Meet the Berkowitzes

Strange how journeys can have small arcs that sometimes make full circles. Since initial contact with my mother's natural sister and niece, we knew our grandmother had been Jewish. Typical of her lack of maternal responsibility to her known children, they had never been raised in the Jewish faith and some never realized their heritage had been Jewish until they were Christian adults. On my quest for yet more facts about the family, I came across someone else doing online genealogy research. We were both researching the same family of Russian Jews who had immigrated from Lithuania to Christiania (Oslo), Norway to New York City at the beginning of the 20th century. We were both following Abraham and Pauline Berkowitz and their twelve children.

We'd had plans to revisit my aunt and cousin earlier this year and, as it happened, Dr. and Mrs. Berkowitz--the latter my fellow researcher--lived just two hours away from them. Dr. Berkowitz' grandparents are our common relatives. Age ranges among their twelve children make the details complicated, but family is family.

It's one thing to intellectually know that your newly-discovered heritage is Jewish. It's another thing to meet family members who actually speak Yiddish and know their religion. This would be the Berkowitzes. They greeted me warmly and, as I've learned happens in adoption situations, Dr. Berkowitz and I studied each other's faces.

"I can see Berkowitz in your eyes," he noted.

This struck me as another of those curious cases of puzzle pieces coming together. My aunt, upon meeting me, had said that from my cheeks down, I looked just like her sister, but she didn't know who's eyes I had. Well, clearly, Berkowitz eyes. (I need to say that I'm very proud of the mannerisms and traits I share with my understanding father...I just--oddly--don't share any facial features with that side of the family.)

We were invited into the Berkowitzes' home and a strange thing happened. We didn't stop talking for five hours. Straight. The Berkowitzes treated us to dinner at--where else?--a fabulous deli and we then went back to their home to talk for another 3-4 hours. The Berkowitzs are great conversationalists---thoughtful, highly intelligent, and sharply funny. And I don't believe any of us ever felt like strangers.

Among the many delightful things they did was a small, whimsical gesture. They'd spelled my name out in small stones on the potting table in their garden. Later, I thought of my very first action acknowledging my heritage after learning about my mother's birth family. According to Jewish tradition, I'd placed small stones on my great-grandfather's tombstone in a distant city as a symbol of remembrance. And, now, the first truly Jewish family members I'd met had arranged garden stones as a sign of welcome to their faraway relative. A small, full circle on the continuing journey.