‘90s FAMILY : One Reunion, One Voyage to Discovery

My mother’s voice pitch was higher; the words tumbled out at twice their usual speed. She was planning a reunion with two older sisters she’d barely known since she was 9--some 61 years ago.

In part, she and her sisters had spent their lives apart because of the vagaries of politics and geography. Lucy had left the family home in Aleppo, Syria, for Japan in 1937, intending to return someday, only to get caught up in the maelstrom of World War II. Over the next several years, Victoria moved to Argentina, my mother to New York.

But there was more to it.

My father had been estranged from his family. Despite repeated questions from me, he rarely spoke about his father and never about his mother or how many brothers and sisters he had.

Distanced from his own family, my father had wanted his wife and three children to himself. Sharing his wife with her sisters--welcoming them to his home and wanting to know more about them--was not a priority.

Thus, I grew up knowing virtually nothing about my father’s family and little of my mother’s.

One day, after spending months hitchhiking around the country, I came home to find an uncle I’d never met sitting in my mother’s house.

He took us out to a fancy seafood restaurant on New York’s Third Avenue and told us to order whatever we wanted. Over dinner that night, for just a few hours, I got to know my mother’s brother.

I met Lucy once for a couple of hours in a cousin’s back yard, among half a dozen party-goers celebrating the Jewish New Year. All told, I exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with her.

I met Victoria a few times over dinner. In her hazel eyes, direct manner and seemingly unconditional acceptance, I sensed a way back to the family I had never known. But each time she was gone within hours, and I never really got to know her, either.

Eventually, my father died, and so did my uncle. It was perhaps the shock of those deaths, together with those of Victoria’s and Lucy’s husbands, that finally propelled my mother and her sisters back together.

Through a series of international phone calls, they decided to take a six-week trip as close to their ancestral home as possible, since a trip to Syria was extremely difficult for Jews.

I laughed last summer when my mother told me of her plans. I had noticed her loosen up substantially since becoming a widow. She’d taken up bridge and shared her winning strategies with me, oblivious to the fact that I understand nothing about the game.

She’d also made a new, socially well-connected best friend. With her, my mother had begun going to movie premieres and parties, hobnobbing with a French movie star, a studio chief and an internationally known designer.

Then, too, when my mother had come to visit me in Santa Monica, an older man in a white Cadillac had stopped his car and invited her for a ride. She refused, of course. When I saw her later, the first thing she told me about was the attempted pickup.

And now, she was planning a trip halfway around the world, to meet sisters she barely knew.

I was delighted for her, but I was also scared. What if my mother discovered she didn’t get along with her sisters, that the family she’d idealized over all these years and miles was more fantasy than reality? Would she still be interested in playing bridge and going to premieres?

And perhaps I was also threatened. Would Lucy and Victoria offer her something I and my two sisters could not, drawing her back into their world, and somehow away from ours?

Nevertheless, we encouraged her, and off she went.

*

My mother and her sisters reunited in Tel Aviv, at the bedside of their 94-year-old aunt, who slipped in and out of consciousness. There was a sadness to my mother’s postcards as she described how she and her sisters sang and danced for six days, trying to revive their aunt’s spirits.

And then the sisters went on to the Dead Sea, where they filled each other in on their lives. Then, it was on to Jerusalem and Jordan, Istanbul and Greece.

The postcard from Greece was the most interesting. On the back of a photo of a whitewashed mountaintop village, above even “Dear Joe,” she wrote, “Send me back this card, so I may keep it as a souvenir,” the first five words underlined.

The trip was going well. My mother had not only gotten to know her sisters, but through them had also learned about her father, Simontov Esses, who had died of tuberculosis a month after she was born. In keeping with local superstition, sharpened by the contagiousness and fear inspired by the disease, my grandmother had burned or torn his photos, and would not speak of him. My mother was not even sure which day she was born, arbitrarily picking March 15th as her birthday.

Only now did she learn that her father had founded the Synagogue of Djemilea in Aleppo, a stone structure considered one of the most important in the area.

My mother also learned about her grandmother, a religious woman in whose bed Lucy had once slept, and about three other brothers who had existed primarily as shadows scattered around the globe.

*

As my mother rediscovered her family, I was surprised to discover how hungry I was to share in the information she provided.

My grandfather had actually founded a synagogue? And Lucy had become one of the leading saleswomen in Japan, a country that has few businesswomen, let alone foreign-born ones?

Suddenly, I was no longer quite so alone; I could sense my roots.

My family had always been there. What hadn’t been there, and what my mother finally put in place, is my knowledge of who my family is.

My mother’s postcard lies in front of me. The village in the photo is incredibly beautiful, the skies the purest blue.

“Everyone here finds the three sisters extraordinary, in the sense that each comes from a different end of the Earth, and we have all come together,” she wrote. “I love you. Mom.”

It’s a postcard I may never send back.