The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  * * *

  • • •

  That night at the hotel, when I got into bed, my head was filled with the little Morris children. So much of their lives must have been informed by this early trauma, and it was doubled by the fact that they were too ashamed to tell anyone about their mother. The children must have thought they weren’t going to be in the orphanage for long, and it would seem that one of Clara’s three sisters—my great-grandmother Martha, in Manhattan, or her other sisters Rebecca, in Montreal, or Rachel, in New Jersey—would’ve taken them in.

  I know that my grandmother had taken in her brother and other relatives when they needed a place to stay, even though she and my grandfather lived in a small apartment in New York City. My dad told me about different uncles who slept in his room when he was a boy and he would have to sleep on the couch. That’s what families did in those days: They helped each other.

  Marcella, Malvina, and Ruth Morris

  Left: Sam and Selma Morris

  Right: Marcella Morris

  Selma Morris

  Why wouldn’t my grandmother’s mother have taken care of the Morris children? The story in my family was that the sisters were angry later in life about being left to fend for themselves without support from the rest of the family, and they were obviously angry with their father: The meager grave in the cheapest section of the cemetery was proof of that. Had their father ever tried to arrange for them to live with other family members, or was he just too ashamed to admit that he needed help supporting his family? Or maybe he really believed he was going to get them out of the orphanage soon and he didn’t want to send them so far away. I hope that was the case. The alternative that he knowingly abandoned them is too horrifying to contemplate.

  What was unavoidable was that the Morris sisters must have had to face the shattering feeling of being unwanted—first by their homeland and then by their father.

  Yet there are clues that there was love as well. In a family album that my cousin Bobby has there are several lovely photographs of Sam and Selma and Marcella, and one of Marcella, Malvina, and Ruth, which Guerson took sometime before 1910. The pictures are so beautifully crafted that it’s clear great care went into them. Nobody will ever know what Guerson Morris was thinking when he took them, but looking at these photographs today, more than a century later, I don’t think there is a question that he loved his children.

  Eleven

  Clara Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  The next day Barbara and I met Larry Harmon, who gave us a tour of what had been the St. Louis County Lunatic Asylum (though the name was changed to the St. Louis Insane Asylum just before Clara arrived). The building wasn’t far from the orphanage; had the children ever visited their mother, or did they even know she was there? The building was constructed in August 1864 by local architect William Rumbold. His idea was to create a structure that brought to mind imperial Rome, which is why it’s topped with a dome, albeit a cast iron one. He had fine marble pillars imported from Italy for the front portico. The place definitely looked like what it was, beautiful but serious. Until recently it was the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, but those offices moved to a newer building, and when we visited, it was mostly empty. We went inside and saw framed newspapers from the hospital’s opening: a two-page spread from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on January 3, 1904, when alienist (as psychiatrists were then called) Edward C. Runge, the asylum’s superintendent, was “driven from the hospital” because he was “fettered by political influencers” to keep dishonest and incompetent employees and who “subjected him to repeated humiliations.” Well!

  We started our tour in the basement, where Larry told us “the most serious patients were kept.” There were rings that hung from the walls, and I asked Larry if patients had been shackled. Larry said they had. There were showers at one end that the inmates were held under. Whatever the truth was about what happened here—whatever treatment or punishment the patients endured—it was a dank, dark, and somber space, and one I didn’t want to linger in for too long. I did notice there were storage boxes stacked along the walls, and I kind of wanted to see if any of Clara’s records were in them, but I didn’t look. The only census record in which Clara was listed with her family in 1910 (it must have been early in the year) asked how many births she had and how many live children she had. The answer that was recorded was eight births and five living children. So she had three babies or small children die. It would have happened before she came to the United States sometime before or between Sam, Selma, and Malvina. Such loss would have been enough to throw me into deep despair I don’t know that I’d ever recover from.

  I let Larry and Barbara go ahead of me as we walked past dirty walls of white brick and saw the obscured keyhole-shaped windows that would have let in very little light, and I began talking to Clara in my head. I told her how sorry I was that she had been sick and that she had to leave her children to come to this place. I knew that she had been a good mother to her children and that she had endured so much pain and heartache over the course of her life, more than anyone should have to put up with.

  As I moved along the corridor, with Larry and Barbara far ahead of me, I got a very strong feeling of someone saying, “I was so frightened.”

  At the turn of the twentieth century, psychiatry was at best a rudimentary arm of medicine. I’d researched the treatments for the mentally ill from that time, and they were, to say the least, limited. There was the ever popular “fresh air” treatment—basically being walked around outside (usually on the hospital’s grounds)—as well as hydrotherapy, where patients were either thrown into a pool of cold water (it was supposed to shock them out of their insanity) or strapped into dunking devices or “bath boxes,” where patients were immersed in water up to their necks. It was actually seen as an improvement over restraining patients in straitjackets. Women seemed to be particularly subjected to these kinds of treatments. By the 1930s, doctors often performed lobotomies, surgical operations where an incision is made into the prefrontal lobe of the brain and some of the brain is actually removed. (The way they were performed involved an instrument that looked like a small ice pick that went through the eye socket and into the brain.) The procedure was barbaric and ineffective and yet was performed into the 1970s.

  Claire had told me that Clara was never able to leave the hospital, which makes me think she probably was lobotomized. Had anyone—her husband? Her children?—come to see her?

  We toured the rest of the building and walked all the way up into the dome. During the tour Larry told us that in 1963, the city of St. Louis needed space to construct a four-story building, and officials chose a lot right in front of the Dome building, where it would block the view of the asylum from the street. People didn’t like to see it, it seems. A friend of mine who grew up in St. Louis said that when he was a kid, the Dome building was the place his older brother used to taunt him with. If he didn’t watch out, he’d be sent there. In 1968, two more floors were added to the front building. Can you imagine how it felt to have your entire hospital shrouded by a hideous cement-block monstrosity? The stigma of mental illness is a strong one. Larry showed me pictures of the building and told us it was demolished in 1998.

  He asked us if we wanted to go into the dome. The patients wouldn’t have been allowed to go up there, he said, but at the time it was one of the highest places to view the city. So we started the climb, first up some rickety stairs to some very unstable-feeling floors. We made our way up a wooden spiral staircase. As we climbed, I could see the colors of the sunset reflecting through the prism of windows in the dome and I recalled the story Ruth had written. Out the windows I saw her yellows and mauves and pinks and violets that “glowed for a space in pastel loveliness.” At the top, with the city of St. Louis spread out before me, from the Mississippi River west toward the sunset, I looked for the angel with the “mother-look” as the colors faded
.

  As we climbed back down, I felt the motherless children and the childless mother, none of whom had been happy here.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the flight back to New York, I rewrote the beginning of the Morris biography:

  Four Morris children, Selma, age nine, Sam, age seven, Malvina, age two, and Marcella, age one, came to St. Louis in 1902 from Romania with their mother, Clara, and father, Guerson. Two years later, in 1904, a sister, Ruth, was born, and six years later, on September 20, 1910, their mother was committed to an insane asylum. Two months later, on November 25, 1910, Marcella, age nine, and Ruth, age six, the two youngest Morris children, were put in the Jewish Shelter Home, an orphanage. Three months later, on February 23, 1911, they were joined by their sister Malvina, age ten or eleven. Four months later, June 29, 1911, Malvina was moved to the Cripples’ Home for the summer. She returned to the orphanage and joined her sisters on September 6, 1911. May 30, 1912, a Dr. Horowitz writes a letter to the Morris father, now known as George Morris, to get permission for Malvina to have surgery on her lame leg. October 31, 1912, she was admitted to the Jewish Hospital, where Dr. Horowitz and Dr. Hoffman operated on her. Four months later, on February 27, 1913, Malvina returned to the Jewish Shelter Home.

  During those years, their sister Selma worked and lived with their father and their brother, Israel, known as Sam.

  I’m not sure exactly when each child left the orphanage, but Ruth and Marcella both attended high school starting in 1917 and most likely were still in the orphanage, and left at some point before they graduated from high school in 1921. Malvina started working as a bookkeeper, and Selma continued as a salesgirl at several department stores and they were all working and living with their father in 1922.

  Sometime in the years between 1923 and 1927, the Morris children left St. Louis. Sam moved to Texas, while Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth moved to New York City.

  Those were the facts. The truth lay somewhere in them, I knew.

  Twelve

  Reclaiming My Romanian Roots

  When I returned to New York, I got a panicked phone call from Dr. Gyémánt. He was in Focşani, Romania, and couldn’t find any records of my family. After talking further, we quickly realized that it was a translation error and that he was looking up the wrong name.

  Later that day, he emailed me and said he had had better luck: The Morrises had in fact lived in Focşani and I could now plan my trip with confidence. I was relieved.

  I have a long list of countries I’ve always wanted to visit. Romania wasn’t on it, even though I had been a huge Nadia Comaneci fan in 1976 when she competed in the Summer Olympics, back when Romania was “behind the Iron Curtain.” When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and the Iron Curtain fell, the world changed, but my interest in Romania didn’t. I hadn’t seen many travel pieces on the glories of Bucharest, Romania’s capital. But Romania was where the Morrises and my grandmother’s family had come from, so that was where I headed. It would’ve been nice if I’d had Caribbean or Greek or French ancestors, but we don’t get to pick our families or our ancestral homelands.

  Because of commitments for the next several months, I didn’t have a big window of time to go to Romania. It was pretty much December or never. The guide books warned travelers not to go then because the country is “dreary,” “gray,” “dark,” and “bleak.” But this was not a vacation, this was a business trip—a fact-finding mission.

  I knew the two towns I needed to visit were Focşani and Râmnicu Sărat, both in Moldova, which has on and off been independent and part of Romania. In my research I learned that they were 185 kilometers and 148 kilometers respectively from Bucharest, but I couldn’t figure out the best way to get to both places—car, train, or bus—and there weren’t many hotels in either place. I emailed Dr. Gyémánt for suggestions.

  He said in his opinion a visit to Focşani was worthwhile. “I recommend to visit the local Jewish Community. The name of the president is Mircea Rond, he is a journalist editor of a local Jewish newspaper. He can accompany you to visit the still existing Jewish sites like the synagogue and the cemetery. The address of the community is: Comunitatea evreilor, Oituz Str. 4, Focşani.

  “As concerns Râmnicu Sărat, it is a town not far from Focşani and it is under the administration of the same Jewish community from Focşani.”

  Being the kind of traveler who panics if there’s no turndown service, I was a little concerned that Focşani and Râmnicu Sărat weren’t included in any of the Condé Nast Traveler or Travel + Leisure stories about Romania. There was a resort town on the Black Sea, just about an hour and a half away. Maybe I could just go there and, you know, take a ride to my ancestors’ towns. If I found nothing, at least I would be in a nice hotel. Dan, my boyfriend at the time, listened thoughtfully to my plan and gently told me that what I was suggesting was dumb, really dumb. I knew it was, but I had tried to contact several different guide companies in Romania for help in getting me to and from Focşani and Râmnicu Sărat and no one was responding, so I was starting to feel as if I was traveling to another planet.

  I mentioned the problem to a friend who studied for years in Prague and she connected me with a travel agent there who recommended a great guide in Bucharest, a young man named Valentin Gheorghe. I emailed him and he emailed me back quickly and soon an itinerary was born.

  Dear Mrs. Klam,

  I would like to suggest the following itinerary:

  Day 1, Dec 5th

  Arrival to Bucharest

  Private transfer to your hotel (please provide me with the time of arrival and the hotel info). I will provide you with a complimentary transfer, just to make sure you do not end up taken on a longer trip by a “too friendly” taxi driver.

  Day 2, Dec 6th

  Explore Jewish Sites of Bucharest. I believe it makes more sense to start here, where we have the largest Jewish community, with a Jewish History museum and 3 major synagogues. Having visited some sites here, we can cover the base of the story.

  Moreover, I also would not travel on Dec 6th because it is St. Nicholas Day and many will be running after presents or visiting relatives as it is the names-day of many Romanians.

  Day 3, Dec 7th

  Drive to Ramnicu Sarat (approx 2h15min)

  Research in Ramnicu Sarat

  On this day we can play it “by ear,” depending on what you will find at each location. Focsani is only a 35min drive, so you can decide anytime for either-or.

  Day 4, Dec 8th

  Research in Focsani

  Day 5, Dec 9th

  Drive back to Bucharest. Again, depending on what you will find at the sites in the country, having a car and driver, this day can be flexible. If by any reason a longer stay is necessary, we can even drive straight to the airport from Focsani.

  Day 6, Dec 10th

  Transfer to the airport.

  The above is what I believe makes the best of your time.

  Please be so kind and give me your input. The above are only suggestions, open to changes according to your needs and priorities. Accepting or declining/changing the plan will not be met with a refusal to conduct the tour, but on the contrary, it be changed to fit your expectations.

  This was my introduction to both the lovely Valentin and the affordability of Romania. I began to feel excitement about my trip; I would be walking where my ancestors walked.

  I spent an inordinate amount of time selecting a hotel in Focşani. I found one with a website that had many pictures featuring a couple sitting at a table in the restaurant dining room, standing with a waiter showing them a bottle of wine, admiring the queen-size bed in the hotel room. They looked as if they answered a casting call for “guy who owns a suit and woman who has a dress” and they were the only ones to show up. Still, I liked the look of them and I made a reservation.

  * * *

  �
�� • •

  When my boyfriend, Dan, and I booked our flights, we learned there were no nonstop flights between New York City and Bucharest, so we had to stop over in Warsaw, Poland, which somehow seemed to go with the tenor of the trip. For the couple of hours we spent at the Warsaw Chopin Airport—arriving early in the morning—there was no sign of sun, yet the place felt weirdly bright and dark at the same time, like the sun was in jail somewhere. And I was intensely aware of Poland’s history: It was the location for several Nazi concentration camps. During World War II, Romanian Jews were brought to Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek, all in Poland.

  * * *

  • • •

  The history of the Jewish people in Romania is not a joyful one. (The history of the Jewish people everywhere is not a joyful one, but I digress.)

  There were only a small number of Jews in Romania until the nineteenth century, when many fled the horrors of the pogroms in czarist Russia and settled there. Unfortunately, Romania was not the refuge they hoped for. In Romania, anti-Semitism began to really escalate in 1821 with the first rumblings of Romanian independence from Russia and the Ottoman Empire. At the time, Jews were forbidden to settle in villages, lease land, and establish factories in towns. There were strict laws preventing them from wearing traditional dress, sending their children to school, and becoming Romanian citizens. In 1866, there was a major riot against the Jews in Bucharest, large numbers of Jews were robbed, beaten, and maimed, and the city’s glorious Choral Temple was desecrated and destroyed. A law then was passed that said, “Religion is no obstacle to citizenship,” but, “with regard to the Jews, a special law will have to be framed in order to regulate their admission to naturalization and also to civil rights” and “only such aliens as are of the Christian faith may obtain citizenship.” This was followed by decades of anti-Semitism and the continuous systematic removal of Jewish rights. In 1877, Romania joined Russia to fight the Ottoman Empire of which it was part, and it successfully gained independence. With that victory came a new flurry of nationalism and worsening conditions for Jews. Up until then, Jews had been considered Romanian subjects within the Ottoman Empire, but now they were declared to be foreigners. Jews were forbidden to be lawyers, teachers, chemists, or stockbrokers. They were not allowed to be railway officials or work in state hospitals, and in 1893, Jewish students were expelled from state schools. Under the pressures of increasing persecution accompanied by political unrest and an internal economic crisis blamed on the Jews, a mass emigration began in 1900—about the time that the Morrises decided to emigrate to America. I’ve always wondered what that must have felt like. Was it a major topic of discussion? Were people all over town talking about whether to move or who was moving or who already had family there? Did it consume them or was it only a few people who kept their plans quiet?