stories tall, with small apartments, each with a balcony that also serves as part of the living space. David’s sons, the two middle children, came to the apartment to meet us on our first evening. What a delight to meet this previously unknown branch of the family!
We had met Adi, the youngest of the four children, when she’d visited New York six months earlier. We liked each other immediately and a bond began to develop. Adi and her husband were very welcoming in Israel, even took us to the movies one night. It seemed that family ties were strengthening.
We met the extended family at an afternoon barbeque at one of their homes. There, like a Jewish Santa Claus full of enthusiasm, I doled out gifts to all of them, including a hand-crocheted sweater for a new baby. While the family was cordial to us, David’s oldest daughter seemed oddly distant. Then the dam broke. She insisted I submit to a DNA test. I was stunned. I held back tears. Did she see me as some kind of scam artist, a thief after David’s vast fortune? Insulted, rejected, in my heart I refused the test. But I said, “OK,” with a bitter taste in my mouth. Nothing else was said. I expected they would make the arrangements for DNA testing.
We left the next morning. David and I both choked up as we said goodbye. I expected to see him a few months later on his annual business trip to New York.
However, David did not respond to my next email, a thank you for his hospitality. I wrote another email. No response. Perplexed and worried, I waited. Finally, Adi emailed me to explain that my visit had created a painful rift in the family. Perhaps fearful I might be a fraud and up to no good, her sister was still insisting that we take DNA tests. Adi speculated that her sister had been very close to Marcel and could not believe her loving grandfather would have cheated on his wife. I understand this must have been difficult for her. David, stubborn also, was refusing to take the test. Adi told me that until they settled their dispute, David would not communicate with me. Unfortunately, auspicious beginnings sometimes have endings that break the heart.
Sadly, the half-brother who’d once defused bombs, now caught in a family struggle, was not able to defuse this bomb. I haven’t heard from David since. It’s been nine years. I can only imagine what could have been. Periodically, I do get an email from Adi in which she informs me that David, now in his 80s, is doing well though her mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Ultimately, I admire my mother’s courage in telling me the terrible truth she kept tightly bound inside her for so many years. I mourn that she waited so long to do so. I also mourn the laughter and joy and pain that siblings might have brought over the years, but it is a life that I could never have had.
Chapter Twenty-Three
FAMILY PILGRIMAGE
SINCE BOTH HERM AND I were born in Europe to families displaced by World War II, much of our history and cultural heritage was lost. Still, we retained a strong sense of what it means to be Jewish. To understand and appreciate what it meant for our parents to be Jewish in their places of birth, and to get more insight into what their lives were like, we had to return to the places of their birth. We did that in a 2010 pilgrimage with our daughter, Rayna, husband Esteban and his parents, Perla and Lito, and grandchild Milo.
Our first stop was to Warsaw, where Pesche had worked in her teens, before it was virtually obliterated by Germany. Its historic center had been recreated brick by brick, following the original architectural plans. It is a beautiful city. There we visited the site of a new Polish Jewish Museum, just a few blocks from the site of Mila 18, the site of an underground bunker where the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising committed suicide rather than surrender. The approximate two hundred others escaped from the rear.
In an unexpected and moving event, just as we arrived in the square, an Israeli military unit arrived to sing the Israeli anthem in front of a World War II Memorial. Holding my grandson, singing along, with tears running down my face, I felt that despite the worst Holocaust in history, we had not only survived but could hold our heads high in the land of those who had wished our destruction.
Herm with our grandson Milo in front of the Warsaw World War II Holocaust
Memorial, 2010.
From there we headed to Mordy, the shtetl of Moishe and Pesche’s stories. We were determined to get there, despite a series of mishaps that included missing the direct train and were compounded by the fact that none of us were able to read the Polish train schedule or announcement board. Surprisingly, none of the ticket clerks understood or spoke English.
Thanks to an English-speaking Scandinavian tourist, we managed to find a train from Warsaw to the transfer stop in the town of Siedlic, the closest point to Mordy. There, randomly and luckily, we happened
upon the only English-speaking taxi driver in the town. Fifteen minutes later, the driver pointed out a rusted metal flag on the road that marked the Mordy train stop, as I started to wonder how we were going to get back. We asked the taxi driver to come back for us in a couple of hours, paid him for the fare and negotiated a high fare for the return.
A couple of hundred feet farther, we found the small, rectangular square where Moishe’s family’s store had been. It was eerie. It seemed that time had stood still.
The square was adorned with a neatly manicured patch of grass, its focal point a military statue. Along either side of the square ran the main road, lined with its original wooden commercial structures. Some were boarded up but others were nicely painted in a variety of colors. The one we counted-off as Moishe’s was painted blue. They were no people in the square since we had traveled on a holiday, as we learned, but none of the structures looked abandoned.
Some of the other buildings were more modern but most seemed to be in their original state, watched over by unseen spirits. A one-lane road ended at each of the square’s corners. We walked down the dirt and gravel road leading from the northwest corner to small abandoned farms where chicken coops still stood. The buildings seemed to house the ghosts of residents past as well as their chickens. We saw no evidence of electricity or indoor plumbing. When we’d talked to Pesche about her time in Mordy many years earlier, she’d recalled, “A man came with a machine and made electricity. Each family’s treasure was a horse or a cow.”
We were grateful to see our driver two hours later. At our request, he spoke to a couple of old men, standing on the corner watching our every move, to ask whether they had known the Huber family and whether they knew the whereabouts of the Jewish cemetery. We watched as they shook their heads at the photos he showed them. But, based on their directions, the driver took us down a well-paved, modern road leading from the southeast corner of the square and lined with far-reaching grain fields. Off the road we found the hidden, abandoned old Jewish cemetery.