by Julie Klam
We arrived at the spot that the Jewish cemetery was located, which was not far from the synagogue in Râmnicu Sărat. There was a huge building in front of it, apparently some kind of factory, and we were told we had to walk through it to get to the cemetery. This felt wrong: It wasn’t how cemeteries were placed or organized anywhere else I’ve been.
We went into the factory, which seemed empty: Nobody was around. Suddenly an older man in blue coveralls emerged from a hallway. Valentin told him that we were looking for a cemetery, and the guy nodded. He took us out a side door and pointed to a chain-link fence just ahead.
Cemetery in Focşani
The cemetery gate was kept closed by a stick with a wire around it. Not exactly high tech. We lifted the wire and the entire gate collapsed, falling into several pieces at our feet. We stepped over the pieces and put the gate back together like we were rebuilding a house of cards.
Inside the cemetery, the stones were a mess, shattered and uprooted. Portions of the place were so overgrown with brambles that I had to use a stick to get near enough to the stones to read them. I had never seen anything like it. The entire place looked as if it had never been maintained, though I knew it had also been a casualty of many earthquakes.
I walked over to one side of the cemetery to gather stones for the graves and gasped. In the grass were animal skeletons. Dozens of them. Mostly dogs, I assumed. It was a disturbing find to stumble across.
I picked up stones to put on whatever graves were standing. I was looking for the Morrises, but I wanted to give anyone I could find a stone. When I did find an intact gravestone, the letters on it were so faint and worn that almost all of them were impossible to read.
The sadness in this place was overwhelming: The people buried here had been forgotten by the living. I hoped their souls were off somewhere having a nice party. The dogs, too.
It was around three o’clock and by then we’d spent a couple of hours there and none of us had found any Morris or Moritz graves. Our plan had been to stay in Focşani another night, but really we had seen and done everything we could. Valentin offered to drive us to Transylvania, but we decided to head back to Bucharest. I was kind of desperate to get back to the bustle of a city and the cheer of a joyous beer wagon.
We said our goodbyes to Valentin and I told him to please come to New York and bring his family. He said he would love to. We chatted a bit about travel and I mentioned we were thinking of going to Prague and Vienna the following year, and he said to let him know, that he was there a lot (which we did and actually met him for dinner in Prague, but that’s a story for another book).
That night in Bucharest Dan and I went to a traditional restaurant called Vatra.
When I walked in, there was something about the smell and the decor that reminded me of my grandma Billie’s house: There were scents of cinnamon, coriander, dill, and rosemary; the air was warm; and the light was golden and cozy. A red velvety wallpaper covered the walls, and traditionally dressed musicians walked around and played guitar and lute and some kind of pan flute. We had delicious eggplant spread and hot bread, and fried cheese appetizers and warm vegetable soups, and then I had my favorite chicken schnitzel and Dan had stuffed cabbage. Like any minute now Grandma Billie would appear wiping her hands on her flowered apron.
As Dan slept that night, I lay awake thinking of how I was here with this man I loved who very possibly would become my second husband and that there are so many different ways to go through life. I chose to have someone along for the ride, while the Morrises blazed through life on their own, content with each other. There was a time in my late twenties when I had lived alone so long that I thought I might not meet someone and get married, and imagined my life on my own. It very easily could’ve gone that way. Maybe if I had lived with my sisters I would have felt less of a longing to meet someone.
* * *
• • •
The next day the only place I really wanted to see was the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. (This wasn’t officially a business visit, but I wanted to try to get a sense of how most Romanians lived during the time that the Morrises lived there.) It was a long walk from the hotel to the museum, but we enjoyed it, as it gave us the opportunity to see more of Bucharest’s grand architecture. But when we got to the museum, we found it was closed for renovation. The gift shop, however, was open. It sold blouses and skirts and handmade beaded jewelry and scarves and hats, little dolls and refrigerator magnets. I wanted to buy everything I saw. I had a feeling I wouldn’t return to Romania, and I wanted to take home something of it with me. After spending way too long deciding, I picked out a couple of gifts, but nothing that really satisfied me. Maybe that was impossible.
That night we ended up back at Caru’ Cu Bere for a last beer. As I sat there, while I knew I was ready to go back to my life, I felt a longing for a place that no longer existed.
Fifteen
Cousins and Commodities
Romania was so important in seeing where the Morris sisters—and I—came from: our shared history, and how what happened to them at the beginning of the twentieth century informed all of our lives in America. There is so much that we can’t be sure about in our family history, even if we have the facts. But now I had a glimpse of the life that Guerson, Clara, and their children left behind and what they might have been looking for in America. I felt my grandmother Billie there as well, and I had a sense of what they must have brought with them: their meager belongings, of course, but also parts of themselves that were intangible—family recipes, traditions, memories, faith.
While the search in Romania was more complicated and less definitive than I’d hoped, I imagined that further research in the United States would be different. Maybe, I thought, I’d walk into the New York Public Library and find the Morris sisters there, fully formed from all the detailed information about them that I could call up from the library database. (Cue the gods laughing at me.)
When I returned to New York, I emailed a historian at the New York Public Library’s Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy and explained what I was looking for—any information on the Morris sisters and their lives—and where I was in the dark, which was pretty much everything about Marcella’s career. A few days later a research librarian responded with a few pages from Ancestry that I already had and suggested that I look through the financial company’s annual reports. (The what?) And if Marcella had spoken at the White House, I could check the Congressional Serial Set (1817–1980). (Again, the what?)
I wrote back to say thank you but left out that I had no idea what he was talking about. I told him I would be visiting the library soon and discovered I didn’t need an appointment.
Regarding my understanding of all things financial, I believe the technical term for me is “dum-dum.” My father was a financial planner, and my husband (reader, I married my boyfriend) writes about financial situations for big banking companies, so you would think that some of their expertise might have rubbed off on me. Yet nothing has. It might be because I have never had any of my own money so I have not needed to figure out what nifty ways I can invest or what types of IRAs I should open. In terms of the stock market, bonds, and commodities, every bit of it is not just unfamiliar to me, it is deeply upsetting. It’s in another language that I feel I should know and realize that I probably never will. While money makes the world go round, it’s also kind of boring to me. I want to throw rocks through the business section of every newspaper I come across, being the financial Neanderthal that I am. This is not a trait I am proud of, believe me. At the same time, I know that I’ve reached an age where I am more comfortable with words than I am with numbers, and I’m okay with that deficiency.
I now realized that I wasn’t going to be able to research an important part of the Morris sisters’ story if I didn’t understand the world they, particularly Marcella, lived in.
I was still n
ot sure where Marcella worked as a trader. In her later life she was self-employed, and in all of the censuses that I researched, her profession was listed as bookkeeper, and in the 1940 census she was listed as a secretary in an advertising agency. (The censuses beyond 1940 were unavailable.) The New York Public Library had sent me links to many archives but said there was a lot more in the library that wasn’t digitized, so it might be worthwhile to come in person.
I really wanted to know more of Marcella’s work story from my family. My father’s cousin Bobby, who is Claire’s brother, was the executor of the Morris sisters’ estate, and I am very close to his two daughters, Sherie and Carole. Bobby lived in New Jersey and Florida like Claire did. When I was first thinking about this book in 2007, I emailed Bobby (who was then seventy-nine years old) and asked him for any information he had about the Morris sisters. This was the email I got back:
Hi, nice hearing from you.
Four Morris sisters and their brother set out from Montreal in the cold of winter sometime at the turn of the 20th century to California. Their mother had tuberculosis and father, an unemployed photographer, had reasoned that the weather there would be good for mother and the newly formed movie industry would provide opportunities for employment. Upon reaching St Louis, the mother got sick and died and the father put his five children in a Jewish orphanage, telling the children, he will get a job, pick them up and resume their trip to California. In short he never returned, Marcella got out of the orphanage, went to Cleveland and got a filing job with an investment banking firm. The firm recognized that she had a great memory of trading symbols and trained her as a commodity trader. Her expertise was in pork bellies. In fact at the beginning of World War II, she was summoned to Washington DC to testify on winter corn and pork bellies since at that time it was a staple of the average diet. She thrived in the industry, endured enormous animosity from a male dominated field, and made lots of money. All of her sisters lived together for their entire lives, mostly doing business with females. Never recovering from their father’s betrayal. Leaving the bulk of their money for the benefit of female related causes. Hope this answers your inquiry. Love, Bob
Reading this, I realized that it must have been Bobby who had written the sisters’ biography for the Southampton library—he was the Morris Foundation! Though he had gotten the information from them, I knew that parts of it weren’t accurate, but I now knew what questions I wanted to ask. So I called Sherie to see if I could arrange a meeting with Bobby in Maplewood, New Jersey, where he and his wife, Eileen, have a condo. (They live primarily in Florida but come to New Jersey to see their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.)
Sherie told me that her father had been having some significant memory loss, so I shouldn’t expect too much. I made a date for the following Monday and started work on my list of questions.
Sixteen
The Berkowitzes of Maplewood
During the drive from New York to Maplewood, I thought about my family and how nice it was to be close to my second cousins, and I wondered how much Bobby would remember. Which led me to think about my own memory. When I was young, I had a ridiculously retentive memory: I could remember details about people’s lives, meals I had eaten, the dialogue from entire movies. It was almost like a party trick. Then in my forties, around the time my first husband and I were divorcing, I lost it (my memory, not my sanity). I can still remember details that normal people recall, but my memory is no longer one of my superpowers. If in thirty years my niece decided to write a book about my cousins and she started asking me questions, what would I be able to tell her? Even now, so many details about my past are completely gone. My mother, however, remembers everything everyone ever did, especially if it was not good. She puts it in her mental “book.” I am fairly certain she could get full-blown amnesia and still remember the kids who came over at noon and how their mother didn’t pick them up until 11:00 p.m.
My expectations were in check—I didn’t know what I’d find. I was really just looking forward to seeing them. It had been about five years.
I walked into the condo and Eileen said, “My God, you got so tall!” I had just turned fifty. It was one of my favorite moments.
Carole and Sherie laughed, and I told them I did think I had a little growth spurt recently.
Eileen had had a genealogist do a family tree for her several years ago, and she gave me a copy of what had been found. Eileen also showed me a photo of a beautiful painting of flowers that she had in Florida. Malvina had painted it, she said.
Bobby was now almost ninety and he looked well and was so happy to have us all around him. But as we talked, it was obvious he wasn’t sure about many details, and I realized that I already had most of what I was going to get from his memory.
It was a bit past lunchtime so we went right out to a local diner and caught up on more-recent events. We talked about Sherie’s new granddaughter and Carole’s kids and who everyone had spoken to. It was so much fun talking with relatives you loved and actually enjoyed spending time with, a benefit of researching family. I thought of the Morris sisters and imagined they probably just sat around sometimes enjoying each other’s company.
Seated, from left: Billie and Willie Klam and Malvina, Ruth, and Selma Morris at a Berkowitz bar mitzvah in 1966
On my way back to New York, I decided I needed an expert who knew the financial world to explain it to me. I had the ideal candidate: my father’s cousin Herbie. He and my dad actually lived together during various times of their childhoods growing up in New York City during the Depression, and he has always been more like my uncle. I’ve adored him ever since I was a kid.
Herbie served in Germany during the Korean War from 1953 to 1955. He came home and with the GI bill was able to get his college degree and then an MBA, both from NYU. After teaching business at St. John’s University, he became a successful stockbroker, financial researcher, manager, adviser, and partner in the company that became Citicorp, and he owned his own financial services firm. If anybody could explain the intricacies of the financial world to me, it was Herbie.
We set up a time to talk. I wanted to hear his thoughts on Marcella Morris, the financial sister—and anything he could remember about any of them.
Like my father’s other cousins, Herbie has a home in the Northeast (his is in Westchester County, north of New York City) and a home in Florida in the same community that Bobby and Eileen live in.
“Hiya, dollface!” he said when he recognized my voice on the phone. Everyone should have someone in their life who calls them dollface unironically. (He also signs his emails “Unky Hoib,” which might be the best signature ever.)
We chatted about family for a bit. He told me he had just gone to Staten Island to the United Hebrew Cemetery, where his parents and my great-grandmother and some other relatives are buried. He told me I should go out there, too. I asked if the Morris sisters were buried there.
He laughed. “Nooooo, they were cremated and . . . disposed of. They didn’t want anyone pissing on their graves.”
I asked what he knew about Marcella.
“I knew all four of the sisters,” Herb told me. “Your grandparents, Billie and Willie, held a seder every year for Passover in their house in New Rochelle, and Malvina, Selma, and Marcella would come. Malvina was very badly crippled, as you know; she could walk but it was terribly difficult. I can recall vividly the moment the seder was over, Marcella would head for the stairs and go up to the second floor to do her work, I guess trading commodities.”
My grandparents had moved to their house on Fern Street in New Rochelle when my dad’s sister Susie was born. My father was entering his senior year of high school and when they moved, they pulled him out of his private school in Riverdale, New York, that he commuted to from their Harlem apartment. The house, I remember, was dark, with paintings on the walls of old Jews and the old country. Later, when they moved to
Florida after they retired, everything in their apartment was white or Lucite, including the matzoh container (the Lucite box had “Matzoh” printed on it). They had gone from dark to light.
Listening to Herbie, I imagined Marcella setting up a workspace after dinner in the upstairs bedroom with the fuzzy olive-green flowered wallpaper and using my grandparents’ black rotary phone that sat on a doily on the night table.
“Julie,” Herbie admitted, “she wasn’t pleasant.” It was clear he was no fan of Marcella’s, and I was interested to find out why.
I told him that Claire had said Marcella was the secretary of J. P. Morgan and they had had an affair, she furnished his New York City apartment, and they talked about what stocks to buy. I had already determined that it could not have been J. P. Morgan, because he died in the St. Regis Hotel in Rome when Marcella was twelve and still in the orphanage in St. Louis. I wanted to know if he had any better intel.
“This is the story as I know it,” Herb began. “Somewhere along the line Marcella became a secretary to Harold Bache. Harold Bache was the nephew of the founder Jules Bache, who succeeded him at Bache and Company, which you probably know as Prudential-Bache. Let me tell you, at that time Bache was huge, second or third largest in the entire stock market in terms of dealing with retail clients. So purportedly she was Harold Bache’s secretary. What the hell did that mean? I don’t know, and I’m not being cute.”