Children of the Holocaust is partly a work of reportage that lays out the 5Ws up front and includes extensive research and in-depth interviews. It is an examination of the consequences of growing up in a family whose members have been murdered, whose community and culture have been eradicated, where parents struggle with all the many manifestations of what psychologists now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
I structured it like challah, braiding my personal narrative, oral history, and reportage, because the concept of intergenerational psychic trauma was then new, and as a journalist breaking new ground, I felt obliged to produce more persuasive evidence than my own experience.
Children of the Holocaust was translated into several languages, helped create an international second-generation community, is viewed by mental health professionals as a contribution to the study of trauma, and has stayed in print for nearly thirty years. Like many memoirs that strike a collective chord, it served a crucial healing function not only for myself but for many others—children of immigrants; children of other genocide survivors; children of parents traumatized by war, loss, and abuse. I like to think of my first book as a contribution to what Jews call tikkun olam, or “repair of the world.”
In one of his essays, V. S. Naipaul writes: “However creatively one travels, however deep an experience in childhood or middle-age, it takes thought (a sifting of impulses, ideas, and references that become more multifarious as one grows older) to understand what one has lived through or where one has been.”2
That process of making meaning is very similar to the process of piecing together other kinds of narrative, whether in psychoanalysis or fiction. What distinguishes memoir from these other two endeavors is its attempt to produce a finished work that elucidates memory and its workings, separates it from fantasy as far as possible, and renders lived rather than imagined experience.
Within the literary world, I’ve encountered a kind of disdain for memoir that my journalism professors expressed for creative writing. How lazy memoirists are! novelists exclaim, as though it were easier to adhere to facts in constructing a story than to invent a fictional world. And this healing stuff. What a nonliterary pollutant to bring into what should be a purely artistic activity!
As someone whose family history is frequently termed a “fiction” or a “hoax” by Holocaust revisionists from Canada to Iran, I’m particularly committed to the memoir form. In addition to its unique literary qualities, it serves a crucial historical role. As the poet Czesław Miłosz, another survivor of the European totalitarianisms, writes: “Unless we can relate it to ourselves personally, history will always be more or less of an abstraction....Doubtless every family archive that perishes, every account book that is burnt, every effacement of the past reinforces classifications and ideas at the expense of reality.”3
• • •
In addition to exterminating human beings, the Nazis destroyed family and community history throughout most of Central and Eastern Europe. My next book, the memoir Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, was written with the idea of reconstructing that history. I began working on it as a way of mourning my mother’s sudden death in 1989. My work was made infinitely easier by Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution that fall and the subsequent opening up of archives and museums. Working from my mother’s unpublished interviews and memoir, I was able to trace and document my maternal ancestors back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and to write about the kind of lives they led. I was particularly interested in my maternal grandmother, Pepi, whose absence I felt keenly as a little girl. But I also wanted to find out as much as I could about the world she had come from before the Nazis and the Communists erased it. I wanted to reconstruct a time, as my colleague Charlie Fenyvesi titled one of his memoirs of pre-Holocaust Hungary, “when the world was whole.”
In writing Where She Came From, I not only traveled through Central Europe but also cruised the stacks of research libraries and wandered into such esoteric academic subspecialties as the history of the production of alcoholic spirits and the sociology of the first generation of Viennese psychoanalysts. I searched through dusty ledgers, sat in old cemeteries in the Czech-Moravian highlands, and read other people’s memoirs, starting with what scholars identify as the first one by a Jewish woman—seventeenth-century merchant Gluckl of Hameln—right through twentieth-century memoirs by women such as Heda Kovaly, whose book Under a Cruel Star is crucial for anyone trying to grasp the sequential blows of Nazism and Stalinism.
In reading them, I paid attention not only to the facts but to what they evoked in my own mind and heart. I tried to find—as French writer Marie Cardinal titled one of her memoirs—les mots pour le dire, or my own “words to say it.” I learned to follow wherever the road led—irrespective of unlikely destinations. I learned to capitalize on, rather than minimize, drama, to trust my subjectivity, to let myself get lost in free association and introspection. I continued to struggle with the most difficult thing for a writer coming to memoir from journalism: making the claim that my subject was important or, as the newspaper I used to write for put it, “fit to print.”
Women writers and writers from minority groups have struggled with this problem for a long time, and while literary culture has grown steadily more inclusive of differences of all kinds, it is still a challenge, particularly in a market-driven publishing environment. Memoirs by writers like Eva Hoffman, Jung Chang, Patricia Hampl, Jan Morris, and Kay Redfield Jamison that have stubbornly staked out their own idiosyncratic territory have inspired me to explore mine and to believe in its importance and validity.
For the past seven years, I’ve been digging into the intimate subject of first love. Like everything else I’ve written, First Love is part biography, part cultural history, as well as first-person narrative based on memory. It engages questions of sexual and emotional development against a backdrop of history and culture; it explores an adolescence in the 1960s.
My first love came from a traumatic background of his own: he was the son of blacklisted American Communists, people for whom my parents did not have much sympathy. These larger events in both of our families colored and provided a counterpoint to our relationship. He had been an old friend, and I called him when I got home, that August of 1968; our personal history is linked in my mind with the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Forty years later, I am still mining the material at that intersection of public and private space.
1 For a minimemoir on my experience at the magazine, see “That Cosmopolitan Writer” in MORE: A Journalism Review (October 1973): 13; also available at www.helenepstein.com.
2 Finding the Center (London: André Deutsch, 1984), 12.
3 Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 20.
JUNE CROSS
All in the Family
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away
FROM Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away
“Mommie! Mommie!” I called out, wanting to show her something. “Come see!”
She ignored me, finished her conversation, and put down the pot she was working with. She wiped her hands on the half apron she wore over her little black dress. Then she took me by the hand and led me toward the bathroom.
I tried to pull her the other way.
“But, Mommie, I wanted to show you something!”
She quickly and quietly closed the door and sat down on the toilet lid so that we were face-to-face. “Didn’t I tell you to call me ‘Aunt Norma’?”
I giggled and put my hand over my mouth. I had totally forgotten about our little game.
“This isn’t funny!” she hissed.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Mommie—I mean, Aunt Nor
ma,” I said, giggling even harder, thinking of the time she and I had giggled ourselves silly while Uncle Paul was trying to say grace. But now, looking into her eyes, I stopped and caught my breath.
I nearly didn’t recognize her. Her narrow eyes looked like an evil witch’s.
“June, this is very serious!” she said, her voice as sharp as razors. “Larry could lose his job. We could all end up homeless! You won’t be able to stay with Peggy and Paul in Atlantic City! Our future depends on this! Do you understand me?”
I tried to back away, but I bumped up against the clothes hamper. Trapped between the toilet and the wall, I responded with a mask of my own—my small voice.
“Yes, Aunt Norma.”
When the party was over, after everyone had left, my mother sat down by the side of the bed and apologized for being so harsh.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said, “but this may determine Larry’s entire future. This agent could be very important for Larry, to help him get jobs. I didn’t want him thinking I’d already been married and had children; it might not reflect well on Larry.”
When Mom finally married Larry, his family disowned him. I thought I was the reason—that my failure to remember the rules of the game at that party had made his family mad.
Over the years Mom and Larry developed two circles of friends: those who knew about me and those who didn’t. Gradually my visits began to coincide with those occasions when it was convenient for me to be seen.
• • •
All in the Family
Few conversations in America get complicated as quickly as those involving race and family. In the fifties, few subjects were more taboo than unmarried women having children. Miscegenation and illegitimacy, shame and guilt—these emotions form the contours of my life story.
I am the African American child of a white woman and a black man. My parents were never married. I was raised never knowing this truth. I didn’t even know how my parents had met. I knew my biological father’s name, James “Stump” Cross, but aside from the fact that he was African American and involved in show business, I could have told you little about him. I was certain—or fairly certain—that my white mother, Norma Booth, who I thought was part Blackfoot Indian (wrong), had been deserted by my father when I was two (wrong) and married my stepfather, who I thought was a Russian Jew (right).
I also knew that Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul, who had raised me in the black neighborhood of Atlantic City, were not really my aunt and uncle. So as I considered writing a memoir, I faced questions of accuracy, authenticity, honesty, and some pretty searing emotions. What I knew about my own history was what the lens of my memory had recorded. And most of that was shrouded in secrecy. I didn’t have a secret, I was the secret. My mother often hid the fact that she had given birth to a black man’s child. That’s why at age five she sent me to live with “Aunt Peggy” and “Uncle Paul.”
My biggest struggle in writing Secret Daughter, therefore, was not with the content of the story but with how to describe my journey to unravel the secrets. How much history did one need to know in order to understand the motivations of my parents? In order to understand how external events had affected my life?
Linear stories are easier for people to follow, but my story—and my understanding of my own story—didn’t unfold so neatly. How does one articulate the absence of history, and the meaning of that absence to a life? I had never met my grandparents and knew nothing about them—not even their names. I never understood what my white mother’s ethnic background was or what she did for a living. I didn’t even know my father’s whole name until I was seven or eight. I didn’t learn what he actually did for a living until I was twenty. In an early draft of my memoir, I wrote that, when my mother first introduced me to my father, around the time I was five or six, I didn’t know what a “father” was. My editor couldn’t understand the sentence, and I couldn’t figure out how to explain it. I could have said my father was a stranger to me, but that wouldn’t have begun to describe the unrecognized and unacknowledged void that I carried within me.
Had I told the story the way it actually happened, the way my own diaries, photographs, and memories remember it, the first two-thirds of Secret Daughter would have been filled with my recollections of happy days—my life as a black middle-class child who went to dance classes and summer camp, who taught Sunday school and played piano during talent competitions, and who dreamed of being Miss America.
But story requires tension and surprise, my editor kept reminding me. Yet I did not begin my life as a “secret daughter.” I was, simply, my mother’s daughter. The necessity for concealing my true identity was apparent to some adults around me, but never spoken of to me. Those who cared for me made every effort to shelter me from this fiction.
The moment when I came to full awareness, readers tell me, forms one of the most heartbreaking sections of my book, although I don’t remember feeling heartbreak as a child. I was four or five when my mother scolded me for calling her “Mommie” in public. I was forced to hold several competing notions in my mind at the same time—that my mother was my mother yet not my mother, that something about us was dangerous enough to destroy us, that the world was not a safe place in ways far more threatening than what could happen if I crossed the street against the light. I remember parts of the encounter more vividly than I remember what I did this morning after breakfast—the feel of the small white tiles on the bathroom floor against my feet, the white aluminum clothes hamper chilly behind my back, the fierceness in her eyes, angry. Was she actually angry at me, like an “evil witch,” as I wrote about it in the book? Or was she a lioness protecting her cub? Or was that fear I saw? How can I know for sure, from a distance of nearly fifty years? In my child’s memory the story is filed next to the fairy tales about Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, but did I know the meaning of those frightening tales at that young age?
Writing Secret Daughter began as a way of correcting the public record. The false story that my white mother and stepfather adopted me needed to be replaced by the truth. Telling the secret, making it public, was my way of inserting my story into the national story. I was motivated not by a desire to tell the story of a fascinating life but because I know, as a student of racial history and race relations in America, that my story has been replicated untold millions of times by sons and daughters who never found their way to a book publisher. In order to tell my story, though, I had to use the tools of the documentary filmmaker, the medium in which I’m most fluent, as well as the sources of the historian. Here is where I encountered the crevasse between history and documentary, between the oral tradition and the public record.
For documentary filmmakers, the editing room becomes a studio where we shape and weave bits of image and sound to arrive at an emotional truth based on the best research we can muster. Beginning documentarians are normally taught to follow the timeline of their shooting, fashioning from the ribbons of tape a chronological tale that emphasizes a what-came-first, what-came-next scenario. This is a what-happened approach to storytelling. It works well if one accepts at face value what one sees, without considering the history and the backstory of the participants and their communities. But fledgling documentarians inevitably falter trying to introduce public history into their personal stories. If one puts history where it belongs—before the events that unfolded in front of the camera—it usually leads to dull filmmaking. The question one faces is, How much history do you need to know? The answer, in documentary, is, Only what you need in order to understand what’s going on.
In other words, the documentarian’s approach to filmmaking emphasizes externalities—it favors what the eye can see or what the ear can hear. As a student of the form back in the seventies, I felt its tyrannical nature. The very first film I ever did, seven minutes long, was a rumination on the nature of time. I was a maudlin twenty-one-year-old, and for some rea
son a recording of Nina Simone introducing her rendition of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” at the New York Philharmonic on October 26, 1969, caught my attention. “What is this thing called time?” Simone pondered. “You go to work by the clock. You get your martini in the afternoon by the clock. You drink your coffee by the clock. You have to get on the plane at a certain time—and it goes on and on and on.” I saw, as Simone did, that “time is a dictator.”
Probably because I was already mulling over how to present the narrative sequence of my own life, time became the first mystery of personal storytelling for me. I needed to become a historian. I had to search through a wealth of documents for the written record and the artifacts of important moments. I had to listen to the meanings carried in oral histories. This historical digging yielded a more detailed framing of what happened to me and my parents. But as I researched my own life history for the documentary that ultimately became Secret Daughter, I discovered that historical records themselves are fallible and incomplete.
I grew up in a black section of Atlantic City, before the civil rights movement. We had, within one block of my house, two grocery stores, two barbershops, a tailor, a notary public, and a bookie. But aside from the title deeds in the city hall, there is no information on the people who owned those homes and lived in that community. There’s no film of them for the simple reason that those who owned cameras and film in those days saw no reason to document the lives of the black community. It was as if we did not exist.
Each person’s unique story helps to fill in that void. But the telling is not simple. As a writer of memoir working in the smaller yet deeper dimension of feelings, flow, and structure—my own interior history—I struggled often with which bits of my life I would choose and how I would explain them.
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