Every Family Has A Story: Tales From the Pages of AVOTAYNU. Edited by Gary Mokotoff. Hardcover, 292 pages. Avotaynu, Inc., Bergenfield, NJ. Price: $37
There are several dozen genealogical adventure stories in this collection, straight from the pages of AVOTAYNU, this very journal. At their best, these tales by many authors combine the intrigue of a Sherlock Holmes detective story with the vividness of fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Many of the articles in this book illuminate why we do genealogy and the nature of the emotional payoff that comes from rooting through antiquated records in musty archives, entering the forbidding precincts of old cemeteries, and traveling vast distances to ancestral villages in search of an authentic connection to our family’s past.
“Freya Joins the Kahn Klan,” the opening story by Freya Blitstein Maslov, tells of the author’s remarkable discovery, evident from a printed obituary, that the unknown mother who had given her up for adoption had seven other children—her brothers and sisters. “That night, when I got home from work, I called the funeral home mentioned in the obituary and asked for the next of kin.” Soon she is on the phone with her biological brother and trying to find a way to break the news to him. An emotion-laden reunion followed—as did a remarkable epilogue: Freya’s daughter fell in love and married one of her new-found cousins.
In “The Diary of Miriam Hanania,” Batya Unterschatz, former director of the Israeli Search Bureau for Missing Relatives, describes the remarkable sleuthery by which she discovered the name of the writer of a wartime diary that turned up in an Amsterdam antique shop. But then, in a shocking twist, she called the diarist’s apartment to speak to her and was told, “I am afraid that is not possible. You see, we have just returned from her funeral.”
Many of the stories, including “On Helping a Relative Find His Father,” by Wayne Pines, carry an Aristotelian moment of discovery. “Before calling Phillip with the answer to his quest, I wondered how he would receive it,” Pines writes. “Phillip’s mother was a devout Methodist and had brought him up in that religion. How, I wondered, would a Methodist electrician from Athens, Georgia, react to being told that his father was Jewish with a large extended family in the United States, England, Israel, and Russia, many of whom were quite religious?”
Like late romantic or gothic stories that seek the restoration of a family’s fortunes, many of these genealogical adventures involve a compulsory scene in the cemetery. “Oh! Dan, come here! I think I’ve found it!” is how Daniel A. Kirschner’s “Family Footprints in Lithuania” begins, while Olga Zabludoff’s “When Good Men Did Nothing” begins as follows: “As I stumbled over rocks in the old Jewish cemetery and unraveled vines that clung to my clothes, I thought I was seeing only the remnants of a cemetery….” For modern American Jews, the path to psychological wholeness often takes us through the cemetery.
AVOTAYNU publisher Gary Mokotoff, who edited this volume, supplied numerous stories which are among the best in the collection. My favorite is “Max,” a remarkable tale that begins when a lady named Marilyn calls him after reading an article about him, wanting to know if he was related to a certain Maximilian Mokotowski. The lady’s mother had been married to Max briefly, Marilyn tells Gary, but upon learning that he was a bigamist, divorced him and suffered a miscarriage. “Marilyn, I have news for you,” he tells her. “I don’t think your mother miscarried. I think she had the child, a boy, and put him up for adoption.” The rest of the tale describes Mokotoff’s efforts at helping Marilyn find her brother and other family members.
Mokotoff again demonstrates his close kinship to Sherlock Holmes when a man named Larry writes to ask him if they might be related. His reply: “Are we related? Your name is Lawrence Mokotoff. You were born on June 18, 1934. Your father’s name was Max Mokotoff, and your mother’s name was Mary Sears. I have been looking for you for 15 years. Oh yes, you have a half sister and half brother who live in the New York City area.” Larry, needless to say, is dumbfounded.
Snooping around graveyards? Following a paper trail? Digging through musty archives? Who knew that such material could be woven into such a gripping form of Jewish literature? You don’t have to be a genealogist to enjoy these tales of family-tree sleuthery, but it helps.
Bill Gladstone
