charlotte, ca 1917

my great-grandmother charlotte was a liar. i didn't know this when i was small - in those 8 years we spent in the same world - and i'm not sure anyone else alive during those 8 years knew it either. if i weren't a snoop, no one would know she had lied about anything, and i used to think that my revealing the truth would be some kind of betrayal.

grandma told everyone that she was born in charleston, south carolina, and that is the place my grandfather filled in on her death certificate when she died, the place she herself gives on her marriage license and passport applications. i thought this was pretty exciting - no, fascinating - because it simply reeked of something exotic and exciting, of mint juleps and azalea bowers and evenings on verandas with rhett butler.

the thing was, though, that south carolina disagreed with charlotte: they couldn't find her birth certificate anywhere. strange, i thought. at the same time, though, i had found other documents where charlotte gave her birthplace as new york city, the place where i knew she spent most, if not all, of her childhood and young adulthood. at first i didn't think it was strange that new york city couldn't find any sign of her birth certificate either - i had other relations who were born in new york city, whose names were so mangled in the writing down that they were almost impossible to find.

that wasn't the problem with charlotte, though. nope. the problem was that she wasn't born in new york city, or new york state, or even in north america.

instead, she was born in what is now the minsk region of belarus and came to the united states in 1899 as a 5 year old named chaje (later americanized to sadie) with her mother and her sisters.

i found this out because i one day, by fluke, found an entry for charlotte's father, the adorable sam, in an online index that led me to his naturalization papers. these papers listed his particulars and those of his wife, minnie, and those of his five children - rose, ida, sadie and jennie - all born in belarus - and william, born in manhattan. this was quite perplexing indeed, because, um, where was charlotte? and who in the hell were rose and ida and sadie? i had been told that charlotte's siblings were jennie and william - no mention of anyone else. but this had to be my family, i thought. how many other sam & minnie hurduses could live in new york city, let alone the world?

then i took a closer look at the papers in front of me and realized that sadie had the same birthdate as charlotte: august 18, 1893. and then i said, "wait, what?"

belarus is a long way from charleston or new york city, sadie is quite different than charlotte, and this all meant that grandma was lying.

my grandfather couldn't believe it either. he and his sister had always been told their mother was born in charleston and that her name was charlotte, but those were certainly her parents, most definitely her younger brother and sister, most assuredly her birthday... but what about rose and ida, i wanted to know. oh yes, my grandfather and his sister recalled, now that i mentioned it, there were some older sisters named rose and ida, but charlotte didn't really get along with them that well - they were older, more jewy, less assimilated. plus they lived in florida and one of them died young. jennie talked to rose and ida because she was "soft," for which charlotte used to reprimand her. but really, no one remembers all of it, and i still have never been able to discover anything substantive of these sisters on my own.

all of this information has been percolating in my head for several years, giving me a chance to figure out what it all means and why she did it. i am still not completely sure. it would have been easier, in a way, to fully comprehend if charlotte had denied any ties to her old world family at all, but she didn't. she and her husband, my great-grandfather, spoke yiddish in front of their kids when they wanted to tell secrets and she was close to her parents and her younger siblings - even if she was distant enough from rose and ida that her kids forgot they existed until prompted. it wasn't a desire to efface her entire background, to deny family - but a desire, perhaps, to be more fully the person she thought she was: charlotte, not chaje. a "real" american, not an immigrant. i still struggle with this, and with trying to understand how the mere appearance of something so relatively unimportant in this melting pot of a country could become so important that you'd keep it from your children their entire lives. and i think i will probably always struggle with it, because i will never know for sure exactly what she was thinking.

charlotte hurdus fenning (1893-1989)

henry, ca 1930

the other night, i saw an our gang short that featured a lot of impressive ear-wiggling. not only were the girls onscreen entranced by the mysterious ear maneuverings of their male counterparts, but i was too. mostly because i wanted to know how the hell one little boy could wiggle his ears so damn well.

it also made me think of a story that i'd forgotten i knew, one about ear-wiggling.

henry here, my grandmother's first cousin, could wiggle his ears. when my aunt helene was a toddler and refused to eat, henry was invited over a lot, precisely because of his ear-wiggling talents. what would happen is this: helene sitting in her high chair would refuse to open her mouth to admit any spoonfuls of pureed broccoli, or whatever was on offer. henry would wiggle his ears and she'd open her mouth in astonishment, allowing for the surreptitious deposit of food into her mouth.

this seems like a pretty good system, though potentially a little awkward since henry wanted to marry my grandmother at one point and ardently pursued her, even though she said no. i don't think henry was married yet when helene was a baby and the ear-wiggling-aided feedings were taking place, but maybe he was. and anyhow, maybe it wasn't awkward at all: henry and his wife were friendly with my grandparents, up until henry's death in 1979, when my grandmother one day received an angry letter from his wife, who i will call r. this letter was fueled by jealousy and sadness that henry was (i guess) always in love with her (ethel, that is) instead of with r, and after that, they never talked again (to my knowledge, anyway).

ethel, for her part, though i'm sure she felt badly about the whole thing, didn't want to marry her own cousin, because first of all it would have been creepy. secondly, she wanted to have a family and would never have dreamed of introducing children with their shared, first-cousin genes into the world. and thirdly, she was always in love with his older brother, dorian, which is another story for another day.

henry (heinrich) kalisch (1905-1979)

rona and charlie, march 10, 1935

yesterday, i was working with someone else on organizing his family photographs and i was slightly jealous, seeing the sheer number of photos this family had taken and posed for on their myriad travels around the world. i'm not completely sure why i was jealous, because it isn't as though i come from a family of stay-at-home, unadventurous and untraveled people. i suppose it had something to do with their somewhat meticulous arrangement, organization and labeling. it had to do with how well-preserved those kodacolor images of fashionably dressed americans in front of the trevi fountain were. it had to do, too, with my own lust for travel and my jealousy for where these very very well-traveled people had been.

but then i come home, look at my own collection of familial memories and don't feel quite so jealous. they may not have been kept organized in albums and labeled with dates, but that doesn't matter. the fact that they are my people on their long ago (or relatively recent) travels is what makes the difference.

rona brown rose richman (1906-1992) and charles harold rose (1894-1964) in agua caliente, mexico.

belle, october 1942

my grandfather's cousin belle was born in new york, grew up in detroit and moved to los angeles in the early 1940s. she was a businesswoman - owning, according to my mom, a company that manufactured reeds for musical instruments, and her death certificate says she was a owner of a music production company of some kind. when my grandparents frank and ethel married and moved to l.a. she was a close friend of theirs and i can see why: besides the simple fact that she was my grandfather's first cousin, she looks like fun. she looks like the kind of person who laughed easily, didn't bow out of a good time, and would tell funny jokes; the kind of person who drank black coffee, smoked cigarettes and called people "doll" without any sense of irony. the kind of person i would probably like.

but belle was also a lesbian. this meant that despite the fact that she was a great pal of theirs, my grandparents distanced themselves from her when they became the parents of two daughters. it wasn't the fact that they became parents and that they had no more time for fun, but the simple fact that she was a lesbian and they had two daughters. they didn't cut her out completely - my mom played the flute when she was a kid, a flute that belle gave her - but they did push her away from their little family on purpose.

i know that it was ignorance that did this - that maybe they told themselves they, as mature adults, had no problem with belle's "choices" or "lifestyle" (not "sexuality" or "orientation" or "identity") but that such an influence could be somehow pernicious to young, unformed girls. or maybe they were worried about what people would say.

i can understand and appreciate the time and place in which this decision of theirs was made.

but all the same.

that doesn't really change it. it still doesn't change how sad it makes me to see this picture, to know the history, and to know that with the passing years, belle and my grandparents fell out of each other's lives completely. she didn't know - unless maybe she read the obituaries - when they died the year before she did, mere miles away in the same city. and we didn't know when she died, didn't know anything of her at all, until i found the records several years later and saw how close in space we were to one another, but how far apart the ties had stretched.

i'm sorry, belle. i wish i could have made up for it somehow.

belle loretta hoffer (1912-1992)