When It Became Real

I'd written earlier about the decades old search my sister and I had undertaken to discover our adopted mother's natural parents. When we were miraculously contacted by our previously- unknown-cousin, two facts became known during the first conversation: 1. Our grandmother had not died during childbirth as we'd been told and 2. Our grandmother had been Jewish, as we'd not been told.



By coincidence, my husband was scheduled to have a conference in a few months in the city in which my grandmother had grown up and where, we discovered, my great-grandfather had died. I tried, both online and by calling various cemeteries, to find out where my great-grandfather had actually been buried. I finally had success with a call to a large Jewish cemetery and wrote down his plot number.



My father's side of the family had been primarily German Protestant and I grew up with that as the only ethnicity to which I knew I belonged. When I spoke with our previously-unknown-cousin, she'd explained that they knew there'd been Jewish heritage in the family, but our grandmother had never practiced her faith and had certainly never exposed her children to it. In fact, her youngest child never knew anyone in the family had been Jewish until she was an adult. Which brought to mind the persistent question, "What is a Jew?" As a practicing Catholic, would I also claim to be Jewish? Is it valid as an ethnicity, as a race, even if it's not your religion? It seemed an impossible question to fully answer.



But, I did know that a very rich, vibrant heritage had been abandoned by two generations. As a genealogist, it genuinely bothered me to think of all the ancestors who had been forgotten, all their treasured rituals and traditions unknown and meaningless to their descendants. I knew I'd read somewhere about stones being put on the headstones of Jewish tombstones as a sign of respect. I was determined that, when I stood before my great-grandfather's headstone, I'd do the right thing as a descendant.



There seemed to be many explanations for the tradition, but the constant among them was that it was a sign of remembrance...that others would see the stones and know that person was not forgotten. So, my sister and my cousin (son of my mother's twin brother, who had joined the search) mailed me stones from their backyards. I took stones from my backyard and put them all in a bag that I packed in my backpack.



When we arrived at the cemetery, it took a while to find the right plot. I stood in silence in front of a large tombstone, carved with words written in Hebrew and a Star of David at the top. It was an extraordinary moment. Until this point, every result from my effort to know my maternal heritage had been on pieces of paper or on computer screens. And, after twenty-some years, it had all brought me to this spot. By this point, I'd learned enough to know that my great-grandfather had been far from perfect and had left scars on many who had known him. Yet, for that moment in time, I was his descendant...one he never knew he had, yet one who remembered him and who carefully placed the small stones on his empty headstone.