The Family Secret

Please watch the video below. It’s just a minute long.

Before writing my book, In the Wake of Madness, I knew little about my maternal grandmother, Gertrud Stern. My mother adored her, but she passed along only two unrelated threads that tied me to her. The first was sweet: Gertrud, she often reminded me, had golden hands - a catchphrase for her Mama’s ability to sew, embroider, and create just about anything with fabric. I had seen some of her handiwork in old photos and in a baby romper made for my brother. The other thread was more of a lament than a story or a character trait. When asked if she had any regrets in life, my mom had only one: she had not flown to South America to see her Mama when she was dying.

The family secret, the fact that Gertrud was born Christian, was revealed to me only later - and only because my mother hoped to quell my fears that my father would never accept the non-Jewish man I loved. But a fuller picture of my grandmother came to me after my own mother was long gone, when I discovered dozens of letters written in her own hand to her family, far away in New York City. Those letters were written in Kurrentschrift, a script taught in Germany’s public schools before the turn of the 20th century. It was indecipherable, and I had almost given up hope that I would ever know what was said in those letters. But good fortune was with me: I connected with a retired schoolteacher in Kronberg, Germany who was able to read the old script and type up transcripts to be translated. Since that moment, Tilman Ochs has become a valued friend. His contribution to my life (and to the family memoir) is incalculable. Those letters gave me a chance to hear the voice of a grandmother I never had the chance to meet: to understand her passions and her terrors.

And now I, too, am a grandmother, forever grateful that our children and grandchildren do not live an ocean apart.