Jon Homes, Jewel Rosenberg, and A.M. Homes
Jewel Rosenberg, my grandmother, my adoptive mother’s mother, graceful, grandiloquent, profound. She is in some ways why or how this book exists. I am not sure that I would have become a writer if it weren’t for her, nor would I have gone to such lengths to become a mother. Without Jewel Spitzer Rosenberg there would likely be no Juliet Spencer Homes—a girl who is now almost three, with no biological relation to my grandmother yet bearing a striking physical relation to her.
When the events charted in this book began to unfold, my grandmother was too old to make good sense of them and my mother elected not to tell her about the return of my biological parents. That decision bothered all of us—my grandmother was the ruler of the family, the queen bee; she was the one we went to about everything, the one with good advice, the one who was remarkable.
She was born in June of 1900, the turn of the twentieth century, in North Adams, Massachusetts. At fifteen she got glasses, looked up at the sky, and saw it wasn’t all black—for the first time she realized there were stars. At sixteen, enrolled at North Adams Normal School (Massachusetts State College) and studying to be a teacher, she was called into the president’s office and told she would never get a teaching job because she was a Jew. She didn’t tell anyone about the incident—except her brother Charlie.
In my grandmother’s house there was a table built in the year of my birth by the Japanese-American artisan George Nakashima from wood my grandmother selected at his shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The table is seven feet long, lush—French walnut. It is subtle, not announcing itself as something special until you spend time with it, until you get a feel for it. Then its significance becomes clear.
This was the family seat. This was where we gathered, where my grandmother, our matriarch, held court, where her brothers and sisters and their children and their children’s children came to celebrate, to discuss, to mourn.
There have been great multigenerational political and philosophical debates at this table, especially when my grandmother’s brothers Charlie and Harold would visit—the family radicals. They put themselves through college, changed their name from Spitzer to Spencer, ostensibly to protect the family from their radical reputations, but conveniently also hiding their Jewishness. They both studied law but never practiced. Charlie went to work in a Chicago steel mill and became a union organizer, and Harold married the dancer Elfrede Mahler and went to Cuba, where he taught English and she became the head of Cuba’s modern dance movement. When they came to town, we would spend hours at the table, debating everything from the current political situation to the lyrics of songs they made up as children.
This table was where my grandmother fed us. She had long ago taught herself to prepare the traditional French cuisine that my grandfather had grown up with—and had long ago progressed from a Massachusetts farm girl to a seriously sophisticated intellectual.
As a writer I think of narratives—family stories. Growing up, I was never sure about whether or not I could or should absorb the family history. At family gatherings great-aunts and-uncles from around the world would pull their chairs in close and tell stories about life on my great-grandparents’ farm in North Adams, Massachusetts. I fell in love with these stories, felt attached to them, but also was made uncomfortable—this agreed-upon narrative was not my narrative. “It’s not my history, not my family,” I would whisper to my mother. “We are your family, believe me,” my mother would say. I wanted to believe, but something felt off, inorganic.
Growing up, I had two adopted cousins who were black—they lived in upstate New York and we didn’t see them all that often. Once when we were all at a relative’s house for dinner—the adults downstairs, the three of us playing in the upstairs bedroom—I said, “I’m adopted too,” trying to make a connection. The cousins looked at me blankly—“No you’re not.” “Yes I am.” I was insulted that they didn’t believe me—it didn’t occur to me then that because I was white like my parents they thought I couldn’t possibly be adopted. “Mom, am I adopted?” I yelled downstairs. “What are you children doing up there?” was the answer.
When she was in her late nineties I would visit my grandmother at her home outside of Washington every couple of weeks. We sat at the table and drank tea and talked. While we talked, she rubbed the table, her hand unconsciously moving in circles as if polishing the wood, repetitiously stroking it like a talisman, for comfort, for the giving and getting of wisdom.
We each sat in her familiar place, my grandmother at the head, I just to the left.
At her age, she was perhaps now even older than the tree the table had come from—in my mind they are inexorably bound.
“We went up to the old farm,” I said very loudly.
“You did? And you were able to find it?”
“Yes.”
The weekend before, my cousin (also a writer) and I had driven up and down the hills of North Adams on an impromptu pilgrimage to find the farm where my grandmother grew up. The dirt driveway had long ago dissolved; the only way in was by foot. We climbed quickly, ascending into the mythology of the farm.
The original buildings remained, crumbling, collapsed, but still identifiable. I conjured images of my grandmother as a child, one of nine born to Lithuanian immigrants at the turn of the century on this Massachusetts dairy farm. I imagined her walking down the dirt road to a one-room schoolhouse, picking wild blueberries, helping my great-grandfather milk the cows and tend the chickens. I remembered her telling me the Mohawk Trail was just out the back door, and in my mind she was outside playing a real-life version of cowboys and Indians, substituting farmers for cowboys, cows and plows for horses and guns.
My cousin went on an ersatz archaeological dig, using a knife to poke in the dirt near one of the buildings. After a few minutes, he pulled out an old bottle.
“This must mean something,” he said.
I nodded. We each took a couple of slate shingles from the crumbling roof and made our way back to the car.
“Tell me about the farm. How was it?” she asked, as if half expecting there was still someone there leading the cows out to pasture in the morning and back home again at night.
“Interesting.” I told her about the landscape. She closed her eyes. I told her about the rolling hills, the tall trees, Mount Greylock in the distance.
“Just as I remembered it,” she said.
She looked at her table. I imagined this table echoing something, some other great long farm table in my great-grandmother’s country kitchen. I see my grandmother’s nine brothers and sisters as children underfoot in their mother’s kitchen. I see my great-uncles as teenagers in the summer selling buckets of water to overheated cars on the Mohawk Trail. I feel their grief when their fourteen-year-old sister, Helen, dies of diphtheria in 1912. I see their brother Maurice staying in North Adams—becoming the town doctor, delivering over twelve hundred babies.
My grandmother rubbed her finger along the grain of the wood.
Again, her hand circled the wood. “Tell me about you,” my grandmother said.
“I’m fine, I’ve been working hard, I’ve been thinking about buying a little house out on Long Island, a cabin where I can go and write.”
She nodded. “It’s important to have a house of your own,” she said.
“Tell me about you,” I said back to her.
“I’ve got nothing to tell,” she said. “I’m bored.”
She had worked her entire life—full-time until she was eighty-six. In 1918, two years before women won the right to vote, she came to Washington by herself, got a job in the War Department, and soon brought her brothers and sisters down from the farm. In 1922 she met my grandfather, the Romanian-French hatmaker, during a summer visit home when he happened to be working at his uncle’s hat shop in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s my grandfather sent for his younger brothers Julian and Maurice, hoping they would stay in America. The boys came for a summer but didn’t like it—they couldn’t get girlfriends because they didn’t speak English. They returned to Paris and in the 1940s were deported from Paris to concentration camps—Julian to Drancy and then Auschwitz, and Maurice to Auschwitz. Neither survived.
Later, in Washington, D.C., my grandparents started a successful wine importing company, and when she was seventy-eight, Jewel Rosenberg became a founding director of the first bank in the United States organized by women for women.
Whatever I know about how to live my life, I learned from her. When I graduated from college and wanted to become a writer, she lent me the money to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter. I dutifully paid her back $50 a month, and when the debt was repaid, she wrote me a check for the entire amount. “I wanted you to know what it means to work for something.”
Back at the table, she sighed. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t feel useful anymore.”
“It’s your turn to rest and let others do things for you.”
“I’m not a rester, I’m a worker.”
“Let’s go for a ride,” I said, getting up from the table. We drove to a local farm, the place where my mother took me apple picking and pumpkin hunting as a child. I drove up a rutted road toward the berry patch.
“Where are we? This is beautiful, it reminds me of North Adams.”
I parked beside a row of blueberry bushes and opened her door.
She made her way to the bushes and started grabbing at the berries and popping them into her mouth, her ninety-eight-year-old fingers suddenly nimble. Sweeping her hair back, she looked up at the sky and moved down the row, picking rapidly. She was a girl again, filling the basket with ripe, warm berries. “This is exactly how it used to be.”
We drove home with the basket of berries on her lap. She squeezed my leg. “Buy your little house,” she said, and I did.
I called her from the little house on Long Island. I stood in the small yard and told her what I was planting: rosebushes, tulip bulbs, seeds for carrots, beets, and squash. I had turned over a small square of land at the far end of the yard and began calling it “the field.” I told her about tilling the field, tending my crop—the enormous satisfaction in this work, in being away from the city, my hands deep in the dirt.
She turned ninety-nine. “When are you coming home?” she asked several times in each conversation. “Soon,” I told her. “Soon, I am coming home.”
And then she was gone, the only person I’ve known to die unexpectedly at ninety-nine. I hurried back to Washington. I went to her house. I moved from room to room. I sat at the table, waiting. I had the feeling that she too felt she left too soon. She seemed to still be there, hovering, floating, packing.
I stayed for a while, just sitting, comforting myself with the echoes and objects that were like symbols, vessels of history.
At the end of the summer I pulled my carrots out of the ground, as proud of them as I was of any story or novel I’d written. She was the person I would most want to share them with; she was the one who would understand when I held up the green grassy ends and proudly said, Look what I made.
I see now that I am a product of each of my family narratives—some more than others. But in the end it is all four threads that twist and rub against one another, the fusion and friction combining to make me who and what I am. And not only am I a product of these four narratives—I am also influenced by another narrative; the story of what it is to be the adopted one, the chosen one, the outsider brought in. In the living room bookcase of my parents’ house there was a two-volume slip-cased set called The Adopted Family. One of the volumes was a book to be read to the adopted child, and the other was a book for the parents. I would often sit with that book not sure entirely what it was about but sure that it was of great import, that in some way it was quite literally about me. I felt like a doll whose package comes along with a book.
As a child, I devoured biographies—in particular a set of biographies for children called Childhood of Famous Americans. I read each of them again and again; two in particular stuck in my mind: Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth. And at some point they conflated into a character of my own making, Eleanor Babe, a sort of early superhero—not only did she start organizations like Unicef, she had a mean curve ball. Thinking back on those two books, it’s clear why they lodged in my thoughts; both Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth were sent away by their families—Eleanor to live in London with aunts who had no understanding of her, and Babe to a children’s home in Baltimore after his mother died. It was their outsider experience, their loneliness, that I identified with. They were invisible adoption heroes—not only had they survived but they succeeded.
It was the death of my grandmother that compelled me to try to have a child of my own. Motherhood was something that terrified me. I have a great fear of attachment and an equally constant fear of loss—I am not sure if this is true for everyone, but for me the ghost of the dead brother still and always looms. When I was younger I always thought I would adopt a child, but after Ellen’s death and then my grandmother’s, I felt I wanted a biological child, and so it was something that I decided to do. It had never occurred to me that it would be difficult to get pregnant. I started at thirty-nine, and in the end it took two years, thousands of dollars, the best of medical science, and two miscarriages before my daughter was born.
“What’s the matter?” my mother asked. “Isn’t adoption good enough for you?”
“Of course it’s good enough,” I said, but it wasn’t that—I felt compelled to try my hardest, to issue a biological echo, to see myself before myself, writ large and small and as fully related as one can ever be.
Months after my grandmother had passed, my mother called and asked if I would like my grandmother’s table.
“I know it’s big and that your house is small, but I think it would be nice if you had it.”
The table came in through the side door, carried by four men, carefully wrapped.
“These are tables of great weight,” one of the men said, and he was right, but the weight was not so much literal as emotional. I inherited much more than an object—it was a mandate to live and work as hard and with as much grace and style as she did.
At first the table looked out of place, lost. I oiled it. I rubbed it with a soft cloth, moving my hands over the surface and noticing the richness of the tone—the lived-in marks that Nakashima called Kevinizing after his son Kevin. I thought of the spiritual life of the wood, what it gave beyond a surface.
The first time I used the table, I invited a friend over for lunch. I took my usual spot. Instead of looking at a painting on my grandmother’s living room wall, I was now looking out a window at a bird feeder. I set two places at the table, hers and mine. My friend sat in my grandmother’s place and something felt strange.
“I need to change places with you,” I said.
The friend looked at me oddly—she didn’t understand.
“Could we switch?” I asked, and then I slid into her seat.
When the table gets dry—thirsty—its surface looks pale, parched. I rub it with oil; it drinks and then glows. And while it is only a table, an object made of wood, it is a perfect and constant reminder of how to live, how to stay connected. It was in this little house—which I wouldn’t have bought without my grandmother’s nod and a gift that helped with the down payment—that I got the phone call from my mother saying my mother had died. It was in this house that I first miscarried and that, a year later, I celebrated my child’s first Christmas and Hanukkah. It was in this house, at this table, that I sat alone unpacking the four boxes from my mother’s house in New Jersey. It was this table that could hold those boxes.
The table is the centerpiece of our family life. It is where on the weekends my young family gathers—my daughter draws her pictures here; together we make cookies and decorate them. Each time I sit here I remember myself in my grandmother’s kitchen, in awe and admiring her spice rack, her jars of cookie sprinkles and cinnamon hearts. Now, sitting in what was my grandmother’s seat, I watch my daughter sitting in my spot to my left. I watch this girl, who more than anyone reminds me of my grandmother. She carries the same facial expressions, the same gestures, the same simultaneous compassion and judgment. I witness the way she moves through her life, the confidence with which she carries herself. Like my grandmother, she takes great pleasure in making sure that others are taken care of. And as I am thinking this, she gets up from her spot, comes over, and gently pushes me out of my seat.
“I need your chair,” she says, climbing up, filling the vacated spot.
I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too. Most important, now I am Juliet’s mother, and that brings with it a singularity of love and fear that I have never known before, and for that—and she is truly a blend of all four family lines—I thank all of my mothers and fathers, for she is my greatest gift.
Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.