Lisa Grunberger – An Excerpt from ‘The Happy Adoptee’

1. Orphan

Long Island, 1998

During the summer of 1998, two major things happened that shaped my decision to find grandparents for Rachel:  during that summer I became an orphan and I learned my birth mother’s name.  

            Six years after he lost his wife of 49 years, I have to tell my father that he has terminal cancer. He’d found blood in his stool but hadn’t told anyone until it was too late.  Compared to my mother’s decline, my dad’s seems slow. 

            In June he’s the best man at a wedding of a Brazilian couple he met in the mall where he still worked as a clock repair man. This young couple fell in love with his quiet European charm.

            After I told him, it was as though I had said it is raining to someone who was standing in the rain.  After I told him, my father pats the top of my head and shuffles off to tinker with his beloved antique clocks.  On the final day of August, he dies. 

            In early July over breakfast my father hands me the keys to the safe deposit box which is on Main Street across from the Greek diner, the Golden Coach (which we kids called the Golden Roach) where I waitressed tables one summer. He wants to make sure all his papers are in order and to show me the deed to the house. I am 31 years old, just out of graduate school, and yet, driving to the local bank with the miniature keys in my bag, I feel like a teenager driving my parents’ car for the first time. Having to search through my parents’ safe deposit box, it felt like a violation.  

            In the small, private room, I unlock the narrow metal box. Estee Lauder’s White Linen, my mother’s perfume, pours out. I see the soft, colorful pouches in which she stored her diamond earrings, her bracelets, jewelry she would only wear on special occasions. And here, unexpectedly, are letters, written on business stationary, both in hand-written script and typed, in German, in Yiddish, Slovakian, Hungarian, from my Opa Leo, my grandfather, to his son, my father.  From the little I was told, Opa Leo sent his only son away from Bratislava to Mandate Palestine so he could survive the war. I try to read the letters in German, but his handwriting is difficult. 

            Tucked under a long box that housed a lapis lazuli bracelet, I find an envelope and inside, a letter dated 1967. 

            Birth Mother: Susan Morris.

            Height: 5’6”

            Weight: 130 pounds

            Works in a chocolate store.

            Father: John Doe.

            Height: 6’2”

            Weight: 180 pounds.

            He is very gifted in foreign languages and has two children from another marriage, two boys. 

            An emotion I had never felt before ran through my body.  What is this feeling, I wondered as I drove back home to my dying father?  I had no name for what I was feeling.  You see, I loved my parents more than anything in the world.  My mother was already in the other world with my grandmother.  When you don’t have a name for what you’re feeling your actions come out as crude, flailing around.  It was an unexpected discovery to learn her name at this time. Her name: Susan Morris. 

            An excitement: is she alive? A dread: is she alive?  Hope and fear passed through me as I drove the short distance home to my dying father.  It was something new to discover this, but it was not yet the right time to discover this. 

             Back home, I wave the adoption papers at my father, lying in bed half asleep.

            “You knew her name all these years?” I say, part accusation, part question. 

            “How could you not tell me?”  

            He speaks softly, for even when he was well, he would rarely allow himself to be provoked by my outbursts. It goes in one ear and out the other, he would mime, when I became loud and dramatic.  

            “Leeza, come here. Sit down. I didn’t even want to tell you that you were adopted.  Mommy insisted we had to tell you. That to be honest was the best policy. But you were our child from the moment I held you. I never wanted you to be confused by who you were and where you belonged in this world, Leeza. I’m sorry if we hurt you.”

            By late July he’s so weak he can barely come down for the light dinners I would make: loosely scrambled eggs, a simple salad, and a slice of fresh rye bread from Walls bakery, a few miles up the road, in a wealthy Jewish neighborhood called Hewlett Harbor.  For years my mother and I would go there every Friday, take a number from the old-fashioned machine, and wait our turn. Rose, who’d worked behind the counter for decades, would always hand me a black and white cookie or a lace cookie dipped in chocolate. “Say thank you, Leeza.”  

            When one evening I saw my father, who could finish a half loaf of bread in one sitting, had not touched his rye bread, I knew then my father was really ill. 

            That night, he slowly walks up the stairs. When he gets to the top, he looks down.  I thought he was looking at me, standing at the bottom of the stairs.  He looks so small, I think, for the cancer was shrinking his tall, robust frame. No, he was looking at the living room, the dining room, where every space of wall held one of his precious antique clocks. He polished them every Sunday.  He wound them up, and tended to them like they were his children, part of our family. 

            He scans the room, his hand holding the banister in a way I’d never seen him do, and he says, “Leeza, I don’t think I’ll come down again.”  Then my father turns his body around and shuffles off inside his leather slippers into the room my mother died in.  He sleeps on her side of the bed now, closest to the bathroom, in case he has to go quickly. 

            The last day of August, I was going to go out for a short bike ride. I’d been taking care of him for months with no break. I kissed his forehead and started to leave. 

            “Leeza,” I hear him call in a faint whisper as I’m walking down the stairs. I go back to his room, sit beside him on the edge of the bed. I kiss his face, his lips, his forehead, I hold his hand. I know he’s dying now. The hospice nurse had been here just yesterday and assured me he had about two to three, maybe even four more months.  But here we are. 

            Daddy whispers, “I love you, you’re a good daughter.” 

            And then he closes his eyes and exhales. It was very peaceful.  

*

            After I sat shiva for a week I decided it’s time for some comfort food: ice-cream. There was a fabulous little café called the International Delight Café in the next town over, in Rockville Centre, Long Island. They served home-made waffles and Baci gelato and pistachio that was to die for.   

            I got in my 1991 red Toyota that Daddy had driven from Long Island to Chicago, when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  There was a big bow on the roof of the car.  On my way home, with two pints of gelato in the back seat, a woman high on pain killers blew through a red light at 50 miles an hour at an intersection on Main Street and slammed straight into my passenger’s seat. A classic T-bone hit.  

            My car spun out of control, whirling wildly until it slammed smack into the brick wall of the dry cleaners on the corner of Main Street where Mommy and I used to drop off Daddy’s shirts. The force of the car broke a huge chunk out of the curb, which remained unrepaired for years. A crowd of people stood across the street at the East Point Inn, an old East Rockaway restaurant, which would soon be torn down to build a Wendy’s. They heard the crash and thought for sure I was dead. I see a woman with a plastic lobster bib around her neck, holding her hand to her face and then looking away. 

            The paramedic opens my car door and sticks his head in. “Ma’am can you hear me?  Don’t move, ma’am. The ambulance will be here in a second.” He had his cell phone out.  “Let me call your husband.”

            “No husband.”

            “Mother?”

            “No.”

            “Father?”

            “No.”

            “Brother? Sister? Cousin? Aunt?  Uncle?”

            No, no, no. My heart hurt in that moment and I thought the seatbelt had bruised my chest, which it did, but it was something else.  It was this litany of no’s to all the loved ones he listed that pained me. I gestured towards the gelato melting in the back seat.  It was early September 1998. The ambulance came and they placed a neck brace on me. 

            I went to the junk yard a week later to look at the car. The passenger seat was like an accordion; it was inside the driver’s seat and the front of the car was short, pushed into the dashboard.  Totaled.  I should have been totaled too.  But somehow the only injuries I sustained were on my right side; the entire right side of my body turned green and black and blue over the next two weeks. Some minor whiplash. And I had headaches for weeks. 

            It’s a small town where I grew up in East Rockaway, and a few months later I ran into the tall Irish paramedic who arrived on the scene. “To be honest, from the looks of your car, I was scared to open the door to your car that night. I thought your body would be in pieces. When 

you began to talk, it was like a miracle.” 

            It hit me when I came home from the hospital how alone I was now with my father gone.  An only child.  My father was an only child and most of his family had been murdered by Hitler.  My mother’s family, her brother, and his children, all lived in Israel.  

            I come home to the sound of my father’s 250 antique clocks.  Listening to their familiar chimes was comforting and filled me with longing for my family.  To hear my mother’s voice again, my father’s, my Omama’s, even their bickering over Omama invading mom’s privacy by putting her underwear away.  

            My mother’s favorite clock was a 19^th century ornate French clock with a crystal pendulum.  When it chimed its high-pitched chime it was my mother’s voice.  My father’s grandfather clock in the corner of the living room was a deep bass, my father’s voice searching for a Cadbury milk chocolate bar in the kitchen.  My Omama’s was the Swiss cuckoo clock.  

            All of these sounds merged with the bark of our mutt, Tammy, the knock of the mailman, an orchestra of sound, mixed with my own tears, wails, really, lying in my parents’ bed, my body bruised, me a miracle.  I will live in this house for almost seven more years while my friends get married, have children, get divorced.  My future fiancé will fall through the attic floor into the living room as we clean out the house.  I will look out the window of my childhood bedroom to see a huge dumpster filled with Mom’s Mr. Coffee machine, my Barbie Dream Truck, and my father’s old shoes.  

            My mother’s friend “Aunt” Esther calls me and suggests “it might be a good time to search for your birth mother, Lisa.”   She might as well have said it would be a good time to join the circus. It’s the farthest thing from my mind. I can barely move, let alone search. I hang up the phone, the old-fashioned kind that still attached to the wall.  

            No, it’s a good time to wallow in self-pity and grief.  I’ve lost both my parents, have a freshly minted doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and I’m childless.  I eluded death and realized how alone I was.  

            When the neighborhood yenta, Linda Weisberg saw me at 37 still in the house, she asked me, “Lisa, when you are you going to sell the house and have a few kids, get married, settle down?” 

            “Linda,” I told her, “When you look down the block and see a knight in shining armor riding a big beautiful white horse, then I will sell, or, when the last of my father’s antique clocks stops chiming. Whichever comes first.” 

            One day, while emptying out the second freezer in the garage, I find frozen chicken paprikash my mother had made for my father before she’d died. I had years of excavation ahead of me. 

2. Journal

1976 

30,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL 

            On my first trip to Israel in the Bicentennial year of 1976, when I was 10, my mother pulls out a purple-wrapped little rectangular book. It was in a Macy’s Big Bag, except this was 8the smaller version of the Big Bag.  I open up the gift. It’s the most beautiful journal with flowers on its pink cover and a gold key dangling down its side.

            My mother tells me things then that will stay with me for the rest of my life.  There are certain moments that are momentous, moments that you never forget. Forty years later, I remember what she said: “Soon we will arrive in Tel Aviv, my original home, where I was born, Leeza.  Unfortunately, my parents have already died, but we will go to their house in Holon where I grew up and you will see the beautiful Eucalyptus tree in the front yard. I think you are a writer, Leeza. I want you to train yourself to notice everything, to use all your senses.” 

            Mom has brought some photos of her family so I can recognize everyone when we arrive in Israel. My 13-year-old cousin Bati has dark black curls like her mother, Mira. My Uncle Shimshon is tan and strong and has curly salt and pepper hair. When she shows me a photo of Ronen, my 18-year-old cousin, in his new army uniform, I gasp. “He looks like me!”  I say, noting his dirty blonde hair and his face, a Polish Jewish face like mine. 

            “Soon you’ll meet my baby sister, Devorah, who lives on a kibbutz in the Negev. She looks like a Yemeni Jew, Leeza.”  And when I meet Dvora, I can’t believe she’s my mother’s sister, because they don’t bear even a slight resemblance.  

            Then she asked me what the five senses were, and I told her. “That’s right,” she said. “I want your eyes to see everything, your nose to smell everything, your tongue to taste everything and your hands to touch everything and your ears to hear everything, and at night, you will write it down.  An artist must be endlessly curious about the world, Leeza.”

            I was dazzled by the time she took to give me this journal. My mother usually wasn’t this dramatic, and I felt the gravitas of the situation, the moment, if you know what I mean. She was seeding something in me right then and there flying through the sky.  

            “And this is a private journal, Leeza. Here is the key to lock it. I will never read your journal unless you want to share it with me. An artist must cultivate her inner life.” Maybe she didn’t quite say it like that, but she did show me how the journal locked. She did make a point of telling me, gently, to keep some things private. And so a writer was born through an act of will and a gift.

            “Look, a cloud,” she says a few hours later. She hands me a pen and says, “When I was bored in Tel Aviv, because there were no Barbies, or bicycles, or fun snacks or amusement parks, my mother would say to me, “look at the clouds, their shifting shapes will tell you stories.”

            “So the clouds became your books?”

            “I guess you could put it that way, yes. The sky became a museum, Leeza. And after that I was not bored.”

            The sky as museum. Tomato juice as a cocktail. Dressing for a trip to Kennedy airport as an event. My mother always could turn any situation with her resourcefulness and ingenuity into something special. Once, when I asked her in college, while taking a course in Feminism, “why, given your interests in art and literature (if she could have set up a mattress in the lobby of the MET I think she would’ve) did you marry Daddy? And why do you continue to cook for him every night such elaborate European meals with soup and salad and vegetables and dessert?”  Deploying my new critical feminist vocabulary, I told my mother “This division of labor strikes me as oppressive.”  

            She looked at me like I had two heads and wondered what bullshit I was learning in “that college in upstate New York.” After a long pause, she said. “Because his simple answers to complex questions never steered me in the wrong way.”

            I would have to wait thirty years to find my own man who also had simple answers to my complex questions and who’s never steered me wrong. When, for example, we were considering names for Rachel my feminist husband insisted she have my last name: Grunberger.  Not even hyphenated to Margolis-Grunberger. 

             “Grunbergers have lost more people during the war than my family.  We need more Grunbergers” he said.  

                                                                        From the Diary

            From 1976 until my mother died in 1992, many of the entries begin: Dear Diary. Writing Dear Diary, was a way to move from the exterior world of hustle and bustle to a more interior space of contemplation.   After my mother died, I began to address the entrees to her.  

November 26, 1992 

            Dear Mom, 

                        I miss you.  I can barely hold the pen to write.  

January 3, 1993 

            Dear Mom, 

                        I took off a semester from Divinity school to be with Daddy.  He misses you and your cooking.  I thought I saw you today at Food Town, a woman pressing her hand into a cantaloupe to test for ripeness.  She was about your height, with golden beauty parlor waves just set, a red pea coat.  Could it be you?  Was it all a bad dream that you died?  I walked up to her tentatively, slyly, hiding behind a display of bananas.  If I had a disguise, I would’ve put it on.  

I had to laugh at myself then, Mom.  Standing in Food Town eyeing a stranger who reminded me of you.  What does grief do to us?  It undoes us that’s what it does.  I have to learn how to re-make myself.  

Xo

Lisa

                                                                        *

            I begin to hate writing into this void where my mother once lived.  And yet I needed to do it, to process what I was feeling.  I found a journal where I had crossed through all the words.  Writing about you hurts.  Makes your absence more real.  

            February 14, 1993

            Mom, where have you gone?  One minute we were watching Pretty Woman on TV and the next minute, you’re not in this world.    I am so full of you I have no room for anyone else.   If I stop longing for you, stop longing to hold your hand, to smell you, to talk with you and hear your voice, if I fill myself up with the world, other people, where will you go?  I fear I will lose you, Mom.  I hear you say to me, let me go Leeza, I’ll always be here. But I can’t.  I want to be with you, Mommy.  I miss you so much my whole body hurts.  

            I saw Murray, the manager, as I was leaving Food Town emptyhanded.  He put his hand on my shoulder and turned his eyes down.  He misses you too.  The whole town misses Rachel.  I go home to sleep.  

            Nov. 2, 1996.  Mom’s Yahrzeit

Dear Mom.  You’ve been gone four years.  Bill Clinton was the last president you voted for. And you made a point on your death bed to vote by absentee ballot.  As an immigrant you were fiercely devoted to the participatory part of this participatory democracy and canvassed in our little town on the southern tip of Long Island for over 25 years, going house to house registering people to vote.  You schlepped little Leeza on these canvassing trips in the summers by bribing me with Mr. Softy.  It looks like Clinton’s going to be re-elected.  

Xo

Lisa

            September 1998 

            Dear Mom, 

Is Daddy with you now?  Has he arrived safely?  Can you see me from where you are?  Does consciousness continue after our bodies die?  I have a freshly minted doctorate.  I’m trying to be a writer.  Mostly, I’m teaching yoga and waiting tables.  

Xo

Lisa

3. Jewish

Philadelphia, 2019

            I worry about doing this genealogy test.  When I close my eyes, I see the Gestapo handing out mandatory genealogy tests from Ancestry.com a block from where my father Robert grew up in Berlin. It’s 1933. If you have no Jewish blood, you have nothing to worry about.  Spit, spuch, citizen, spit!  See, it’s in nature itself, the proof of who you are. 

            You see, my house was vandalized in 2017 by a neo-Nazi skin head who graffitied a J and part of an E on the side of our South Philly house.  So this Holocaust history is personal for me.   My house is my shelter, and it was targeted by an antisemite.  I’m on a hair trigger, alert to anyone who ascribes meaning to blood.  

            So what did I do?  To protect my young daughter, only 4 at the time, I had Robert take the mezuzah off our front door.  It felt cowardly but also necessary, so we wouldn’t advertise our Jewishness to people who hate Jews.

            Here I am, spitting into a little plastic vial, paying to do a test to find a grandparent for Rachel.  Going against my natural kneejerk revulsion to attributing meaning to genetic algorithms.  

                                                                                    *                                                                                              

            “What if you find out you’re not Jewish?” my friend Christine asks me one afternoon when we’re at the local playground with our children.  I’d just told her I ordered the genealogy test. First, she was surprised I was adopted.  

            “I told you I was adopted when we first met,” I say.  

            “I guess I forgot.  You just talk about your mom and dad so much and obviously loved them so much, I just, I don’t know…”

            “…thought an adopted kid couldn’t possibly have such a strong connection to her adopted parents?”

            I’d been pushing Rachel on the swing, and I stop pushing her, letting her move back and forth, back and forth, like the pendulum swing of my father’s grandfather clock, slowing down, as I let Christine’s strange question envelop me. Christine’s been a guest at many of our seders and knows how Jewish I am. I met her in yoga class and she’d said, “you’re like a yoga rabbi.”  

            I took it as high praise.  I don’t mention the book I’ve been reading, Jews and Words, by Amos and Fania Oz who write a line I love so much I’ve committed it to memory:  “Jewish continuity has always hinged on uttered and written words….ours is not a bloodline but a text line.” This tickled me to no end as a Jew, an adopted Jew, a writer, a Jewish woman adopted writer, oh, I just love how it stakes its claim and goes beyond blood.  

            You see, Christine’s questions – what if you find out you’re not really Jewish, falsely assumes that to be Jewish runs through blood lines.   That you’re not really Jewish unless it’s biological.  Just as Rachel and Robert Grunberger are not really my parents because they are not my biological parents.  Biology uber alles, because biology determines what one is.  This suggests if I find out my birth parents are not Jewish then what, my Jewishness is false?  

            The logic is absurd.  Will I suddenly be freed of all my Jewish East coast neurotic angst?  I’ll stop being funny then, I don’t say to her.  Like Barbra Streisand fearing: what will happen if I get a nose job and purchase a goyish nose, will I stop sounding like myself?  

            Is it possible to not be something that lives and breathes inside you?   Is Jewishness inherited, the way eye color is inherited?  An emphatic no.  The question, Christine’s question, contains all the errors about adoption, inheritance and Judaism inside it all at once, it’s all wrong her question for I feel my real parents, my father, the Holocaust survivor, and my mother, an Israeli born in British Mandate Palestine, are my real parents, not my counterfeit parents.  

            Anybody who says I’m not Jewish is not Jewish I’m sorry but that’s final I want to say to Christine, quoting the Jewish singer Leonard Cohen.  Let Cohen’s response be my own. 

            Rachel’s swing slows down.  But Christine’s question worries me, makes me wonder what I might find in my DNA, that threatens or destabilizes who I think I might be.  Do I carry the BRCA gene?  What secrets might lurk inside those four proteins that compose my genome:  A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine?  What might these little invisible proteins know about me that I don’t know about myself? I didn’t even get my test results back, and already I’m under the algorithmic spell’s questions, already reducing myself to proteins flowing through my blood. What meaning could they possibly have for me?  

            “So why did you want to find your birth mother?” she asks me.   

            It took me two genealogy tests, traveling to five cities – Manhattan, Chicago, Oswego, Buffalo and Minnetonka –– interviewing countless people, meeting blood relatives, filling up ten journals, over a four year period where I watched my little girl grow from a blonde curly haired 5 year-old to a dirty blonde-haired 9-year-old –– to answer this question. It’s a seemingly simple, straight forward question of motives, but it’s opaque and difficult to answer.  In other words, I took the long way home, zigzagging around this simple question of why so many times it gave me vertigo.  

                                                                        *

            Doors creaked open during my search and I peeked inside. People came out –– dead people and living people–– and I spoke to them, and they told me stories and I listened.  By the end, I was the same and different, had some hunches about what life is all about confirmed, and had some hunches rattled.  I was shaken and stirred, yes.  Things that were once narrow became a little more spacious.

            That night in bed, I start laughing.  I’ve made up a new joke.   “What is the difference between adoptees and non-adoptees?” I ask Robert.

            “I give up.”

            “Non-adoptees think they know where the come from.”

                                                                       

 From the Diary

January 3, 2019

            Dear Mom, 

            I’m so worried about what I might find with this genealogy test.  Rachel and I walk home, holding hands, and I think, I already ordered the test, it’s on its way, our mailman slash stork, Tom’ll deliver it any day.   I could always ask for a refund from Ancestry.com.  I don’t have to do it, to spit into the vial and send my DNA back to some lab to go through the algorithm to locate any genetic kin who are out there.  I don’t really need to know. 

            I mean it’s not urgent–– like having a baby urgent was to me, like honoring you and daddy is urgent, like flossing is urgent so I don’t get a rare infection because I lazily left a piece of spinach in a back molar and it goes to my heart and the next thing you know I have sepsis and die leaving Rachel alone with her lovely father who has a chronic autoimmune disease.  

            No, it’s like you said Mom, I have to move forward, Kadima, full speed ahead, I have to erase these doubts and spit and try to find Rachel grandparents and other family so, God forbid, something should happen to Robert or me she should not be left alone.  Just do it, as the Nike ad says, so unequivocally Protestant, decisive and strong. 

Xo

Lisa

_____

Pushcart nominee and Temple University Professor, Lisa Grunberger is the author of four poetry books, including For the Future of Girls.  She’s the author of Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position (Harper Collins) and the play ALMOST PREGNANT.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, and The Laurel Review’s anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry.  She’s seeking literary representation for The Happy Adoptee: A Double Holocaust Memoir.