Claire Ballman
Jewel Rosenberg
I am compelled to look for more information—I have always known things that I don’t know that I know. Unidentifiable bits and pieces would visit me in my mind’s eye as if somewhere between dream and reality, but now I want to understand what I know and why.
The twenty-first-century search for roots is decidedly different from what it was as recently as the late 1990s. Now it is all about the Internet—Google, Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, and JewishGen. It is about electronic message boards and user-submitted family trees, and all of it a far cry from the days when you pulled out the family Bible and checked the names written in the front, when cousins lived next door, when you sat down and talked with old folks who, even if they weren’t related, had known your family intimately for generations.
On the Internet, one can within seconds locate the long-lost and create a portrait of family out of the scraps of information that float randomly like atoms smashed, like fractured molecules desperate to reconnect. Every clue leads to another; first you find that there are several versions of the person you are looking for—the wrong ones, the almost right ones, and then the one.
Genealogical research is currently one of the top-ranked hobbies in the United States—in some ways it’s more like a sport, collecting ancestors like baseball cards. It’s also a kind of couch potato way of traveling through time—it’s done in isolation, at odd hours, in a virtual world—and yet it is about connection, getting back in touch. And it is addictive. I am at it round the clock, a twenty-first-century Sherlock Holmes, trying to make this information age work for me. I pay $200 to join Ancestry.com. I buy electronic multipacks of articles from the Washington Post archive. I am perpetually punching in my credit card information—blindly buying anything that might be relevant.
I begin with my father’s parents. I do not know their names, I know only that my mother told my father she was pregnant on the day his mother died—so I’m thinking it had to be sometime in 1961. I search the Washington Post archive and there she is, my grandmother Georgia Hecht—passed away on April 11, 1961. (Not so long ago, in my collection of stories Things You Should Know, I wrote about an unmarried woman getting pregnant. She names the child Georgica. Conscience, or coincidence?)
Each time I locate something—a detail, a fact, a missing fragment of information—I have the sense of having made a match. Something lights up. Bingo! We have a winner! And for a moment everything is clear, and then just as quickly I am all too aware that still, always and forever, there will be an enormous amount that remains a mystery.
My father’s father is more difficult. Before I find him I locate his mother’s parents. I put the name Georgia Hecht into a 1930 census search and find her living with my father, who is five, at her parents’ house in Washington, D.C. Now not only do I have her maiden name—Slye—but I have her mother and father, my great-grandparents Mary Elizabeth Slye and Chapman Augustus Slye. I discover that Chapman A. Slye was a steamboat captain and also find in quick succession a dozen great-aunts and-uncles.
Within a week, I have traced the Slye family back to George Slye, born in Lapworth, Warwick, England, in 1564. I locate Robert Slye, born July 8, 1627, in England, who came to America and in 1654 was named as one of the parliamentary commissioners to govern Maryland under Oliver Cromwell, lord high protector of England. He was also speaker of the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly and captain of the colonial militia in St. Mary’s County, and served as a St. Mary’s County Court justice. Linda Reno, a wonderfully generous researcher I meet online, forwards a historical note showing that on April 24, 1649, a court in Hartford, Connecticut, fined Robert Slye ten pounds of tobacco for exchanging a gun with an Indian.
I am in the Washington Post archive looking up the Slyes, and there—buried in the January 25, 1955, obituary of Mary Elizabeth Slye, wife of the late Captain Chapman A. Slye, mother of “Mrs. Irving Hecht” (aka Georgia Slye)—is the information I’ve been looking for: Irving Hecht—my father’s father. I try to find Irving Hecht in the census and can’t—it is as though he was absent on the day in 1930 when they counted all the people. Who was he? Where was he? What were the circumstances that took him away from his wife and son? What did he do for a living?
Once it begins, the search is urgent; I am up in the night surfing, connecting the dots. Suddenly there are pieces of information I can’t live without. Locating Irving Hecht takes me several more hours, but when I find his obituary—Thursday, July 5, 1956—I also find his brothers, Nathan of New York, Arthur S. of San Francisco, my great-uncles!
And as I am finding the right people I am also just as rapidly finding others that are right for a moment and then are proven wrong. For a long time I am sure one of the Harry Hechts is my grandfather, and then before I find the right Irving Hecht, I find the wrong Irving Hecht, living with his wife, Anna, and young son, Bertram, in Brooklyn on January 6, 1920. With each discard comes the lingering sense that invariably we’re all interconnected, all responsible for one another, and that no one Hecht is any more or less compelling than the next. Coming from a position of having no history, having any history, even if it is the wrong history, is fascinating. Every life lived is of interest.
Bloodlines—I find myself more and more interested in the strangers I never knew, in the blood relations that are unveiling themselves before me. I notice that I am not as motivated to dig for the history of the mother and father I grew up with, and am not sure why. Is it because I already feel familiar and familial with them—or is there something psychically unique about discovering this new biological narrative? There is no escaping that what I am finding resonates; there is the hum of identification, a sense of wholeness and well-being. On a cellular level it makes sense—it matches. And simultaneously there is a kind of contradiction, a challenge to who I think I am, how I experience myself. The best way I can describe this experience, which eludes conventional language, is to say I think of this as the difference or dissonance between the unknown or dormant biological self that I arrived with and the adopted, adapted self that I became. The looking, the digging awakens numb spots, labyrinths in my own experience, in my ability to process. I feel a peculiar overexcited high and at other moments a devastating depression. I continue to dig, thinking that if I consume information, I will be able to inhabit it, I will feel more complete—not realizing that perhaps the exact opposite is just as possible.
The desire to know oneself and one’s history is not always equal to the pain the new information causes. At times I have to slow down to accommodate a self that is constantly struggling to catch up, to recalibrate. I go to bed at midnight, and at 2 A.M. find myself at my desk—logging on. In the middle of the day I nap. My brain is constantly reshuffling the files and organizing and accommodating the new information. On the one hand I want to know my history, and on the other it is overwhelming to become aware of so many lives and to realize that most, if not all, of my ancestors are completely ignorant of my history and/or even my existence. There is a part of me that resents how hard I am working to locate information that they have lived with all along—information that is theirs for the asking.
I am looking at the records of the Slyes of St. Mary’s County, who owned other people and who sold or gave them away. I am looking at these early settlers wondering, What were they thinking? Why, having come from such incredible privilege, did they not do more with their lives? They got here first, came with land and labor and power, and what did they end up building for themselves? Why did none become president, or direct a large corporation? Why did they not lay the railroad, or discover electricity? Why did they not start a nonprofit or fund philanthropy? I am frustrated with them for falling through the cracks of history. I think a lot about responsibility—did they take responsibility for who they were and what they did? What quality of people were they? And why does it mean so much to me? Why do I need for them to be good—better than good—need them to be great?
These are my souls.
I go to the New York City Municipal Archives at 31 Chambers Street. To get in, you have to show identification, tell them what you are there for, get a pass, and then go through metal detectors. I am stopped because somewhere in my bag I have a pair of tweezers. I leave the tweezers at the desk. In room 103, I sign in and pay $5 to use the microfilm machines. The people who work there have been there forever—they know the contents of each of the flat metal drawers, they know the Soundex system of organizing information, the difference between a marriage license and a marriage certificate. They know how to dig for buried treasure—but they are cranky about answering questions. It is like a civil servant episode of Taxi, with Danny DeVito playing the hostile clerk behind the counter.
Still, there is an undeniable beauty to the things found in this room—reels and reels of microfilm, images of lives lived long ago, documents writ in an ornate Old World hand of variable legibility. I go through the reels slowly at first, not wanting to fast-forward, not wanting to miss anyone, feeling like each one of them is due a visitor, an appreciation.
The room is full of people each piecing together their private puzzles and the first thing that occurs to me is they’re not all adopted—so what are they looking for? I remind myself that the quest to answer the question Who am I? is not unique to the adoptee. In this room everyone is looking for something that will help them either confirm or deny part of what they believe about themselves. They are looking for backup, support, for definition. They are all deep in it—buried in names, dates, codes—but most are also happy to render assistance. Some volunteer helpful hints, while others tell their stories. I often ask, “How long have you been at it?” “Seven years,” one woman tells me. “It started as a hobby, a birthday present for my husband,” another says. “It started when my father died,” another woman says. “Have you tried the Italians? They keep good records, even on the Jews.”
Another woman leans over and whispers, “Have you been to Salt Lake City?” Salt Lake is “the mountain,” the mecca for genealogical information—home base for the Mormons, who go around the world collecting genealogical data. Every month five to six thousand reels of microfilm are added to their collection. Unbeknownst to much of the general population, the reason the Mormon Church has such wonderful genealogical records is that they’re collecting people—they hope to determine the genealogy of everyone in the world to prepare them for posthumous conversion. Basically they’re making Mormons from the dead—baptism by proxy. They have a purification ritual through which they claim you as their own. There has been outrage from the Jewish community because the Mormons took the information of Holocaust victims—people who were killed because of their religion—and made them Mormons. In 1995 the LDS church said it would honor an agreement to stop the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims and other deceased Jews, and yet it continues. “And they are making more Mormons every day. I went once for two weeks,” the woman tells me. “It was heaven. Think about it,” she says.
There is the whir of the machines, juxtaposed against the virtual silence in which everyone works—it is difficult to stay focused. Repeatedly and anxiously I lose track of what I am looking for. A guy in a white shirt is hogging the files; he’s got multiple drawers open, his arms filled with reels, and he’s blocking the way. The rule is one reel at a time—take it, look at it, and put it back—which also makes it harder to misfile upon return. “Excuse me,” I say, “it’s one reel at a time.” He ignores me. “Excuse me,” I try again. “Just a minute,” he grumps, digging through a drawer. I push my leg against the drawer, threatening to close it on his hand. “Excuse me—Is your dead person somehow more important than anyone else’s?”
I find marriage certificates for David and Rika Hecht, my paternal great-grandparents, both born in Germany, and with each come the names of their parents, my great-great-grandparents: Nathan Hecht and Regina Grunbaum and Isaac Ehrenreich and Rosa Steigerwald. Within the hour I have birth certificates for Irving (born Isaac), Arthur Samson, and Nathan—my grandfather and great-uncles.
I locate Moriz Billman, born in Gomel, Russia, in 1846, who came into America in 1888 with a second wife and children from two marriages, and who later petitioned to become a citizen of the United States as Morris Bellman of 466 Bergen Street in Brooklyn. I find Billmans who became Bellmans and then Ballmans. I get a copy of the marriage license of my maternal grandfather, Bernard Bellman, to my maternal grandmother, Clara Kahn, and find that Bernard was married before and in 1925 divorced a woman named Margaret R. Bellman. Did his children—my mother and her brother—know? Were there other children from the first marriage? The man at the desk tells me that if I am curious I can look upstairs on the seventh floor—if the divorce was filed in New York City, I might just find it there.
With each name and date comes imagery. I start making mental pictures of who they were—who I might be. I am the granddaughter of an English Southern belle. I am the granddaughter of a Romanian/French immigrant. I am the granddaughter of the Lithuanian farmer girl, the granddaughter of the Russian bookie, the granddaughter of an Irishwoman. I am the adopted daughter of the guidance counselor and the left-wing artist and the biological daughter of the philandering adulterer and the wayward girl, the little girl lost.
I am back in time, wading across a clear running creek. I am a farmer on a plantation, I am captain of a ship. I am the woman in a long white dress, my curly hair high up on my head; I am feeling the heat of summer—the Southern humidity, the thick stagnant afternoon air, the coming of thunderstorms. I am conjuring sea captains and drinking glasses of blood red wine. This is the stuff of poems and fever dreams. I am of a plantation and I can say I knew it all along at some preconscious level. I am imagining the lives of indentured servants and slaves—some of whom had the very same names as the people I am looking for. When were they freed and where did they go?
What becomes clear is that all of this is about narrative—the story told. I can’t escape the oddity of how it happened that I, a person without a past, became a novelist, a storyteller working from my imagination to create lives that never existed. Every family has a story that it tells itself—that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates; some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.
As children we are all gullible by nature. It doesn’t occur to us to question the family narrative; we accept it as fact, not recognizing that it is a story, a multilayered collaborative fiction. Think of the variations, the implications in terms of time, place, social status and structure. You are from Topeka and have been for five generations; your grandfather was a preacher, your grandmother half Indian. Or your grandmother is from a small village in Italy; she came here after her entire family was killed in a flood of volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Your mother was married once before and had a child she gave away—somewhere you have a sister. Your mother was out walking one night and someone came up behind her—and the product was you.
I take the elevator to the seventh floor. The smell of stale paper smacks you as soon as the elevator door opens; the hallways are filled with metal shelving units, packed with paper, precariously perched files that are threatening to tumble onto the floor. This is the history of New York, the history of America—and it’s as though I’ve plunged into a Coen brothers movie.
It is a room of tables pushed together into a center square. There are current and not so current newspapers on the table and people sitting around, doing nothing—I am not sure if they work here or are people with nowhere to go. Maybe this is a historical day treatment center; maybe people are doing a certain kind of “time.” The room is absent of air, of the passage of minutes, hours, and years. “Where would I find a divorce from the 1920s?” I ask the entire room. One man perks up. “Might be over here in the card catalog,” he says, nodding toward the corner. There are huge metal cabinets, with cards for each lawsuit filed. Next to the card catalogs there is a large metal locker. Curious, I pry the door open. Old directories sigh and crumbling pages tumble out, dumping what looks like sawdust—or mouse bedding—onto the floor. Quickly I close the door and go back to the card catalogs. Again, I am flying blind, looking for anything and everything under any of the names on my list—Hecht, Bellman, Ballman, Billman.
“What kind of case is this?” I say, showing the man the card for Hecht vs. in RE.
“Oh, that’s going to be interesting,” the clerk tells me. Is he serious, or sarcastic? “The in RE cases usually mean that someone was either a minor or otherwise incompetent to represent themselves.”
Just the phrase, “In Re:,” gets my mind going. I sing to myself, “In Re:, a drop of golden sun.”
“If you want the files you have to fill out a request—the old cases are stored off-site.”
“Great, where’s the form?”
“Sixty Chambers Street. Room 114.”
Sixty Chambers Street is impossible to find, even though it’s supposedly right around the corner. The narrow streets of lower Manhattan are dwarfed by large hulking buildings—some incredibly old, others more modern fortresses. Between the buildings there are police patrolling with machine guns in hand—this is our new world, post 9/11, and we seem to believe that people patrolling with guns makes us safer. There is a prison right there and a woman standing guard outside with a flak jacket and a big gun. “Excuse me, where is 60 Chambers Street?” She tells me, “I have no idea,” and in a minute I discover that it is just across the street, and I’m thinking it’s a problem that the guard doesn’t know where she is and doesn’t seem to care—especially if she had to tell someone where she was or which way someone went.
The dissonance is shocking—on the outside there is the Jersey wall, men and women with guns, the bright wash of summer light, the incredible baking heat, and inside, the smell of age, of mold and dust and things not touched for fifty years. I am depressed as hell, reminded of how unattached I am, and how crazy it is to do this digging—nobody cares. Whatever I find, it’s only ephemera, the thinnest bits of information. I think of the papers that blew from lower Manhattan into Brooklyn when the World Trade towers fell, burned notes from people’s desks, and how people clung to these scraps as if they held the secrets of the world, of creation.
At 60 Chambers the guard at the metal detector stops me and I confess that I have tweezers in my bag. He doesn’t care. All he wants to know is, “Do you have a camera on your phone?” No. Inside I file my requests. It’s noon. I am exhausted.
From my apartment I am exchanging e-mails with strangers and with relatives I have known for the whole of my life. I pull the adoptive relations in a little closer. I have the sense of belonging to my adoptive family more than I did as a child—this comes from having shared the experience of growing up within a narrative that, while it is not my own biologically, is now mine socially and culturally. I write to my adoptive maternal relatives in Paris and London. From them I collect tales of Jacob Spitzer’s dairy farm on the Mohawk Trail in North Adams, Massachusetts—the dog, the cow, the horses, Nigger and Dick. There are stories about the children (the great-aunts and-uncles that I grew up with), Lena, Henry, Helen—who died in 1912 of diphtheria at fourteen—Maurice, Samuel, Solomon, (known as Charlie), Harold, Doris, and my beloved grandmother Julia Beatrice.
I collect information about Simon Rosenberg and Sophie Rothman—my adoptive maternal great-grandparents, born in the 1870s in Braila, Romania, a town on the Danube. My grandfather, Bernard, their eldest child, was born there in 1896, and by 1898 the family moved to an apartment at 64 rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais district of Paris. In France they had a successful hat factory and a very large family. My great-aunts and-uncles there include Rachel, who burned to death at three when the children were left home alone and her dress caught fire—my grandfather and his brother tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out. Among the other children were Joffre (who died at six), Raymond, Etienette, Henriette (who lived for six days), Adele, Maurice and Julien (who both died at Auschwitz), Emmanuel (who died of wounds in World War II), and another brother, Leon. In 1972, when my grandfather died in Washington, I got two of his hats, a winter hat and a summer hat. Elegant and understated, he never went out without a hat. At thirteen, I visited Paris and met Adele and Etienette. We went to 64 rue Vieille du Temple—my grandfather’s family name was still on the buzzer, more than fifty years after the fact.
Through my adoptive father, several aunts in Florida, and a cousin ten blocks from me in New York, I cobble together the story of my adoptive paternal grandfather and grandmother—Jacob Homes and Minerva Katz. Throughout my childhood they never spoke of their past—I knew them only as hardworking people with a fondness for cheese Danish and stewed fruit. Jacob Homes (Homelsky) was born in Russia in 1892 and had three sisters and a brother. In 1910 he walked from Russia to Finland and found work on a boat, which landed him first in Canada and then in Philadelphia—where he earned enough to bring his mother and siblings to this country. In 1916 he met Manya Kvasnikaya (Minerva Katz) from Ekaterinoslav, Russia.
Minerva, the youngest daughter in a large family, was a late-in-life baby, rejected by her parents and largely raised by her oldest sister. She was educated for two years in a Russian school and then tutored by someone who gave her lessons while she sat atop a pickle barrel at the herring stall her sister ran. At home, Minerva slept above the oven on a bed of straw.
As a young teenager she traveled to the United States with her sister and brother-in-law, and they settled in northern New Jersey. She worked as a cashier in Atlantic City, went to school through sixth grade, and later lived in Philadelphia with a woman who sold goods to immigrants. There Minerva slept on a board over the bathtub.
In Philadelphia, Jacob Homes delivered meat from the butcher to the house where Minerva was living—he liked her because she could read and write. They married; a first son died at birth. In 1918 Joseph Meyer Homes, my adoptive father, was born, followed by five sisters. No one recalls whether Jacob’s father came to this country—but all believe he was killed in an accident, run over by a wagon.
In 1929, when they were living in New Jersey, the family’s butcher shop burned down and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Minerva’s brother lived. In Washington Jacob found a tank in a junk pile, filled it with gasoline, and took it to the farmers’ market—selling gas by the five-gallon bucket to the farmers for their return trips after the market. He progressed to selling gas on the streets for ten cents a gallon and grew the business into the Homes Oil Company.
It was only when I started asking questions about the family history that my adoptive father told me one of the stranger stories of his youth—a moment where his own history collided with a particularly ugly and now forgotten moment in American history. In July 1932, he was working at his father’s gas station on Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C., when generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton lead four troops of cavalry, four troops of infantry, a mounted machine gun squadron, and six tanks on a mission ordered by President Hoover to run the “Bonus Marchers” out of town. Soldiers on horseback with bayonets chased the Marchers—World War I veterans—out of their makeshift housing. Men and animals came charging right through the gas station. My grandfather grabbed my father and pulled him to safety. The story of my father and the Bonus Marchers—twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans who marched on Washington, demanding payment of a cash bonus—is one that I hear for the first time when I am forty-four years old. I am thrilled to have it. I feel as though I’m slowly reconstructing an ancient lost tapestry.
At home in New York the electronic dig continues. I hire two researchers to help me—one in New York and one just outside Washington, D.C. We communicate by e-mail only. I tell them about the bits and pieces, the fragments of facts that I’m looking for, and they go in search. I am happy to have more than one mind on this—more than one thought pattern trying to piece the puzzle together.
I am in correspondence with someone living in Israel who may be related to my adopted father’s family in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I am talking with the Reverend John Gray in Ohio, whose interest in genealogy was sparked by the idea that he might be related to his movie hero, Roy Rogers, aka Leonard Franklin Slye. The Reverend Gray sadly reports that he is not related to Roy, but in all likelihood I am—Roy was a Slye from Warwickshire, England, and Ohio. I am exchanging regular e-mails with Linda Reno in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. She is, in fact, a distant relative and has done enormous research charting the Slye family. Each of my correspondents is as nearby as the computer keyboard, and yet as ethereal and vaporous as memory itself. And still and always I feel on the outside. I worry that at any minute I will be busted, and my pen pals will say, You are not part of this family, and you are not entitled to this information. With my chest tight I e-mail Linda Reno confessing my illegitimacy, and when I don’t hear back for two days I am terrified—and then enormously relieved when I do, and her response is warm, genuine, and accepting.
It goes on for months—in waves. I hunt and gather and then, exhausted and often disheartened, I stop and I pull myself together and do it again. I become convinced that I can crack the case of my biological maternal grandmother’s second husband—I have what I am quite sure is a photo of him and my grandmother, on what looks like a New Year’s Eve in the 1950s. I find a lot of Barney Ackermans in Florida; it seems like the kind of place where a Barney Ackerman would retire. I find a scrap of information that seems to indicate there was a Barney Ackerman who died in Canada in the 1990s but I can’t piece it together. When were Barney Ackerman and Clare Kahn Ballman married and divorced? Finally, through the Washington, D.C., researcher there is a crack in the case—she finds the wedding license. They were married September 22, 1950. Ellen would have been twelve years old at the time—vulnerable to this already twice-married stepfather. Another crack in the case brings me his obituary—it lists him as a dry cleaner and says that he was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and died March 28, 1993, at the time of his death married to Jeanne Ackerman of Hebron, Nova Scotia. That makes at least four marriages—with the first divorce in Florida, the second in Reno, the third probably in northern Virginia around 1960. He has one daughter and at the time of his death one granddaughter. Did Ellen know he died—was she relieved? It was never clear to me what Ellen’s relationship to this man was. From what she said to me in phone conversations and from what Norman was later able to add, my sense is that the relationship was at least to a degree sexualized and made her very uncomfortable.
More digging. I find Pearl B. Klein, sister of Bernard Bellman, admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar in 1924 at the same time as her husband, Alfred Klein, who later became chief law officer of the Civil Service Union.
I find Bernard Bellman’s brother John (born Jake) Bellman, whose son Richard became a major figure in the mathematics world, conceiving the idea of “dynamic programming.” Richard taught at Princeton and Stanford and worked for the Rand Corporation and at Los Alamos, while also writing forty books related to mathematical theory. I go back and forth through the material and each time I sift, new crumbs fall out—last names, the married names of sisters, the names of uncles, cousins, locations, each bit a piece of the puzzle.
My search expands. I use Internet search engines such as AnyWho.com to locate addresses for random people named Slye, Bellman, Ballman, Hecht (there’s almost no one named Homes). I write letters explaining that I am a journalist working on a family history project and would like to talk with them. As exciting as it is, I find it difficult to get the letters into the mail, difficult to make the follow-up calls. I want to talk to them, but I worry they won’t want to talk to me—and by the way, what am I going to say if and when they ask me who I am?
I hire a graduate student to help me make the first round of calls, answering any basic questions—establishing that, yes, this is a legitimate research project. I do the follow-up interviews. I speak with two Slyes who happen to be reverends, Harry in Texas and John in Virginia—neither knows the other, but both are incredibly nice, warm, forthcoming, proud of their family. I talk with Chapman Slye, who runs twenty-eight school cafeterias in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and is named after my great-grandfather. Chapman tells me about the family ties to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, about the adventures he had with his grandfather Harry E. “Skipper” Slye Sr., a shipmaster who lived to be 102 years old and guided boats up the Potomac River until he was eighty-five. He also suggests I talk with his mother, widow of Harry E. Slye Jr. I speak with her and numerous other Slye cousins. And when I ask about Georgia Slye Hecht, no one seems to remember much, except that she was “formidable,” “dominant,” and many of them were a little scared of her—especially women marrying into the family. The Slyes I speak with are a lovely, hardworking, earnest, good-natured group, very proud of their family history; but as in many American families, each successive generation seems to move farther from the family seat and is less in touch with its extended family, less aware of the family history. They ask me nothing about how I might be related to the family and when I ask one of them if there was any intermarriage, he tells me that the biggest thing was when Catholics married into the family. There is no sense of there ever having been a Jew among them—no mention of Georgia Slye marrying Irving Hecht—which gives me further insight into my biological father, Norman’s, determination to go out of his way to identify himself as not Jewish. The Reverend Harry L. Slye speaks of family reunions, long ago, when his grandfather, also Harry L. Slye, a prominent Washington, D.C., undertaker, would bring chairs from the funeral parlor out to the family home in the then rural suburbs, and the full extended family, cousins of all ages and generations, would gather, feasting on St. Mary’s County oysters, playing games, and dancing on the lawn.
My assistant reaches someone in New York named Robert Hecht, who is not likely a relative. He tells her that he’s leaving for Paris and I can call him there—I wait a few days and try. A woman answers the phone and explains that he’s now gone back to New York. “What is this in reference to?” she asks and I am on the spot. I make an effort to explain. “I’m not sure he’ll be interested,” she says, “but you might want to e-mail my daughter and plead your case.” She gives me the e-mail address of her daughter, a lawyer in New York. Ruffled by her use of the phrase “plead your case,” I gather my courage and ask, “What’s your name?” “Elizabeth Hecht,” she says, and a chill runs through me. Elizabeth Hecht, that was my name—that was the name on the little bracelet that I wore home from the hospital. All the more odd because my adoptive mother had planned to name me Elizabeth but, when she saw the bracelet, she changed her mind. “Elizabeth Hecht,” she says, and it was the last thing I was expecting. Chemicals of every sort flood my system, telling my brain to hang up, to flee, telling my brain to laugh, telling my brain this is so strange—she’s not really Elizabeth Hecht; she was once Elizabeth Somebody Else and she married Hecht. “You can try my husband,” she says. “He’s back in New York.”
I dial the number in New York; an older man answers and tells me this is not a good time for us to talk. “I’m on my way out.”
The tenor of these conversations makes me wonder who these people are.
I Google Robert Hecht and Elizabeth Hecht and find out that he is a very famous dealer of antiquities and part of an international scandal involving the sale of allegedly stolen Italian artifacts, and as of the end of 2005 was on trial in Rome, along with former Getty Museum curator Marion True, accused of trafficking in ancient art.
As far as I can tell, Robert and Elizabeth Hecht are not my relatives, but again, I find the story fascinating.
One day as I’m going through the Bellman documents, I feel brave and leave a phone message for an Eric Bellman, a therapist in California. I call knowing that somewhere I have a relative named Eric Bellman—son of Richard Bellman and brother of Kristie, who I wrote to after Ellen died and never heard back from. It takes Eric weeks to call back, but it is a match. I’m pleased with my ability to deduce which of the Eric Bellmans in the United States is a biological relative. I tell him about my project, about the dozens of letters sent. I tell him that I’ve heard from a lot of Slyes and Hechts but no Bellmans. He tells me that Bellmans are like that—whatever “that” means—and while we don’t have an enormous amount to discuss, I am glad to have made contact.
What I don’t tell him is that after I decide that he was the Eric Bellman that I was looking for, I Googled his image and then compared the photograph I found online to one of his father taken many years ago. Playing my own version of FBI analyst, I compared their hairlines, their eyebrows, the shape of their chins and concluded that this Eric Bellman was the right Eric Bellman.
In my searching, I find newspaper clips relating to the Hecht family in and around the New York area. Again, I Google and come up with Warren Hecht, a dentist. I call his office. He answers the phone himself, I attempt to explain the project. “Write me a letter,” he says gruffly. “Okay, but can I just ask you a quick question? Are you by any chance related to Arthur, Nathan, and Irving Hecht?” Elated, he repeats the names. “Arthur, Irving, Nathan,” he says. “Yes, Nathan was my father.” “I thought so.” “Who is this?” He asks. We talk excitedly for a few minutes and he proposes that we meet the following Tuesday at 7 A.M. Surprised by his enthusiasm, I agree. It’s as though he’s discovered a long-lost relative—which in fact he has. When Warren asks how I fit in, I tell him that I am the daughter of Norman Hecht but that Norman and my mother weren’t married, so I didn’t grow up with him. That seems to land without much complication. He says how much he’s looking forward to meeting me and we hang up.
The following Tuesday, my phone rings at six-fifteen in the morning. It’s Warren Hecht calling to cancel our meeting. “I’m just too busy,” he says. “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.” When I push him to find out if he’s really too busy, or if there’s more to it, he seems nervous. I find myself wondering who got to him—who turned off the enthusiasm? Devastated, I let him go—I hadn’t realized how much I was looking forward to meeting him. I wanted to show him what I’d found, his father’s birth certificate, his grandparents’ marriage certificate. I wanted to ask what he knew about his grandparents, his uncles, and so on. After that, I decide to suspend the live interview portion of the adventure at least for now. It’s too much of a setup for rejection and too painful to continually repeat.
I sign up for the National Geographic genealogy project. I pay $100 and scrape the inside of my cheek, twice over a period of twenty-four hours—collecting DNA—and send it off, as if to join the family of man. Online I spot another DNA test that promises to tell me the most likely names of my ancestors. I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband’s family name—she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism—the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost—no one questions it.
Months later I go online, punch in the ID number that came with my test kit, and am given the information that my DNA belongs to the Haplogroup U, and that yes, like every woman I am descended from “Mitochondrial Eve.” But who was she? Can I look her up on AnyWho.com? Can I write her a letter? From the information provided, I learn very little about my genetic journey. I am given the option of printing out high-resolution documents, including a personalized certificate that says I participated in the Genographic Project, but other than that I feel like I spent $100 to find out what I already know—I am related to everyone.
Among my best online discoveries is Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, an organization of almost five thousand volunteers who will search for information in their local area—investigate historical records and church documents, trace headstones. Their volunteers are spread throughout the United States, Canada, and forty-four countries—the group averages eighty-two hundred requests a year.
Dipping further into history, I go to 60 Centre Street in New York City, another of the city’s record offices, and request all files with the relevant surnames.
A week later the New York county clerk calls and leaves a message saying that some of my files have come in and that others cannot be located because they have been destroyed. Downtown I plunge into the labyrinth. Over a high wooden counter the case files are handed to me; they are crisp with age, these brittle documents, the onionskin paper dried out, each piece like a pathologist’s slices of the skin. The pages are typed, the signatures and notations made with an inky black pen. I am pouring quarters into the Xerox machines, hurrying to photograph the faded pages—as though to copy them as quickly as possible before they evaporate, as though taking these poor copies out of the building with me makes them permanent, real, present in this world.
I examine the cases, having no idea if these people are related to me and to a large degree not caring. Each is a history, a story drawing me in.
Magdaline Bellman vs. William H. Bellman
Action for an absolute divorce alleging: “That defendant on the 14 day of August 1923 at Hollywood Crossing in Cedarhurst Long Island, in the borough of Queens City and State of New York committed adultery with a woman whose name is unknown to the plaintiff…. That the sole issue of said marriage is one child Howard Bellman who was born on the 11th day of February 1913.
The divorce, granted January 30, 1923, stipulates that William H. Bellman was not free to marry again without permission of the court. In January of 1934 William Bellman returns to court, asks for and receives permission to marry.
Did Magdaline Bellman really not know the name of the woman her husband slept with, or is this a way of being polite? Where at Hollywood Crossing did the affair occur—was it a motel? And is the street name Hollywood Crossing not incredibly ironic? Was the unnamed woman William slept with the same woman he married ten years later? What happened to Magdaline and her son, Howard? And are they related to me?
The clerk at 31 Chambers was right—the in RE cases are the most fascinating. The outer folders are stamped in faded large red letters: LUNACY.
B. Kahn vs. In Re: Case 20101 1928
Bernhard Kahn of West 104th Street, born in Russia, aged fifty-four, arrived in the U.S., lived in Chicago and after being in New York six months, on May 19, 1928 was committed to Manhattan State Hospital, Wards Island.
He had been brought to Bellevue from the 10th precinct by ambulance.
Officer stated patient turned on fire hydrant on Lexington Ave; said he wanted to wash down the germs; the city was full of malaria germs and insane germs and the people were all going insane; had thrown away his hat because it was full of germs and bugs—was talkative.
In the presence of the doctors, the patient said:
I went to Cook County hospital—they took so many people from our trade and they tortured and they killed them—In Chicago I was against prohibition—I was against whores—We had had brown taxis and yellow taxis—Three million people tortured me in my city of Chicago—From the psychopathic I came to New York—the Jews are writing about the Hazenz here—then they got the attendants who are insane—three degrees of insanity—there is no such thing as perfect—I admire you—you are perfect.
Was there any one line in particular that sealed his fate?
When I first came across this case, I thought for a moment that this might in fact be the story of my biological mother’s great-grandfather, and in that moment, it seemed to make sense. It still does in some way, except that the dates are way off. In my mind’s eye it was a perfect case, until, of course, a more perfect fit came along—the case of Benedict Kahn.
BENEDICT KAHN, Plaintiff, against JACK ROTHSTONE and JOHN J. GLYNN as administrators with the will annexed of the Estate of ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN, deceased, Defendants.
This case immediately reminds me of a line in Richard Bellman’s autobiography, Eye of the Hurricane, noting that his father’s brother Bernard “Bunny” Bellman “married the boss’s daughter.” For the first time I have a clue about what that might mean—I am thinking this case likely involves my mother’s maternal grandfather, Benedict Kahn, and that it was through Benedict Kahn, that Bernard “Bunny” Bellman learned his trade.
Filed against the estate of the infamous gangster Arnold Rothstein, who was shot on November 4, 1928, the case states that Benedict Kahn and his business associate Harry Langer—who filed a separate case for $76,000—both made loans to Arnold Rothstein that had not been paid back at the time of his death. Benedict Kahn’s affidavit reads:
I am the plaintiff herein. This action is brought to recover $21,000 with interest thereon upon two promissory notes aggregating $19,000 and a check of $2000.
It goes on.
I never gambled with Arnold Rothstein in my lifetime. I never borrowed any money from him. He and I were intimate personal friends, and from time to time he borrowed money from me. He knew I was always possessed of large amounts of cash.
Nowhere in the papers is there any explanation of what business Kahn was in that had him “always possessed of large amounts of cash.” Basically there was no defense for this case because the only option was for the Rothstein estate to prove that this was a gambling debt and therefore not legal or valid.
After much back-and-forth the motion for a judgment is granted, “in favor of the plaintiff for $21,000, together with interest, as demanded in the complaint.”
The fact that the man who appears to be Ellen’s maternal grandfather had the nerve to make a case against the estate of Rothstein, a man described as “the spiritual father of American organized crime,” and a “criminal genius,” tells me that Benedict Kahn must have been someone that both the estate and the court took seriously—but beyond that I find nothing, except the seeds of a strong interest in numbers and gambling that echoed throughout subsequent generations.
And then there is the sad story of the Bellman who got bumped on his head—big time. Here is another Henry—this time Bellman, not Hecht—but for inexplicable reasons, I remain convinced that somewhere I do have a biological relative named Henry.
Henry Bellman vs. In Re: George Bellman vs. Timken Silent Automatic Co.
Henry Bellman, born in Germany in 1902, arriving in New York in 1928, is brought to Bellevue saying he can’t sleep, has a headache, lights are bothering him. In the presence of the doctors, he said:
The way it looks they throw lights, right into my room, and I can’t sleep. I hear them talking. They laugh at me. I moved five times in three or four months. They follow me in the street. They make fun of me. I heard them say c.s. and s.o.b. I don’t know if they want to kill me. They are down here too.
He was committed to Central Islip State Hospital.
George Bellman as guardian for Henry Bellman files a case against the Timken Silent Automatic Co. asking for $150,000 in damages, stating that Henry, never injured or ill, working as a driller for $8.80 a day, was on September 8, 1934, on First Avenue between Ninety-sixth and Ninety-seventh Streets, struck by a truck. The truck, which swerved to avoid a granite block in the roadway, bumped another car into a ditch, and then ran through a barricade, striking Henry Bellman, knocking him unconscious for more than ten minutes. His injuries, initially thought to be mild, became progressive. His condition deteriorated, and in July 1935 Henry began to complain that people were spying on him. The case was filed first by Henry and then by the family—seeking to be able to afford a better-quality care for their brother. It was settled without trial for $27,500, of which $13,750 was paid to the attorney the brother hired before his condition had so deteriorated. The Honorable Edward R. Koch was presiding justice, April 8, 1936. Case file stamped LUNACY.
I can’t help but think about the difficulty of these immigrants’ lives, of Bernhard Kahn and Henry Bellman and thousands of others. They left their homes and families in Europe under what were often pressured and fearful circumstances. With only the belongings they could carry on their backs they set off on a difficult journey to a mythical faraway place, hoping for Utopia, finding instead a foreign language, discrimination, and poor working and living conditions. I am amazed at the resilience and fortitude most immigrants demonstrated and am also surprised that more didn’t simply go mad—there are times I think, how could you not?
Whether or not Magdaline, William, and their son, Howard, or Bernhard or Henry are related to me by blood, they are all related by humanity and by the stories the files tell, and it is all lunacy! I am including the stories here because I cannot bear for them to be forgotten.
I continue to dig, off and on, stop and start, and collect the fragments of hundreds of lives. The technicality of biological relation becomes somewhat irrelevant—I am thrilled by what I am finding, by dipping into history, by seeing how people lived and died, noticing what else was going on in the world at each of these points. As stressful it has been, I have enjoyed the process; it amazes me how deep and expansive the World Wide Web is (at only fifteen years old) and I am thrilled to have met and corresponded with so many people along the way. My search is no longer all-consuming, the initial urgency has settled into a perhaps healthier continuing curiosity and no doubt will continue on and off over time. And yes, there is comfort in having connected some of the dots—in having names and dates and some sense of where my family lines and I fit into history. I can juxtapose Robert Slye’s birth in England with the reign of Queen Elizabeth. I note that Friedrich Nietzsche is born in the same year as Jacob Spitzer (the father of my beloved grandmother Julia Beatrice), and that in 1959, the year of my brother Jon’s birth, the Dalai Lama escapes Tibet and goes to India, while Alaska and Hawaii become the latest additions to the United States. In January 1961, the year of my birth, at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the American poet Robert Frost stands to recite a new poem, “Kitty Hawk,” but is frail and fumbles the words. He begins again, instead reciting “The Gift Outright.”