The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  I imagined God hovering above my house in a sort of 1960s pie-plate-style spaceship. He looked like he did in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but kinder—sort of God crossed with Santa. In my mind’s eye, I could see him through the wide windshield of his spaceship, steering, looking down on all of us, his subjects.

  In the ship with him were all my dead relatives. He was flying them around heaven and every night they’d take a pass over our houses. (My religious perceptions were heavily influenced by the Rankin/Bass Christmas productions.) I would pray not for things, just for him to take care of my dead family. And I would end every prayer the same way: “I hope you are having fun in heaven.” I wanted God to know I cared not just about the dead people, but also that he was taking some time for himself. #Godcare.

  As I got older, I prayed less to the Guy in the Sky and more to the one who watched that my checks didn’t bounce more than once. My praying took place at the ATM, the mailbox, and the answering machine. But I still thought of my relatives up there in the spaceship, and when friends died, they joined my family up there, too.

  During the times when life was difficult, I imagined them all up there waiting to hear what I needed. I didn’t close my eyes and clasp my hands, it was more like active thoughts as I walked around. “Grandpa, please make someone offer me an assignment before my rent is two months late.” Or, “Grandpa, please help my kid get through my divorce without too much pain.” I pretty much only ever ask my one grandpa, my mother’s father, Saul. I was the closest to him, but he was also the one who was most likely to take care of what his family needed. From a kid’s point of view, he had a seemingly endless supply of money, he was generous with it, and when I had a problem or needed help, he would put his arm around me and say, “Whaddaya need, puss?”

  When I started writing this book, the spaceship added four more passengers: Selma, Marcella, Malvina, and Ruth Morris. At first my view of them was sort of vague because I didn’t really know them individually, except that Marcella was the sister who made all of the money. Mostly I was asking for them to help me find the answers to the questions I had about them and their lives. When I found an answer or uncovered a fact, no matter how small or inconsequential, I would look up to the sky and send them kisses and thank-yous.

  When I finished my travel for this book—to Southampton, Romania, St. Louis, Hyde Park, Ellis Island, and Greenwich Village—and I found all the research I could unearth, I felt a pang of disappointment for the many details I couldn’t find. And I had a lot of regrets. I really wished I could have found out why Clara had been committed to the asylum, and learned how Marcella managed to become self-employed, who Ruth married and what happened to him and their marriage. And what about the stories of the White House and Golda Meir? There were so many facts I found along the way that I found fascinating: Ruth’s playwriting, Sam’s life in Texas and his parallel experiences to his sisters, that the sisters had traveled all over the world. They took ships and planes, sometimes together and sometimes alone. Selma, for example, went to Rotterdam in 1955, and a few days before my husband and I left for a vacation to Portugal, I found Marcella’s TWA ticket from New York to Lisbon in 1960. Such background didn’t really help me piece together the sisters’ larger story, but seeing the ticket made me understand that these women weren’t constrained by their marital status or their gender. They had had unfortunate and difficult starts in life, but those tragedies—a mentally ill mother, a father who abandoned them, years spent living in an orphanage—didn’t define them. Rather, they propelled them.

  I was talking about them with my dad one night and he told me how unusual he thought they were when he was a boy: He wasn’t sure if it was because they were the only unmarried women he knew or because they were such strong, independent women. I told him that what captivated me about them and their stories was how much they persevered and succeeded and that they were women! I went from being interested in them as subjects to write about to loving them as unique, dynamic women I was proud to be related to.

  At a funeral a few years ago I listened to the rabbi talk about the deceased’s five children and his many grandchildren. “We all come from somewhere—the people before us—we never really do anything by ourselves,” he said.

  Growing up, I mostly identified with my mother and her sisters. They were strong but they were taken care of by men. My mother’s mother calculated her four daughters’ value in how well they did at finding husbands with financial means. That was part of me as a child, though when I started therapy at age eighteen, I was very aware it isn’t exactly a healthy or useful attitude for women to have.

  My mother’s father worked in his father-in-law’s mattress ticking factory, Solinger and Sons, along with his two brothers-in-law. When my mother’s older sisters got married, their husbands went to work there as well, along with her male cousin. There were seven incredibly smart female children of my grandfather and his brothers-in-law who were never even considered as employees for the company. My mother, aunts, and I have often talked about how it never occurred to anyone in their family—men or women—that the daughters would come into the business. What the women could have done with it and how the company might have thrived was fascinating to think about, particularly as their one male cousin ran the company into the ground not that many years after he took it over.

  My father’s mother worked with a jewelry designer in New York City’s diamond district when my father was young. She was a businesswoman! But my dad felt that her absence from home while he was growing up destroyed his childhood, and he was completely against my mother working outside the home until my brothers and I were in high school (though to be clear, there was no job my mother was burning to do until then). My grandmother told my mother, her daughter, that if a woman worked, it meant her husband wasn’t able to support her. (I know, I know, but it was in another time and under other circumstances.)

  Because these ideas were perpetuated through generations of my family, working women weren’t part of my identity growing up. I knew some women who had careers, of course—friends of my parents—but mostly I saw mothers who stayed at home or worked part time to “help out.” Those women’s lives were tied to their families and their homes.

  Even after I graduated from college and started working, I didn’t really believe that I could support myself or a family. I always thought I would add to some future husband’s income. I would make the “mad money” while my husband made the real money that would buy us a nice Manhattan apartment—maybe a Classic Six—and keep us comfortable. When I found myself actually having to make enough money to support my child years later, I did it, but it never felt like me. It felt like Cinderella looking at herself in her rags: You knew that she was meant to be in princess clothes. I couldn’t help but feel that I was posing as a functioning, responsible adult but I really wasn’t: I should be keeping house and being the junior partner to my husband, who was making the money that sustained us in our comfortable, secure life.

  This changed for me when I went from having jobs that I struggled to shoehorn myself into to finding work I enjoyed that I felt capable of doing well.

  One of the amazing and unexpected benefits that I realized when I researched the lives of the Morris sisters was that they were identified as my relatives. When I would tell people about them and what I was learning, their reactions made it clear that they thought I was part of them. I was proud of this relationship, and had a sense of competence I’d never felt before. I was connected to a group of strong women who did what they did and succeeded without the support of men. They were the complete opposite of the conventions and attitudes of my mother’s family. And somehow, I feel as if I’m a quilt made from them all.

  I also realized that while technical difficulties prevented me from writing this book fifteen years ago, I wasn’t really ready to write it then. I couldn’t have understood at that point in my
own life just what obstacles the Morris sisters overcame and how deeply difficult their choices were to make in 1920. I see that those same decisions would be difficult for me to make in 2020.

  As I researched this book, my coffee table became Morris sisters central. I had a file for each sister and one for all the major places they’d lived. For three years my family wasn’t allowed to put anything else on the table (they did anyway, but it was technically a breach of regulation).

  When I finished the manuscript, I took all the files and papers about the Morris sisters and put them into one tall pile and just stared at it. And then I began to feel sad, desperately sad. Normally when I complete a draft of whatever it is I’m writing, I do a happy jig and schedule celebratory lunches/drinks/dinners with as many friends as possible. But this time my reaction was different. I didn’t want to leave these women; I didn’t want to be done spending time with them.

  I walked around for about a week with a sadness I couldn’t get away from. It was like mourning. It felt like a death somehow—or four deaths. I wanted to go back to Romania and St. Louis, and rent an apartment on Charles Street. I wanted to spend more time with the Morris sisters, getting to know them bit by bit, fact by fact, as I’d done for the past three years.

  And then I realized that there had been a death in me, too. The person who thought it was her birthright to be incapable of self-sufficiency, the woman who expected the world to be predictable, reliable—she was gone. I no longer saw myself that way. After all, I was related to the Morris sisters, Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth—women who dealt with life on their terms and lived and loved and survived by carving out a place for themselves in the world. And understanding that truth made me feel different—renewed.

  I think that we all have a need to find out where we came from, and invariably there is some history, some truth, that explains who we are to our own satisfaction. Some of us reject it and make a different path for ourselves. And some of us embrace these notions and put them on display for everyone to see.

  In the beginning, I was fact-checking the history of the Morris sisters that I’d heard from my family, and so many times I felt deeply disappointed to be thwarted by the lack of proof that there had ever been a White House visit or a copy of the letter from Golda Meir or a handkerchief from J. P. Morgan. But despite those tantalizing, missing details, what I am left with now—and what I can share with my family, too—are their lives. Like why their father put them in an orphanage, and what their mother suffered through, and what it took for these four sisters to get where they got. What made them, each in her own way, difficult and wonderful, annoying and confident. How a person like Marcella could have this truly storybook life arc, from being born in a country that doesn’t want her to walking a thousand miles across Europe to crossing an ocean in steerage to losing her mother in the worst imaginable way to gathering her sisters in New York to making $10 million—every bit of it entirely on her own, through nothing but sheer will and stubbornness and, yes, maybe some meanness. It doesn’t matter whether or not she slept with J. P. Morgan or advised FDR. It doesn’t matter that High Button Shoes wasn’t stolen from Ruth. What matters is these four sisters forged an incredible life out of almost nothing, and they are my cousins.

  I found this all in the facts, yes, but I also found it in the helpfulness of Viki and Larry in St. Louis, the knowledge and care from Mr. Rond in the Focşani synagogue, the good humor of Valentin, the doggedness of Alison, the cooperation of the people in Southampton. I feel like this army of helpers I assembled along the way became a profound part of all this. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I learned a great deal more in part through the goodness of a lot of people.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had a dream a few weeks before I completed the research on the Morris sisters. In the dream, I was sitting at a long table next to my mother, and at the other end were the Morris sisters, all of them very old. I asked my mother what I should do and she said, “Go talk to them, this is your only chance!”

  My thought was that this was my opportunity to find out what happened to their mother, what happened with Ruth’s marriage, and whether Marcella really did go to the White House.

  I got up from my seat and walked to the other end of the table. As I reached them, I saw that they got younger and younger until they were in their forties—my age. They were laughing and chatting with each other, Ruth dressed as a flapper and singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon” as Malvina got up to dance around the room, her legs strong and fine. Even before I spoke I realized that I wasn’t going to get the answers to my questions, and that maybe I should just leave them alone to enjoy this time together.

  At that point, Marcella noticed me and said, “What do you want, Snoop?”

  “I have questions,” I said.

  She smiled at that and, shaking her head, she looked at her sisters and said, “We were very good at hiding the evidence.”

  Afterword

  Having been in therapy for more than thirty years, I know that your dreams are written by your brain. The dream I’d had about the Morris sisters was not likely a visit from them. They have other things to do, I’m sure.

  I also know that the truth about the Morris sisters matters much less to me now than I thought it would. When I started looking into their lives, I was certain that the truth about them would be found in straight, clear facts. I was wrong. What mattered—what I learned was true—was that spending time with them, getting to know them and growing to love them, is now part of my life and will be forever.

  the end.

  * * *

  • • •

  Well, not quite.

  I finished writing this book and it was on its way to production (when a book is copyedited and its layout is set). I was quite pleased with everything, recalling the years of hard work that I’d put into it and all that I had discovered. Basking in my glory, if you will. I decided that it was maybe even better that I didn’t get all the answers to my questions about the Morris sisters, because for most people, that is how their search into the past will go: Some questions will be answered, other questions will pop up, and if you pay attention, you’ll learn something from both. And people should feel fine about that. Life isn’t a movie. The stories in it don’t always get tied up with a neat bow.

  My editor and his assistant were going through the photos that I wanted to use in the book. He noticed that one of them had a funny mark on it and asked if I could submit a clean version.

  This turned out to be a complicated request. I had found the photograph on Ancestry.com, which I had subscribed to during the time I was doing research for this book. When I finished the research, I kept my Ancestry subscription for another month but then ended it, which meant that I couldn’t retrieve the photo without resubscribing to the site.

  I called my friend Ann and asked if she could locate the photo for me: She is an avid Ancestry user and would never close her account. Early on she had made a Morris family tree on Ancestry to convince me to write the book, so she went to that and searched for Ruth to locate the photo. As she did, she asked me several questions about Ruth, and I told her I could never find Ruth’s death certificate or any information on her marriage. I had looked for three years. I explained that sometimes you just need to be okay with a brick wall.

  Ann’s response was simple: “Huh,” she said.

  I said, “They were married for a short time, then they split up, and he passed away shortly after that. Probably from a broken heart. There are no records.”

  Ann said, “His name was Paul Koditschek, and they were married September 30, 1942.”

  Long pause.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s right here,” Ann said. “It looks like the record was recently added.”

  She texted me the image of the marriage license. It said:

  Paul Koditschek,
white male, born on 11 April 1911 in Vienna, married Ruth Morris 30 September 1942

  Residence: 130 Bank Street, New York, NY

  Occupation: Statistician

  Father: Seigfried Koditschek

  Mother: Elsa Koditschek

  The witnesses were Erika and Edward T. Zusi

  Marriage Certificate #15772

  I looked at the image, and tears leapt out of my eyes. I really did wonder if I was dreaming again. I was so flustered I kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God.” She went on. “Well, he didn’t die right after they split up because he died in 1974,” she said. “I guess his heart wasn’t that broken,” she said as, at the other end of the phone line, I restarted my Ancestry membership, shaking as I entered my credit card number.

  “Wow,” I said, counting in my head. “He was seven years younger than Ruth was.”

  “And he got married again,” Ann said. “In 1948. Oh wait—he was in the military—”

  “Okay, I’m logged in—where are you?” I said.

  We were like two detectives, one dumb and one smart, each pursuing the same case. One moving very fast and the other moving . . . the opposite of fast.

  At last I tracked down Paul Koditschek in my Ancestry search. The first detail I saw was his draft card.

  “Okay, we are going back,” I announced.

  Digging back into Ancestry.com, I found the ship’s manifest of when Paul arrived in America. He left Cherbourg, France, on the Queen Mary and landed in New York on March 23, 1939. His occupation then was listed as lawyer and he was twenty-seven and single. His draft card was dated October 1940. Jeez, the military didn’t give him time to catch his breath.

  A year later he filed an application for naturalization called a declaration of intention. It said he lived at 36 West Tenth Street and worked as a manager, and that he came from Vienna, Germany. (For those of you who remember The Sound of Music, Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938. It was called the Anschluss and it cut short Maria and Captain von Trapp’s honeymoon.) At that time Ruth was living on West Fourth Street and Malvina, Marcella, and Selma lived on Charles Street, all very close together in the West Village. West Tenth Street was just a few blocks away.