The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  My come-what-may attitude was starting to alarm me. The three of us talked about whether we should find our hotel and then come back. As we were discussing it, a woman in a kerchief opened the door. Valentin spoke to her in Romanian and explained who I was and that I was hoping to meet Mircea Rond, who was the president of the Community of Focşani Jews. They had a further conversation and eventually Valentin turned back to us. He told me that Mr. Rond wasn’t there, this was his wife. He would be available the next day. I asked if we could set up a time and she said 10:00 a.m. She went back inside and Dan, Valentin, and I looked at each other. Our plan had been to meet with Mr. Rond today and he would tell us what to do and where to go. Now that it would take place tomorrow, we still had a lot of time left today.

  Valentin suggested that we go to the Office of Vital Records in Focşani to see if we could learn anything there about the Morrises. One of the details that I had observed about Romania, a country I was falling in love with, was that everywhere you looked in big cities and small towns there was a mix of glorious European architecture: beautiful stone buildings that made your heart soar and were a match for any in Paris, Vienna, and Prague; and buildings in various states of degradation—graffitied, crumbling edifices or abandoned completely (the Communists’ intention was to destroy anything with historical value)—in which you could still see what they had been. Before the Communist era, Bucharest was called “the Little Paris.” Now a big part of the city was blanketed by ugly, Soviet-era, Stalinist-Brutalist concrete-block monstrosities that looked like despair.

  The synagogues I saw were the former, elegant and stunning. The vital records building was the latter. And not just in form, but in function as well.

  We walked up a staircase to the office, and the line for assistance hit us midway up. The walls were painted institutional green; there were no adornments except signs in angry capital letters with a lot of exclamation points. I imagined they said you’re doing it wrong! get out!

  At the top of the stairs was a small glass window that an attendant opened a crack to speak through and then snapped closed immediately after. She had Crayola-red helmet hair, wore heavy, brash makeup, and had a pair of cat-eye glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked like a character from a Pixar film.

  Valentin approached the window to see what he could find out. The woman looked aghast at such a breach in procedure and opened the window to yell at him. He spoke back and she closed the window and then vanished.

  He looked at us with amusement. He, along with the person whose turn it was, stood at the window waiting for her return for nearly twenty minutes. When at last she came back, she addressed the other person and ignored Valentin. One of her colleagues, a man, appeared, and Valentin tried to ask his question to him. The man spoke without looking at Valentin (too much effort, I guess) and left.

  Valentin then walked back to us and said that we would have to put our request in writing and wait for someone to contact us in eight to twelve weeks. Then we would be able to return to wait on the line with the other sad people.

  I asked Valentin if this was what Communism was like. (America has such bullshit bureaucracy, too, but this had a more strident feel to it.)

  “Yes, so we have no information about your family, but you now know what it felt like to live under Ceaușescu,” Valentin said.

  It was dark outside when we left, but we had the Morrises’ address from the Romanian birth certificates, Centrala Street 36, and we decided to see if we could find the house.

  There is no longer a Centrala Street in Focşani, but by locating a map of the area from the year 1900, we were able to track down where it was. We drove to that part of town, which was pretty desolate except for a group of small, abandoned houses that looked as if they were built in the mid-nineteenth century. When we pulled up to them, one of them had moonlight streaming down on it, and I decided that must have been the Morrises’ house. It appeared long abandoned, and the lawn and shrubbery managed to look simultaneously dead and overgrown, like something out of Sleeping Beauty. Standing on the street where the Morrises lived as a young family full of hope, I couldn’t help but feel that when they left this behind they felt some certainty that life in America would be worth all it took to leave here. Did they ever regret their decision?

  I took some pictures and got back in the car, and Valentin drove us to our hotel.

  Dan and I decided to have dinner at the Soho Pub, a Romanian interpretation of a typical English pub that was just across the street from our hotel.

  We walked into a huge, modern, clubby-looking place. It was pitch dark. A young woman came out of the kitchen and turned the light on. She seemed surprised to see us.

  “Can we have dinner?” I asked in English.

  She shrugged and clearly didn’t speak English, so I used my five Romanian words and she pointed to all the tables (we had our pick). This type of experience rarely happened when we traveled in big cities—it was almost always possible to be understood. As strange as it was, I felt we were getting the sense of what it must have been like for people entering America unfamiliar with the language and customs: hostility disguised as indifference.

  When the waitress came to our table, we ordered hamburgers. I pointed in my guidebook to the translation of “well-done meat”—“carne gătită bine făcută” because I wasn’t really a meat eater, and if I were, I would prefer it didn’t resemble anything meat-like. Dan indicated that his burger was not to be well done.

  The waitress left and we went back to talking about our day. We talked and waited. And waited. And waited. After about an hour, the waitress reappeared and brought one burger to the table. We waited and then I called her back over and said, “Two burgers.” She looked very disappointed in us. She had not understood that we each wanted our own burger, so she went back to the kitchen and we waited some more. Eventually another burger emerged from the kitchen. To my surprise, they were delicious—almost worth the ninety-minute wait. Or maybe we were just starving. After, we paid our check and left a large tip. The woman watched us go, locked the door behind us, and turned off the lights. I wouldn’t have been surprised if we were the only customers for the whole week. We certainly were the only patrons that night.

  The next morning on the way to see the synagogue, Valentin explained that people didn’t go out to dinner much in these small towns because most of them couldn’t afford to, and definitely not on a weeknight. Which would explain why our waitress was so surprised to see us.

  We arrived at the Focşani synagogue and the door was opened by the jovial, robust Mircea Rond, with royal-blue eyes the same color as his sweater and a rim of white hair that circled his bald head. He walked us into the “office” of the synagogue, which was sparsely furnished with some old desks in two corners, and in the middle of the room was a kitchen table covered in a red-and-white-check plastic tablecloth. To one side of the room stood a prayer stand, which is usually placed in a synagogue to the right of the ark of scrolls. At one of the desks sat an older woman in a wool ski hat and scarf (it was cold in there), and she was looking at documents through a magnifying glass. She never acknowledged us. Mr. Rond’s wife was there again, too.

  Valentin asked Mr. Rond if he spoke English and he said, “Yes.” To that his wife said quickly, “No, he doesn’t.” He shrugged and smiled, and everyone laughed. Mrs. Rond told Valentin in Romanian to translate or we would be here for a week.

  We sat at the table and Valentin explained to Mr. Rond that I was looking for as much information about the Morris family as I could find. He nodded knowingly and I later found out that people coming in search of their roots was very common here.

  Mr. Rond explained that when the Communists came to power after World War II, they took all the records and archives from all of the religious places, Jewish and Christian, so there was very little to show us. That was a disappointment: I’d hoped to get a sense of what life had been like h
ere for a Jewish family like the Morrises.

  Focşani synagogue

  There was a lot of talking between Valentin and Mr. Rond. We had now gone to several places with Valentin, and I realized how much I liked having to speak through an interpreter. So much of the time people say everything in a way-too-long, convoluted way, and the interpreter has to listen, and as he’s doing that, you can smile and stare off into space and think about what you’re going to have for dinner. Usually the interpreter comes back with a few words of explanation, and boom, you missed a big lecture but still get new information. It’s the best of both worlds. But here I wished I understood Romanian.

  Mr. Rond asked if we wanted to see the synagogue. When we told him that we did, he got up and went over to one side of the office, where he opened a set of French doors into a large room that was the sanctuary. He explained the synagogue had never been renovated, so it still looked much as it did when the Morrises came here.

  The room was on the small side for a Jewish sanctuary, seating maybe sixty people or so, but the ceiling was very high and colored a pale blue that had gold hand-painted Stars of David on it. The walls were peach hued with more gold stars painted on them, and there were balconies across from each other. Just below the ceiling there were small circular windows on all sides, each with a Star of David on it, and in the front, an ornate ark of scrolls, pale blue and gold, and above it a large chandelier with bulb lights. Above it the eternal light hung. The sanctuary was even colder than the first room: I could actually see my breath, but I couldn’t help feeling the warmth of the place.

  The place was like a smaller version of the synagogues we saw in Bucharest, but untouched by time. I imagined Guerson Morris filing into the wooden pew for the last time, looking up at the stars, while Clara and the daughters looked down from the balconies (the women’s section), each of them wondering what their new country would be like.

  We returned to the kitchen table and Mr. Rond explained (with Valentin translating) that the Jewish community of Focşani dated back to at least the second half of the seventeenth century. A synagogue had been built on this spot in 1827 and was later destroyed by an earthquake. The one we were in—the one the Morrises would have known—was finished in 1896.

  In 1899 there were 5,954 Jews in Focşani. Today there were fewer than 30. Mr. Rond ran the occasional service (though he’s not a rabbi). He said that several years before we visited, a man whose family had come from the town brought his son back to be bar mitzvahed in the synagogue. He tried to find a video of the ceremony on his computer to show us, but he couldn’t locate it, and I realized again how easy it was to lose sight of the past.

  I asked what life was like in Focşani for Jews at the turn of the twentieth century and if he thought the Morrises left because of anti-Semitism. Mr. Rond said he didn’t think that was likely. Though anti-Semitism existed, it wasn’t what drove Jews from Focşani. They simply would have been looking for a better life, which fit with the story of Guerson wanting to be a movie director.

  Mr. Rond went to a cabinet and took out some homemade local wine. Valentin told us that in December, when the wine is new, they call it must (pronounced moost). It’s basically the first fermentation of the wine, a kind of Romanian Beaujolais nouveau, when it has all the sugar in it. Romanians are very proud of it because it’s only around for about a week and then it’s gone for the year. You didn’t want to offend someone by not drinking their must.

  He poured glasses for us. Valentin toasted us and proclaimed, “The show moost go on!” and I took a sip. While I like wine, even sweet wine, I thought my teeth would fall out from the must’s sugariness. Dan managed to drink his—probably because he’s from the Midwest and incredibly polite—so I shoved mine over to him while Mr. Rond went over to an old cabinet with a glass door. Dan courageously downed mine as well.

  Mr. Rond brought back to the table several large and very old books that appeared to be some kind of ledger. He sat down again and told Valentin that when he arrived in Focşani, he didn’t know much about the Jews who had lived here, but then he happened to find these ledgers and papers tucked behind a toilet in the bathroom. Someone must have hidden them there from the Communists.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  He looked at me and in English said, “Books old. People dead.” Valentin shrugged and laughed.

  Mr. Rond kept going. He told Valentin they contained all kinds of information about the Jews in Focşani. Addresses of families, births and deaths, the grades of the pupils who studied in the synagogue. And the synagogue had a copy of a book called 1789 Rules for Jewish Workers.

  He opened up one of the ledgers. Delicate, creased pages were filled with columns of boxes, and in each box were handwritten lists of names in ancient inky handwriting. Some boxes had one name, some had more. It was hard to decipher the faint tiny letters, but Dan, Valentin, and I each took a book and looked through them carefully, turning each page slowly, keeping our fingers away from the writing.

  Mr. Rond said something and Valentin translated. “These are the forgotten people remembered.”

  Despite a thorough search, we didn’t find any Moritz (which is Morris in Romanian), and Mr. Rond thought it was possible that when the Morrises lived in Focşani, their last name was Guerson. We did find a Moses Guerson who lived on the same street as the Morrises and who died in 1912, but we couldn’t determine whether he was a relative. I showed Mr. Rond copies of the birth certificates the researcher had found for the Morris children, and in those the last name was Moritz. But he said what we would consider a last name would depend on who was writing a name in the ledger at the time. He pointed to the name of the witness who had recorded Sali Moritz’s birth, and said something to Valentin and laughed. Valentin told us the witness was seventy-four years old. He may not have known what he was doing. (Seventy-four in 1900 was a lot older than seventy-four today.)

  We asked Mr. Rond about the synagogue in Râmnicu Sărat. He gave us directions—the town was about forty miles away—and told us there was a man there who would open it for us and could also take us to the old cemetery in town.

  As we got ready to leave I realized that Mr. Rond was my link to the Morrises, and to my grandmother, and to my Romanian past, and that this was probably the only time I would ever see him. The thought made me want to cry, which I did when he hugged me as he left and promised to email me the video he had tried to find. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t and he never responded to any further emails from me. However he is now my Facebook friend and likes pretty much everything I post.)

  Râmnicu Sărat was the town that Selma and Sam were born in; the Morrises must have moved there when Clara was pregnant with Malvina. Râmnicu Sărat was the next town of any size south of Focşani, so the move wouldn’t have been too much.

  Synagogue in Râmnicu Sărat

  We met a gentleman who had been tipped off by Mr. Rond. He unlocked the door for us.

  The synagogue in Râmnicu Sărat was very much like the one in Focşani. It had been built in 1855 and had never been renovated. The entry room was filled with Holocaust documents and old books stacked on tables and windowsills.

  The walls and ceiling of the sanctuary also were hand painted in pale blues and corals with gold Stars of David. There also were tiny murals and gold eagles on the walls, and the chairs were upholstered in aubergine velvet. At one time it must have been stunning, but now there were water stains and large cracks in the walls. It looked as if everyone left this place one day and forgot to come back.

  Valentin pointed to a side table. On it was a red velvet cloth that spelled out in gold thread “moritz seifler.” Mr. Rond had told us that as with English, Morris was both a first name and a last name.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had come to Romania to find out about what life was like when the Morris family lived there in the nineteenth century and w
hat may have caused them to leave. Life in the first half of the twentieth century must have been extremely terrible to have caused the Jews in Râmnicu Sărat—indeed, across Europe—to leave so quickly. Or was it the belief that life was just so much better in America?

  What would the Morris sisters’ lives have been like if they’d stayed in Romania? Would they have survived World War II? Would Clara still have gotten sick? Would Guerson have abandoned his family? Would Malvina have gotten any help for her leg?

  Standing in that forgotten synagogue in an overlooked town in a little-visited part of Romania, I realized that so much of life is made up of how we deal with the choices we’ve made and the choices others have made for us. As we go through life, we make decisions on what we should do and how we should live. Should I go to school? Get married? Whom should I marry? What job should I do? Where should we live? After a certain point, you realize that you must contend with those choices, as they frame the future you’ll have.

  We left the synagogue and headed to the local Jewish cemetery. I told Valentin that the Morrises had taken a steamship from Southampton, England, to New York, and wondered if he knew how they might have gotten there.

  He answered quickly: “On foot!” Sometimes Jews leaving Romania had a horse and wagon, but many of them walked for part of the way. They believed they were coming to America, a place of fortune, freedom, and a future, so they did what they had to in order to get there. And when they arrived at the boat, they traveled in steerage, which was all that most of them could afford and which was an additional nightmare. Ship companies made money from numbers, so people were crammed in the lower deck of ships, where lights were kept on all the time, hygiene and privacy were nonexistent, and the passengers couldn’t see the sky. The conditions were terrible, but Valentin told us that the people who left Romania were not the worst off. The Romanians who emigrated were far from rich, but if they were truly poor, they were left behind. It was those who had enough money to have hope who emigrated.