That’s madness. Maybe that’s why we had no diagnosis when we went to family therapy in the 1960s. Our madness was an ill-fitting story that chafed against the reality of who we were and whom we loved and why. We weren’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. We were just what people look like who are suffering a mistaken identity, people who are forced to live in a plot they don’t understand and cannot make sense of.
* * *
In 1992, after Lara and I discovered we were Jewish and learned of our parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, I asked my mother why she had hidden this from us. After all, many of their Jewish friends had posed as Catholic during the war, but dropped the façade afterward. “But I couldn’t do that,” my mother said. “Don’t you see?”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She stopped abruptly, and a look of despair crossed her face. “I would lose Zosia.”
“What do you mean?”
Mom shook her head. “Zosia wouldn’t have allowed me to continue to be her sister,” she said. “And Renzo—” She choked up. “I could have visited only as a friend, but never as family.” Then she looked away, and I couldn’t bear to press her further. She changed the subject, and I let it go.
My father survived the war on his own wits, with luck and minimal outside help. But my mother and her sister—their story would have ended in the war. Without Uncle, they would be statistics, folded into the six million. I would not be here to figure this out and write about it.
There’s irony for you—so I am predeceased, after all. By exposing the truth, I have revealed the fact that I shouldn’t even be here in the first place, that I’m alive only thanks to the lies that Uncle, Zosia, and Mom made up in order to survive the war in Fascist Italy in the 1940s. If not for my father’s arrival in 1946, I have no doubt that my mother, Zosia, and Giulio would have raised Renzo together and lived in Rome for the rest of their lives. Mom always told me that by the time she got to Rome, she had no interest in men or marriage, and she flatly refused all the men who asked her out. But my father’s miraculous survival messed up the arrangement. He wanted a family—his own children—and my mother’s attachment to her son nearly broke her in two.
It was this broken mother, stripped of her own son, who became my father’s wife, and my sister’s mother and my mother, on a new continent, across the sea from her firstborn. My mother raised me and Lara in a state of loss that she could not admit even to her own husband.
The Jewish thing—that was just the loose thread hanging out. That’s the piece that had been dangling in our faces all our lives, but Lara and I didn’t realize it till we were in our thirties. That’s the string we pulled, and look what fell out!
It must have thrown Mom into a panic. You pull on that string, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire delicate weave of stories unravels. Mom and Zosia made it to the finish line. They protected my father from finding out, but only by cutting me off and away. They could not risk losing their story in order to keep me. That’s the bargain I made them choose: me or the story. They chose the story they had made, the fictions they had spun, the others who depended on those lies for their lives.
And Lara? Like me, she is collateral damage of the war. She too suffered the loss of sense and the loss of her sister in the fallout of our family. Lara and I tried to make up for our parents’ losses, but more often than not, we reenacted them. Our bond is strong; we are tied together in our estrangement.
epilogue
My sister and I are now in our sixties. She’s a good person. Following my mother’s death at the age of ninety-four (twelve years after my father’s death), Lara offered to share what was left of my parents’ finances, and I accepted. It was all arranged through lawyers and bankers. She has never acknowledged her role in disowning me, and despite her efforts to reconnect, I feel safer keeping my distance. It’s not clear whom I trust less with our relationship—my sister or myself. I have learned to be more realistic about the limitations of repair.
For decades I tried to figure out what was wrong with our family, whether Lara was actually mentally ill or whether her behavior—and mine—was simply the result of living in the contorted reality of a history that was hidden from us. I can’t put a name to what was wrong with my sister, or what was wrong with me. She and I are survivors of a family of secrets, and perhaps that’s the most accurate diagnosis of our condition. We represent two sisters’ different expressions of a similar past.
I’ve also wondered whether scientific evidence could prove that Renzo is my mother’s biological son, rather than Zosia and Uncle’s child. But having been disowned and declared dead by my family, I’m in no position to obtain DNA samples from them. As a lawyer, I’d like that kind of proof. But as a writer, I need something more important—to understand who my mother was and how she managed to survive with the lifelong debt she felt to her sister, the love she felt for Renzo, and the obligation she felt to us. And I need to understand how my father managed to carry on, feeling that he had married a “deranged” woman, but unable (and perhaps unwilling) to know the details of the six years during the war in which they had been separated. And finally, of course, I need to understand my own relationship with my sister, to have compassion for the children we were and the adults we became, and to come to peace with how we managed to live under the burden of so many secrets and lies.
Even with scientific proof, I would still need this narrative to help me make sense of my family, to understand the crazy logic in the decisions we made and learned to live with. After the war, Zosia forced Mom to make a choice: either be true to her own identity, and lose her sister and Renzo; or choose to live a lie, but remain sisters with Zosia. Fifty years later, I faced a similar dilemma—I could either continue to live a lie, and remain in my family; or I could lose my sister and family, but speak my own truth. Unlike my mother, I chose my truth, and in so doing, I lost Lara and my family.
Families are proof that love and loss go hand in hand. My family is gone; my family is everywhere. They live inside me, and we’re finally learning to get along with one another. Or at least to accept what is, and love what can be loved. After all, there is an awful lot of love in our stories. It would be a mistake to think otherwise.
acknowledgments
I am ridiculously lucky to have had so many people help me with this book. My bashert editor, Jackie Cantor, and agent, Gail Hochman, form the greatest dynamic duo of superheroes in the galaxy. Jackie, your smarts, enthusiasm, zany sense of humor, and friendship mean the world to me, not to mention the freakish amount of time and hard work you’ve put in on my behalf. And Gail, you are at once fairy godmother and magician, having managed to tease a manuscript out of the 400 pounds of alphabet soup I kept sending you. Thank you for your tireless encouragement, savvy, and pizazz.
I’m bowled over by the extraordinary talent and dedication of the whole team at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster. Special shout outs to John Paul Jones, Joal Hetherington, and Lisa Rivlin for making this book so much better than it was before it reached your nimble minds. I am equally indebted to Jennifer Bergstrom, Sally Marvin, Lisa Litwack, and Sara Quaranta for your support and expertise—dreamboats all.
Elise and Arnold Goodman, thank you for your unwavering support and energetic work for over two decades. I don’t know where I’d be without you. I’m also grateful to Sam Gelfman and Kirsten Wolf, whose thoughtfulness and advice were invaluable. Deanne Urmy, a bouquet of thanks for your generosity and for offering me a way forward.
Helen Epstein was the instigator and overseer of this project for nearly twenty years, providing meticulous editorial and writerly advice, psychological counseling, excellent meals, and friendship. Helen, I would probably still be frozen before a blank screen if not for you.
Heartfelt thanks to Lisa Rubinstein for listening to me for the past thirty-six years, for nevertheless believing in me, and for patiently teaching me to believe in myself.
I have subjected a number of
dear friends to countless awful drafts of this book, and their patience, insight, and friendship made it possible for me to continue. Special Gladiator gratitude to Mari Coates, Susan Sterling, Tracy Winn, and Stan Yarbro. Additional shipping containers of thanks to Jim Ayers, Joanne Barker, Charlie Baxter, Michael Collins, Nancy Gist, Cynthia Gunadi, Trish Hampl, Ehud Havazelet, Richard Hoffman, Marjorie Hudson, Madeline Klyne, Geoff Kronik, Maria Lane, Guillaume Leahy, Sumita Mukherji, Bob Oldshue, Lisa McElaney, Kevin McIlvoy, Peg Alford Pursell, Mary Elsie Robertson, and Robin Romm for providing help and support along the way. For those of you not listed here (you know who you are), thank you.
I am grateful for the generosity and support of Henry Ferrini and the Gloucester Writer’s Center and to the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and its merry band of alumni who have sustained me all these years.
Finally, thanks to Donna, my first and most faithful reader, accomplice, and soul mate. This is not the only line she’s fixed in this book.
More in Personal Memoirs
The Glass Castle
Shoe Dog
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo
Year of Yes
An Invisible Thread
Primates of Park Avenue
about the author
HELEN FREMONT is the author of the national bestseller After Long Silence. Her works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review. A graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she has been a teaching fellow at both Bread Loaf and the Radcliffe Institute. She was a Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center Scholars Program at Brandeis University and worked as a public defender in Boston, where she now lives with her wife.
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Copyright © 2020 by Helen Fremont
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition February 2020
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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco
Jacket design by Regina Starace
Jacket photographs by plainpicture/Virginie Plauchut; Shutterstock
Author photograph by Mikki Ansin
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fremont, Helen, author.
Title: The escape artist / Helen Fremont.
Description: First Gallery Books hardcover edition. | New York : Gallery Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022576 (print) | LCCN 2019022577 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982113605 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982113612 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982113629 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fremont, Helen. | Fremont, Helen—Family. | Children of Holocaust survivors—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC E184.37.F74 A4 2020 (print) | LCC E184.37.F74 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022576
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022577
ISBN 978-1-9821-1360-5
ISBN 978-1-9821-1362-9 (ebook)
The Escape Artist Page 28