The ride on the F train from Manhattan took 45 minutes but the journey was far longer. They crossed an ocean. I came from Pittsburgh. We were separated not just by 11 decades, but by a family broken and a history forgotten.
I had discovered them...their very existence, not merely their burial place...after searching for over a decade. I wished my father could be here, but it was two years too late for that.
I felt a tear as the train crossed to Brooklyn. Why, I'm not sure. Was it for a man whose name I happen to share, though for most of my life I was no more aware that he'd existed than he was that I would? For an unfortunate young woman who died too soon, tied to me not by blood but by marriage and death? For had she lived I, my father, and many others I loved would not.
Was it for my father, a wonderful man whose last months I would have spared him if only I could? Was it for myself, knowing that someday I would join them across the great divide, perhaps wondering, middle-aged and childless, if someone would remember me?
Washington Cemetery is an impossibly crowded final resting place for over 100,000 Jewish souls. Graves are jammed into every spot imaginable...and some that are not. A parkway cuts through it, with semis lining the curbs on both sides of the road. Train tracks pass over it. Neighboring apartments look down. In short it is, I'm quite certain, absolutely nothing that those present at its founding ever imagined or hoped it would be.
They'd probably feel the same way about me. I'm not Jewish, not in any real sense. My father was half-Jewish and never practiced. His father was a Jew, though pretty secular in my experience. His mother was not. Thus, my father by Jewish law was not Jewish unless he were to convert.
Go back one more generation and my great-grandparents were Orthodox, so much so that my great-grandfather helped build a temple, Poale Zedeck, in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. My grandfather's sisters remained observant though he in all but the most minimal sense did not.
My grandparents divorced and my father was raised by his mother's parents, Roman Catholic immigrants from Italy, though their faith never took hold either. His dealings with his father were sporadic, and with the rest of his Jewish family non-existent. His grandfather died before the divorce. His grandmother and aunts never acknowledged him or his sister. He and his half-brother passed through each others lives on occasion but had not been in touch for many years before they died. His half-sister he never met, a tragedy I would give anything to reverse if I could. I myself never spoke to her till a year after he died.
Three-quarters of a century ago family bonds were broken...stolen...without the consent or even, in some cases, the knowledge of those who through no fault of their own would live lifetimes with part of their family cut off from them.
I wonder sometimes about my own search, my digging through the past. Is it just a hobby or do I search in the hope that I might someday understand it? Or even, in some small way, put it right? I know my father always enjoyed sharing the discoveries. I enjoy it less, now that he is gone.
It began with a search for my great-grandfather, Louis Lawrence. My father was a young boy, 4 years old when he died, with only the faintest snippet of a memory left behind. What he did remember, however, was his Italian grandmother Angelina saying that things would have been different for my father and his sister if Louis had not died. That made him all right by me.
It was about 10 years ago when I discovered where Louis was buried. What might have taken a phone call under normal circumstances took me a couple of years. The knowledge still existed in human memory, but not any memory I knew how to contact or access.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I asked my father if he wanted to visit the grave. Knowing the pain from his upbringing...which he would rarely acknowledge...I think I expected a no. But he went, and seemed to get something from the experience, though on my later visits he never wanted to go back.
Finding Louis, it turned out, was child's play, compared to finding my way further back. It took me several more years of searching to trace him back from Pittsburgh to New York City. And there I began to find surprises.
I had thought Louis the first to come over. He was not. His father, David, arrived in the mid 1870s, some 15 years before he did. I knew already of his brother Henry, who settled in Pittsburgh before he did. I learned of a sister, Sarah, who also lived in New York and joined her brothers in Pittsburgh a few years after Louis relocated.
And, most surprisingly, I learned of Giza Klein.
Giza...or Gisela, according to her tombstone...was the first wife of my great-grandfather. Given the outrageous mortality rates of their era it was not a shock, just a possibility I had not considered. I learned there was a child who preceded her death, whose name I still do not know. I learned of Stella, their daughter, born in 1899, her fate for a long time a mystery, though I always suspected it did not turn out well.
Giza died in an ill-fated third pregnancy. Till I uncovered her I doubt than any living soul for generations even knew she'd been alive.
Six weeks after Giza's death my great-grandfather remarried. Common enough in that time. Men did not take care of children. It was likely an arranged marriage, put together quickly for practical reasons. If it seems unromantic, perhaps romance was an unaffordable luxury when life was a daily struggle to survive.
Louis' father died the next year, and Louis and his new wife soon came to Pittsburgh, joining his brother Henry who was already established in business here. It was Henry, I believe, who first anglicized the name. It was easier to do business as Lawrence than Lorincz, or Lorenz, or...well, you get the idea.
Stella, her father and stepmother lived in a store on the site of a steel mill, in an industrial Hell along Pittsburgh's Second Avenue, surround by horse carts and choking fumes and belching flames that lit the sky at night.
But not, in Stella's case, for long. Just days after the birth of Louis and Fannie's first child she was, horribly, scalded to death in some sort of accident. And so, the last remaining tie between Giza Klein and the future was gone. Not only would there be nobody to remember her life, but indeed, few would even know she had ever been alive. She had been fully eclipsed from this life.
All this and more was on my mind as a got off the train at Bay Parkway. The woman at the cemetery office was more than helpful, patiently sorting through various versions of the surname. Finally, David and Giza were located, and armed with a small map...not especially detailed...I crossed the road to find them. The last part of the journey had arrived.
It took some time. I wandered past long row upon row of tiny tombstones in the children's section. I wonder if the smaller stones were cheaper, easier for a struggling turn of last century family to provide. I passed solemn old stones and newer, gaudier monuments in shiny black with laser etched photos, a sort favored by the Russian and Balkan emigres of recent years.
The search was fruitless for a time. I searched rows 1 through 6 without luck...till I decided to reverse the search. Sure enough, the numbering began at the back fence, not the front. It didn't take much longer.
At the end of a long row, beside a small footpath that separated his section from the graves of the children, after half an hour...or maybe two-thirds of a lifetime...or was it several lifetimes...I reached my great-great-grandfather.
I don't honestly believe in an afterlife...and if there is one, well...I doubt it's spent hanging around wherever the remains of your mortal shell happen to be. That sounds like an awful eternal fate to me. I approached with uncharacteristic solemnity and then, silly as it sounds, I introduced myself. I explained how he and I were related, thanked him for having the courage to undertake the uncertain journey from a small village in northern Hungary to the biggest city in the world. I patted the stone gently, and planted a small kiss on the top before I moved on.
Having located my great-great-grandfather Giza would not be hard to find. She would be three more rows forward, near the other end. I took my time. It crossed my mind that I would be the first visitor in a very long time...and perhaps the last for all time.
Moments later I stood face-to-face with the tombstone of the former Giza Klein, the woman who was not my great-grandmother, whose blood did not flow in my veins...
And I cried. I mean...I cried. No eyes welling up...no single tear running down a cheek. Spontaneously, almost instantly, like a child, I sobbed.
I tried to explain...to her...to the stone...to the sky...to myself? It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. She didn't deserve this. Her children didn't deserve this. Why was I the lucky one? Why my father...as much a I miss him still? Why my grandfather? Why wasn't it her great-grandson here?
I never felt so lucky...maybe even, despite my near atheism, blessed...and so horrible, all at once time in my life.
I hugged the cold granite. I didn't pat it gently, as I had for my own blood moments before. I hugged it as I cried.
I know little, but I know this: Everybody deserves to be remembered. And I promised Giza Klein Lawrence this...as long as I lived, somebody would remember. Somebody would remember her, somebody would remember her Stella, dead nearly as long as her mother...even the child whose name, gender and even the dates of their short life I still did not know...I would remember that they were here.
It was the least...and sadly, the most...I could do.
I composed myself and moved on. I waved to my great-great-grandfather as I passed. I headed into the cemetery office to again thank the woman who had helped me, but inside the door I decided it would be best just to go.
I took the train back to Manhattan. I had a $20 corned beef sandwich. It was delicious...and probably more than Giza ever spent on a month's groceries in her life. I went back to my hotel, to pick up my luggage and head to La Guardia and then home.
I've been back home for several days now, and writing this for that long. I've spoken for a second time to the sister my Dad never knew. She wants to meet after a lifetime...two, really...with the sister she never had a chance to know. I will try to help make that happen, lest the tragic divide be compounded again.
I think I have located Stella's resting place. It is closer to home. Over a bridge, across a river, up a hill. I have been there before. It is in the same small cemetery that holds my great-grandparents. It is perhaps 1/100 the size of the place where David and Giza are. I will go and look for her. Soon.
Shalom.
If anyone is interested or curious, the rest of the photos I took on my visit to Washington Cemetery can found here: http://s1239.photobucket.com/...