I am speechless when I consider all that has happened over the past few years. I would never have believed that sorting through Harry’s closet filled with a treasure trove of papers, letters, and photos would teach me so much about my family’s past while opening unimagined doors into my future.
Perhaps because they had to leave almost all of their belongings behind, my mother and Harry spent the rest of their lives keeping almost everything, always assuming that the most innocuous little thing would come in handy someday. My favorite scene in the movie “Crossing Delancey” is where Bubbie carefully folds up and stores away the brown paper and string that a package was wrapped in, as if it were something extremely valuable - my family treasured worthless items at least as much as Bubbie did. However, unlike Bubbie, Harry and my mother didn’t necessarily keep things in a neat orderly way. Both of them would fill boxes with a mish-mash of unrelated items so you never knew when you might come across a treasure or junk, most often both stored in the same place. I’m guessing I inadvertently disposed of some important things my mother had kept when we hurriedly packed up her belongings after she sold her house. Many of her treasures were carted away by 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Thankfully, I learned my lesson and didn’t let that happen to the things Harry kept. I combed through each box and leafed through each book, making sure not to toss something worth saving. Each time I thought I’d found everything, suddenly I’d stumble on something that I’d missed.
The most important example of buried treasure was a small envelope stuffed with old letters. I found it several months after I thought I’d unearthed everything in Harry’s closet. I can’t even recall where I found it.
I’m pretty sure I found the letters in this envelope.
The envelope was perhaps an inch thick. It turned out to be stuffed with letters my grandmother had written from Vienna to my mother, Harry, and other relatives in San Francisco between November 1939 and October 1941 - there were about 100 letters written on thin air mail paper and crammed into that small envelope. When my mother and Harry first got to San Francisco, my grandmother wrote almost daily, trying to maintain a connection to her children who were thousands of miles away. I’m guessing no one had looked at those letters since they were stored in that envelope back in 1946 or earlier. Roslyn finished translating them recently and I understand so much more about both my mother’s early years in America, as well as the ultimately unsuccessful efforts by so many people to bring my grandparents to San Francisco to reunite them with their children.
My mother had told me the names and shown me photos of seemingly distant family members but never told me much about them. Now that so many letters have been translated, I feel like I know some of these relatives intimately and I realize how integral they were to my mother’s and grandmother’s stories.
Over the past few years, thanks to this treasure hunt, I have met dozens of new people, some of them related to me. I have discovered a fascinating new pastime (hobby? calling? who knows what it will turn out to be?). All because I opened a closet door and looked inside.