A Book of Great Worth (27 page)

All of this was largely academic – relations between the clan of Joseph and that of Abe had never been good, and after the deaths of the two old men, who had barely spoken to each other for years, the members of each camp mostly lost contact with the other. And, within the clan of Joseph itself, brothers and sister, who once had their aged parents as a focal point, also began drifting apart, seeing each other less and less frequently.

“This is a shame,” said my mother, who herself came from a close family, and she invented a family circle to bring us all closer together.

“This will be nothing but toil, and heartache,” my father cautioned, though he did it with a wink to us children, suggesting he wasn’t completely serious. “When it comes to family, best to let sleeping bears lie.”

But my mother persisted, and, for most of the Fifties and into the early Sixties, twice a year she would organize a large gathering of the descendants of Joseph and his good wife, Leah, whom I knew as
bubba
: once in the summer at Uncle Henry’s lakeside cottage in the Catskills, and once in the winter, at the home of one or another of the New York uncles, Izzy or Sam or Henry, or our own apartment in Brooklyn, not far from where my grandparents had lived. These reunions would be attended by all of my father’s siblings, even my uncle Nathan, in from Pennsylvania, and their spouses, children and the few grandchildren who had already appeared. They were pleasant enough, with plenty of good food, drink and talk, but it was generally conceded that, were it not for my mother, they wouldn’t occur and the family, as a family, would likely cease to exist – which is exactly what eventually did happen when my mother died. But long before that, disharmony was sown by the approach to the family circle of our distant cousin Henrietta, whose existence had previously been unknown.

The letter was addressed to my mother and was postmarked in Whitehorse, YT, which, a quick search through the atlas revealed to be the Yukon Territory, in northern Canada. The name on the letter, Henrietta Dumont, was unfamiliar to all of us.

“Yukon,” my father said with interest. He was fond of the novels and stories of Jack London, and could even recite a line or two from the poems of Robert Service.

“My dear cousin Bertie,” the letter began, and at this point my father interrupted, “Cousin? Bertie, you have a cousin Henrietta? In Canada?
I
had a cousin who went to live there, as you know, but
you
? I didn’t know that.”

My mother had already read the letter once, to herself, and now was attempting to read it aloud to us all, at the dinner table, the meal having been completed and my sisters having finished clearing away the dishes and serving the coffee. “Let me read this, Harry,” she said with mild exasperation.

“Who’s stopping you?” my father protested.

My mother cleared her throat. “My dear cousin Bertie, We have never met, indeed you have probably never heard my name or known of my existence...”

“She’s right so far,” my father interrupted.

My mother glared at him over her glasses and went on. “I take the liberty of writing to you, though I am in fact a cousin of your husband...”

“
My
cousin!?”

“...because I understand that it is
you
who take responsibility for maintaining ties within the family.”

Here my father kept silent, listening intently, but nodding his head gravely. The disasters he had seemed to predict hadn’t materialized, but his ambivalent feelings about my mother’s efforts with the family circle had persisted – he appreciated what she did, was grateful, but not entirely in favour.

My mother took the opportunity of my father’s silence to clear her throat. Then she continued reading: “My mother was Glicka Larocque, who was a first cousin of your husband’s, their respective fathers having been brothers. My mother and your husband played together as children. Indeed, she had the warmest regard for your husband.”

Here, I should say, the dynamics of the table shifted, the mood changing palpably. My father leaned forward, his listening obviously growing more intense. My mother, on the other hand, frowned, as if there were an unpleasant taste in her mouth. She paused to take a sip of coffee, then read on.

“This I know not directly from my mother’s lips, as she died in bringing me into this world, and I have had the bitter task of growing up as a motherless child...”

“So it’s true,” my father murmured, aloud but really to himself.

“...but from her hand, as I have acquired, after a long struggle with my brother – the less said about that the better – my mother’s diary. It is from this remarkable volume that I have learned much about my mother’s family and the world from which she sprang,
the world which you, dear Berte, are now the self-ap
pointed guardian of, the world to which I now aspire to belong to.”

“Dangling prepositions,” my sister Judy remarked at this point, setting off a brief argument between her and my sister Esther about the appropriateness of
grammar in a family letter. Esther, the eldest and al
ready in Brooklyn College, leaned towards the informal; Judy, still in her last year at New Utricht High School but the editor of the school newspaper, was a stickler for the rules. I myself was still in the “better seen than heard” stage of my childhood and had no views at all on grammar.

After my mother re-established order, we quickly
learned the facts of our cousin Henrietta’s life. My fa
ther’s cousin Glicka had indeed fallen in love with a Canadian, just as family lore had always said. He was a fur trader, a former trapper, whom she had met during one of his trips to New York. His name was Armand
Larocque, a Canadian mixed-blood of French and In
dian stock, a people known as Metis, and, although that seemed unlikely, he claimed to be Jewish on his mother’s side, believing her to be descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel – my father inexplicably guffawed when he heard that. Glicka had accompanied
this man to a city far to the west and north called Ed
monton, where they established a small but comfortable home. Her husband was often away on business, either further north acquiring furs, or in the south
cultivating markets, and it was during one of these ab
sences that, having already produced two healthy children, Glicka had a delivery with complications that resulted in the birth of Henrietta and her own death. Armand Larocque came home from the north to find himself a widower and the father of three orphans. The infant was named after his own mother, with Glicka as her middle name.

According to Henrietta’s detailed account, which my mother continued to read, Larocque remained in Edmonton less than a year before moving further north, to the frontier community of Labeche, where he would be closer to his suppliers. To deal with the children, he took a new wife, an Eskimo woman he called Rose of Sharon. This woman, Henrietta wrote, was kind and thoughtful, but absent-minded and restless “and no true substitute for a real mother.”

“My poor girl,” my father said, receiving a skeptical glance from my mother in return.

To make matters worse, Henrietta and her brother, Abram, were always at odds – “he blamed me for our mother’s death,” she wrote – and the unpleasantness
between them, along with their father’s frequent ab
sences and their stepmother’s frequent indifference, made for an unhappy childhood. (Oddly, there was no further mention of the third sibling.) To escape the squalid life at Lebeche, Henrietta married young, to a special constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Marcus
Dumont, a fine man who, like her, was partially of na
tive blood. Her life with Dumont proved to be an eventful one, as he was posted to a number of different
northern locales during his brief career, which had recently come to a surprising, tragic end during an en
counter with a polar bear. The details, she wrote, were too painful to go into. At any rate, she now found herself a widow, the mother of two small children, living in respectable but extremely modest means on a small government pension in an isolated outpost. “Besides myself and my children, and a kind gentleman named Dr. Isadore Birkowitz, a dentist who has befriended us, there are no Jews here in Whitehorse,” she wrote. Having recently acquired her mother’s diary, after the previously mentioned legal battle with her brother, she was now filled with longing to establish contact with her
family and the larger world of Jewry. “My children de
serve this,” she wrote, a statement which, in its simple eloquence, touched us all, even me.

There was a long discussion at the table about the events and personalities depicted in the letter. Grammar aside, Judy thought many of the letter’s elements were romantic; Esther tended to be more cynical. It was my father who wondered how Henrietta had learned of the family circle and my mother’s leading role in it, no less our address – none of this, obviously, would have been in her mother’s diary. A thorough rereading of the letter confirmed the absence of any such mention. But all that aside, we all agreed that Henrietta’s letter was gripping and could not be ignored.

Ironically, though, the plight of my father’s cousin
galvanized not my father but my mother. With my fa
ther’s encouragement, she began an immediate correspondence with cousin Henrietta. She prepared a newsletter that repeated the salient points of Henrietta’s story and circulated it among not only the members of the established family circle but tracked down and made contact with that darker side of the family, the descendants of my father’s Uncle Abe, with whom there had been little communication for years. At the next family gathering, which, as it happened, came just a month or two following the arrival of Henrietta’s first letter, places were set for this absent cousin and her children, just as, at the
seders
of many religious Jews, a place is set for the absent prophet Elijah. My mother prepared cards, on which she wrote the names “Henrietta,” “Uglik” and
“Toogl” – the children apparently had been given Es
kimo names – and placed them on the empty plates, as a reminder to all. Most significant of all, she put a bowl next to Henrietta’s empty plate, into which, she made it clear, donations were to be placed. It wasn’t clear what exactly the donations were for, since the distance between New York and Whitehorse seemed enormous, but a travel fund of some sort was mentioned.

My mother, who had only recently emerged from a life dominated by caring for her children to return to
work, having obtained a two-thirds-time secretarial po
sition at a public school nearby, was much caught up in, as my father termed it, “this Canadian cousin business.” I couldn’t recall ever having seen her so energized.

My father, who, as a newspaper reporter, was skeptical, even cynical, by inclination, was, as ever with matters of family, ambivalent. He was enthusiastic about making contact with this new-found cousin, but raised suspicions. “What do we really know about this woman, Bertie?” he asked. And it was true. There did appear to be discrepancies and puzzles in her story, particularly her knowledge of the family circle.

“Perhaps her husband tracked us down,” my sister Judy offered, and it did seem reasonable that her connection to the police world might give her access to otherwise private information, but my father remained skeptical, pointing out that Henrietta’s written chronology left unclear which came first, the acquiring of her mother’s diary or her husband’s untimely death.

“Perhaps the dentist, Dr...?” my mother suggested.

“Birko-something.”

“Maybe he has connections in New York...” Her voice trailed off.

My father shrugged. “Is this yearning for family going to cost money?” he asked.

“
Harry
,” my mother replied crossly. “This is
your
cousin, daughter of your darling Glicka. Remember?”

“She was a good woman, Glicka,” my father conceded, his eyes taking on a faraway cast.

My mother’s crusade – such were its dimensions as it developed – soon became clear: to bring Henrietta and her children to New York, where they could take their rightful places within their immediate and larger families. This would be a monumental task – “This is crazy, Bertie!” my father cried when he first heard it – as the moving expenses would be prohibitive and it was questionable whether Henrietta’s pension, meagre as it was, would be able to follow her to another country.

“Who knows if her children can even speak English,” my father complained, seeking and finding objections. “Probably they speak Eskimo. They eat raw fish.”

My mother laughed with a combination of exasperation and humour. “You spoke no English when you came here,” she sweetly reminded him. “And isn’t pickled herring your favourite
forshpeiz
?”

My father didn’t like to be corrected when he was wrong, especially by my mother, from whom he had higher expectations. He sulked. But he was a reasonable
man, a fair man, and gradually he came around. Al
though labour was his regular beat, he had a nose for a good human interest story, and he wrote an article for
The Day
about this distant cousin – “this adventuress at the furthest outpost of Jewry,” as he described her, dubbing Whitehorse the “north-westernmost neighbourhood of the Lower East Side” – and soon Henrietta was a
cause célèbre
in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
The
New York Times
picked up the story, offering a short item. Letters to the editor in the Yiddish press championed Henrietta’s case, and my father enlisted the services of his brother Henry, the attorney, to look into the legal aspects of her immigration.