Read an Excerpt

From Chapter One: Waiting for a Lost Daughter

During the Korean War, in 1951, my brother, Norman, was investigated for top secret clearance. He had enlisted in the Air Force, and was assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission. It was at the height of the Cold War and the hysteria of the McCarthy era.

Federal investigators knocked on our neighbors’ doors and visited our high school. They asked questions about my brother’s patriotism. Had he ever expressed any sympathy for Communism?

Other FBI investigators grilled my brother. One day, they said to him, “We know that your mother has a sister in the Soviet Union. What would you do if a Soviet agent came to you and told you that your aunt and her family would be killed unless you gave the Russians some information?”

“I would say ‘Kill them all,’” my brother responded. “I am an American.” When he came home on leave, he told us the story. Our mother, Florence, nodded her head in passionate agreement.

“You did the right thing,” she said. “This sister in Russia, what is she to me? Would I know her? Would she know me? Do I even know if she is alive?”

She knew her once as her oldest sister, Frayda. Her big sister had braided her baby hair, tickled her until she laughed, and hidden with her during the Bolshevik Revolution. But that was in another life.

My brother and I and all our cousins grew up knowing there was a branch of our family in Russia. Our parents never talked about them. There were no letters. We didn’t know where they lived, or how they lived, or if they lived.

There was, however, one photograph. It had a place among the pictures of smiling brides and grooms and curly-haired toddlers covering every inch of space on my grandmother’s dining room buffet, spilling over to flat surfaces like window sills and coffee tables, each photograph another piece of our family’s life. Except this one.

There was something mysterious about this picture. Mysterious and sad. The photo was done in that somber brownish black and white, sepia, which is once again in vogue in art photography. The sadness did not come from the photographic process. It was the people who were sad. Four people — Frayda, her husband, little girl and little boy, looked straight at us with no expression in their faces, no life in their eyes. Those faces hid more than they told, but what they told was that theirs was a life so different from ours that despite a certain look to the eyes, a certain shape to the face, these were not our people. Only there, in my grandmother’s dining room display, were they part of our family.

At the height of the Cold War, my mother agreed with her son. There was no need for my brother or our government to concern themselves with the possible Russian agent. The sister in Russia was probably dead. How could she have survived the Nazis? And if she lived, what was she to us?

Then, in 1963, a dozen years after my brother’s experience, almost a half century after Malka, my grandmother, had shepherded four of her children to America, a letter came from our lost aunt, Malka’s lost daughter.

My aunt and her family were alive.

© Sissy Carpey