Unraveling the Mystery of My Father : From the Time he Was Young, the Author had heard the Story of His Father’s Flight From the Ukraine. Then He Heard a Different Version and Set Out to Find the Truth

On a Sunday in June, 1993, having completed the field research for a magazine assignment on the aftermath of the Chernobyl tragedy, I filled Volodya Tikhii’s car with black market gasoline in Kiev, and we drove into the steppes of central Ukraine, to the village where my father was born.

Tikhii was a gaunt, slightly stooped Ukrainian nuclear physicist in his early 40s with thinning blond hair and thick, owlish glasses, who had accompanied me earlier to Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor. He spoke deliberate, thoughtful English, gleaned from scientific texts at Moscow State University, then humanized through increasing contact with international environmentalists. He warned me that the 200 kilometers to Mala Viska, a town he’d never heard of until we found it on his map, would take us at least five hours, bumping over roads that partly explained the former Soviet Union’s inefficiency at distributing its harvests. That didn’t matter, I explained. One reason for this pilgrimage was that my father had died the previous September. Seven weeks later, my mother unexpectedly followed.

Those losses, and the fact that, as a boy, my father had to flee his birthplace for his life, were justification enough for Volodya Tikhii, who understood both bereavement and exile. Seven years earlier, his own father had perished in the Gulag (his crime, for which he was jailed repeatedly: teaching the Ukrainian language). Recently, Oleksa Tikhii’s remains had been exhumed in Russia and carried back to Kiev. His reinterment as a martyred hero had at last accorded his family some peace and closure--a consolation his son now kindly wished to extend in some way to me, with the loan of his aging blue VAZ sedan and his offer to be my translator.

What I didn’t tell Volodya Tikhii was that this journey involved more than honoring my late father’s memory. All my life my father had told me what had happened to him and to my grandfather back in the Ukraine (“which,” he always added, “was part of Russia.”) I heard the story so often it assumed mythological dimensions. I read it again in newspaper columns that eulogized him. But not long before his death--yet after strokes had so ravaged his memory that I could no longer challenge him--I’d heard a sharply different account of the same events. Now I was driving through a rolling landscape of collective farms, whose vast, pale fields of wheat and hops disappeared over the horizon toward Mala Viska, where I hoped someone could tell me the truth.

*

This is the story my father told me all my life:

My grandfather, Avraham Weisman, was born in a village between Kiev and Odessa. Because his father--my great-grandfather--administered a powerful man’s lands, he survived the pogroms that either killed or banished many of his own relatives around the turn of the century. Although the law limited the right of Jews to own property, over the years my great-grandfather nevertheless managed to acquire substantial acreage in reward for his services.

In his early 20s, my grandfather Avraham traveled to Hungary, where for two years he worked in a mill, studying its function and memorizing its construction. When he returned to his Ukrainian village, he built one on his family’s land. By the time his first child--my father--was born in 1912, my grandfather had more than 100 employees and lived in a large house overlooking the Malayavis River. Milling wheat and pressing sunflower seed oil had made him rich enough to marry a rabbi’s daughter.

There is a sepia photograph taken in their yard in 1917 or early 1918. My father, Shimon Vaisman in Yiddish, Simon Weisman after Ellis Island--is in knickers, mounted on a tricycle with large iron wheels. My father and uncles were attended by a governess. My grandmother, Rebecca Weisman, nee Gellerman, did not have to work, although she often sewed clothes from fine fabric with my great-grandmother Frieda, the rabbi’s widow, who lived with them.

My father clearly remembered the day the soldiers came, he said. They were not Czarist troops, but Bolsheviks. He recalled how they tramped into the house with muddy boots. When his grandmother barred their passage across the imported carpet, the revolutionary who led the ragged column drew his sword and slew her. Six-year-old Simon ran at her attacker and pounded him with his little fists. The soldier hit him with the butt of the sword that killed my great-grandmother. At this point in the story, my father would show me the scar on his forehead, next to his dark widow’s peak.

They marched the family outside. My grandfather was summarily tried and convicted of being a capitalist collaborator for selling wheat to the imperial Czar’s army. His mill and adjoining fields and forests were confiscated for the revolution. With his wife and children helplessly watching, Avraham Weisman’s communist captors stood him against the house and shot him.

My broad-shouldered grandfather had measured well over six feet. My father recalled struggling to help drag his body, enshrouded in one of my grandmother’s sheets, to the grave they dug before they fled. Rebecca Weisman took her sons and what little she could carry to the nearest city, Yelizavetgrad (today Kirovograd), 60 kilometers to the east. Her only skill was sewing; by night she made clothes to sell each day in the market.

‘You kids don’t know how lucky you’ve got it,’ my father told my sister and me. ‘When your grandmother sold something, we ate. It wasn’t too damn often.’

She wrote to relatives who had left years earlier for the United States. After months, a reply arrived from a sister, whose rabbi husband had found work in Minnesota as a kosher slaughterer. They knew someone loaning money to help Jews escape the menace and chaos of the fledgling Soviet Union. The cash they sent went to coax officials. Three years after my grandfather’s execution, my grandmother Rebecca and her sons traveled to Moscow, for a half-year of paperwork and more bribes. My father’s principal memory of those times was bald Vladimir Lenin parading like God through the streets. Then a train from Belarus Station to Riga. Then a boat to America.

They arrived in 1922. My father, 10 years old, sold newspapers in a language he couldn’t read on freezing Minneapolis street corners. My grandmother remained, to her death, what Yelizavetgrad had transformed her into: a dressmaker. Years later, along with my father’s exploits in World War II, the legends of their poverty became my lullaby: Simon and his brother Harold rising for their predawn bakery route each day before high school; baby brother Herman, sent one morning to buy cracked eggs--all they could afford--and, upon finding none, asking if the grocer could crack him a dozen.

*

Years later still, it was this brother, my uncle Herman, who cast doubt on my father’s story. By then, Herman had retired from a second career as a bureaucrat for various federal agencies in Washington, which paid better than being an English professor. It was work he regretted, but since my Aunt Margaret, the brilliant classmate he’d married, was stricken with multiple sclerosis, he couldn’t easily decline extra money.

As an undergraduate, Herman had authored plays that were staged at the University of Minnesota. His dreams of becoming a dramatist, however, succumbed to the Depression: “a starving writer,” I was frequently reminded by my parents. Because as a boy I displayed few active symptoms of becoming any kind of writer--I kept no diary and never wrote stories, although I did read a book a day--I was always mystified by these warnings.

What I did as obsessively as read was play football, and that was not by accident. The game of football was exalted in our home as the first of two providential passages in my father’s life: A high school coach had noticed the husky kid with the accent and made him try out for the team. By his senior year, Si Weisman had won All-City honors and leaped from poor immigrant status to sudden esteem. Girls now noticed him. An auburn-haired, Fourth of July blind date named Charlotte Meshbesher became his steady. After high school, she worked for five years as a secretary to help him through law school. When he graduated in 1938, they were married.

The Depression in Minnesota wasn’t much kinder to untried Jewish lawyers than to playwrights; during stretches between the few cases my father managed to procure, they sometimes lived on bread and catsup. But just after my sister was born, the other crucial pivot in his destiny, World War II, changed everything. Private Weisman landed with the Third Infantry Division at Anzio Beach and returned three years later wearing sergeant’s stripes, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with two oak-leaf clusters, a Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre. In 1946, even Gentile Minneapolis law firms courted Jewish war heroes. Astutely, he joined one.

The following year I was born. The first toy my father placed in my crib was a football. I was not so much raised by this ex-platoon leader as steeled and disciplined like a plebe. Within five years, he formed his own law firm and built a home in the suburbs. And, for a reason I was never told, my father and my Uncle Herman were no longer speaking.

*

January, 1991: With three other independent journalists, I had been traveling through Latin America to produce a documentary series for National Public Radio. Now I was in Washington, D.C., with one of my colleagues, former NPR producer Cecilia Vaisman, interviewing World Bank officers. From a cubbyhole in NPR’s Special Projects division, scheduling appointments in places we were headed next--the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile--I called my Uncle Herman and Aunt Margaret. The evening that I took Cecilia to their house for dinner, we were late because war began in the Persian Gulf.

That afternoon, Scott Simon, host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” where Cecilia’s formerly worked, had confided that as one of the journalists selected to accompany U.S. troops to battle, he’d be given 12 hours’ secret advance warning of the hostilities to catch the official press plane. “If you’re around and notice that I’m not, you’ll figure it out,” he’d giggled.

The last we saw of him, he was pushing through a suddenly frantic newsroom toward the door, wearing a leather flight jacket and no longer smiling. I knew the feeling, how a journalist’s reflexive thrill at the prospect of witnessing the ancient rite of combat is quickly dissolved by the sickening reality of men willfully firing at each other. Over the last six months, I had accompanied Guatemalan insurgents clashing with army troops and found myself--and Cecilia--on a forced march with Colombian guerrillas in the Andes, a situation that nervously recalled an assignment two years earlier in that same country.

That previous occasion had ended badly--a firefight in which most of my companions were killed. This time, we had been luckier, but now as she and I lingered in the NPR newsroom’s doorway, we wondered how our current assignment--chronicling the fate of entire cultures that were becoming endangered species--could ever compete for attention with Operation Desert Storm, with its instant replay and colorful yellow ribbons for the home team. Potent as it was, our material seemed no match for a patriotic American resource war against a swarthy villain in the Middle East, now unfolding on prime-time TV. Cecilia drew on her gloves. “We’re late for your uncle’s. Vamanos.”

*

Before meeting her on this project, I’d sometimes notice the similarity of our surnames whenever the radio stated that “we had production help this week from Cecilia Vaisman.” Getting acquainted while driving through Central America, we’d discovered that both our paternal grandfathers were born in rural Ukraine between Kiev and Odessa. Just after the turn of the century, Mauricio Vaisman had escaped the pogroms by migrating to Brazil, marrying a woman he met on the boat from Europe. Within two years, they moved to Uruguay, and then to Argentina. Two generations later, Cecilia was born in Buenos Aires.

In the cab on the way to Herman and Margaret’s, we again compared family pictures. One was a wallet-sized portrait of my family, taken in 1949. In it, I am 2 years old. I’m on my father’s lap, dressed in shorts and suspenders; my hair, like my older sister’s, is light and curly. My dark-eyed mother stands behind us, leaning toward the camera. My sister Rochelle, then 7, has her arm around Dad’s shoulders. We look happy.

My resemblance to my mother, obvious in this photograph, is something everyone remarked upon during the first part of my life--until, years later, my father’s expressions surprisingly began to appear in the mirror. But even more intriguing is this smiling, youthful Si Weisman in an open-neck shirt, the shape of his face identical to Cecilia’s distinctive square features. The picture she held alongside it persuaded us that the likeness was beyond coincidence. It showed a thin, distinguished, graying man in a dark suit and tie, next to a buxom woman wearing a V-neck blouse and black skirt. They are seated in lawn chairs; around the edges of the picture are hints of broad-leafed foliage. These are her grandparents in Argentina, now deceased. Mauricio Vaisman’s head is cocked slightly toward his wife, Leah. His forehead is high, his nose straight, his ears slightly protruding, his expression erudite. He looks uncannily like my Uncle Herman, whose driveway we were just about to enter.

*

Herman had prepared seafood salad. My Aunt Margaret, wheeled to the table, wore a turquoise robe. Since I’d last seen her, the MS had advanced. Margaret’s wit and insight, accrued from a lifetime of reading, were still apparent, but she had to ask Cecilia several times where she was from and what she did. “Sorry, dear,” she apologized. “I ask myself the same things just as often,” she added, winking. Cecilia winked back. They both laughed.

Herman and Margaret’s youngest daughter, Abbi, had joined us with her husband and infant daughter. I had seen Abbi only once before, when she was 9, the same day I first met her older brother and sister. By then, I was already 25. On the way to dinner, I had explained to Cecilia that my father and his brother didn’t speak for nearly two decades, from the time I was 4 until just before my grandmother died. “Why not?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

That night, Herman cleared up speculation over whether Avraham Weisman and Mauricio Vaisman possibly had been brothers. Cecilia knew that her grandfather had two male siblings, but Herman was certain that his father had only a sister, named Rivkeh. Maybe, Herman surmised, our great-grandfathers were related. “It’s possible,” he said. “My grandfather may have had brothers. I know only that his name was Shuel--Saul.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were,” said my cousin Abbi, fingering the pictures. “He really looks like you, Dad.”

Herman gave Cecilia a hug. “‘Welcome back, relative.”

He went to a closet and returned with a oval-framed portrait of my grandfather Avraham. The severe man in this antiquated photograph was balding and bearded; nevertheless, he resembled several people in the room. I could also see my father. “What happened between you two?” I asked my uncle.

He knew who I meant. “That was a long time ago, Alan.”

“I know. I remember the last time I saw you. At Grandma’s.” His picture of my grandfather, which had formerly hung on my grandmother’s wall, stirred dusty recollections of her dark, cramped house in Minneapolis. It was a gloomy little gallery of the deceased, featuring framed tintypes of her rabbi father and his wife; of her husband, Avraham; a photo of Milstein, the hypochondriac she married in the States, who surprised everyone by actually dying from one of his multiple complaints; their daughter Frieda, taken at 13 by pneumonia, and a graduation picture of Herman and Si’s brother, my Uncle Harold, dead at 27 from infected kidneys.

The same year that Harold died, my grandmother had remarried again, this time to the widower of my grandfather Avraham’s sister, Rivkeh. This third husband, her former brother-in-law, had contributed his own photographic cache of deceased relatives to my grandmother’s dreary display, including a walnut-framed enlargement of his first wife, invalided in the pogroms, which hung from a tasseled cord. As a child, it was not a joy to be surrounded by their dead stares. Among my few pleasant memories was playing with Uncle Herman on my grandmother’s thin floral carpet. Then, at one point, whenever we made our usual Sunday visit, he was absent. “Why?” I repeated.

Herman and Margaret exchanged glances. “All right,” he said. “It was around the time when Si started his law firm.”

Herman by then was teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. One evening my father found himself dining with a professor who was his brother’s colleague. Sometime after his third whiskey, my father turned to him and inquired, “Tell me: Is my brother still a goddamn communist?”

This was 1951, the McCarthy era, and when this comment filtered back to my uncle, he confronted his brother and raised hell. After 40 years, Herman’s mild face still colored as he remembered. He had demanded an apology and had insisted that my father call their mutual acquaintance and retract the remark. “Of course, he refused. Si can be pretty stubborn.”

I could picture my father’s response to such a request. Herman saw my eyes roll. “But,” he hastened to add, “so can I. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t forgive him for quite a while. We lost 17 years.”

During a trip in 1968 to see his mother, Herman contacted my parents. The feud had persisted long enough, he said. My mother phoned me that night at college to describe the lovely dinner they’d had. Now I realized why she called: Her relief at seeing her husband reunited with his left-wing intellectual brother was partly because history was echoing itself with his son.

“I understand completely,” I told Herman. “You can imagine what we went through during Vietnam.”

Actually, he probably couldn’t, because the rupture between my father and me was pretty spectacular. In 1960, for my bar mitzvah present, Si had taken me to the national Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, where he was an alternate delegate. My immigrant father had become an intimate of men like senators Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, and young Walter Mondale. That week he helped craft the speech, delivered by Minnesota Gov. Orville Freeman, that nominated John F. Kennedy for president.

Eight years later, Kennedy was dead and Vietnam had swallowed his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, was about to be nominated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, despite the primary successes of his former Minnesota colleague, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy. For my father, now an attorney for the Teamsters, the choice was easy. Dismissing McCarthy as a deluded idealist, he had traveled to Chicago to help solidify organized labor’s allegiance to Humphrey. I, meanwhile, was encamped with thousands of peace demonstrators across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where he and the delegates were staying. The evening before the riots started, we met on the sidewalk. Following that encounter, our own silence began.

Cecilia hadn’t heard this story. “My God. What did he say when he saw you?”

“Among other things, that I was supporting the sons of bitches who killed his father.”

“What do you mean “killed his father’?” asked Herman.

“Communists. All my life I’ve heard how they assassinated my grandfather--your father--in Russia. And now I wanted to hand them Southeast Asia on a silver platter. Et cetera.”

Herman looked at me quizzically. “Communists didn’t kill my father.”

Now it was my turn to ask what he meant. “I’ve heard that story all my life,” I repeated.

He shook his head. I stared at him. “Then who?”

“It was the Cossacks.”

*

For three years following the 1917 October Revolution, civil war convulsed the Russian federation. The Ukraine especially was bedlam. When occupying German forces left after World War I, parts of the region were seized at various times by Ukrainian nationalists, Bolsheviks, the counter-revolutionary Cossack army and even the Poles. At one point, according to Herman, the Cossack general Anton Denikin launched a massive plunder of Ukrainian Jews. One evening, Denikin’s marauders rode their horses into Mala Viska.

They set fire to the village, burning my great-grandparents alive, seizing jewels and property, and raping and disemboweling my grandmother’s sister. When my grandfather Avraham saw them coming, he ran with my grandmother and their sons through the fields. The Cossacks fired after them. My grandfather, a big, easy target, was hit. He told Rebecca to take the boys and flee. Late that night, after the pogrom had waned, she returned to find he had bled to death. A neighbor helped bury him, then hid them overnight in his haystack. The following day, they left on foot for Yelizavetgrad. My grandmother carried a suitcase filled with Czarist rubles. She kept them until they left for America, but they remained worthless.

Herman removed his glasses and massaged his eyes. “Once,” he said, “when we were still in Yelizavetgrad, but after Denikin had left the Ukraine, she went back to see what she could rescue. Everything had been confiscated. All she got were some sacks of flour. She shared them with the neighbors to make matzos for Passover.”

“Wait a minute, Uncle Herman,” I interrupted. “You were only a couple of years old when this happened. My father was nearly 7. How could you possibly remember all this?”

“What I remember is my mother telling it, all the time I was growing up. I can still hear her, cursing the name of Gen. Denikin.”

*

Would my father have recognized this place? Mala Viska had been Sovietized--its center razed and replaced with a linden-lined parkway devoid of buildings, except for a small department store and one of the dull, cream-brick instant tenement housing projects of the Brezhnev era, ubiquitous throughout the former USSR. We drove past two statues of Lenin, a vintage armored tank on a pedestal slab and a monument to heroes of the Nazi occupation. A free-standing concrete wall bore a plaque honoring local schoolteachers, whose photographs were mounted alongside it.

It was Sunday and it was raining; nearly no one was on the streets. Volodya located the soviet, a featureless concrete structure in the middle stages of neglect. We were hoping to find the town historian, who would probably know where a mill had stood in 1918, but everything was locked. Next we tried the police station. Inside, two men with thick blond crew cuts wearing brass-buttoned uniforms were barking into telephones. Behind them was a large wall map of the district. Inexplicably, I felt a chill of slick terror. As one of them gave Tikhii directions to the historian’s house, I looked into his pale blue eyes, wondering if his grandfather had killed mine.

The old village of Mala Viska still existed after all, tucked out of sight behind all the public works. Grigory Nikolayevitch Perebenyev, retired school director and unofficial local historian, lived on a rutted dirt lane of zinc-roofed brick and wooden cottages, each with a vegetable patch and a coal bin. The rain had stopped; his wife and granddaughter were outside tending a bed of lilies. Grigory Nikolayevitch was bedridden with the grippe, but since I had come all the way from the United States, he donned slippers and a sweatsuit to receive us.

He told us that in the early part of the century there were four mills in or near Mala Viska. They had long since burned. Two of them--water mills--were noted by Pushkin when he passed through the village, he added proudly.

“That would have been before my grandfather’s time.”

“Da.” Of course. But the other two were more likely what we were seeking, anyway, because they were near the Jewish quarter. The bigger one, which was on the river, very well might have been Avraham Weisman’s. He recalled reading that the manager was a Jew named Lipschinsky.

He didn’t recognize my grandfather’s name, but that meant little, he said. Records were very sparse. “It was extremely complicated here during the period of the Civil War. The White Guard, then the Red Army, the Anarchists, the Grigor’ev gang, the Austro-Hungarians, the Don Cossacks. So much was destroyed. It wasn’t until 1920 that it was possible to say that the Soviet powers overwhelmed all the rest.”

“The Cossacks?”

“Certainly. Cossack troops moved through here from Novo-Mirgorod, during the summertime when people had begun harvesting. Many Jews were assassinated.”

“Are there any Jews left? Someone who might remember my family?”

His thin face filled with sympathy. “The only Jews here now are newcomers. All the others were killed during World War II. No one survived.” He thought a moment. “There’s someone who might know, though.”

*

We were looking for Lenina 91-A, the home of Varvara Spak. Lenina Street was near where the mill once stood, Grigory Nikolayevitch had told us. We stopped to ask directions from an old woman in a white wool babushka, gathering eggs from a chicken coop in her yard. Nearby, a goat was tied to a tree. A flatbed truck drove by, followed by a horse-drawn cart.

She asked why we had come. Tikhii explained about my father and grandfather. She didn’t know them, she said, but she hadn’t lived in Mala Viska until 1927. She pointed to the houses around her. Nearly all her neighbors were Jewish, she said. Her daughter’s friends. “Killed by the Nazis,” she said, “all the Jews and their children. It was impossible to do anything for them.” She reached for my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I explained that I hadn’t expected to find any relatives here. I only wanted to see it, maybe learn exactly what happened.

“Varvara remembers many things. Her daughter is a teacher. They should know.”

Varvara Spak’s house was white with green shutters. No one answered when we knocked, but presently she came up the path, walking with a cane. She wore a black kerchief patterned with roses. Her daughter carried kindling. We sat on a bench under a chestnut tree.

It was the daughter, Daria, a mathematics teacher, who knew the name Avraham Weisman. She had heard it in a lecture on the history of the oil press factory. That was him, I said.

Her mother was sorry that she didn’t remember my grandfather herself, though she wasn’t surprised, because she would have been a little girl then. She was two years older than my father, who had died on his 80th birthday. It occurred to me that I was talking to someone who might have seen him when he lived here. Suddenly this felt very real.

She did remember the mill and explained where it was, very close by. When she was in her teens, she said, it was run by an accountant named Lipschinsky. Then it burned.

Her teens: That would have been after the Russian revolution. Lipschinsky, the Jew, might have been my grandfather’s employee, kept on by the Communist government because he knew how to manage the mill. It made sense. Varvara thought so, too. “After the Bolsheviks took over, Jews worked and lived here like everyone else. Until the Nazis.”

“When exactly did the Bolsheviks take over?” I asked.

“Not until after 1920.”

“Then who killed my grandfather?” I asked. She looked at Tikhii, who translated. Then she turned back to me.

“When did you say he died?”

“Late 1918 or 1919.”

The old woman shuddered. “Then it was Denikin. Gen. Denikin killed many Jews. He ruled here two years. I met him myself. He came to our house and demanded that my older sister come to work in his kitchen. When my father refused, he nearly killed him, too.”

*

I walked through a glade of willows down to the river. The hillside above--where my grandfather’s mill, his house, and a small synagogue that Varvara Spak also remembered had once stood--was now planted in cabbage, potatoes and sugar beets. Mistechko, she had called this: a word meaning an enclave where Jews--mistechkovyj evrayij--lived. Bigger towns were often surrounded by mistechka, busy little hubs of local economy. The pogroms wiped them out.

I stood at the end of a low wooden dock so Volodya could take my picture. A green film of algae ribboned the water’s surface where reeds grew along the bank. Some geese floated by. Later, I would ask myself why my father had lied about what happened here--surely, like Herman, he had heard his mother’s curses--and finally I would figure it out. I would also see how that lie was magnified as it passed to the next generation--it was part of my birthright, and now, knowing the truth, I must answer for it. But in that moment, all I did was look up from the river to the cloud-hung sky and ask:

Dad, did you play right here? Can you see me? Do I have your expression on my face? Did you stand by the edge of this river? Yes, you did. You were here. This is what you lost. I am so sorry.

*

There are truths we are told and congenital truths we only sense. My father’s account of his own father’s murder was fundamental to my upbringing, yet it turned out that I was shaped even more by hidden undercurrents he was trying to escape. In this, I am not alone. Especially in this land of America--for reasons that his bewildering deception eventually led me to understand--children inherit not just the legacies our elders impart but also a void left by what they withhold. Instinctively, we yearn to fill it.

During the year my parents began to fail, I frequently rushed back from foreign assignments--once, all the way from Antarctica--to Arizona, where they had retired. I waited in hospital corridors with one while the other was in the intensive care unit, surrendered my father to a nursing home, threatened my mother’s arrogant oncologist with mayhem and stood vigil with each of them to the final breath. Later, staying up nights with my sister, going through papers and photographs, confronting the knickknacks of a lifetime--so invisible until the decision to keep or toss onto the miscellaneous table at the estate sale--I began to see the relationship between who they were and what I do. I had just listened as my mother’s life--orphaned by her mother, abandoned by her wandering father--passed before her ears while her two sisters keened and argued over her deathbed and recalled stories I never knew. Only weeks before, we had buried my father, wearing his tallis and his World War II dog tags, in a Jewish ceremony in a military cemetery, to the accompaniment of taps and rifle salutes and Kaddish. With their deaths, it dawned on me how often in my career I had chosen to write about the themes of their lives: immigration, orphans, violence and displacement. But it was only later, by attempting to unravel the reasons for my father’s fabrication, that I began to grasp that it was truly no accident that I became who I am.

“I remember my mother at the window,” my father’s cousin Harry Friedman told me, “crying that she had to help them.” We were at a Greek restaurant in Minneapolis; Friedman, at 77, was still a professor of ophthalmology . His mother, my grandmother’s older sister, had borrowed the money to bring my family to America.

Dr. Friedman, who was born in the United States, knew little about my father’s flight from Ukraine. But as he recalled that strained year when my grandmother and her refugee sons crowded under their roof, I suddenly glimpsed images that felt strangely like memory: My father and his younger brothers, chafing in the shadow of their cousins’ smooth native English; the growing tension every month when the usurious debt incurred on their behalf came due; hints of their aunt’s childhood resentment, suddenly exhumed by the arrival of my grandmother. She had been their rabbi father’s darling--alone among her sisters, she taught herself to read and write; now, still young and beautiful enough to attract suitors, she pleased no one when she inexplicably spurned a prosperous jeweler to marry a religious neurotic.

Least of all, her sons, who ended up with their useless stepfather’s bakery route because he wouldn’t drive in the snow. Yet I learned that my father’s temper, which filled my own youth with trembling, rarely surfaced in those teenage years. Instead, according to those who still remembered, he cooled and withdrew. That didn’t sound like the man who raised me, but I was beginning to understand why. By receding from them, he was reinventing himself.

As a journalist, I had seen it often but never recognized it in my own family: how displaced, dispossessed people create new histories or revise old ones to define themselves in alien settings. Even for brave risk-takers seeking a fresh beginning in a new place, the need to migrate bequeaths humiliation--guilt over being unable to withstand whatever led to exile, and shame for the homeland that forsakes its sons and daughters. Consequences of this disgrace, I have found, ripple through succeeding generations. I hear it in the frustration of U.S.-born Chicanos whose Mexican parents, clutching at America, deprived them of Spanish--just as my father never permitted my sister and I the Yiddish he spoke with his mother. He not only denied us a bond with this grandmother who never learned English, but he also kept us from knowing her truth. Our truth. Yet, before anger could engulf my memories of him, I realized that he had simply, blindly, done what all immigrants must do: whatever it takes to survive.

Football glory and the rewards he reaped by returning from World War II with a chestful of medals had taught my father that success in America came from being American. By associating with non-Jewish attorneys, even when founding his own firm, he continued to disengage from his past. Then, while Jewish entertainers and writers were being hounded as alleged communists by Sen. Joseph McCarthy--and when Jewish alarm intensified as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as traitors for selling atomic secrets to the Russians--my father found a way to transmute potential peril to his benefit.

How many times was he casually asked during those years, perhaps on the golf course or while sharing a drink after a day in court, “Si, aren’t you from Russia?” How long before he learned not only to disarm this question but to turn it to his advantage with a story of how the goddamn communists butchered his father? During the McCarthy era, I imagine this became a very useful, revisionist personal history. Unfortunately, to pull it off meant severing himself from his only living brother, whose mild leftist tendencies, he apparently decided, posed a threat to what he’d achieved.

He went on to become a liberal attorney, defending workers’ and civil rights. He trained me to believe in justice and truth. Was this in atonement? I thank him for it, even though it backfired on him when I began to accuse as unjust some elementary American institutions he had adopted as sacred. Because of him, I opposed one war and went on to identify others as worthy of fighting, just as he did against Hitler. Whenever I pursued a dangerous story, on some level I was emulating the way he risked his life for what he thought was right.

Do I forgive his lie--the anger and loneliness he caused his brother, the easy false premise by which he tried to convince me what to think and whom to hate? Obviously, before long, he actually believed it. It became his truth. What concerns me more now is to what extent this lesson of expediency at the expense of ethics has crept into my own life. What myths do I invent, which corners do I cut? Do I justify doing so, just as my father’s need to assimilate justified his own deception? Do we all ultimately resort to self-delusion, just to survive? Do entire nations do the same?

These questions are my legacy from him: a terrorized 10-year-old when he arrived here, witness to his own father’s murder in the roiling aftermath of the Russian revolution. I’m sure that the 10-year-old boy, hawking papers in the Minnesota cold, didn’t care whether Bolsheviks or pillaging Cossacks did it. All he knew was that his father was dead and his uprooted family now had nothing. The myth-making came later.

Yet maybe, I tell myself now, that myth really wasn’t so calculated. Maybe the traumatized, fatherless boy needed an anti-communist martyr to live up to as he groped his way in a bountiful but callous America. Maybe later, as a man, he never fully trusted that his considerable attainment of the American dream was due more to his grit than to his subterfuge.

Or maybe this: Today, whenever Newt Gingrich and his ilk appear on TV, justifying their pogrom against the poor while distinguished analysts nod approvingly, I suffer a flashback: I am again 4 years old, watching Joe McCarthy whip his Senate committee into a froth on a black-and-white screen, naming names and spitting accusations, while my tight-lipped parents murmur “‘God, say it can’t happen here, too.” And I realize that maybe my father’s truth was that he just never forgot how flimsy the dream really is, after losing nearly everything one unholy night in Mala Viska.