Part II: Dad – More Surprises

Trieste, 1971.

I was still coming to grips with learning that Dad had been one of seven siblings, three of whom were murdered by the Nazis, when Aunt Carola continued with her surprises. Several more of them were as dreadful as the earlier ones.

“It sounds like you’ve never heard of Muki,” said Carola sadly. “Uncle Bruno’s and my dear son Muki. His name was Albert but we called him Muki . . . He and your Uncle Dan were taken in Venice and murdered at Auschwitz. Muki was a boy . . . just a little boy. . . We had all gone to Venice because we thought that it would be safer than Trieste but it wasn’t. Bruno's parents were there too in that café near Piazza San Marco when the Germans came to round up Jews . . . The Gestapo closed the doors of the café and asked for papers, and all the Jews were rounded up. We were not there and when we found out, Bruno and I became desperate . . . I cannot tell you the horror . . .” She stopped, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Uncle Bruno gently laid his hand on hers.

“We ran to the train station,” she continued. “We tried to find out where the train was heading . . . But it had left and it was impossible to save them.”

She stopped again, unable to go on. We all remained quiet, sharing her grief.

“And since you now live in the U.S.A.” she resumed, her tone a touch more impatient, “have you ever met your cousin Leon from Baltimore, the son of my sister Marie? He was born and raised in Athens. The Germans took Marie and her husband Samuel to Auschwitz . . . Leon ran to the hills and became a partisan. He was a brave man, my nephew Leon; he survived and moved to Baltimore, where he lives today.”

“No, never met him” I mumbled.

It was all too sudden and too shocking. The flood of names and events condensed thirty years into thirty minutes. We remained silent, while I tried to come to grips with the enormity of the tragedies that had befallen the Goldstein clan and the absurdity of Giorgio, I, learning about this for the first time. They stared at me in bewilderment.

I slumped in my chair. After a while I asked, “ . . . So, what about my father as a young man in Smyrna? Please tell me something about him."

Aunt Carola's mood hardened unexpectedly. She replied in stiff German, “You tell us Giorgio: Why didn’t Moritz ever get in touch with us nach dem Krieg, after the War?” Her tone had changed. She was agitated. Bruno and Clara looked at each other with a touch of panic. They must have known that this moment would come yet were unable to derail it. But it was too late to stop Carola. We were together in a speedily flowing raft heading ever faster toward the rapids. Getting off was out of the question.

“You see,” she continued, angry now, accusatory. "Your father never responded to our letters, many of them. We wrote to him many letters after the war. We told him that our mother Regina had survived and that we had buried her in Trieste. We told him that Dan, Muki, and Bruno’s parents and his sister Marie and her husband had all been murdered at Auschwitz.” Her outburst trailed off and she was breathing faster. Uncle Bruno caressed her hand and gave her a glass of water. Aunt Clara looked somber.

“We told him that we lost our dear child, your cousin Muki . . . But your father never answered. Why, Giorgio? You tell us . . .” She looked at me and I looked at her.  

What could I say? Something’s wrong, I thought. I’m here to unlock Dad’s silences and learn about him, and she expects that I will have answers for her?

Uncle Bruno jumped to Dad’s defense, in broken German and a little Italian. “We think that when your father Maurizio heard what had happened to us that he became, how you would say . . . traumatizzato. . .”

I barely heard him. Never mind my shrink Friedman’s sage advice, which had helped me grow up and mourn and empathize with my rebellious teen-age self. I felt my adolescent anger at Dad coming back. I felt myself returning to that familiar hurt; an annoyed kid of thirteen without a mom and with a silent and difficult dad. I was in the rapids with my aunt and couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it.

I looked at Dad’s ghost, who was sipping his cappuccino. Sonofabitch, I thought, you kept everyone at a distance, me, your sisters, everyone…! What the hell’s wrong with you? You had six brothers and sisters? I had uncles about whom you never told me? And who’s this cousin who died in Auschwitz, little Albert or Muki, or whatever his name? What else did you take with you? I could have cried, not so much grieving that I had lost relatives to the Nazis but feeling cheated. If your folks don’t have the answers, I asked the ghost, who will give me the answers? He did not look up from his coffee.

I explained to my family that I had no idea about any of this. I described what a distant and lonesome life Dad and I had had in the last years before he died. How little we talked. How little I knew. How little I could help them understand. I was sorry that these things had happened. Dad was a reserved man, I said. I was sorry that he had not written.

Then I stopped. What am I doing? I thought. Why am I defending him? As far as I’m concerned, he’s guilty as charged.

Little by little, the sadness embraced all of us. I felt a kinship with them brought about by the object of our common sorrow. Bruno and Clara were somber, but I couldn't tell what Carola was feeling. She remained silent, her anger seemed to dissipate and then her expression took on a sparkle, almost a smile. I sensed that she understood more than I and that my tale had confirmed something about her brother that she had long suspected. The mood started changing as our predicament sunk in and we became reconciled to our shared legacy of this enigmatic father and brother. He was a cryptic sonofabitch all right, but he was our sonofabitch. And so, with little else to do about any of it, we started talking about him.

I learned the outlines of his life and of his siblings. I heard, for the first time, of the burning of Smyrna, Dad’s birthplace, by Kemal Pasha in 1922, how the Goldsteins ended up in Samos, and I learned of the family wine business that they had there. Aunt Carola described a more outgoing and lively young man than the lonesome one I had known in the last few years of his life. Carola proudly described her brother as a man who was “up to date” with the latest developments. She described an adventuresome man, a risk taker, an older brother whom she had obviously loved. A father figure, she called him. She remembered that in Smyrna he practiced Swedish Gymnastics. None other than Joseph Pilates, whose exercises are now practiced everywhere, was one of its main proponents. To my shock, I learned that Dad did Pilates when young . . . Go tell.

She told of his immigration to South America in 1926 and his returning only once for a short visit in 1934. That was the year that Uncle Albert died by suicide in Samos and was buried there in a cemetery with all those Greek letters. She talked about his silence after the war, which had hurt so much. And I told of my distance from him and how much that hurt, and of his death, and of my emigration and quest to find him.

I looked over at the ghost but he was gone, his coffee cup empty.  

I asked why Dad had emigrated when he was thirty years old and had traveled so far away from the Aegean of his birth. Clara made as though she finally wanted to say something but Carola talked over her, rushing her words. Young men looked for their fortune in a faraway land, that’s how it was done in those years, the streets of Buenos Aires, you know Giorgio, were paved in gold. Carola threw a sharp glance at Clara and said something in quick Italian that I didn't understand. To this day I don’t think Carola’s hurried explanations shed much light on Dad’s break with his family.  I wonder if she interrupted Aunt Clara because her sister was about to reveal a family secret that Carola wanted to keep buried. I was too young to talk over one aunt and ask the other, “What were you going to say, Aunt Clara?” I didn’t do that, and if there was a big secret, it was buried with all of them.

In the next few days, they took me to visit Grandma Regina’s grave outside of town. Regina, the “Queen Mother,” as Carola called her, ran the households in Smyrna and then in Samos because Grandpa Leon was always on business travel, selling wine. Carola told me more about Uncle Albert, who had committed suicide, and about her young son Albert, who had been killed by the Nazis, and who carried her brother’s name. She thought that perhaps Dad had also chosen my middle name, Alberto, in memory of one or both. We couldn’t tell whether Dad even knew that little Albert had been born, not to mention murdered. She told me that she had named her second son Miki, in remembrance of Muki. She added that she had named her daughter Maura in remembrance of Dad’s Italian name, Maurizio. I felt the strong web of family connections. I looked at my cousins who smiled and nodded silently.  

My Aunt Carola was a tough woman by the time I met her. She had been battered by profound losses, by deaths and disappointments. I knew that her ghosts were still living in that old house in Trieste wandering the gravel paths, protected by the thick wall. I felt caught in her web of remembrance and reincarnation. I wanted to know more, but I didn’t have the guts or the heart to stand up to my aunt. In that first visit, I got no further than skimming the surface. Knowing that Dad had had six siblings whom he never mentioned was more information than I could digest in one short trip. A few years later, after completing graduate school, I made another European trip. I went to Samos and returned to Trieste – and, bit by bit, learned some more.    

***

As I was absorbing the lives of a family I’d never known and about whom I had heard little, I discovered the hard way that much of history is written on graves. And for wandering Jews like us Goldsteins, the graves are all over the world. There are Goldsteins buried in Buenos Aires; and there are plenty Goldstein ashes in the earths of Auschwitz; and, as I found out, there are Goldsteins buried in Samos. And there is Grandma Regina Goldstein, buried in Trieste, whom I first met 25 years after her death. The inscription on her tombstone says that she is reunited with Marie, her daughter deported from Athens; with Dan, her son, and with her grandson Muki, both of whom were deported from Venice. Regina is not the only one buried in that grave in Trieste. Several ghosts from Auschwitz are also buried there. My family.