When she came to the phone, she said, “I know who you are.” It was about 5:00 p.m. on the East Coast, September 21, 2005. Her daughter, Amy, answered and said her mother was outside. Could she call me back? I explained I was Barbara’s cousin calling from Hawaii and our fathers had been brothers, but we’d never spoken before. My dad was Bob Wayne, but she’d known him as Uncle Sam.
* * *
When my father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1964, the lights went out on my life. Not the outside lights; those stayed lit for others to see. That semester of my freshman year, I got my best grades in college and kept going with the help of good friends. I remember condolence notes with inspiring quotes from girls in the dorm, a period of intense dreams, a bad bout of the measles over Easter break. That summer, after losing my father on the Ides of March, my mother, three younger brothers and I danced out our grief to the sappy sounds of John Gary, and it kind of worked. Although my boyfriend had left me shortly after my father’s death on the grounds that this was too needy a time in my life for him to be around, he returned three months later, and I got caught up in a budding romance. But my inner lights went out despite those joys, as if on a slow dimmer, and the buoyancy of my late teens closed down to a focused diligence, fueled by my sudden awareness that a woman needed a job so she would not be widowed, as my mother had been, at 43 with four children age 18 and younger, without ever having supported herself.
My mother turned to another man for support, and this time she made a poor choice of one 14 years her junior, one who cared for her but knew little about being kind or supportive to others. Family friends suspected his motives and brought a suit in probate court breaking my father’s will in an effort to preserve his assets for his children. Like Dickens’s Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the suit lasted for 10 years and eroded most of the remaining resources. When things began to deteriorate during my second year of college, I declared I was staying home to hold the family’s finances together, but I couldn’t bring it off, not with a passionate, and at some level terrified, mother making very different choices. Within three years we lost the house, the neighborhood and the friends we knew best. Every year or two for the next decade, my family moved somewhere else.
My first marriage became my way out, and my brother Greg escaped to California, but my two youngest brothers learned that dislocation inside your house is worse than moving from place to place. Meanwhile, I internalized the loss of the parent whom I had most admired and felt safe with, the one who spoke my language of interest in serious issues and seemed to value my mind, so my inner lights kept going out. In losing my father, I lost a world of security, good judgment and wit with warmth—but without schmaltz. I have missed my father for all of my adult life, and in trying to find his family, what I was most trying to recover was more of him.
* * *
When Barbara came to the phone, she asked how I’d found her. I said I’d located the ship manifest in the National Archives that listed all four brothers, their mother and grandmother as emigrating from Borana, Romania, although we’d always been told they had come from Hungary. I’d found the family’s American names in the 1930 census and received their petitions for naturalization from the archives in New York and Chicago. For a year I’d been trying to build up a history from official documents that included questions such as “Whether a polygamist?” “Whether an anarchist?” They were loaded with information, but they were cold on the heart. I had to make my own stories from them so they would speak more kindly, and even then the news they conveyed was about an arrival at Ellis Island on December 29, 1920, on what must have been a very cold day, and life in a tenement in the South Bronx 10 years later. By then my grandmother was already at Ward’s Island State Hospital with a permanent mental breakdown. That was the one document I couldn’t bring myself to copy, as if having it around was too palpable a reminder of the cost of this move.
I’d located Barbara through the Ernest Klein and Company International Supermarket, her father’s grocery store on 55th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, where I went for my sixtieth birthday so I could talk to people who would help me find my family and see the locations in the Bronx listed on those impersonal forms. I’d spoken with Joe, the store’s night manager, and then to the daytime manager, who gave me a number at the management company, where I was advised to wait until a current part- owner returned to town. Along the way the voices were less guarded and more encouraging. The grocery store led me first to Barbara’s younger brother, Frank. When he was a kid, Frank said he used to call my father Uncle Sam-Bob, because he knew he’d changed his name. He acknowledged we were cousins when we first talked, but the understandable question still hovered: What was I after? Why was I trying to find a family I had never known in my life, except that my Uncle Ernest had attended my father’s funeral?
My cousins’ answers to my own questions began slowly to fill the void of what my brothers and I had never known about the New York family. In the vacancy, we had imagined all kinds of grim things, since we’d been told that our father had been asked to leave town by the New York Police Department for running numbers. The four brothers must have been pretty desperate when they first arrived. They were between 8 and 14 years old and had no father. Frank told me they had sold apples on the street and balloons in the park, anything to earn a bit of money. Barbara said my father might have left New York about 20 years later, because he was just of a “different cut” from the three others and less bound to the Old World. Unlike them, he didn’t have to work seven days a week just to keep the family going, since he was the youngest and didn’t have to quit school in sixth grade like his brother, Ernest. As he grew older, he’d even had time to do some dancing, and he’d won a medal for it—Barbara might have it somewhere. She also had fragments of information about Hungary. She delivered it all with an off-handed generosity that put me at ease. And she had said, “I know who you are.”
Someone on my father’s side had acknowledged me with a full heart. I felt larger, more connected to a complex past, but the old questions flooded back in. I still knew very little about these people and they about me, and we all knew less about our parents’ earlier lives: where they had actually lived, why they had left their homeland, how they had struggled in their early years in America. Their whole immigrant experience, from Hungary to here, was pretty much gone. Everyone who had lived that history was dead, and few stories were left behind, because they had been too painful to talk about. We children had been too caught up in our own lives to ask the right questions before our fathers died at fairly young ages.
My cousins had grown up around family in the Bronx and had some sense of the traditions and textures, the smells and tastes of our fathers’ lives there. They had all been together, with the mess and discomfort that family can create, but with some on-the-ground sense of who they were and might become. My family had none of that connectedness. We lived in Chicago and celebrated the holidays alone or with just a couple of friends in a secular style, without the constraints and definitions of a religious tradition and without extended family arriving to mark days as special. My father visited his New York family and shared a bedroom then with his nephew, Frank, but he never told us about his trips. He kept us separate from the Kleins. On some holidays, as I watched the turkey and Santa Claus candles in front of our dinner plates at the end of the meal, I wondered why the sadness lasted so long after they had become lumpish masses and burned themselves out.
Connecting with the Kleins contradicted my father’s wishes, but once my mother had died as well, no one was left to object, and my brothers and I had a right to know. As cousins, we compared some of the stories we had been told. Frank recalled his father saying the family lived near a river and a border; later he remembered something about Transylvania. The brothers had spoken Hungarian when they were together. Barbara said the town in Hungary had a town square with a religious statue in it, and the family was kept alive through the help of a greengrocer who had the town’s only supply of tobacco. He may have given or sold it to the brothers, who used it to bribe the anti-Semitic German troops occupying the town after World War I in order to avoid being killed by them. We still don’t know who that greengrocer was, but now that I’ve been to the town and discovered the family’s business there, these fuzzy recollections all make a lot of sense.
After I spoke with each cousin on the phone, I sent Frank and Barbara a big package of documents along with an account of our immediate family called, “The Children of Bob and Eleanor Wayne.” I was trying to say we were a family worth acknowledging, but I didn’t know the people I was sending it to, so I couldn’t say my brother Greg was a gentle soul who worked in wood, that Dave was an autodidact, or that Daniel identified so fully with the father he lost at the age of six that it had fueled his success in high tech. Instead, I said that Greg was a carpenter, Dave worked in real estate, and Daniel had recently sold the software company he started back in the 1980s to Oracle and spent two years with them in Europe. I enclosed photographs of us and one of my father, since Greg’s memory of Ernest at the funeral was that their dad had looked just like ours.
The more we communicated, the more it became clear that the different branches of the family weren’t in touch much any more. The eldest of the brothers died unmarried and rather young. There had been no contact with the family of the second brother for 40 years. After spending decades together in the Bronx, the Kleins had been atomized down into nuclear units, just as my own family had been when my father moved away. Yet the information I sent to my cousins prompted talks with their own, grown children. Two grandchildren used the documents for high school projects on genealogy. The package was creating conversations, and I like to think of those grandchildren peering at the Hungarian names of their great-great-uncles. I hoped the information would occasion at least modest reconnections.
* * *
Zoltan, Géza, Árpad, Ákos. I practiced those names as I walked up Capitol Hill from the National Archives. It was July 9, 2004, and I was too excited to take the Metro. I’d gone into the archives with my father’s original name, a rough sense of when he had arrived in America, and where, but little else. Carolyn, an assistant with lovely corn rows, did a Soundex coding of the name “Klein” by transferring the consonantal sounds to a letter followed by numbers. The vowel sounds were dropped, an “L” was a 4 and an “M” or “N” was a 5, so the coding came out to K450. Then she took me to the Index of the Port of New York, which covered July 1, 1902, to December 31, 1943, an enormous period for immigration. She gave me Roll #337, which included K431 Aage to K450 Julius. I fumbled with the microfilm, although I’d used it hundreds of times to read early modern texts. On the film were simple lists of names, last name first, followed by the age at arrival and gender and three sets of numbers. Each name had been typed with an old, blurred typewriter ribbon, probably in the mid-1940s, on sheets of paper that had then been microfilmed. As I scrolled on, the alphabet was going down to the section I needed: Kline, Killun, Cellin, Kullin, Klein. I tried to identify the Ernest Klein entries, but none of the ages matched, so I kept going to the A’s. And there it was:
Klein, Ákos 8m 6 62 6663
My father had said he was nine when he came over, but I figured eight was close enough for the chaos that must have prevailed at Ellis Island. When I found Carolyn again, she said the three sets of numbers gave the line, page, and volume number for films of the Port of New York, organized by date. These were the ship manifests. I went to page 62 on the new roll and nothing meaningful showed up. When I went for more help, she explained that sometimes the page numbers aren’t where you’d expect them to be. She sat down in my seat—an Aeron chair like every other one at the archives, hundreds of them purchased with my tax dollars—and scrolled on slowly, looking for a penciled number at the lower right-hand corner. I could barely make it out, but when she came to 62 and we looked at line 6, there was Ákos. But it said he was Roumanian, so that couldn’t be right. I didn’t know then how close to Hungary Romania was and so was about to give up, but as I kept looking at the fuzzy screen I saw an entire family grouping, Ákos along with three older brothers, a mother named Fanny, and a grandmother, Kata Biermann, who was 60. Carolyn smiled, “I’d better let you sit here.”
I copied the microfilm, first by hand as advised by the woman at the reader behind me, who had taken ages to find her mother, because she’d come over as the nursemaid to another family, and then by copy machine. Afterwards Carolyn took me to the online Census Records for 1930. I could not find anything for Ákos or Géza or the other brothers. By then they were going by their American names, and I had none of those at the time except for Ernest. I must have spelled “Ernest” with an “a” because he didn’t come up. But I did find Fanny Klein, listed as an “inmate” at Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island. Her age matched the ship manifest plus 10, 47 years, and she was described as Hungarian. It was then I knew I’d found my family, because my father had told me she was institutionalized. I got information on how to search for naturalization records, left the building, and phoned my husband. It helped to hear Richard say, “Oh yes, you’ve found them.” Then I walked up Capitol Hill to our small apartment about two miles away, crying behind my sun glasses. A policewoman diverted me twice because of a suspicious package in the area, but there was little to redirect my complicated feelings. The next day I learned that Hungary had lost more than 70 percent of its territory to adjoining countries through the Treaty of Trianon on June 4, 1920, so my Hungarian family had found themselves living in Romania by the end of that year. It took me several more days to see that above the typed word “Roumanian,” in the category of “Race or People,” appeared the handwritten word “Hebrew.” The same inscription appeared for every other family grouping on that page, so this ship called the Rochambeau had carried Hungarian/Romanian Jews from Le Havre, France, to America in 1920.
* * *
In response to the big package with the ship manifest, the naturalization papers and the 1930 census entry on everyone except my grandmother, Barbara mailed me a photograph of her parents and one of our nameless grandfather. Ernest, in 1954, did look just like my father, only his smile was more open. His face and body showed the exuberance of possibility and success, reminding me of my brother, Daniel. This was the man who’d cried as I’d never seen a man cry before when he came to my father’s funeral, weeping Old World-style for the brother he lost. Years before, around some New Year’s holiday, he had sent us a smoked turkey from the Catskill Mountains, and it is thanks to Uncle Ernie that I still love smoked turkey. This was also the man who transformed selling groceries into the Klein family business in New York. His mother had told him before they left Hungary that if anything happened to the family, he should take care of them. He was 10 years old at the time, with two elder brothers of 12 and 14, but it was Ernest his mother chose for the job.
The other photograph that Barbara sent was of my grandfather, who died in 1913. In the picture he looks younger than the father of four children. He is dressed in a black hat that is flat on top with a wide brim; a jacket buttoned high beneath shallow, notched lapels; and a tie pulled over his collar. His eyes are close-set and dark. His mouth is pursed and defined by a slight moustache. He looks at the camera with determination and sadness, as if he would rather not reveal the strength that slips through. Now I know he was an innkeeper and store owner with a business at the very center of his town. His name was Béla Klein, and he died of typhus at age 31 when my father was only slightly more than a year old. How did his wife cope with that business and four small children for seven years before leaving for America? Was it better for her there than it was here, where she lost her mind?
Thank goodness for her mother, who traveled with them and raised the four sons after her daughter was institutionalized. Barbara remembers Kata Biermann:
She lived in a three-room apartment in the Bronx, quite dark and dreary. She was short and bent, and looked feeble, but wasn’t. Her face was wrinkled and leathery, her head always covered with a babushka and she wore a wig. I think the wig is called a sheitel. Always a smile and a piece of candy for me. As I sit here, I can see her as clear as day, impressive hands, long, thin, gnarled, boney, like glass that would break. A slip of a woman with enormous strength, both mental and physical. Talk about women’s lib; they couldn’t hold a candle.
I remember how deeply my father cared for her when he visited her on his trips to New York. Women like Kata sustain women like me. I’m so proud of her.
Ernest Klein, Béla Klein and Kata Biermann were Jewish. My father first told me we were Jewish when I was around nine. That was also when we made our first trip to Miami, stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel and ate lots of matzo balls. I remember buying a copy of Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto, because I was trying to understand my Jewish past. But my father told me not to tell people we were Jewish, because we would not have been welcome in our suburban Chicago neighborhood if they knew. I didn’t understand the prohibition, so I told a few friends as a secret.
The name change was prompted by all the prejudice my father had experienced growing up in Hungary and New York, but he never talked about what happened. He had assumed the name of Bob Wayne when he moved to Chicago, and it took some time to make it legal, for he became a citizen at the same time, following the procedure that Ernest had followed five years earlier. His certificate of legal arrival was issued in 1943; in February of 1945, he petitioned for naturalization and found two witnesses to testify to his having been in Chicago for two years; and on June 12, 1945, he was officially Robert Wayne—less than two months before I was born, just as he’d told me. He was, in other words, a resident alien when he married my mother in 1944, like his brother Ernest when he married in 1932. My mother was not only a lovely, fun, dance teacher at the studio that he managed, but she was a U.S. citizen and a gentile—half German, no less, at precisely the time that the Nazis were killing six million Jews in Europe.
At nine years of age, the Holocaust is even more difficult to comprehend than when one has lived long enough to encounter the prevalence of evil and injustice. I did not know then that half of Hungarian Jewry had been annihilated, although some in my family’s part of Romania were apparently off the radar enough to survive. I did not know what it was like to grow up Jewish in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, how thick the prejudice was and where the safe places were. Closer to home, I did not know that my father would not have been able to get a mortgage to buy our suburban house if his Jewish identity had been known or that his launch of a successful dance business might have been compromised. But how do you leave that large a part of yourself behind? And how large a part was it?
I asked Barbara if her father was bar mitzvahed. “Probably,” she said, “but it wasn’t such a big deal back then. They didn’t even take the day off work. It mainly involved reading a passage in Hebrew.” If Ernie had been bar mitzvahed, my father probably had, too. Frank recalled that his father had been Orthodox, “deeply religious.” Yet Barbara emphasized their non-observance. “They all worked seven days a week. My father regretted not being able to close the store on Jewish holidays. He tried to close later on, but the most important business day was the Sabbath, and he couldn’t close then. He felt that if you can’t close on Saturday, you’re not a Jew. For him being Jewish was kind of a black and white issue.”
By Ernest’s standards, which were high enough to reflect Orthodoxy, my father was no Jew. But being no Jew meant leaving something behind, and the loss was cultural even if not religious. It may have surfaced in the sadness I felt on holidays, which could have come from him and his separation from so much he had known as a boy. Maybe he felt especially conflicted then, though he was proud to be able to give us the affluent and secure lives that we had. We were a small, smiling, picture-perfect 1950s family, but my father paid the highest price for our assimilation. Success in Chicago had been built on a secret and depended on keeping that secret. Only our closest friends knew, and only much later did I learn from the closest one that my father had asked their family to take Greg and me to the Baptist church with them. They brought us along, and I kept going from third grade on, because I liked to sing in the choir and was searching for a grounding of some sort. I was christened in a Lutheran church, baptized in a Baptist church, attended a Methodist college, married in a Presbyterian church, later confirmed in an Episcopal church and gave communion as a lay reader. I tried on different Protestant vestments as I sought answers to some large questions.
After I understood how deeply patriarchal and gender-biased the Christian denominations were, I took a 15-year break, and when I returned it was to a church so egalitarian and involved in social action that they allow members to join without professing a faith. An undeclared position now feels like a better place from which to ask those questions and to appreciate, process and honor my father and my mother. My daughter Sarah’s understanding of this in-between-ness took the form of her Christmas gift in 2005, which was a menorah.
Had I first been taken to church as a cover-up, part of keeping the secret in suburbia? Or a way to ensure the assimilation of the next generation? Or was it because my father knew what he’d lost and didn’t want us to lose the grounding of a religious tradition as well? In one of my favorite photographs of him, he is sitting in his blue chair with the three-volume set of Montaigne’s essays on the end table. They were probably there for decorative reasons, but I remember him reading those books, even though he never graduated from high school. The Columbia Encyclopedia says that Montaigne’s essays move from a concern with pain and death, to a skeptical attitude toward all knowledge, to an acceptance of life as good. Sounds like my father’s trajectory. He was pretty much a skeptic, or perhaps an agnostic, but he was still asking large questions and exploring possible answers to them, as was my mother. I remember the day she told me she believed Jesus was a great teacher, but wouldn’t identify him as a savior to the exclusion of others. That was fairly radical for our safe little niche in suburbia. There was some conviction behind my father’s choice to take on a non-Jewish identity, as there was in his choice of a partner. They both defined themselves as the black sheep of their families and wanted no association with organized religion. Being together for them meant being separate from their relatives and from most institutions. It was a union that worked, but the loss and the secret, the sadness associated with the need to keep the secret, never fully receded.
To this day I really hate secrets. They corrode those who keep them from the inside out, cutting them off from others whom they might love or who might love them. But that’s what both of my parents chose, because it seemed better than what they’d left behind. To ensure a new identity for his children, my father gave each of us the name of Wayne, that supremely fictional patronymic that has no connection to anyone I know of except John Wayne, who undoubtedly also made it up, and no relation to any place I know of except a street in the Bronx. He also gave his first name as a middle name to each of his sons. Gregory Robert Wayne, David Robert Wayne, Daniel Robert Wayne. It’s as if each son was being named as a variant of himself, so he could establish a new lineage. In Bridging Three Worlds, author Robert Perlman says that “a change of name was for many Hungarian Jews the donning of a protective coating.” If that applies to my father, he was using a strategy of Hungarian Judaism when he assumed an identity that concealed his Jewish identity, making a choice that many others have made. But he also was reversing a process that may have named him in the first place. Perlman cites a dictionary of Jewish names as saying that in many Hungarian communities, “the Jews were divided into four groups and each group was assigned the names Weiss (white), Schwartz (black), Gross (big), and Klein (little) respectively.” (Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History, pp. 22–24) Was there an aural pun between my father’s choice of Wayne/wane, meaning to decrease in size, and the meaning of Klein as small? Did he try to protect us by Wayning himself and all of us? Or am I just making this up to fill the void of not knowing?
Barbara still pays to have a candle lit and a prayer said in her synagogue on the anniversary of my father’s death, in the ceremony called yahrzeit. She still calls him Uncle Sam, and her fondness for him comes through in her stories. She doesn’t blame him for his choice, but she understands what we all lost better than any of us do. Her first remark to me, “I know who you are,” came from a lived experience of our family that I can never have as she does, so she knows me in a way I don’t know myself. My father is Sam to her, Bob to us, Sam-Bob to Frank, and never ceased being Ákos to his broken mother, whose mental aberration was seeing all of her children as if they were still young boys and had never grown up. Her mind couldn’t forge a bridge to the New World, so the children she recognized in New York were the ones who were still in Hungary. Barbara and Frank used to go with their parents to visit Fanny Klein in the mental institutions, but they had to wait in the car and were never allowed in to see her. My dad lived in three different places under three different names and died before he told me much about the other two. As far as I know, he never lied to me, but he left large swaths of his life unspoken, and perhaps it was best for him that he left before I could ask all the questions I would have asked as I grew older. He knew I wouldn’t let him off easy. And in the event there were enough generous people to provide help when needed, enough tracks to find some of the family, enough cousins alive to tell some of the past. I also had a lot of dumb luck. There is much I don’t know about that Ákos-Sam-Bob person, but he is more present to me now than he has been in many years.
* * *
My husband and I had lunch with Frank and his wife in December of 2005, and it was good. We looked at their family pictures and told stories, sad and sweet, as families do. In January of 2007, we met Barbara and Amy for lunch, and again it was good. Richard remarked, pointing to a water glass, that I tended to see all such vessels as half empty. Amy replied, “To my mother, it’s cracked.” Perhaps there’s no genetic connection here, but it’s oddly comforting. We e-mail now and talk occasionally to stay in touch. I’ve even heard from the family of the second brother. Back in 2005, Frank sent a letter to a cousin from that branch explaining my search and asking him for any information he could contribute. Two years later, out of the blue, an e-mail from his sister appeared in the Inbox, expressing interest in what I’d found and offering to share her father’s materials. I look forward to another lunch this coming summer, and she has already talked with Barbara. I’m beginning to feel that my father’s death was something other than the Greatest Disaster Ever, something that required me to rally, defined me as a person and, after a long period of waiting, saved up some surprises for my sixties. I am also less concerned these days about assessing the water level in the glass, especially since traveling to Boian.
That turns out to be the Romanian name for the town my family was from. It used to be in Hungary; now it’s in Romania. But the place to encounter Hungarian culture is still Hungary. Richard and I went there thanks to a fellow Arden editor who was working at the Folger Shakespeare Library while I was there. When he heard the story about my finding the ship manifest in 2004, he said with authority, “You have to go to Szeged.” He is usually so nondirective that I agreed in a heartbeat. He contacted his former student, Liz Driver, who was teaching at the University of Szeged and had brought him over to do a short course a year earlier. She talked to her department chair. A curriculum vitae was sent, a few e-mails explaining the dates of my sabbatical, and the visit was arranged for April 2007. I would teach a two-week course on Early Modern British Women Writers for the cost of my accommodation. Then Liz asked where my father’s family had come from. I supplied the names that appeared on the documents: Borana on one, Boyan on the other. She forwarded the message to members of the English department. No response. No one had ever heard of the place in Romania.
Then her friend, Anna Fenyvesi, a sociolinguist, took an interest in the silence. Anna likes riddles, puzzles and adventures, and this search combined all three. She contacted Attila Szabo, who was compiling a place-name dictionary for Romania, and he replied with a list of five different Boians prioritized by the number of Jewish residents in each location in 1910, incomplete data being available for that complicated year of 1920. Anna and I looked at the results and opted for the first on the list, Tasnádbajom/ Boianu Mare, because the Jewish population was greater and the town was more Hungarian. It was a very small village not too far from a larger town called Oradea/Nadyvárad. Every place we looked at in Romania had two names, Romanian and Hungarian, and the choice of which to use implied an acceptance or rejection of the 1920 allocation of Transylvania to Romania at the Treaty of Trianon.
Suddenly, we had a sense of where we were from, a dot on a map. But it was in Transylvania. All any of us knew about that place was Dracula, and he’s bad company. I went to the library and made color copies of large atlases, copying them for the first two Boians just in case we’d guessed wrong. The three other locations had had no Jewish residents at all. The maps did not tell me much, but they offered an illusion of certainty, a locus domesticus. I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Romania and Moldova and extracted as much information as I could. On November 27, 2005, Anna traveled to Tasnádbajom with a friend and took digital photos of the town. It was grim. There were modest but mainly poor houses spaced far apart, little sense of a town center or community. A few white geese waddled about the mud streets, and the Hungarian doctor’s house looked cheerful, but the town was very poor. We were all sad as we looked at the photographs, and Barbara said they confirmed what she’d suspected all along. It was just like Fiddler on the Roof. Having actually been there, Anna agreed with our response, but she still offered to go there with us when we came to Szeged. She understood fully why the journey was important.
I asked if we could try to locate any records of the family in Tasnádbajom, and Anna wasn’t sure how to proceed. She wrote a detailed letter to the Hungarian doctor in the town, but received no reply. One day my cousin Frank sent me a slideshow of Romanian synagogues, and three from Oradea were among them. When I Googled them, I found an Oradea Jewish Community website with a listserv for people searching for family members. Frank posted a message about our family and asked for information on locating birth and death records. Months went by; one day a message came from Susan Geroe advising us to contact Professor Ladislau Gyemant at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár. Geroe was born in Oradea and now lives in San Diego. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and her novel, The Silence of Parents, explains how one generation’s desire to protect their children from horror could translate into its own form of trauma for the next generation. She is active in the Second Gens, a group that supports the children of survivors of the Holocaust. Researching Gyemant, I discovered that Geroe had put us onto the world expert on Transylvanian Jews. He advised that state records were likely to be located in mayor’s offices, rabbinical records in the synagogues, and that the cemeteries were intact. He was optimistic about our finding something, which surprised me. When Anna wrote to him to ask which records we should consult if we didn’t have time to search for both, he suggested the mayor’s office. She had seen it and said it looked something like a Greyhound bus station in Western Pennsylvania.
Anna lined everything else up for our visit. Her childhood friend, Andrea, knew where we could stay, and Andrea’s boyfriend, Sándor, would do the communicating. He had been born in Romania and worked for years in Oradea as an accomplished violist. Sándor spoke Romanian and Hungarian, but not English. He phoned the mayor of Tasnádbajom to discuss our visit and would accompany us on our trip. I was advised to bring a large bottle of whiskey for the mayor and chose a liter of Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch, enhanced by six boxes of chocolate-covered Hawaiian Host macadamia nuts.
Meeting Anna for the first time after 18 months of e-mail correspondence was an experience. A strong-boned, tall woman with a gentle voice, her sense of irony prompts an easy laugh at any moment. She has three young children, twin girls aged 5 and a 10-year-old son. Her skills as an organizer are famous among her friends, and she has a formidable intelligence. Fluent in Russian, English and Hungarian, she researches linguistic minorities in Hungary and is highly attuned to the social implications of language differences. Before she sent an e-mail to Professor Gyemant, for example, she consulted a friend about whether it would be preferable to write to him in Hungarian or English. She worries about such things, as does Sándor. The response we eventually received from town officials had a lot to do with their diplomacy, linguistic and otherwise.
During our second week in Szeged, Anna invited us to dinner to meet Andrea and Sándor, since he would be traveling with us. We had a delicious meal of pesto grown from fresh basil in her garden and were visiting comfortably after the meal, just about ready to break up for the evening, when I pulled out the documents I’d brought with me. They included the copy of our grandmother’s passport sent to me a year earlier by Barbara. I had transcribed this document for Anna to the best of my ability, but neither she nor anyone else in Hungary had actually seen it. We’d worked out the location of our father’s birthplace before I received it.
It was about 9:40 p.m. when I handed the passport to Sándor, and his alert, lucid face kind of froze. The passport included mention of another location besides Boian on three different places in the document. It was hard to read, so it took him some time to recognize it as Tarnava Mica, and still more time to determine that this was a county. He did not know where it was, but he did know it was nowhere near Tasnádbajom or Oradea. Suddenly there was a lot of conversation in Hungarian with no translation. There were more important things to do than explain to us what was happening, especially since it was not great news. As the discussion grew more animated, Anna consulted her computer for the information she’d received from Attila Szabo for the place-name dictionary well over a year before. Sándor called Romania on his cell to find out where Tarnava Mica might be. At some point, Anna’s boyfriend burst out laughing and translated for us: Sándor had said, “We’re in deep shit.” Ten-year old Andy was fascinated by it all, bouncing from one chair to another and came up with the best hard copy map of Transylvania we were to see that night. On it he showed us where the Kis-Küküllő River was; its name was Tarnava Mica in Romanian. He understood what was happening a lot better than Richard and I did.
Eventually we were clued in that between 1919 and 1925, Tarnava Mica was the name of a county now known as Sibiu. Within it is a town named Boian in Romanian, the exact name that appears on the passport, also known as Alsóbajom in Hungarian, which means lower Boian. The town is near a river, as Frank remembers his father saying. Barbara had recalled some mention of a cross and a town square, and its one tourist attraction is a 15th-century fortified Saxon church, which is on the official list of the “Endangered Relics of Transylvanian Hungarian and Saxon Culture.” So the town that Anna had traveled to in 2005 was not where the family was from, and none of us had ever seen the correct one. Yet, within less than 12 hours, Anna had everything rearranged for us to go to this Boian instead. We left on Thursday, May 3, overnighted in Deva, and drove three hours the next day to Boian/Alsóbajom. Since the nearest village of Bazna was a small spa town, it had good accommodations. Sándor phoned the mayor of Bazna and Boian in advance, who said he was happy to allow us to look at the town’s archives in his office. Apparently, there aren’t too many people who come all the way from Hawaii to see them.
Following the presentation of my bottle of Glenfiddich and two boxes of Hawaiian Host macadamia nuts to the mayor, we were introduced to his assistant and the town secretary for Boian. Sándor explained what we were looking for, and they began with the death records. It didn’t take long. Written in Hungarian, the death entry identified Béla Klein as a shopkeeper and barkeeper at the time of his death in 1913. They also located and copied for us the birth rec-ords of all four sons. As soon as the town secretary saw the reference to a store and bar, she told us it was still in existence, and they would take us there. The mayor escorted us by car to the village a mile from his office in Bazna and arranged for us to be taken around by a group that included the secretary, who appears really to run the town; the headmaster of the school, who spoke French; the geography teacher, who spoke some English; and various others who, at times, included the police chief and the priest of the Romanian Orthodox church. We gathered first with everyone in the school office and then walked around town on foot.
Boian/Alsóbajom is today still a poignantly poor village with little indoor plumbing or modern amenities, but it’s nestled into a beautiful landscape of rolling hills and cultivated fields. Most of the streets are still made of mud, and most of the homes are without electricity. Many of them would have been present when my family was there; others sport their dates proudly under the peaks of roofs in bold colors: 1941, 1950, 1929. The village has about 2,000 people, as it did back in 1910. Thirty-seven of them were Jewish then, which apparently amounted to three families. Ours ran the pub known as the “Lajbi,” which is the name of a vest that Hungarian men wear over a shirt and under a coat; this also was the inn and the store at various times. Another Jewish family seems to have run the village mill. The Kleins were then doubly a minority, being not only Jewish but Hungarian in a place where more than 74 percent of the villagers were Romanian, 15 percent were German and only 10 percent Hungarian.
Yet today’s residents have large hearts and were generous in welcoming back the daughter of one who had left so many years ago. As we walked through the village, a few old women came up, gripped my hand tightly and shared their stories. Most wore layers of long skirts, warm jackets and scarves over their heads, like my great-grandmother. Their faces were leathery and looked even older than their years to my eyes. One woman with an especially kind face said her grandfather and my grandfather had been good friends. The officials walked us up the hillside through the town’s small Jewish cemetery, which was completely overgrown and had only one gravestone standing. They took us to the 15th-century Saxon church, which now only attracts occasional visitors. Later we saw the Romanian Orthodox church, clearly the religious center of the town, with its head priest who looked like an ad for Armani in his open-necked black shirt.
On our second day, we traveled to Medias to see the closest synagogue, which has not been in use for 20 years, because most of the Jewish people left around then for Israel. Prayer books layered with many years of dust were piled up in the back. The first one I picked up was dated 1882. This was once a small but attractive synagogue, with a menorah painted on the walls and an anteroom that served as a school, but its disrepair was painful to see. Less than a mile away is the main cemetery of Medias, with a small Jewish cemetery off to the side accessed through the home of a woman with a barking dog and some chickens, whose family appears to carve the gravestones. Since most of the headstones were only in Hebrew, we were unable to find one for Béla Klein, but there were graves for Roza Klein, Fredericka Klein, Mina Klein, Johann Klein and others who had clearly survived the Holocaust. I felt more surrounded by members of my father’s family in this place than ever before.
Back in Boian later that day, the award-winning folk dancing troupe of village children aged about 6 to 15 danced for us in their charming, hand-embroidered Romanian costumes in the small school. They were wonderful. My cousins and I have donated small sums to the school, which may be of use for a new computing center that is under construction, and my husband sent books in English for the children. The village has only been connected to the Internet for the past year. Before we left, we reassembled with the town officials in the school office, ate some crackers and drank homemade palinka, a strong, clear, fruit-based brandy. Then the town secretary, Marioara Sāmārtinean, presented me with a hand-woven wool bedspread that her mother had made 50 years earlier. Our being there seemed to matter to people of the town in ways I am still trying to understand. It was a moving and humbling experience, and it has changed me. Now we know where we come from, a very simple place nestled amongst rolling hills, poor in resources, but rich in the warmth and kindness of its people.
* * *
Lighting Hanukkah candles is for me now both a lonely and a meaningful act. It connects me to those long-lost relatives—cousins I know, grandparents I will never know—as well as friends I care about and a whole people to whom I am unknown and possibly suspect. Although I have been instructed online by Judaism 101 in how to perform this ritual, I am hardly proficient at it or saying, much less singing, the Hebrew words. Sometimes lighting the candles makes me feel more disconnection than anything else, but it still feels right to do, for they carry a past that is deeper than the turkey and Santa Claus candles I played with after holiday meals as a child. They take me back to that earlier emptiness, too. I wonder if the candles burned in the windows of the Lajbi in Boian, if displaying them there was too risky, or if the family even had the resources to be observant. The miracle of these candles burning in Honolulu is not that they remain lit for eight days, but that they connect me to a past I have now come to know and to people from the East Coast and beyond whose ancestors traveled from a village in Romania. As my extended family, their people are in some ways my own. The light cast by the candles is small, but it is a Klein light. It warms me.
Valerie Wayne is a professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Born and raised in the Chicago area, she received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1978 and has taught in Hawaii for 30 years. She specializes in Shakespeare and literature of the English Renaissance.
Avotaynu 2007; 23(4):44-51
DOI: 10.17228/AVOT20070444
Copyright © 2008 Avotaynu, Inc.
