The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  Saraghenia was born on a bright, chilly, early-January morning. She didn’t get the free layette the Chamber of Commerce gave to the first infant born each year (that year awarded to a Passamaquoddy Indian baby from the Pleasant Point Reservation on the edge of town). But whenever we walked down Water Street, Chief of Police Reed Mulholland would stop to say hello to the baby born after he plowed our road in the blizzard of ’71.

  My mother couldn’t wait to meet her new granddaughter. We rented her a room in a guest house in town, but she cried anyway when she saw our tiny cabin, a déjà vu without a real bathroom or kitchen—just a “flush,” as they called it if you had an indoor toilet rather than an outhouse, a kitchen sink, and a large, well-polished cast iron wood-burning stove that occupied the center of our one-room house.

  Mom loved Saraghenia from the start, and I really appreciated that she literally travelled, if not to the ends of the earth, at least to the furthest point east in the United States to meet her. In hindsight, being a mother myself, I feel even more sympathetic toward her. She simply wanted to be part of our lives. The Maine winters were hard and our house was primitive, even for me, but I had to find my own way and couldn’t live my life to accommodate her wishes.

  I will always treasure the memory of a day toward the end of summer when Saraghenia was three. The heath across from our house, Buchman Head, was a carpet of low-growing wild berry bushes, mostly cranberries and blueberries, and the dazzling sun over Passamaquoddy Bay made the water sparkle like a brilliant blue jewel. The counter that lined the back wall of our house was laden with baskets of blueberries waiting for me to strip stray leaves, wash them, and make jam. I glanced out the window and saw my little daughter playing in the backyard wearing only a t-shirt. I watched her pluck a snow pea from the tangle of vines in our vegetable garden. She looked up and waved to me with one hand as she popped the pea pod into her smiling mouth with the other.

  Unfortunately, that bright summer moment couldn’t mask the growing fissures in my marriage. In the fall of 1974, Brendt moved back to Manhattan, and the following March, Saraghenia and I took the midnight Greyhound bus to New York to see her father, and spend a few days with my mother, before we embarked on the next stage of our journey. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t ignore the irony that I had been so determined to give my daughter a happier, more stable life than I had, yet found myself a month short of thirty with a four-year-old child, a failed marriage, little money, no clear plans, and a one-way ticket to San Francisco.

  6

  A New Path

  I sat on the bench in Golden Gate Park with a big smile on my face. The afternoon sun radiated its heat through my whole body as I watched my daughter and her new best friend chasing each other on the grass amidst peals of laughter. It hadn’t been easy starting over. For the first few years we moved every six months, and Sarah, as she was called once she started first grade in San Francisco, changed schools almost as often. But we finally settled down with a housemate in a friendly Victorian on Potrero Hill, and I got a job in a graphic design firm. The most startling thing about being in the Bay Area was that everyone seemed to be interested in some form of spiritual pursuit.

  One day a woman I knew from a beginners’ meditation group handed me a book called The True Sage, a collection of talks on Hasidism, a mystical branch of Judaism about which I knew very little. Each chapter started with a teaching story from a respected rabbi, but the commentary was by an Indian guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I had never found any comfort or guidance in the religion of my childhood, but was intrigued by the possibility of discovering spiritual wisdom that related to my Jewish heritage.

  The first story, “To Walk in One’s Own Light,” had a quote from the Rabbi of Rizhyn: “But if a man carries his own light with him, he need not be afraid of any darkness.” Rajneesh elaborated by saying, “The whole world need not be filled with light—just your own heart. A little flame and that’s enough, because that will light enough of a path for you to walk.”

  His words riveted my attention. Sarah was spending the night with her friend, and I literally read from Saturday afternoon to Sunday night. I could barely put the book down to eat or sleep. When I was done, I sobbed and sobbed. I realized that in spite of the strength I had mustered to handle my challenges, I had lost my trust in life. I wasn’t sure exactly when I started to close down—perhaps to cope with my father’s death, my mother’s pain, the loneliness of my teenage years, the disappointments of my marriage—whatever it was, I could no longer ignore my longing to open my heart and to find the light within me. I didn’t want to become brittle like my mother.

  In spiritual circles there is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I was ready, and I soon discovered that several students of Bhagwan Rajneesh, who later was called Osho, had groups and meditations in the Berkeley area. It was in one of those groups that I met my husband Michael.

  The minute I took my place in the meeting hall, I noticed a tall, slender young man in a crinkled black linen shirt with the two top buttons open. He had brown hair that reached just below his ears and a neatly trimmed beard. He trembled when he introduced himself to the group.

  At the end of the day, Michael followed me to the street. He leaned his elbow on the hood of my car as I fumbled for my keys.

  “Would you like to go out for something? We could just get some wine and pizza at the Jupiter down the street?” he said.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked him. During the all-day workshop I had gotten in touch with my anger and done a lot of yelling and pillow beating. It was hard to imagine that any man would find me attractive.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said smiling. “The minute I saw you, I wanted to meet you.”

  I accepted his invitation—the shell around my heart was beginning to melt. I knew that I had a lot more work to do, but this was a good start. Six months later, we rented a big house at the foot of the Berkeley hills with bedrooms for Sarah, who was nine by then, and Michael’s son, Key, who was seven. For the first time since early childhood, I felt like I had a real family.

  I’d also decided to become a spiritual disciple of Rajneesh. As part of my initiation, he gave me a new name, Anand Mani, which means diamond of bliss in Sanskrit. I wanted to tell my mother, though I was nervous about her response.

  “Will you have to wear a turban?” was all she said when I called her.

  “No Mom, no turban,” I said.

  “Okay, I can handle that.”

  I didn’t tell her that for the next five years I would wear only red and orange, the colors of the sunrise, or that taking a new name was symbolic of giving up my prior identity. I had no idea that even with a new name, the past was still very much part of me, or that a decade later I would be as driven to know about my ancestors as I once was to forget them.

  7

  Safe Passage

  My mother and Michael had liked each other from the start. They talked about their passion for classical music, especially Beethoven string quartets. When we took Mom for a walk in Tilden Park, he pointed out the shiny Buprestid beetles that lived on the pine trees or the spores on the underside of the sword ferns. Afterwards she said to me, “You better be nice to that man so he won’t leave you.”

  “Thanks Mom,” I answered. “Maybe he better be nice to me too. But you’re right. He’s terrific…and don’t worry, he won’t leave me.”

  Mom came to visit us in Berkeley for the last time in April 1987. The occasion was my forty-second birthday. To spend more time with her grandmother, Sarah, a junior at Berkeley High, took Monday off from school. We drove to Sausalito to see the odd assortment of houseboats on Liberty Dock.

  “I like them,” Mom said. “They’re all so original, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Where do they put their garbage?”

  After lunch we found a public trail on the edge of Mill Valley. In spite of a double hip replacement a decade earlier, my mother still loved to walk in nature.
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  “Ah, green,” Mom kept repeating, as the four of us walked along the level dirt path that followed a stream bordered with redwood trees and bay. “I can just smell the green.”

  When we returned home, she wanted to lie down. I sat at the end of the bed rubbing her feet, and studied her familiar face leaning back against the pillow. In the fading glow of the afternoon sun, her normally nervous dark eyes and tightly pressed lips seemed soft, her expression more vulnerable than I remembered. I thanked her for coming for my birthday and told her I always knew she loved me, even during my twenties when I kept my distance.

  “I’m really grateful,” I said. “Not everyone feels as loved as I did.”

  “My mother never loved me,” she said. “Erika was the only one… Nobody else cared about me.” I was surprised by her comment, though remembered that I had heard harsh references to her parents before: I hated my parents. My father was cruel. My mother was weak. She didn’t protect us. I never dared ask her what she meant.

  “I’ve learned to do some guided relaxation,” I told her. “Would you like to try it?” To my amazement, she said yes.

  I made a suggestion to close her eyes, if she wanted to, and observe her breathing. After a few minutes I told her to let out three long, slow breaths. “Just exhale long and slow as though you’re blowing over hot soup… Notice the muscles of your jaw relaxing…your back relaxing…your stomach relaxing…” I said in a soothing voice. I saw her fingers uncurl and her shoulders sink deeper into the pillow. I asked her to remember a happy time from her childhood.

  After a few seconds, she said, “My happiest memory was going to the park with Erika. When we were both very little, we had a really nice nurse, a young blond woman who was sweeter than the others, who took us out almost every afternoon. We had a special place where we played in the grass. I can still see it clearly. I loved to lie on the earth and look up at the sky through the canopy of leaves; the sun streaming through made stripes across my arm.”

  I suggested that she use all her senses to relive the experience of being there again, inhaling green…thick, leafy branches…flowers and grass. As her breathing slowed even more, a small tear settled on the edge of her eyelid, and a slight smile formed on her lips.

  “You are loved,” I whispered to her. “You are taken care of. You are safe. You can always remember this moment and feel at peace.” I tiptoed out of the room to give her a chance to rest.

  A month later, on June 14, 1987, my mother had a stroke.

  By this time, she had divorced George and moved to a rent-controlled studio apartment on the seventeenth floor of the same building on Central Park West. My mother was thrilled to have a terrace in Manhattan, and I remembered how tenderly she watered her outdoor garden of potted tomatoes. She was on the phone with her old friend Celia one Saturday morning when she became incoherent and dropped the phone. Celia called 911 and my brother. Both the medics and Tom, who had to drive to the city from Long Island, got to Mom in less than an hour.

  Just the evening before, my mother had telephoned and spoken to both Michael and me. Now the walks and the conversations were over. I got two emergency tickets to New York. Sarah insisted she had to stay home to take her finals and I had given in. I really didn’t know what to expect, and I understood that she wanted to remember Grandma Alice as the independent, proud woman she loved. As the airplane labored its way east into the darkening night, I felt stranded and uneasy, stretched taut between mother and daughter. I closed my eyes and whispered, “Mom, I’m on my way.”

  Soon after landing at Kennedy, Michael and I settled in the back of Tom’s car speeding down the Long Island Expressway.

  “They had to put her on a respirator because you’ve got the only copy of her living will that declines life support,” Tom said, twisting his neck to talk to us in the back seat. “Thank God, Mom gave her neighbor a key so the medics were able to get in even before I got there.”

  I didn’t say anything. As we crossed the Triborough Bridge into Manhattan, I gazed out at the shimmering lights, my tired eyes blurry, the world forming and dissolving before my eyes. When I’d tried to talk to my mother about her blood pressure, she had said, “Just put me out on the ice like the Eskimos do when someone is no longer useful.” One day in the doctor’s office her blood pressure soared above two hundred, and her doctor wouldn’t let her leave until it went down again and she promised to start taking medication.

  My mother passed away just moments before we arrived. Her room at Roosevelt Hospital, the same facility where she’d had breast surgery almost thirty years earlier, was dimly lit. Uncle Willy, who was sitting in the corner, got up to meet us. The respirator had been removed and Mom was lying on a hospital bed with nothing to indicate that she had suffered any distress except for two small strips of white tape that had been placed over her closed eyelids. What struck me the most was that she looked so healthy and relaxed. Her lips were soft, almost as though she were on the verge of smiling, her forehead was smooth, unlike the worried frown I was more accustomed to, and she had a suntan.

  I had assumed that in death my mother would look pale and lifeless; but she still had her normal color, a soft bronze. I thought of how she had prized her suntan, a symbol of sophistication and youthfulness to her. She made a sun reflector out of folded cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, and on sunny days would sit on a bench in Central Park, near the Tavern on the Green, holding the shiny rectangle under her chin.

  My mother’s familiar graceful hands with their carefully filed nails coated in clear polish rested on top of the sheet. I brushed her skin with my fingertips and was taken aback by how heavy and inert her hand felt. Somewhere I had read that our state of consciousness during our last moments becomes part of our journey into the afterlife. I wanted to give her safe passage, as if she were a child on a train and I could pin a nametag to her blouse with her destination so the conductor would know where she needed to get off. Leaning close, I reassured her that her days of loneliness were over, that she never again had to be hurt. “You’re not alone,” I whispered again, and the words hung in the air.

  Time passed. I heard the hum of the air conditioner in the otherwise silent room. My mother’s color was beginning to fade. I felt Michael’s hand on my shoulder. My brother walked over and stood next to me, and Uncle Willy glanced at his watch. The clock on the wall said eleven fifteen. We had been beside her bed for over an hour. A nurse, who had already stepped in and out of the room twice, told us she needed to attend to my mother. I didn’t want to go but didn’t know what else to do. I reached down and picked my purse up off the floor.

  Before leaving, we all stood in a circle around Mom’s bed. Something drew my attention toward the space just above the head of her bed. I had a sense of a presence, of my mother’s spirit hovering there. But instead of her aging body, I saw the young woman from my earliest memory, smiling and radiant, almost luminous. Then she was gone.

  PART TWO

  The Search

  A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular, you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

  JAMES M. BARRIE

  8

  The Letter

  When my brother first told me that we might be heirs to a property in Leipzig, I thought of it as a curiosity, some kind of ironic joke. I had assumed that with my mother’s death the last link to my family’s past was severed. Even Aunt Erika was gone. She had been killed in an automobile accident in Florida three years before Mom’s passing.

  Then, in October 1990, on the eve of the final reunification of Germany, Uncle Willy had invited Tom and his wife Harriet over for dinner. He wanted to talk about German restitution.

  “You know,” he said, “many Jews whose families had owned homes or businesses in West Germany were compensated for property the Nazis stole from them. But Alice and Erika’s family home was in Leipzig, and the East
German government felt no obligation to settle anything. East Germany wasn’t even recognized by the United States. Several times, the girls hired lawyers to pursue restitution, but to no avail.”

  My uncle told Tom to submit a new claim for the Leipzig property. He signed over to my brother the part that would have belonged to Erika and gave him the name of a lawyer who handled such cases. “I’d be surprised if anything ever comes of this,” he said, “but you can have an adventure with history.”

  I didn’t hear about any of this until a few months later when Tom told me he had contacted the lawyer and I would be getting something in the mail. When I saw the envelope with a return address from Max Osen, Attorney-at-Law, I tore it open and scanned down two printed pages, one in German, the other an English translation:

  The undersigned retains you to prosecute my claim or claims for confiscation of property in East Berlin or East Germany. This claim may be due to:

  a) Aryanization or confiscation by Nazi Germany;

  b) Nationalization or similar action by the Communist authorities of East Germany.

  The word Aryanization sent chills up my spine. It belonged in a history book, not in a letter addressed to me. I wasn’t even clear what it meant. The next day I went to the library. I was surprised to discover that the forced transfer of Jewish assets into “Aryan” hands started much earlier than I had ever imagined, especially in Leipzig, where a boycott of Jewish-owned stores began in 1933.

  In the end, the methodical confiscation of property took everything of value or which could be assigned a value: houses, land, even synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, along with books, stamp collections, jewelry and art objects of every kind, down to the last silver spoon.[2]

  I had never really thought about what things of value my mother once had. I hadn’t seen anything too impressive, only a set of tiny enameled spoons, and a fluted silver vase we kept on a shelf in the living room. Except for the ring. My mother had a sparkling platinum ring with a row of sapphires set between two rows of diamonds. She wore it to somebody’s bar mitzvah and for my brother’s wedding, accompanied by a matching pin that glittered against her beige linen dress. The rest of the time, the ring and pin lived in a safe deposit box at the bank.