The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters
Page 1
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Copyright © 2021 by Julie Klam
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“A Needle in a Haystack”
Words by Herbert Magidson, Music by Con Conrad
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All rights reserved
Used by permission of Alfred Music
Photographs of Focşani synagogue and Synagogue Râmnicu Sărat copyright © Centropa/Daniel Gruenfeld
Photograph of Paul Koditschek courtesy of the Koditschek family
Other photos courtesy of the author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Klam, Julie, author.
Title: The almost legendary Morris sisters : a true story of family fiction / Julie Klam.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057447 (print) | LCCN 2020057448 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735216426 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735216440 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Morris, Selma, 1893-1991. | Morris, Malvina, 1900-1994. | Morris, Marcella, 1901-1997. | Morris, Ruth, 1904-1978. | Morris family. | Romanian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Jewish women—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Jews—Missouri—Saint Louis—History—20th Century—Biography.
Classification: LCC F128.9.R8 K53 2021 (print) | LCC F128.9.R8 (ebook) | DDC 974.7/10430922 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057447
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057448
Book design by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0
For my parents
Contents
A Guide to the Morris Sisters
1. I’d Like to Introduce My Family
2. What I Don’t Know Could Fill a Book
3. The Morris Family Foundation, Inc.
4. Step One: Index Cards
5. Remembering Mama
6. Start at the Very Beginning, a Very Good Place to Start
7. Small Medium at Large
8. Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis
9. Needle in a Graveyard
10. Show-Me State of Mind
11. Clara Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
12. Reclaiming My Romanian Roots
13. Bucureşti, România
14. Focşani
15. Cousins and Commodities
16. The Berkowitzes of Maplewood
17. The Harvard of Jews
18. FDR and NYC
19. Last Wills and Testaments
20. Saying Goodbye
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Though, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack
Still I’ll follow every little clue
For I’ve got to find you
Although I’ve lost you, we’ll meet again, I know
It’s just like looking for a needle in a haystack
Searching for a moonbeam in the blue
Still, I’ve got to find you
It’s just like looking for a raindrop in the ocean
Searching for a dew drop, in the dew
Still I’ll follow every little clue.
For I’ve got to find you . . .
—Ruth Etting, “A Needle in a Haystack”
A Guide to the Morris Sisters
Selma Morris: The eldest. Born in November 1893 in Romania. Died in Southampton, New York, in May of 1991. Talked incessantly, was bossy, chain-smoker, very pretty with a beautiful singing voice. She spent most of her life working as a saleslady for various stores in New York City. Never married.
Malvina Morris: Born March 11, 1899, in Romania. Died January 17, 1994, in Southampton. Physically disabled since childhood due to a birth defect. Was known as the kindest of the sisters, worked as a bookkeeper. Chain-smoker. Never married.
Marcella Morris: Born September 30, 1901, in Romania. Died August 18, 1997, in Southampton. A financial wizard, prickly personality. Chain-smoker. Never married.
Ruth Morris: Born February 15, 1904, in St. Louis, Missouri. Died in January of 1978 in Southampton. The youngest and the only member of the family born in the United States. Considered bohemian, writer, was once married briefly. First of the sisters to die.
A Note on Names and Dates
A brother, Samuel Morris, born in 1897 in Romania, was the only boy and lived most of his life in Texas.
It is inevitable in genealogical research that you come across inconsistencies with names and dates. I have tried my best to keep the information in this book accurate, but there were times when someone spelled a name differently or misremembered a date. In my research, I came across the Morris sisters’ father’s name written as Gershon Bernhart, Gerson, Guerson, Bernhard, and George Bernard. I decided to be consistent by just using Guerson because I believe that is how it was spelled in Romania, but you’ll see that in various places other people call him George or Gershon. And dates varied a great deal. This Guide to the Morris Sisters includes the dates I’ve determined to be correct, because they are the ones that appeared most often. (It’s also where I landed on eeny, meeny, miny, moe.)
One
I’d Like to Introduce My Family
When I was five years old, I noticed that my second toe was longer than my other toes. I noticed this because my grandma Billie, my father’s mother, had pointed out how beautiful her own feet were because her toes were “graduated”—they were sized in ascending order. Then she looked at my feet and was silent.
Later, I mentioned to my mother what Grandma Billie had said, and she replied with extraordinary conviction, “People who have a long second toe are descended from royalty.” My mother, I realized later, also has a long second toe. We were the Queen and the Princess of the Land of Goofy Feet.
At the time, I was young enough and unworldly enough that I accepted her explanation. And I knew instinctively that it wasn’t something I was to talk about with other people; I didn’t need to flaunt my superior lineage. I just kept the information in my back pocket, like an undercover detective with a hidden badge. If I needed to reveal it, I could, but mostly it was enough for me to know.
I’ve never taken a DNA test or any of the other tests available, mostly because I don’t really care to know what someone else finds in me. I’m descended from royalty; does anything else really matter?
I’m willing to admit that I might not be Queen Elizabeth’s distant cousin, but somewhere inside me that little fact—along with many, many other
questionable details I was told about my family growing up—floats around in my personal identity orbit and gives me a gentle pat on the back when life gets tricky. It’s okay when my credit card gets declined; I am descended from royalty.
When a friend of mine found out that her husband had been having affairs for seventeen of the eighteen years they were together—through four pregnancies and years of romantic vacations—she had the most difficult time reconciling the life she thought she’d led with the one she’d actually had. And also, reconciling herself with the fact that if she’d never found out, her life would have felt as it always had. It was the discovery that changed it. When I was younger I told my brothers that when our parents eventually died, no one should tell me for as long as possible. Let me go on and pretend that they just were too busy to pick up the phone. Maybe even record a few messages to leave for me every now and again. I clearly feel as if what I don’t know can’t make me sad.
It’s not that I feel like I need to be protected from bad news . . . well, maybe it is that.
I think about that a lot—about how much of what defines us at various points in our lives is based on what we are told by the people we trust. Growing up, I had friends who told me they had exotic or interesting backgrounds—that they were part Sioux or Cherokee (hello, Cher? though we were just friends in my head), or that their parents once spent the evening in a New York City nightclub with Muhammad Ali and his wife, or that a friend’s mother had gone trick-or-treating with Judy Garland when they were kids. And the family lore I grew up around—the strange people my relatives knew or the exciting places they’d visited, some of which turned out to be true, a lot of which turned out to be embellished, most of which was definitely curated—all goes into how we present ourselves, our lives, and our pasts to the world.
As a young kid, I was a so-so athlete (so, so terrible), and I did almost comically poorly in school (“I just don’t understand how you can get a negative grade on an exam,” my father once said). I wasn’t conscious of the fact that other kids in sixth grade showered and washed their hair regularly until a girl in my class said for Valentine’s Day she was going to give me a heart-shaped bottle of Head & Shoulders. (She did not.) So while I was often oblivious to the world around me, I knew that secretly I was very special. (Maybe it was the royal feet.)
In my defense, we were a weird family. We lived in a town where some of the people were Waspy publishers and senior vice presidents of banks, and others owned the local hardware store or drove the school bus. Their kids, my peers, were not Jewish, and their parents did not come from New York City. And the kids whose parents were bankers went to private school and I didn’t, so I didn’t really mix with them except during tennis and riding lessons (I know how it sounds, but trust me, I was the worst one, and remember I had the greasy hair), and the kids I went to school with were all in church together. So I sort of felt like an outsider in two places.
In college (I got into one!), I found out I had a learning disability. Maybe I hadn’t been so dumb or lazy in high school, and even though I hadn’t been good at sports like field hockey—or anything with a ball, really—I started running and going to the gym and found that if I worked at it consistently, I was actually pretty strong and fast. (Give me that President’s Physical Fitness Test now!) Fortunately, this all occurred when I was young enough to incorporate these notions and changes in my behavior into my life.
After college, I came to the conclusion that I was not really good at working. I found a job working for a judgmental, hostile gentleman who criticized me constantly—so much so, in fact, that I assumed I was just terrible at my job. As I watched my friends begin to climb the ladders in their fields, earning more money and more responsibility, I was working at an insurance company and taking writing workshops on the side. I submitted one piece to a magazine, it was rejected, and I then decided that I wasn’t good enough to make a career as a writer. I was always quick to allow myself to be defined by failures. Those somehow made sense to me. The women in my family succeeded in more traditional senses—cooks, homemakers, mothers. And based on what I knew about my family and history, it was what I expected for myself. That was my family narrative. But it’s possible to learn something new about yourself or your family that changes the perspective and the narrative.
Every family has stories. Some people grow up hearing about their ancestors who were heroic or died violently. The accused Salem witch. The pioneer who lost a leg to frostbite but managed to walk four hundred miles to settle his family and strike gold. Families who immigrated from Ireland or India, and the people who were not brought here by choice. All of these tales go into how we define ourselves. Are we from hardworking peasant stock or from enslavers? Do we live where our ancestors did or are we scattered all over? How does knowing where we are from inform who we are now?
I heard a lot of stories growing up about my great-grandparents who came from exotic distant lands, Russia, Moldova, Bessarabia (which sounded very Aladdin-like to me), but the one story that stuck with me was an unusual one about the Morris sisters. They were, the family lore had it, four sisters who came to America sometime in the last century and were orphaned in the Midwest but somehow managed to get to New York City and become millionaires—without relying on any man—and lived in one house together. I thought of them as my great-aunts, but actually they were my paternal grandmother’s first cousins, so technically they are my first cousins twice removed.
The story fascinated me; I had never heard anything like it before. It was as if the four sisters from Little Women had somehow been reimagined in the twentieth century and banding together had become wealthy through their own talents and ambitions. When I was a kid, I imagined they were Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly, or in this case Rich Aunt Pennybags whose lives were luxurious, interesting, and sparkly. It took me forty years to realize that only one of those adjectives was true.
It turned out there was as much, if not more, misinformation about the Morris sisters as there were facts. People who grow up in the twenty-first century with so much information immediately available to them might have difficulty imagining how it was possible for everyone—in this case, everyone in an extended family—to misremember, misunderstand, or misconstrue so many details about members of their own family. How could so many intelligent people throughout a family tree have so many verifiable facts so wrong? I actually understand it pretty well. Memory is funny. What we hear, what our brain chooses to highlight, is part of it. And if you hear something you aren’t familiar with, your brain might turn it into something familiar. You can get a smattering of facts and piece them together, not even realizing you’re filling in blanks with your own imagination.
I would learn that finding the truth in a family can be tricky.
For example, in 1999, when my grandfather died, my father had to get his birth certificate for New York State to issue his death certificate. My father called the office of records in New York City and talked to a man who worked in the department—that’s what you did at the time to get information. The man wrote down my grandfather’s name and put the phone down (my dad heard shuffling and file cabinet drawers opening in the background). Five minutes later the man returned to the phone to tell my father that he had a paper copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate. All of my father’s life the one detail he knew for certain about his father was that his birthday was on Halloween, October 31. To my brothers and me, this was significant, because we were children and Halloween was among the most fun days of the year.
Only it wasn’t true. My grandfather’s real birthday was November 9, nine days after Halloween. It’s not as if my grandfather had a secret wife or a hidden family, but learning this shocked my family. The truth can do that.
Several years before that I was a sophomore in college, and I remember sitting at my aunt Mattie’s dining room table in Manhattan, thumbing through an ASCAP magazine (that is the American Society of Com
posers, Authors and Publishers). Something in the magazine must have jogged my memory, as I mentioned to her that I was related to Irving Berlin.
She came out of the kitchen and looked at me.
“Who in your father’s family is related to Irving Berlin?” she asked.
(There might have been a subtext of “who in your father’s loser family was related to one of the greatest composers of all time?” She loves my father, but she was suspicious that his tone-deaf family could be related to the man responsible for “White Christmas.”)
“Not my father,” I declared, “my mother!”
She blinked at me a few times.
“If my sister is related to Irving Berlin, then I am related to Irving Berlin,” Aunt Mattie said. “And I’m not related to Irving Berlin.”
We immediately called my mother, and she and Mattie got into one of those conversations that sisters do, which run along the lines of “wasn’t Aunt Rae’s cousin’s wife . . .” And lo, it turned out that my mother was wrong. I was no more related to Irving Berlin than I was to Julius Erving.
My mother wasn’t embarrassed or upset when she realized she was wrong. “I guess I was thinking of someone else,” she said.
Perhaps we were related to a different Irving Berlin, or the Irving who owned a discount furniture store in Berlin, Ohio.
“Well, we were related to Hartz Mountain!” Mom said proudly.
So now I’d go back to the five million people I’d told I was related to the great American songwriter and tell them that I’m not related to Irving Berlin but actually to the flea prevention people. Or maybe I wouldn’t because I had always loved my quirky, cool pedigree. So what if it wasn’t true? Who was going to find out?
That conversation was way back in 1985, before the World Wide Web was born, so at the time a lot of stories about family and ancestry were taken at face value. When someone told me he was related to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I couldn’t ask for proof from Ancestry.com, so I didn’t ask for any documentation. I just believed him. And as a kid if my parents said we were one-eighth Inuit, I would assume that they were telling the truth, just as I assumed my relative had written “God Bless America” because my mother had once mentioned it.