Four generations, circa 1894. Clockwise from top, author’s grandmother Sylvia Fink (1891­–1966); Sylvia’s grandmother, Mathilda Barmon Rosen (1842–1915), her great-grandmother Rebecca Goldman Barmon (1804–1896), and her mother, Yetta Rosen Fink (1867–1928).
My father kept a cut-glass bourbon bottle on his dresser, empty except for the coins he dropped into it from his pockets every night. I remember the stickers on the bottle, tiny Wisconsins. I remember the concave oval on the face of the thick smooth glass. But mostly I remember as a young child sneaking into my parents’ bedroom, standing on tiptoe, and at every opportunity stealing as many coins as I could. I mention this only to explain my furtive frame of mind.

“It was 1968. My parents had both been on the popular television show Jeopardy! in the past year.”

It was 1968. My parents had both been on the popular television show Jeopardy! in the past year, and we kids—I was 11—got to stay home from school to watch them on our grandparents’ new color TV. Dad won enough over three days to take Mom on a trip to Europe, and they were

applying for passports. A stack of papers lay in front of the bottle: my father’s 1945 Army discharge papers, their marriage certificate, and something from Detroit. I snatched it off the dresser, carefully unfolded the official photocopy, and read: Herbert Goldberg was henceforth, as of some date in 1937, Herbert Grayson. Underneath this page, in case there had been any doubt, was my father’s birth certificate: Herbert Fink Goldberg.

At 11, I didn’t think I knew any Jews, and all I knew about them was that they had turned on Jesus. Our family attended Trinity Episcopal Church, as had my mother’s parents. I was in the church choir. My Grayson/Goldberg grandparents’ only visible religious practice consisted of a fanatical devotion to the Detroit Tigers. But I knew this much: Goldberg was a Jewish name, my grandfather’s real name, my father’s name, and in some way mine.

My paternal grandmother, whom I adored (in part for her generosity with Hershey bars), had died in 1966; my kindly grandfather had become demented. He lived in a nursing home 20 miles away, planning trips via a bridge to Hawaii to visit long-dead friends from his Long Island boyhood. My father’s only sibling, Peggy, had been hospitalized for mental illness on multiple occasions, and Dad wasn’t talking about, or to, the rest of his extended family. He was determined to pass as a Gentile; blessed with a large aquiline nose and dark curly hair, he may not have fooled anyone but himself.

By the time I was a teenager, I was obsessed with all things Jewish; this manifested itself in secret excursions to Milwaukee’s old delis and synagogues and a passion for Chaim Potok novels. I found a sure way to get under my parents’ skin: I decided to change my last name back to Goldberg. At 16, I finally gathered the courage to talk to my father, and he scheduled a restaurant dinner alone with me to discuss what he called “the subject.”

How strange it was to watch my gregarious, unflappable dad squirm—and, I am ashamed to admit, I was not above baiting him to see what elaborate sentences he could devise to

avoid using the dreaded words “Jew,” “Jewish,” or even “Judaism.” So focused was I on getting a reaction from him that I never asked the questions I really wanted to: Had something awful happened? Why was he so afraid of being found out? Even if he didn’t want to be Jewish, why couldn’t we know his family? My (usually articulate) dad told me was that, yes, his family members were “those people,” but life was easier for “people who weren’t of that religion.” He hadn’t converted, but he went along to church because he wanted to be “normal.” Only by accident had I learned that he was “one of them,” and he wished I had never found the paper on his dresser.

Message in a Cardboard Box

    Flash forward to 1990. My father had died three years earlier, and Peggy had been forcibly removed from her home and taken to a care facility. Her state-appointed legal guardian discovered several piles of old family photographs, many of them ruined by pools of standing water that Peggy had left in several rooms of the house. The guardian asked my mother, a thoroughgoing WASP and no fan of her sister-in-law, if she wished to keep the stuff. While she most assuredly did not, she asked me if I wanted anything from the house. Gratefully I said yes—and soon two cardboard boxes full of photographs and memorabilia appeared at my office.

The boxes, each about the size of a small TV, leached a damp, musty smell. But there was something almost mystical about them, perhaps only in my imagination. I didn’t tear them open immediately, but waited until I hauled them home that night. My hand trembled as I drew the box cutter through the tape. I pulled back the flaps of the box.

In the jumble of old wedding pictures, framed portraits, my grandfather’s Riverhead, New York, report cards, yahrzeit certificates (the likes of which I had never seen before), and tiny old sepia photographs from an unpronounceable town, I recognized only my grandparents, my father, and my aunt. The other people—and most of the pictures were of other people—could have been anybody. Few of the pictures were labeled, but this was a treasure, however waterlogged and torn. I was determined to learn more.

Finding the Finks Finding the Finks

My brothers and I knew one thing about Dad’s family: His mother was a Fink, and Fink was his middle name. This provided us with hours of juvenile snorts in the era of Allan Sherman’s “Rat Fink.” Our mother told stories, with any telltale Jewish bits omitted, about some of the Fink relatives: the psychiatrist whose patient roster included Oscar Levant, the competitive aunts, the cousin who caused a multi-car collision outside Tiger Stadium when he realized he was going to miss the opening pitch at a play-off game. These people were described as humorous caricatures. Except for one meeting with my dad’s funny and voluble cousin, Carl (the Tigers crash), I never knew them. Now I had their pictures and, in the case of Dr. David H. Fink, letters written to my grandparents and aunt while she was recovering from nervous breakdowns in Pontiac Hospital. Who were these people?

A quick library check of telephone books (years before the Internet) produced addresses for my dad’s aunt Dorothy and cousin Lenore. I wrote to them. Their replies, long, chatty letters, charmed and stunned me. Thus began my genealogical search, and my slow piecing-together of my father’s family history.

Both ladies were delighted to hear from someone in my family and treated me as the returning child of a prodigal. I had not realized that my dad’s willful estrangement had left many relatives baffled and hurt.

Dorothy sent a handwritten Fink-Rosen family tree, complete with branches of “geniuses and such” and “oddballs,” and editorial comments about the merits and shortcomings of various relatives. She called in the summer of 1990 (her voice remarkably clear and steady for a 90-year-old) to insist that my father was probably ashamed of his paternal grandparents, whom she called “the unattractive Litvaks”—a strange choice of words, I would later learn, considering that the Goldbergs were from Ukraine and Dorothy’s own father was born in Lithuania. As for unattractive, well, the pictures confirmed that she was pretty much on the money.

Life takes its twists and turns, and I wound up storing the boxes in the attic of one home, then the basement of another, until 2004 when my brother Rich said that his daughter wanted to see pictures of ancestors and so did he.

Other than tossing out some of the most damaged pieces and sorting a few photographs Lenore and Dorothy had identified, I had done nothing to organize the boxes. Before showing the pictures to Rich and little Jenna, I started sorting them into family groups: Finks, Goldbergs, Rosens, and/or Barmons. And, the biggest pile, Unknown. I needed more help.

Contacting Relatives

By this time, I was regularly surfing the web, and I decided to see if any other relatives were out there. Sure enough, someone had posted a Fink family tree that matched Dorothy’s—Dave Kyle, grandson of David H. Fink, MD, had been compiling family records. We e-mailed, we exchanged copies of photos and information, and when this second cousin called me, we talked as if we had known each other forever, even laughing at the same

From Berdichiv, Ukraine: Members of the Weiner family, possibly author’s great-grandmother Rifka “Nellie” Weiner Goldberg’s father, Zev Weiner, and his wife.

jokes. Dave mentioned that we had another cousin, Tom Klein, who had been doing serious genealogical research for years, and suggested that I contact him.

Tom was delighted to tell me about my father, his older cousin Herbie, the extroverted kid who loved sports and who took Tom to the downtown Detroit hotels each summer to collect autographs from visiting baseball players. I hadn’t known anything about Dad’s childhood before, except for the troubles with Peggy. Tom also gave me insight into the name change: “It wasn’t cool to be Jewish,” he said in a 2005 telephone call. He explained that my grandfather thought he was being passed over for promotions at the Rural Electrification Agency, the New Deal commission where he worked as an engineer in the late 1930s. If he changed his name to something more neutral, at least he wouldn’t be rejected on paper.

A World Bank economist who started taking piano and Hebrew lessons in his retirement, Tom was working on a family tree project of his own: researching our Barmon and Rosen ancestors in Michigan. (My great-grandfather, Myer Samuel Fink, had married into the Rosen/Barmon family.) He sent not only a copy of his manuscript on the Barmons, but a copy of the Fink family tree he had compiled so far. The last page showed that Great-grandpa Myer had a sister, Rose, who married a Cass Sunstein.

Since I lived in Chicago and had friends in academia, I

Author’s Litvak great-grandfather, Myer Samuel Fink, worked as a peddler and cigar maker in New York City before moving to Detroit around 1880. He boarded with David and Mathilda Rosen, who helped hide slaves crossing through to Canada in the early 1860s, and soon entered the mens­wear business with their son, Aaron Dodd Rosen. He married their daughter, Rachel, in 1882. After she died in childbirth, he married her younger sister, Yetta.

recognized that name. Of course, I was thinking of the living legal scholar, Cass Robert Sunstein, then at the University of Chicago Law School. I sent him an e-mail and he confirmed that, yes, we were related; he was the grandson of Rose’s son, Elias.

I was hooked. Reconnecting with family I had only a vague notion of was deeply satisfying; discovering that our family tree had branches I’d never heard of was just plain fun. With Tom’s documents at my side, I started to look for the family online.

A Google search of Cass Sunstein’s name yielded an Esquire profile by A.J. Jacobs, who opened the piece by explaining that he was related to his subject. Yet another third cousin! I had enjoyed A.J.’s comic writing and fantasized that maybe, if I kept tracing the family tree, I would discover a whole cast of talented relatives. Never mind Horowitz or Einstein; maybe we were related to Bruce Springsteen or Jon Stewart. (Friends have cautioned that this is unlikely, since my dad was tall—but guys, if you’re reading this, call me.)

Finding Finks

A.J. wrote back: “We are blood!” Our common ancestors: Moses Fink and his wife, Sarah Rosenthal Fink, our great-great-grandparents. And he kindly forwarded a 68-page dossier his father had assembled on his mother’s family.

That document was a wonderful discovery. I learned that Moses and Sarah had two other sons in addition to my great-grandfather, Myer, and his sister, Rose. Moses Fink himself had a brother, Alexander Fink, with a long list of descendants of his own. Finks were everywhere! Especially, it appeared, in Pittsburgh.

After another frenzied round of Internet searches, I e-mailed about six people I identified as possible matches to the Fink relations on the Jacobs chart—which included relevant pages from Chaim Freedman’s 1997 book, Eliyahu’s Branches, showing that the Sunsteins were descended from the Vilna Gaon—and waited. A quick response came from a nice guy in California who put me in touch with his mother and his aunt Suzanne, the genealogist in the family. Soon she was on the phone with me, comparing notes. Alexander Fink, it turns out, was born in Vilna, and became something of a big shot in 19th-century Pittsburgh. For 20 years, he was the president of the Tree of Life Congregation and was so associated with the place that it was known as Fink’s shul. But, alas, Moses was not a financial and social success like his big brother the retailer. New York City directories and censuses show that he lived in various Lower East Side apartments and worked as a peddler. As for Moses and Sarah Fink’s other sons, I learned that Louis (b. 1851) was a glazier who emigrated first to Liverpool for 15 years before moving to New York. A guy identified in the Jacobs tree as Elias Abraham must be the mysterious son who, according to Moses’ 1900 obituary, was still in Russia.

I had already spent endless hours searching in vain for the right Finks (and Finkelsteins, Finkelmans, Viniks, and Pincuses) online. That we might have relatives living in Europe—or, more to the point, dead in Europe—filled me with despair. At the time I learned about the Fink brothers, I had just finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s brilliant book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, but unlike the author, I was not ready to cross several continents to track an elusive uncle.

Fortunately, all I had to do was walk to my computer and try to find a way around another wall. No Elias Abraham matched my guy. But what about Abraham Elias?

This time it was Ancestry.com that delivered the goods. One Abraham Fink had submitted a naturalization petition in Pittsburgh in 1907. Thanks to the Jacobs records, I knew I had the right guy; the names of his seven children closely matched the names on A.J.’s tree. Best of all, the entire petition, not just the index card, was online and held the key.

Abraham Fink was born in Sapitsken, Russia, in 1851 and arrived in New York in 1902. He lived in Pittsburgh and worked as a Hebrew teacher. According to the petition, his children were also born in Sapitsken—now Sopotskin, Belarus, in the historically unfortunate corner where Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland meet. If Abraham and his children were born there, chances were that my great-grandfather, Myer, was born there too. Assuming that the volumes of material on Alexander Fink had correctly cited his birthplace as Vilna (although it’s certainly possible that he told people the easily pronounceable name of the province rather than a tricky Lithuanian town), Moses was probably born in Vilna, too, and perhaps his wife, Sarah Rosenthal, was from Sopotskin.

I’ve learned a lot about Sopotskin, thanks in large part to Alfred Kramer’s wonderful website <http://kramerlaw. com/GenealogyFram.html>; unfortunately, most of the town’s Jewish records have been destroyed. As of this writing, I have made contact with two of Abraham Fink’s U.S. descendants and hope to find more.

Meeting the Cousins

    Hours of staring at a computer screen had left me feeling disembodied and adrift. Life had given my poky genealogy project a new urgency. In 2007, my brother Rich was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Every week or two I would visit, and it gave him great pleasure to see old photographs and clippings, especially anything from Grandpa Harry, who had competed in baseball, basketball, and football during his Long Island youth. As Rich’s health declined in 2008, so did his comprehension and speech, although he still lit up at pictures of our grandfather in a sports uniform. My strapping 47-year-old brother was dying. I promised him that I would learn as much as I could about our father’s family, and that I would share it with his children. Rich died in January 2009. Time to act.

Last spring I visited a distant cousin, Ruth Barmon Cubine, the doyenne of Barmon family history. I needn’t have worried that my candy gift was a social faux pas; she keeps boxes of chocolate in nearly every room of her Kansas City house. The scroll of her and her late husband’s family tree, a drafting-paper megillah with more than 10,000 names, stretched across her attic. (Our common ancestors are Bernard Barmon, originally from Lipno, Poland, and his wife, Rebecca Goldman, from Danzig. Tom Klein published an article about the Barmons in Michigan Jewish History, vol. 42, Fall 2002.)

When I returned, I looked at a small flipbook of photographs that had fallen to the bottom of the box. There was a 1964 picture of my brothers Rich, Rob, and me, along with two blond boys on a sunny porch in Michigan. I vaguely remembered the day. We were served tongue sandwiches and ran around with a playful dog. My grandmother’s note on the back identified the boys as the sons of my dad’s cousin Gretchen, Carl’s sister. Tom confirmed that Gretchen was very much alive and well. I picked up the telephone.

I felt I had known this woman all my life, and in some sense, I had. We exchanged family stories and jokes and eventually made plans for me to visit Detroit. “I’m a little taller than when you last saw me,” I said. “Well, I’m a little shorter,” she replied.

Last fall, I drove to Michigan. I recognized the cheerful blond woman from the smiling girl in my grandparents’ photographs, although I had a hard time believing she was in her 80s. I think I can best capture Gretchen by letting her speak for herself:

Me, in Woodlawn Cemetery, trying to find my grandparents’ graves: “I think we’re lost. I don’t see any Jewish section around here.”

G: “We could ask those geese.”

L: “Why, do they look Jewish?”

G: “I can’t tell if they’re circumcised.”

Back at her house, Gretchen told me about a few things she had experienced that she never wants to go through again. “I have a bucket list,” she said, “and I think I now have a Dayenu list.” We stayed up late into the night, exchanging stories and photographs and laughing.

The following month, Tom Klein and his wife, Judith, a Holocaust survivor, were coming to Chicago for Tom’s army reunion. As with my meeting with Gretchen, I was at an advantage. When we met in the Palmer House lobby, I instantly recognized “Little Tommy’s” intelligent, kindly face from his childhood photos. I couldn’t help recognize, too, his keen strategic mind and dry sense of humor, traits my father shared.

The Mysterious Goldbergs The mysterious Goldbergs

While my Fink relatives were at least mentioned when I was a child, my parents said nothing about the Goldbergs except to show us occasional postcards from my dad’s uncle Leo, who lived on a houseboat on the Detroit River. My grandfather, Harry Goldberg, was born and raised on Long Island—which was obvious not only from his thick local accent but his profusion of souvenirs of Riverhead, New York. (I regret to say that I have lost the 100-year-old newspaper article about my great-grandmother, who apparently was the Potato Maven of Long Island.) A search on Ancestry.com produced census information on Harry, his brothers, and his parents, who came from Russia. I could connect the names to some of the photographs in Grandpa’s scrapbooks, but I couldn’t find my great-grandparents’ immigration records. The problem? Try searching for Hyman Goldberg in New York.

Fortunately, I knew enough about my great-uncles (Leo, Sam, and Bill) to start searching for living relatives. Along with my grandfather, Leo and Bill had changed their surname to Grayson in 1937; Sam stayed a Goldberg. But there were even more Sam Goldbergs than Hymans in online and printed records. In the end, good old Uncle Leo provided the key: The wonderful Irwin I. Cohn Michigan Jewish Cemetery Index <www.thisisfederation.org/cemetery/default.asp> showed that he was buried in Detroit’s Machpelah Cemetery in June 1974. A quick look in Chicago Public Library microfilms of Detroit newspapers revealed his obituary, which mentioned not only his Navy career but his two surviving brothers, Sam and William, both then living in metropolitan Detroit. The Cohn Index also pointed me to William. From his Detroit News obituary, I learned that he had two living children: a son in Michigan and a daughter in Kansas. A flurry of Internet searches gave me plausible addresses, and with great excitement and trepidation, I composed letters to them, explaining who I was. I included copies of a few Goldberg family photographs from the early 1900s.

Sure enough, I had two more cousins (first cousins once removed, to be precise). One shared family stories, and the other sent a handwritten family tree created by his son for a school project. The hunt was on.

Sam was harder to find. He seemed to have vanished from Detroit. But Harry’s collection included a faded snapshot of Sam from the 1960s, standing in front of a palm tree—so I started searching Florida records. Readers will not be surprised to learn of the numerous Sam Goldberg death records in Florida. I selected a couple of likely ones and started hunting Internet obituaries. This took several tiresome weeks, then: Bingo. Sam Goldberg, formerly of Long Island and Detroit, Henry Ford’s chief mechanic. I wrote to Sam’s four surviving children. His daughter, Doris, phoned back.

Doris didn’t know Grandpa Hyman, who died when she was a toddler—after which Grandma Nellie moved in with her family.

“My dad loved bacon and eggs,” Doris said. “Grandma would get mad because she could smell the bacon. She’d slam the door so we’d know she could tell what was going on.” Grandma kept two sets of dishes, but my mentally ill Aunt Peggy occasionally visited and “would mix things up because she didn’t know. Grandma would have a fit.” Grandma was not above arguing with a kosher butcher who refused to slaughter her chicken of choice. “She never spoke Yiddish to her sons or (grandchildren), only to her old lady friends. She’d speak English with the nuns down the street who would sit with her on the porch.” The old sepia photographs from Berdichiv were her relatives. According to another cousin, Jerry, her father lived to be 103.

My brothers were bemused by my over-the-top enthusiasm for finding relatives and puzzled by my e-mails full of biographies and old photos. One of them, however, agreed to participate in a paternal DNA test. “Dad was going to take this secret to the grave,” he said, exasperated. We hoped to get a clue to Hyman Goldberg’s story.

Jerry’s notes said that Hyman came from Odessa; in Riverhead, he worked as a peddler, then helped his sons at their auto dealership when the whole family moved to Detroit. His headstone reads, “Chaim, son of Zvi Yehuda.” JewishGen records showed nothing in Ukraine for Goldbergs with those names in the right generation. Photos show a slim, mustachioed man with expressions ranging from serious to confused. Who was he?

The DNA test didn’t really help. My brother—and, presumably, my father and all male relatives up and down the line belong to Haplogroup G from the Caucasus region, exemplified by Joseph Stalin. The test traces ancestry back more than 10,000, even 30,000 years, well before the birth of Judaism. All we learned, really, was that Hyman’s people hadn’t strayed very far geographically in the generations before they lived in Odessa.

I looked at records and passenger lists for all the (contradictory) immigration dates listed on Hyman’s census entries. Nothing. Nothing for my great-grandmother, Rivka “Nellie” Weiner Goldberg, either. E-mails to lots of Weiners on JewishGen lists received kind, helpful responses, but no connections. My newly discovered cousin, Doris, gave me the address for a descendant of one of Nellie’s sisters. I sent a letter and lots of photographs, but it remains unanswered. I checked Berdichiv websites, hoping to find Weiners; ditto for Odessa Goldbergs. Nothing. The proverbial

Author’s great-great-grandfather Moshe Fink’s old apartment on Eldridge Street (across from the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York City’s Lower East Side, where he lived 1888­–94. It is now above a Chinese bakery.

brick wall would not budge despite my repeated attempts to beat my head against it.

An answer, although not the one I hoped for, came during a phone call from Doris. We were trying to work out if Hyman might have had brothers or sisters who came here or stayed in Odessa. She explained that this would be harder to figure out than I thought. “You know, Goldberg wasn’t really his family name,” she said. Apparently he hadn’t understood the immigration officer’s question about his surname and simply gave the name of the friend he was going to stay with when he first got off the boat. Chaim became Hyman, and he adopted Goldberg as his new American surname.

All my angst-ridden adolescent plans to change my name back to Goldberg, then, really were about some landsman (countryman), an Odessa neighborhood guy. Hyman’s original surname—original, in this case, meaning what his own father or grandfather adopted under the czar—neither Doris nor any of the other Goldberg/Grayson cousins knows, and we probably never will.

The Search Continues

    In the week before I finished writing this article, I received a telephone call from a Rosen cousin who has lived in France for the past 40 years and wants to learn more about our common ancestor, Abraham David Rosen, a baker and saloonkeeper who joined the Underground Railroad movement shortly after his arrival in Detroit in 1860. The descendants of philanthropist Alexander Fink are keen to learn more. I am exchanging information with the family of Rose Fink Sunstein, the great-great-aunt who journeyed from Lithuania to Liverpool, New York, and eventually Pittsburgh, and whose wedding gift to my grandmother sits in plastic in my own mother’s basement.

Twenty years have passed since I first opened those cardboard boxes. With the help of newly discovered cousins (not to mention the original notes scribbled by my grandparents, my great-aunt Dorothy, and people I’ll never know), I now can identify most of the people in the pictures and tell stories about each of them. Occasionally I feel an unbecoming pride in my discoveries. It is not just the thrill of a puzzle slowly solved that draws me to the library and the computer. I feel that I have found a lost part of my heritage. Peddlers, art historians, engineers, sailors, economists, teachers, saloonkeepers, writers, doctors, filmmakers, mechanics—I have a connection to remarkable people, some long gone, but, to my good fortune, many very much alive. Several of us are talking about family reunions, one on the East Coast and one on the West. I wish Rich could be there.

If my father were alive today, maybe he would call Tom or Gretchen to talk baseball. Would he attend a reunion? It’s nice to think so, but if I’m honest, I doubt it. He never forgave me for discovering his secret. I have a better understanding of his choice after talking with his cousins, and can (grudgingly) forgive him for hiding his family from us. Now that I’ve found not only a paper trail but marvelous living relatives, however, I proclaim my connection to the Finks, Rosens, Goldbergs, Rosenthals, and all other relations with pride.

Lisa Grayson is a writer and translator in Chicago. She thanks her cousins, Ruth Barmon Cubine, Jerry Grayson, A.J. Jacobs, Gloria R. Kaplan, Rosemary Kaploe, Tom Klein, Dave Kyle, Bill Levin, Doris Rose, Gretchen M. Thams, and Lenore Levin Wolbarsht for their help and encouragement, and thanks Marlene Silverman and Evan Wolfson for their research assistance.