family Archives — LUCY PICK BOOKS

June 15, 2021June 15, 2021

Gloria Dattilo Gugliotta: November 3, 1927-May 28, 2021

We visited Gloria in late September 2019 in her apartment in a senior living complex in Pittsburgh with a view of the Allegheny River. At the time, I had a strong sense that I was seeing her for the very last time. Without Covid, that probably wouldn’t have been true, but as it happened, I was right, and I think maybe she knew it too. We talked about the Democratic primary and how she liked Pete Buttigieg, we ordered Chinese food, which took a long time to arrive, and mostly we listened to an old recording made at her parents’ sixtieth anniversary that reunited her with her siblings, singing and playing all the old standards from the 30s and 40s. Beautiful music.

Before she was eleven years old, Gloria started singing with her sisters, Tess and Mary, six and eight years older than she. Gloria sang the lead, rewriting the music so it suited her alto voice, while her sisters sang harmony above and below her, their voices melting together in a way you only hear when families sing together. You can see Gloria in front here with her two sisters behind, Tess then Mary. It wasn’t long before they won the $200 first prize in Wilkins’ Amateur Hour on Pittsburgh’s WJAS radio station, under the name “The Dattilo Sisters Harmony Trio”.

But not long after that, the group broke up for a time, when Mary ran away with a man, “much older” than her — a “criminal.” Two years later she was back, with a small son, and the music continued.

It was not an easy life. Gloria’s parents emigrated from Calabria, her father Vincenzo first, rechristened James at Ellis Island, and then her mother, Carolina, the only woman in steerage with two small children. She refused to ever cross that ocean again. Carolina gave birth to ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Gloria was the last, the baby, and in many ways, it seems she got the best of her mother, as last children in large families sometimes do. They lived in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, not far from where August Wilson was growing up at the same time. They owned a little shop, and Gloria would take the incline down the hill with her mother to the Strip District to buy live chickens and vegetables to sell. Carolina crocheted an afghan from yarn found floating down the river during the Pittsburgh Flood of 1936, that still lies on a bed upstairs at our house. Carolina had little use for the Church.

It’s a life I find hard to imagine, but it was one whose contours were shared by millions of immigrants across the United States. One thing that lasts from that life is the food. My husband, who was married before her death to Angela, Gloria’s beloved only child, describes the meal they ate at Thanksgiving the first time he went down to be with her family. It began with antipasti of every kind on a kind of etagere, then progressed through Italian wedding soup before he was served ravioli so wonderful he had to have a second helping. And then. And then. They brought out a full American thanksgiving: turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables, gravy, pies…

The girls, now renamed The Three Ds, did sing again, on “Buddy Murphy’s Guest Book,” on radio station KQV, and rebroadcast up and down the eastern seaboard. There was talk of more, of trying to make it in New York City after the war, but Carolina put her foot down. Tess got married, and that was the end.

Carolina was not allowed to get an education, but she made sure Gloria graduated high school at age fifteen, and then from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in Psychology and Sociology. Later, Gloria added an MA in Social Work. For twenty-five years, she directed a residential centre for troubled youths in Waynesburg PA. The first time I met her, at a party, she spoke of how experience with those children shaped her generous views of those who fall through the cracks and need compassion and support. Gloria was an Italian-American, a Catholic, a liberal, and a Democrat.

As we sat and talked with her that last afternoon, listening to her sing in the recording of her family, my eye was drawn to the legend written on a plaque on the wall. It was a quotation from Erma Bombeck and it read, “When I stand before God at the end of my life I would hope that I would have not a single bit of talent left and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.'” In wonderment I realized that yes, yes she had. She offered up everything of herself she had ever been given. She gave all of herself. And I have no doubt that what she gave will be received.

So now sit back, relax, shut your eyes and please listen once more to the harmony of The Three Ds, led by Gloria Gugliotta:

Don’t touch that dial; we’ll be right back.

May 15, 2019May 15, 2019

My Favourite Things

I don’t want to try anything new.

I just want my old stuff, please. I’ve become one of those people who has her favourite thises and thats. When things run out or wear out, I want more of the same. It’s especially difficult with clothing. I have an old Armani long sleeved black blouse with buttons that I bought used. It has started to *ahem* spontaneously unbutton itself, so tonight I was trying to find a replacement. The great thing about it is that it isn’t woven, it’s knit jersey, so it’s soft and not tight and uncomfortable. Could I find such a thing anywhere? No. Is it too much to ask for? Evidently yes.

I pretty much only buy one brand of shoes now, apart from things like runners — Think! shoes, made somewhere in central Europe. I have, um, nine pairs at last count — pumps, clogs, boots, sandals. I searched off and on for months just to replace one pair of brown shoes I loved with an almost identical pair. My favourite styles are not available in the States so I get them in Europe or buy them on eBay.

I got my kettle in college and my Cuisinart was a graduation present from my grandmother. When the lid broke, I got a new one from a slightly shady place in Florida rather than buy a new machine. I’ve got a Swedish Assistent mixer, just like my other grandmother’s, which was a present 25 or so years ago. I’ve replaced bits of parts for it a couple of times too.

Speaking of first grandmother, I still have quite a bit of her old clothing, though not much of it is in regular rotation any more. Off the top of my head, there’s a mohair cape from Scotland, a black on white hand embroidered silk shirt from Hong Kong, and *her* mother’s genuine alligator purse. The only thing I wear often though is a pink cashmere undershirt.

I am very loyal to the people who cut my hair. There have basically been three of them my entire life. Gaston on Laurier and then at Eclectic in Montreal from High School through graduate school. He’s retired but if you think I’m loyal, my mother went to him for about thirty years. Then I saw Geanine in Chicago for about seventeen years. Now Harumi cuts my hair and she COMES TO MY HOUSE! I began going to her at a salon and when she left I begged her to tell me if she even went to anther salon and that’s when she said she would come to me. She was born in Japan and she gets her scissors sharpened there when she goes home to visit her parents (come to think of it, I suspect she would understand this post). When she was at the salon, she got me onto a particular Japanese shampoo and conditioner that you can’t really buy here. I just found some online, but it wasn’t there a few weeks ago and I only half believe they’ll send it to me. If we ever move from Chicago, I seriously ponder coming back to get my hair cut.

The only soap I have used for years is Nablus soap. I still buy my underwear from Marks and Spencer when I am in the UK. I’m down to one lipstick, MAC’s Creme in Your Coffee, even though I kind of hate people who spell cream as creme. Urban Decay’s glide-on eye liner is a standby, even though they keep discontinuing the purples on me. Viper looks like it has possibilities. Also: Glossier Boy Brow, Bobby Brown BB Cream in Light, and OMG I see they have discontinued my undereye concealer, whatever will I do, where will I go?

I’ll do what I always do when I need advice. I’ll ask my sister.

December 9, 2018

Pepparkakor

Everyone wants the pepparkakor recipe and then they lose it and want it again. The cookies get better and better as they age and it is very nice to come home in the bleak mid-January and realize you can have a nice pepparkakor with your tea.

Jul Pepparkakor

11oz light corn syrup (if you can get a cane sugar syrup like Lyle’s Golden, even better)
11 oz brown sugar
11oz butter
2 eggs
1 heaped tbs. of each of cloves, cinnamon, powdered ginger
2 tsp baking soda melted in a little warm water
2 lbs flour

Heat syrup; add sugar; let it melt; add butter and lightly beaten eggs. Add spices and a little flour. Add baking soda. Add the rest of the flour bit by bit. Knead dough when it is too stiff to stir. Keep overnight in a cool place before rolling and cutting out the cookies. Thin and crisp is traditional. I also like them a bit thicker. These days I make a half recipe. The full recipe is a LOT of cookies. I’ve never used this recipe to make a house, but I think it would work.

400o oven for five minutes.

When cool you can ice them with royal icing (one egg white 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar, 1-1 and1/4 c icing sugar, beaten forever).

November 18, 2018November 20, 2018

Jews with Swords

It has been a very long time, after all, since Jews anywhere in the world routinely wore or wielded swords, so long that when paired with “sword,” the word “Jews” (unlike, say, “Englishmen” or “Arabs”) clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity, like “Samurai Tailor” or “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” — Michael Chabon, “Afterward,” Gentlemen of the Road

When I was little and Remembrance Day rolled around on November 11, I would always be slightly ashamed and confused that neither of my grandparents fought during World War II. When I was a little bit older, old enough to enjoy looking through my grandmother’s stack of old family photos, I learned something new. Maybe nobody fought in World War II but they did fight in World War I. On the wrong side. This year, on the hundredth anniversary of the armistice, I decided to investigate.

I pulled out this photograph of my great-grandfather Oskar Bauer, and did some research. From the Verordnungsblatt für die Kaiserlich-Königliche Landwehr, Volume 37 of 1907, I discovered that at that time, he was a Kadett-Offiziersstellvertreter in the Uhlans regiment, number 4. What does that mean in English? The Kaiserlich-Königliche Landwehr was the Imperial-Royal territorial army of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1908, the Austrian army changed the title of cadet-officer’s deputy to that of ensign. By February 17, 1915 he had been promoted to Lieutenant, according to vol. 46, no. 17, p. 210 of the same source. The Uhlans, with the separate regiments of Dragoons and Hussars, formed the cavalry of the Austro-Hungarian army, and he was in the “Kaiser’s own” 4th regiment. Its normal home was at Olmütz, now Olomouc in Czechia, where this photograph was taken in 1914, and its composition in the same year was 65% Ruthenian, 29% Polish, and 6% “various.”

In the photograph, you can see his sabre in his left hand, and on his right knee, a helmet that would have been identical to this one, and which harked back the the origin of the Uhlans as a Polish cavalry regiment. As World War I opened, the 4th Uhlans were part of the Austro-Hungarian 3rd army, under the command of Rudolf Brudermann. They were sent north into what is now Poland with the 1st through 4th armies to face the Russian army in what would become the Battle of Galicia, a decisive loss for the Austro-Hungarian forces. The Fieldmarshal and Chief of General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf sent ten divisions of cavalry across the border to do reconnaissance on August 15th. On August 21st the 4th Uhlans met the Russian 10th Division in what was to be the largest cavalry-against-cavalry battle of the war near Jaroslavice-Wolczkowce, one of the last times horses were used effectively against each other. The battle of Galicia ended with some 400,000 members of the Austrian army killed, captured or wounded. Eventually, the Russians were able to take Przemysl, the third-largest fortress in all of Europe.

This photograph shows my great-grandmother, Marianne Grünfeld, and it was taken in Przemysl, evidently in 1914, which was the same year their first child, Oskar “Willy” Bauer was born. She was twenty and her husband was thirty-four. Przemysl was an interesting place — on the one hand, a major Austrian fortification and barracks and so a site for the elite Austrian military to gain fame and renown, and on the other, a town that had been majority Jewish in the eighteenth century with a population that ranged from comfortably wealthy to very poor. It was still 30% Jewish by 1931, the year before Joseph Roth published his The Radetzky March. Roth’s novel haunts my reading of these events of my family’s history. It is the story of the von Trotta family, grandfather, father, and son. The grandfather was a Slovene peasant-cum-soldier, ennobled at the battle of Solferino for saving the emperor’s life. The father becomes district commander in an unnamed town in Moravia where the regimental band opens every concert with the Radetzky March. Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, the Czech-born Austrian commander for whom the march was written was, for a brief yet never-forgotten time, the commander of the fortress and town of Olmütz. The son is a lieutenant in the Uhlans regiment stationed in his father’s town, until disgrace makes him shift to an infantry regiment. He ends up in a town like Roth’s own home of Brody, a smaller version of Przemysl, with its mix of Jews, Poles, and Ruthenians, and dies in the early days of the war, when my great-grandfather fought his cavalry battle.

Roth made his military hero an ennobled Slovene, perhaps because he couldn’t quite imagine a Jew, ennobled for military service. But they did exist. My great-grandmother’s father died when she was only a year or so old, and her mother, Anna Feldmann, married Wilhelm Fuchs who was ennobled in 1908 as a captain, second class, in the infantry, with the title Edler von Annshort. This was his coat of arms. Note the star of David. He lived with his family in Przemysl, and died in 1911. I have often wondered what it was like to live as a Jewish noble and military family in Przemysl, on the borderline between the military elite and the shtetl. On the one hand, they were trying to assimilate as much as they could, and succeeded to the degree that Fuchs was ennobled and earned the Signum Laudis, a medal awarded to officers for military merit. On the other hand, no one ever forgot they were Jews. Marianne and her sister Alice both married army officers; Marianne and Alice both married Jews.

When my grandmother was a young girl, Marianne and Oskar had her baptized, still trying hard to assimilate and erase their differences with those around them. She reconverted to Judaism to marry my grandfather (perhaps the only person to convert *to* Judaism in central Europe in 1936). My great-grandparents, as I have said before here, died at Auschwitz. I don’t know when or how Marianne’s mother, Anna Fuchs Edle v. Annshort, died. I know she was alive in late 1937/early 1938 because we have a photograph of her holding my father. I can guess.

December 21, 2014

Two More Cookies

I finished making two more kinds of cookies today, Uly, or Vosí hnízda (Czech beehive cookies) and a type of sandwich cookie called an Amadeus cookie. For both, I began by making Lillian Langseth-Christiansen’s Suvaroffs, from the Gourmet Magazine Old Vienna Cookbook. They would form the base of the Uly, and the “bread” for the sandwich cookies.

Then I made a paste of marzipan, pistachios, and kirsch to fill the sandwich cookies.

The cookies were dipped in a chocolate glaze, then left to cool.

All the Uly recipes on the internet seem to used crushed biscuits for the “hives,” except this one, which used walnuts, so it became my inspiration. I made a half recipe of the walnut dough, and it seemed a little sticky, so I added a couple of tablespoons of cocoa, and some breadcrumbs. I’d add the former again, but I don’t think I needed the latter. Then I shaped them in my Uly mold, given to me by my very kind cousin (who can bake me into the ground, so to speak), Erika Pick.

I filled them with a buttercream made from a stick of butter, an equal weight of icing sugar, and a tablespoon of rum. Then I filled the hives, and affixed them to the suvaroffs. Yum!

October 15, 2014

Marianne Bauer

L to R Marianne (Grunfeld) Bauer, Fritz Waldsheim, Liska Bauer, Oskar Bauer

My father died in July 1987; my uncle told us about our Jewish background that same summer; in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and in June 1993, my sister and I went to Czechoslovakia (as it still was then, though not for long) with my grandmother, Liska. Travelling through Prague and the Czech countryside with Granny was like listening to Marcel Proust. We would turn a corner, she’d see a building, and the stories would pour forth. A visit to the the Kinsky palace, in Chlumec where my great-grandparents had lived, reminded her of how when they’d pass it on their weekly drive between Prague and Hronov, my Gumper would tease, “Don’t look up. The Count will invite us for lunch, and we just don’t have time.” In the Prague Castle, we saw the Spanish Hall where she went to a Red Cross Ball then, “That’s the Schwartzenburg Palace,” she exclaimed before one sgraffitoed building, and told us how it used to be the Swiss embassy, and how she had gone there to beg (successfully) to have her Swiss visa extended, though she did not yet have her exit permit from the Gestapo. To get the permit, her father bribed a high Nazi official who came to their house and was “decent to them” and gave her the right permit. All my photos of this trip show my sister with her arm around my small Granny, holding her and protecting her.

We went to the farm where she grew up in Herelec, and the second floor apartment on Anny Lekenske street in Prague, where she moved with her parents and brother. And a lot of the stories she told were about her parents, especially Marianne, her mother. Marianne was born in 1894 in Jihlava, or Iglau as it was called then. Her father, Julius Grünfeld died the year after she was born and her mother, Anna Feldmann, remarried a man named Fuchs who had been ennobled with the name Fuchs-Anshort. It seems that Marianne lost contact with her father’s family, but just in the past year my sister and my niece have been able to reconnect with a branch descended from Julius’s oldest brother. They…look like our cousins! Which they are.

Marianne’s step-father was an army officer, and moved the family to Przemysl. Now part of Poland, it was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it was a crucial crossroads for trade, and a strategic barrier against the Russians. Some of the most important battles in World War I were fought there. It was also home to an ancient and substantial Jewish community, which formed a third of the population of the town. There, this ennobled sophisticated family, whose livelihood depended on assimilation to the norms and values of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its military, encountered, perhaps for the first time in large numbers, the Ostjuden, whom they would have seen as threatening and strange. It is perhaps this experience that best explains Marianne’s indifference, or perhaps better, hostility, to her Jewish background. The nineteenth-century emancipation of the Jews was not just an emancipation from the punitive restrictions of the state; it was also, for those who chose — and the families of both my father’s parents did so choose — an emancipation from the rabbis. Her son, Willy, was not circumcised at birth (and, poor boy, medical problems caused him to have to undergo circumcision as a youth). My grandmother’s name was entered in the record of Jewish births in Iglau, but the same document also records her abandonment of the “israelische religion” at the age of three to become a Catholic. Granny showed us the church where Marianne encouraged her children to participate in the Ascension day procession, and she told us how a crew of thirty Slovaks would come to bring in the harvest in the autumn. They wore their national dress on Sunday and to her mother’s delight, made grain crowns for the family, which they would keep safe until the following year. These folk customs delighted Marianne, but she showed no interest in her own tradition. Moreover, she identified herself with the traditions of Austria, not this new country of Czechs. Granny showed us the old Deutsches Haus in Prague where Marianne would go to meet friends. “Of course,” my grandmother then said under breath, “They all became Nazi collaborators.”

My grandmother loved her mother; you could hear it in her voice. The photos show them smiling together like sisters, my grandmother a little shorter, plumper, and more ordinary-looking than her elegant mother, but raised to be strong, and to value herself. I have a few things that belonged to Marianne: the family portraits that were passed down through the daughters of the family, her handwritten recipe book, a pair of earrings — chased gold lozenges, each inset with a pearl. My grandmother loved clothing, and she loved to go shopping, a trait she passed down to her granddaughters, though she wasn’t interested in labels, and she despised the boutique-ification of women’s fashion (one of my favorite stories about my Granny was her tale of walking into a Valentino boutique and picking up some of the garments, whereupon the salesman rushed up to her, distressed that she was touching the clothing. “Madame,” he said, “You mustn’t touch. If you want something I will help you. This is haute couture, you know.” Granny turned to him and said, “THIS is not haute couture; THIS is prêt-à-porter,” and stormed out of the shop.) When she died, we divided up her clothing, and one of the pieces I chose was Marianne’s alligator purse.

On December 14, 1941, Marianne and her husband Oskar were sent to Theresienstadt, and on January 20, 1943 they were sent to Auschwitz, where they perished. They had visas for Cuba, but Oskar said, “What do I want to do? Live in a hotel for the rest of my life?” and they did not go. My grandmother spoke to a survivor of Theresienstadt after the war who told her the last time he had seen her mother, she was smiling and taking care of the chickens. “And that is how I always like to think of her,” my grandmother said, voice shaking,’Smiling and taking care of the chickens.”

September 3, 2014September 3, 2014

Home Movies

A few years back, my uncle put my grandfather’s home movies onto three DVDs and I spent yesterday evening watching them. I had seen them before, of course. Well, most of them. I had always been a little wary of number three, with the unpromising title, “Hunting and Fishing.” But I decided it was time to watch that one too, though I admit I gave up somewhere around “the fish hatchery in Compton.” And it was worth it.

It begins with scenes of hunting in what was Czechoslovakia, in the years right before the war. My grandmother and grandfather are both there, dressed like they are about to climb every mountain, as they indeed did a couple of years later. They hunted in the way modelled for them by the nobility of Austria, with the rows of rabbits and birds and beasts lined up, a final report for the master of the hunt, and a moment of respect for the animals who gave their lives that day. They were probably at the hunting lodge of my father’s cousin and brother-in-law, Paul, and I can’t say for certain of course, but I imagine most of the people in the film, apart from the beaters perhaps, were Jews like them. In 1848,the same time that the Jews began to be liberated from the laws that constrained their lives, the right to hunt was opened beyond the nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and my ancestors took advantage of all their new freedoms. The night before the hunt, they drink and laugh, most of them in their twenties, and my uncle’s voice-over names those he recognizes: Ruda Beck, my grandfather’s best friend, who survived Auschwitz; the Winters, Ernst and Ilona, who got out in time.

After the War, my grandfather returned to Czechoslovakia, to find what was left, first in 1946 and again, with my grandmother, in 1947. A film clip shows her on a train with final destination marked “Praha,” after a little skiing at Davos, or was it Zermatt? My grandfather hunted again with Paul, who had survived Theresienstadt. The film, now in colour, shows a much diminished group, Paul’s face, gray and worn but he smiles when he receives a bottle of Slivovitz in a newspaper wrapping from one of his guests. The prizes of all these hunts, the antlers of the deer and the fanned tail feathers of the capercaillie, still hang on the walls of the house my grandfather built in the 1960s.

It is wonderful to see, in these movies, the faces of the people I loved. My father, endlessly, as a baby, looking worried, my grandmother laughing and flirting for the camera. my grandfather, handsome and debonair as he carves through the snow on skis (a relatively new pastime in the 30s). My grandfather thought he was Cecil B.DeMille, so there are rather more shots of pre-war (unbombed!) Rotterdam, moody churches in Budapest, and dark Viennese palaces (with one tentatively goose-stepping guard) than I would like, when all I really want to see is my family, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t.

My uncle was far better behind a camera than my grandfather, though his medium was the still rather than the video. Did my uncle take the photograph at the top of this post? I love this picture, because it shows my grandmother, grandfather, and father the way I remember them. My grandmother is glamorous and vivacious, smiling and having fun. I admire the way she seized the joy out of life, right to the very end. My father is laughing in this image that shows him almost at the exact midpoint of his life — and holding one of the damned cigarettes that eventually killed him, far too young. I see both myself and my son in his face. My grandfather looks serious, but apparently he is doing his “Jack Benny face.” Whether my uncle took this one or not, his attention to the faces of our family, to the way we look from the outside made him the eye through which we look back at ourselves, as a family. Most of my favorite photos of my family were taken by him, and it is not surprising that he was the one to preserve these videos for us. He talks, at the beginning of the video, of how bittersweet it is for him to do this work, to create this bridge between past and present. I am grateful.

April 14, 2014April 15, 2014

Passover

We celebrated Passover tonight; me, my son, and my husband. It is something I’ve done more years than not since my son was at pre-school at Akiba-Schechter, sometimes with friends, but most often just me and him, and now, this year, my husband too. It seemed a natural thing to do when my son was bringing home paper seder plates with the sections marked, a children’s haggadah with frogs pasted in haphazardly, and a tie-dyed matzah cover.

Every year it means something a little bit different. This year, I think of my cousin and uncle, celebrating in Israel on their first visit there, with the Berman family, with whom ours has been bound for so many decades. My son and I shared part of this season with them three years ago. I think of my grandfather, the first of our family to find himself in Jerusalem, who left from there for England on April 2, 1939 missing the start of Passover by only a couple of days. My grandmother probably rarely celebrated, if at all, but I am sure that until he was forced to flee his homeland at least, my grandfather celebrated every year. Did he celebrate with his fellow Czech refugees in their messy flat in Putney in 1939? Or was that the first year he let it slip? And this year the words of the Haggadah expressing the joy of the Jews at their liberation, and their gratitude to the God who protected and saved them ring especially loud. “He brought us out from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to festivity, from darkness to great light.” I imagine my ancestors repeating this over the centuries during times when they were far from free or festive. But each year they repeated these words of joy and humility and gratitude no matter their current pain.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I drove out of town one Saturday to visit an old friend who is dying. Strangely enough, we both knew her through completely different channels long before we met each other. We were not surprised that she was only capable of speaking to us for a very few minutes. She was in her beautiful bedroom, in a hospital bed facing a large window looking onto the sky and the trees, agonizingly slow to come into bud this year.

“You have a beautiful view,” I said.

“I know,” she replied, before she drifted back to sleep. “I’m lucky.”

January 21, 2014January 21, 2014

My Grandparents

For any of you who are still skeptical that Captain von Trapp confused me about the Jewish origin of my family I present to you exhibit A, my grandparents, dancing together. The dirndl is in my closet at my mother’s cottage. High on a hill was a lonely goatherd…

December 28, 2013December 28, 2013

When I Knew

The title is misleading. The question I still ask myself is not, “When did I know I was Jewish?” but, “How, in God’s name, did I not figure it out sooner?” I blame Captain von Trapp.

I cannot remember a time when I did not know the story of how my grandmother fled Czechoslovakia, weeks after the Germans invaded, with my two-year-old father in tow, to meet my grandfather in London (the story of how he got to London, however, remained a secret until much more recently). She was a great storyteller, and in her version, she was not a bold heroine, but a foolish and somewhat spoiled girl, slightly oblivious of the danger around her. I heard many times about how she charmed the Gestapo at the border into letting them leave, how they had to stay in Versailles, and how my grandmother abandoned my father every morning to the tender ministrations of “la promeneuse” so she could hot-foot it to Paris, and later, of their life in London and Wales, of ration cards, and air raids, and shoes that unaccountably did not get polished when you left them outside your door at night. What I did not hear anywhere attached to the story was the word, “Jew.” It was a word I never heard used by any member of my family, in any context.

And that is where the Sound of Music comes in. I saw it for the first time a long time ago, long enough ago that I remember standing for the national anthem before it began. My grandparents had come to visit in Toronto, and we all went together. And there, on the screen, was their story, their love for their homeland, the evil Nazis, and their flight to freedom. They even lived high on a hill with a lonely goatherd, in a Swiss Chalet. In Quebec. Here it is:

When the Captain sang “Edelweiss,” my mother says, tears rolled down my grandfather’s cheeks. Bless my homeland forever.

And once again, not a mention of the word “Jew” in the whole movie (Weirdly, when you think about it. Sure, the von Trapps weren’t Jewish. But Max? Max?). No wonder I was confused as the evidence began mounting and the questions started to come. Because I knew, I knew. But I didn’t know. I read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and then all the Leon Uris books. I had dreams about being chased by Nazis. I even wrote a short story for school about a young girl, oh roughly my age at the time, escaping. I asked my father where our name came from. He lied (Miners from Lancaster come to work in the Silesian coal fields. I still have not forgiven him for this one!). I asked him why Gumper was smart enough to leave when others didn’t (you can tell I am getting close at this point). I asked my grandfather what happened to his two sisters. He left the room, and my grandmother changed the subject. I knew we weren’t Catholic, like all the other Czechs I knew, though when my grandfather swore, it was by Jesus and Mary (this also threw me off). Did I think they were Hussites? But no, the von Trapps weren’t Jewish. You didn’t have to be Jewish to flee the Nazis. It wasn’t a question about myself that I asked; it was one I had already answered.

Then cousin Frances came for one of the last Christmases before my grandfather and father died, and this time brought with her a family tree. On it were large branches that were missing, unknown relatives marked only “died in the war.” And Frances told us that we had a Jewish background. I didn’t fully absorb it, confused as I still was by the Captain. Maybe Gumper’s mother had been Jewish?

After my father died, my uncle sat me and my sister down with my mother and told us the story of our origins and swore us to secrecy. My mother already knew; my father had told her before they were married in an offhand way, and she regarded it as a matter of complete indifference. We didn’t keep it a secret; we started talking about our background and history with our father’s cousins, and with our grandmother, especially when we travelled with her to the Czech Republic after the wall came down. My sister remembered revealing all to our Kitchener cousins when we visited them for Christmas a couple of years after our father’s death.

For me this knowledge came, not as a revelation but as a confirmation, an “Oh, of course.” It was like I had spent my life doing a puzzle without the picture on the box, trying to piece together the faces I saw from the pieces I had. Someone handed me some missing pieces and suddenly all the sections I had been working on began to fit together. And on the woman’s face, the pieces now formed a smile.