by Linda Morrison

All you had to do was look in their faces to know there was so much more to their stories than what we heard. They—our older family members— were immigrants from Russia, Poland and Germany who lived vastly different lives in the old country—memories they suppressed and kept as secrets to the end. Some of our grandparents and great-grandparents never fully assimilated because they feared that the same things that happened there, could happen here.

To us, the assimilated children—born in the US–it was a sorry shame.  We never really knew the entire story of any one of our parents or grandparent’s truths…the tales they couldn’t bear to tell.

But we could imagine what happened.  Once books by Anne Frank and Elie Weisel became available to us at the library, we read about other survivors of the war against our ethnicity…the one where our tribe was selected to become extinct.

It wasn’t that my sister and cousins and I didn’t ask questions.  We just didn’t get complete answers.  My mother proudly said that her family had been in this country for three generations—ours being the fourth—and they were deeply involved in the creation of the first synagogue in their small Pennsylvania town.

But what about the others that came later? Or better yet, the ones who never got here?

That’s when the discussions would stop.  Occasionally, we’d see the eyes of an oldster get wet with remembrance and they would turn away to wipe away the tears.  If we pressed long enough, we’d hear that Jews were never allowed to be citizens of any of the European countries they inhabited.  Their records were kept only in the local synagogues and oftentimes, once their synagogue was torched, they lost their entire identity.

We saw the pain in their faces, yet we needed to know more.  My father was one of the last of my family to arrive in this country from Poland.  He came over in steerage with only his mother’s sister, who had been summoned by Dad’s father to bring him and my aunt who was chosen to be my grandfather’s second wife. This was apparently not unusual in those days.  It seems that my grandmother had died before she got the chance to emigrate and my father’s little sister died of what they referred to as “a hole in the heart”—something now curable with modern surgery.

But when I asked my dad about his mother, he would flat out sob. Sometimes, he’d be calm enough to say she was a wonderful woman and then he’d cry some more.

Later on, I learned my grandmother was shot in the stomach by Russian soldiers who relentlessly killed innocent people during the pogroms of early part of the 20th century.  Jewish men, women and children were singled out because they were not formal citizens; they had no merit in the society of the time.

It took even longer to learn that my father was with his mother when she died. She instinctively pushed him behind her and he fell underneath her body when she was shot and killed, thereby saving his life.

He never really stopped running from the terror, never even telling us his original name that was taken from him at Ellis Island, because he feared reprisals that would never come.

Dad became a naturalized citizen with that new name—my maiden name— and a new identity, but he never felt more than just a lost boy who was shipped to this country when his mother and sister died, so he could live with his father who began a new family in which he never fit.

He never told us his whole story, nor did we get to meet his father, stepmother or step siblings.  “Some things,” he often mumbled, “were better left undone.”