“Okay,” Bella says. “I used to ask why Annie was there, and my mom would say, ‘Because she never got her period.’”
Bella shoots Anna a look that can only be classified as a glare. What’s that all about, I wonder? Why aren’t they laughing about the kind of little white lie that a mother tells a young daughter, trying to protect her from the more awful truth?
“Do you remember saying that?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” Anna says. “Tante Tillie told me that.”
I’m too surprised to say anything at first. This couldn’t be true—there was no mention of it in the Routine History, and Mona Evans surely would have included it in her catalogue of Annie’s various problems. So was that Tillie’s usual explanation for her daughter’s mental illness? Or was that the story she adopted as Annie’s stay at Eloise went from temporary to long-term to permanent? Or—and I couldn’t discount this possibility—was this pseudo-biological connection something that Tillie actually believed, or came to believe, perhaps her way of coping with her pain and guilt?
It did explain why Bella had insisted earlier that she was younger than twelve when she first went to Eloise—she had to place the visit before her first period. I didn’t take the next logical step, though; I didn’t realize how a premenstrual girl might react to this explanation. Bella helped me out.
“I worried about it for months,” Bella said, “So when I finally got my period, I thought, ‘Thank God, I know I’m not going to go insane.’”
On Friday nights, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, my grandparents often went to the Oliweks for Shabbos dinner. We didn’t celebrate the Sabbath at my house—we didn’t light the candles just before sundown or say the traditional prayers or attend synagogue services on Saturday—and I wasn’t aware that Hyman and Tillie were particularly observant, either. Sash traces our lack of religious involvement to Mom’s frustrations as a teenager, when the family’s poverty meant that they had no money to pay for tickets to the High Holiday services, and Mom would make the rounds of several congregations, pleading her case. She found it humiliating, made worse by her bottled-up indignation at the inferior role that women had to endure at nearly all synagogues in those days. Why should she beg to attend services that gave women short shrift or, in the more traditional congregations, made them sit separately from the men? (I wouldn’t call her a feminist, exactly—more of a firm believer in equality and opportunity.)
Growing up, I had no idea that just past Eight Mile Road, in the suburb of Oak Park where the Oliweks lived, Friday nights were kind of a weekly reunion for the Schleins of Radziwillow. The 1950s dinner table often included Chaim and Tillie, Anna and her family, and Nathan—or “Uncle,” as Bella, David, and Dori called him. He was their great-uncle, but they regarded him as the grandfather they never had, especially after he came to live with them for good in the mid-1960s, following his retirement from Ford Motor Company.
Uncle Nathan. Was this the uncle my mother often talked about, the one who had promised to send her to college and then reneged? Some facts fit, and some didn’t: Mom described her uncle as living in Chicago (which Nathan did off and on, but he spent the bulk of his adult life in Detroit, according to Anna) and as well-off enough to pay her way (which sounds like a stretch for Nathan, an auto worker paying child support and alimony to his divorced wife in Chicago during the 1930s).
But most important, Nathan wasn’t Mom’s uncle. He was Tillie’s cousin, and therefore Mom’s cousin once removed. Was it possible that everyone called him Uncle, just as Anna called my grandmother Tante Tillie, even though Tillie wasn’t her aunt? That seems unlikely. During the 1930s, when this mysterious uncle made the offer, Anna was still in Radziwillow. There was no one in America yet who would consider Nathan to be an uncle.
I ask Anna if she has any idea of the identity of Mom’s uncle. She’s sure it must be Nathan. David thinks so, too. “I don’t know of any other uncles,” he says. “In all the genealogy I’ve done, I’ve never found any other uncles.”
As a result of these Sabbath dinners, the Oliwek children probably spent more time with my grandparents than I did, and their memory of them is very much the same as mine, except that David adds an adult-level twist. “They must have been traumatized by something,” David says. “Chaim, he almost never talked.”
That brings an emphatic second from Bella. “He didn’t talk. He was silent. He was nonverbal. He really was.”
“He didn’t talk much,” Anna concedes, “but he was a fine man.”
No one endorses that view, or contradicts her.
“When I was young, I remember thinking about Chaim and Tillie, ‘These people are so old,’ Bella says. “They aged long before their time. Tillie was so small, so shrunken.”
“And if you think about it,” David says, “when we knew them, they were younger than we are now.”
That wasn’t quite true—my grandfather was already in his sixties by the time David was born—but I understood his underlying point: Hyman and Tillie didn’t have an easy life, and anyone who met them could see that, even a child.
Before we call it a night, I show them some of the records I’ve collected on Annie, Mom, and my grandparents. “Wow,” David says, several times, in reaction to the nightmarish weeks leading up to Annie’s hospitalization, and “Unbelievable” when I read aloud about Annie’s refusal to bathe or let her mother leave the house. I’m wondering if hearing some of the specifics might cause Anna to express some sympathy for what Mom was living through, but Anna remains silent until she hears the part about Annie crying when anyone visited the family. “Just like when I saw her,” she murmurs.
We spend a few minutes sifting through some of Mom’s photos from the early 1940s. Anna spots one, a shot of a young couple unknown to me. I had brought it just in case Anna could identify them. “That’s Millie and her first husband,” she says.
“Millie?” I say.
“Nathan Shlien’s daughter.”
Again, a link to the mysterious Nathan. “Were Millie and my mom close?” I ask Anna.
“Not too close. Millie lived in Chicago, but she came to Detroit occasionally.”
But close enough for Mom to keep her photo all these years.
Anna lingers over a photo of my parents on their wedding day, November 1, 1942, taken outdoors before or after the Sunday ceremony—given their poses, I would guess that it’s after. Dad, in a gray suit and unbuttoned overcoat, a silk scarf dangling from his neck, has his left arm around Mom, who’s wearing a short-waisted coat made of something furry but nothing around her neck at all—a carefree poke in the eye of the November chill. Both have grins as wide as Woodward Avenue. On Dad’s right is Mom’s friend Faye; on Mom’s left is Tillie, looking a bit grim in a dark coat and pillbox hat. She and Mom are holding hands, but Tillie’s not smiling, and if I didn’t know that this was a day of celebration, I’d say her expression is one of worry.
Looking at the snapshot, and Tillie in particular, spurs Anna to speculate at the mixture of emotions Tillie must have felt on the day of her eldest daughter’s wedding. She would have been happy, relieved, and concerned all at once, Anna says.
Anna explains: In Eastern European towns like the one where she and Tillie and Chaim grew up, it was commonly thought that if one family member were “crazy,” then future children might be crazy, too. So parents of a mentally ill child also worried about their other children. Would anyone want to marry them? If they did marry, would their offspring be mentally ill, too? These fears led some families, not surprisingly, to avoid any mention of a “crazy” ancestor. It was harder to conceal the behavior of a living relative, especially a living sister or brother.
But not impossible, especially in a bigger town such as Detroit. Had Mom told Dad about Annie before their marriage? Did she tell him afterward? Like so many of my questions, I had to believe that the answers were out there, and that with the right combination of luck and determination, I would discover them. But sometimes, I felt like
someone rummaging through a lost and found: You go there looking for one item, and then you come across something else you didn’t even know was missing.
As I drive away from the Oliweks, I can’t get Anna’s phrase from the other night out of my head. I am family.
Sash had been right about the rift between Mom and Anna, and yet I still hadn’t come prepared for Anna’s animosity toward Mom. Now I understood that these two women couldn’t have come from two more different places.
Anna had lost everything to the Nazis. They had killed her mother, her brother, her sister—her sister!—and Anna herself had avoided certain death only by posing as one of them, as a German, the very people responsible for murdering her family and destroying her way of life. She survived, but at some psychic cost: Her deception worked so well that she ended up working as a translator for the Wehrmacht’s military police, and later for a German construction company aiding the Nazi war effort.
Then she comes to the United States, where she discovers that she hasn’t lost quite everything, that she has a family after all, and that family includes Nathan, Tillie, Hyman, and a cousin named Beth, who’s engaged in a pretense of her own—that her sister, part of Anna’s precious new family, doesn’t exist. Is it any surprise that Anna disapproved of my mother or her decision?
From Mom’s point of view, Anna wasn’t just a threat to the secret; she also was standing in judgment of Mom’s choice. Whatever reasons or rationalizations Mom had for choosing to hide her sister’s existence, whatever scars she carried from listening to Annie scream night after night, how could she explain any of this to this newcomer, this Holocaust survivor, this woman who had lost her mother, brother, and sister?
Their falling-out had inevitability written all over it, but I think it went far beyond the secret itself. Mom had asked Anna not to talk about Annie, and Anna had gone along. They continued to see each other, with no particular problem, until Anna agreed to act as a kind of surrogate daughter, to do something that Mom could not do, or would not do: take her distraught mother to see Annie at Eloise. Then Anna comes along and steps into the role that rightfully belonged to Mom, if only she had felt free to play it.
You have no right to mix in the family. That’s what Anna had quoted Mom as saying. Whatever her exact words, maybe what Mom meant was: You have no right to take my place.
Two very different women, two very different backgrounds, yet both adept at keeping secrets.
“Have you ever heard that Hyman and Tillie were first cousins?” I ask Sash, as soon as I have a chance.
“First cousins?” Sash says. “Where did you hear that?”
Her question echoes the one I asked her back in the spring of 1995, when she phoned to say Mom might have a sister. Family history, repeating itself, again.
“Anna Oliwek. Although it may be more in the rumor-than-fact category,” I tell her. “She’s not sure of the family relationships in the generation before Tillie and Hyman, so without finding the birth records in Ukraine, there’s no way to know for sure.”
“Well, it’s news to me,” she says. She reminds me, though, that she didn’t know my grandparents that well—that while she felt like she had two mothers, her dual world stopped there. “I didn’t see Hyman and Tillie very often. I know Mom didn’t like her father, and didn’t like to talk about him.”
“Or about her uncle.” I repeat what Anna had said about Nathan Shlien, that she thinks he must have been the uncle who had pulled the rug on Mom’s college hopes. “From what Anna says, Nathan saw a lot of Hyman and Tillie. How could we know nothing about him?”
Sash has a good time with that comment. “Do you really need to ask that at this point?”
“Want to hear something else weird?” I say. “Do you know who lived in the same neighborhood as the Oliweks in the 1950s? Uncle Billy.” Bill was Dad’s younger brother, married to Lil. His family and the Oliweks weren’t just neighbors, I tell her—their kids played together and the families socialized. “Anna says she doesn’t remember talking to Bill about Annie, but I suppose she might have,” I say. “He’s on my list of people to interview, so I guess I’ll find out.”
When I reach Mike and Jeff, they’re just as surprised to hear about the first cousin story. “Do you think it’s true?” Jeff asks.
“I really don’t know,” I say. “Often there’s some truth to these things. Maybe they were cousins, just not first cousins.”
But even if it is true, how could I ever know if it’s one of the “sins” that Tillie felt she had visited on her children? Only Tillie knew what she meant when she said it, and as social worker Jim Mulherin wrote in his 1972 Northville report, “Apparently no one had noted just what sins mother was referring to.”
I’m able to confirm one fact: In 1915, it was illegal for first cousins to marry in Michigan. The state is one of twenty-four that still prohibit first cousins to marry, a ban that originated in the moral view that such unions came close to incest and the scientific view at the time that the genetic risk for children was unacceptably greater. Recent studies have suggested that the risk of birth defects for the children of married first cousins is not as significant as previously believed; it’s slightly higher than the rest of the population, about the same as the risk faced by a woman who gives birth at forty rather than at thirty.
The main question, though, is what my grandparents thought. Assuming they were first cousins, they may have been surprised to discover, when they applied for their Michigan marriage license, that they were violating a law by marrying. In the Europe of their birth, not only were first-cousin marriages legal but, in some cultures, they were encouraged as a way to preserve property. European royal families particularly favored the practice. And, as David had pointed out, Jewish law has no prohibition against it.
But I don’t know one key fact: When did my grandmother make her declaration that “the sins of the parents are paid for through the children”? Not in 1915, when she married. Not in 1919, when Annie was born. Not in 1940, because the statement doesn’t appear in the Routine History. She probably made it sometime during Annie’s long tenure at Eloise, probably during some sort of meeting with the Eloise staff about Annie’s progress. Then, in January 1972, when social worker Mulherin is reading Annie’s records to assess whether she can be deinstitutionalized to a nursing home, he discovers Tillie’s statement and is so struck by it that he includes it in his report.
So what was the context? At the time Tillie made this statement, she had lived in the United States for a long time, long enough to be aware of the widely held view that first cousins were taking a big risk by marrying and bearing children. (Marriage itself was not the problem, which is why some states allow first cousins to marry if they agree to receive genetic counseling.) Annie’s problems seemed like proof of that risk: Deformed leg, perhaps some retardation, and then her mental illness. So it’s entirely possible that by the 1940s or 1950s or whenever Tillie made her statement to the Eloise staff, she has become convinced that she had committed a sin by marrying Hyman and having children.
But somehow, I don’t think so. I don’t think my grandmother was speaking about a particular set of sins, or even a particular action. I think she was talking about guilt, not sin. (If I were telling a joke, the punch line would be: After all, she was Jewish, not Catholic.) She was blaming herself for everything that had happened, for giving birth to a daughter with two strikes against her, for not being able to take care of her, for allowing her to go alone to the clinic (whether the sexual assault occurred or not), for sending her to Eloise, for the shame that it brought the family. Who knows? Maybe in some twisted way, Tillie felt responsible for putting Mom in the position of wanting to keep Annie a secret. If Annie had never been born, then Mom wouldn’t have needed to hide her.
Did Toby Hazan, Mom’s psychiatrist, know anything more about Mom’s secret? Now that I have legal authority to seek Mom’s medical records, I feel more comfortable asking Hazan to dig out his files on Mom from Apri
l 1995, when Rozanne Sedler surprised us with her question, “Did your mom have a sister?”
I’ve never been quite clear on the events that led Rozanne to make that call. I had always assumed that Mom must have said something to Hazan during their initial meetings, but if so, what, exactly? I was hoping that Hazan’s notes might offer some clues as to why, suddenly and inexplicably, she had chosen to mention that she had a sister. Was it a small crack in the facade, evidence that she wanted to shed her burden, but couldn’t bring herself to let the wall of secrecy just crumble?
Hazan phones back a few hours after I leave a message with his office, instantly reminding me of why I had always liked him: During the four years that he treated Mom and monitored her medication regimen, he was attentive and unfailingly helpful whenever any of us called to find out how Mom was doing. I mention that it’s been seven years since we last talked, and I ask him jokingly what he’s been doing in the meantime. He banters right back: “Waiting for your phone call.”
Hazan once told me that Mom spent more time in her sessions with him talking about her children than about herself, so I’m not surprised that he remembers what I do for a living, asking, “How’s life at The Washington Post?” That provides a perfect opportunity to explain that I’m on a leave of absence, working on a book about Mom’s secret and her sister.
Hazan doesn’t say anything right away. I assume that he’s wondering how much he can tell me without violating doctor-patient confidentiality, so I mention my legal authority, but that’s not the primary reason for his silence.
“I don’t think I knew that your mom had a sister,” he says.
That’s the last thing I expected to hear. How could that be? All these years, had I been operating under a false impression? No, that wasn’t possible. Rozanne had made that call to Sash (there was no doubt about that), and if she knew, how could Hazan not know? Even if Mom had mentioned having an institutionalized sister to someone else, Hazan was the doctor in charge, and he would have been told. He must not remember. After all, it’s been years and he…
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