From This Day Forward (33 page)

I was very fortunate, because I knew my grandfather well, he lived only three blocks away, and his storytelling provided me with a rich oral heritage about his hometown of Bialystok, which is now in eastern Poland. My family name was Rogowsky, the “sky” was dropped at Ellis Island, and my birth certificate says Rogow, not Roberts. My father changed our name when I was two, but my grandparents and all my cousins on that side were Rogow and still are.

Living in Europe had brought me closer to my heritage, and after the fall of the Berlin wall, we planned a trip to Eastern Europe, starting in Vienna, where our niece was living. I badly wanted to see Bialystok and Cokie agreed, but I had no idea how to start. So I literally looked up Bialystok in the New York City phone book, and found an old-age home on the Lower East Side with that name. I called the number, described what I wanted to do, and asked if anybody there knew the town. I was in luck, the director of the home hailed from Bialystok, and after we talked awhile he told me to write to his friend Anatole who lives in Warsaw and studies the Jewish history of eastern Poland. I wrote to him and heard nothing back, but I had his phone number, so when we got to Warsaw, I called. Anatole said, well, I'm getting old, it's a long trip, but when I heard your family name I decided I had to help because Artur and Shmuel Rogowsky were two of my father's best friends when I was growing up and they must
be your great-uncles. It turns out they're not my uncles. But Anatole agreed to guide us, we hired a car and driver, and we set out the next day for Bialystok, about two and a half hours due east of Warsaw. On the way we stopped at Anatole's home village, and while we're walking around he talked about how fondly he remembered Artur Rogowsky singing the prayers on Friday night in a beautiful voice.

 

CR: I said that settles it, he can't be a relative of yours, nobody in your family can sing a note.

 

SR: So much for sentiment. Anyway, we were standing in the main square when I said, I've always heard my family name comes from a village around here. And Anatole answered, I know the place, but I need directions. I was stunned. I'd come wanting to find some sign—a birth record, a gravestone—that my family had been there.

 

CR: We both thought our best bet was a graveyard.

 

SR: So we drove down this dusty country road in rural Poland…

 

CR:…it could have been the nineteenth century, there were oxen pulling carts…

 

SR:…and we came to a roadside sign that reads
ROGOWO
. There was my name!

 

CR: It was a sign all right.

 

SR: I said I was looking for a sign. I didn't bargain for a real road sign! There were, of course, no Jews left in the village; still, we took a lot of pictures under the sign. Then we went on to Bialystok, which turned out to be thoroughly depressing. The town is one monument to devastation after another.
On that corner, a synagogue was set on fire, killing five thousand Jews. In this field, the Nazis slaughtered six thousand Jews. We went to the graveyard, but most of it was overgrown, except for a small plot that Anatole tended himself. There was an obelisk on the plot, a memorial to about seventy-five Jews killed in a pogrom in 1906. My grandfather would have been about sixteen in 1906 and I realized that this was probably the pogrom that had helped drive him out of Bialystok. I approached the obelisk, where the names were written in Hebrew or Yiddish. When Anatole slowly started reading the names, I realized that, in effect, we were saying “Kaddish,” the Jewish prayer for the dead, and I remembered enough from my Hebrew-school training to point to each name as Anatole read it.

 

CR: You could actually read a good many of them once you started.

 

SR: I could follow it. When he said “Katz,” I knew which one was Katz. I'm sure some of them knew my family, my grandfather. His name could have easily been on that obelisk. Then I said to Anatole, you know the one place I always remember my grandfather talking about was the railroad station. My great-grandfather was a cloth merchant and Grandpa Abe would always go down to the railroad station and pick up packages for him. It was from that railroad station that he left for Palestine. Anatole's face lit up; you're in luck, he said, because the railroad station is still the way it was a hundred years ago. It's practically the only building left in Bialystok your grandfather might have seen. We went to the station, I walked out onto the platform, and then I knew I was standing in his footsteps. I could almost feel his presence. I said to myself, “Pop, we survived, and I've come back to prove it.” Then I broke down and sobbed for twenty minutes, totally without warning.

It was a moment of profound meaning. It connected me
to my whole past. I wrote about it for
U.S. News
and was flooded with letters from people saying, “How can I do what you did? How can I get in touch with my ancestry?” Many wanted to share the stories of their own families and one of them wrote, this is where my family's from, this is what the name was, maybe it has some meaning for you. I realized that that's what all those letters were about; people were searching for meaning, for connection, for some sign of their own that their families had been a part of history.

 

CR: There is a coda to the story. Steve's grandmother was from a small village outside of Bialystok called Eishishok and we had heard the story many times about how his grandfather and grandmother had met—how he fell in love with a picture of her in a photographer's window. But we couldn't find Eishishok. It wasn't on any map. We knew it couldn't be too far from Bialystok, they didn't have cars, but no one we asked knew what we were talking about. There was a town with a similar name, and when we got home we said to Steve's dad, “We couldn't find Eishishok anywhere; it simply doesn't exist. Is it maybe this other town?” He said, “No, no, no, I don't have this wrong, it is Eishishok.” We let that pass. Then Steve's sister and I went one day to the Holocaust Museum and lining the central tower of the museum are photographs from the town of Eishishok. We couldn't find it because it no longer exists. It was completely wiped out.

 

SR: Also, it was in Lithuania and it had a different name in Lithuanian.

 

CR: I grabbed Laura and whispered, “This is your grandmother's town! We couldn't find it but here it is!” They were studio portraits of ordinary life, weddings and birthdays and anniversaries, pictures that would have hung in photographers' windows. They were taken perhaps fifteen or twenty
years after Steve's grandmother had left the town, but of course there had to be relatives in those pictures.

 

SR: I got a phone call after my article appeared from a cousin of mine who was sobbing: “I read your article and I'm so grateful. We have all of these scrapbooks and mementos of my husband's family, but I never had anything about our family to show our children. And now I do.” And I said, “Pam, that's why I went, I went for all of us.”

 

CR: We were particularly pleased to be able to come home and tell Steve's dad about our trip; after all, it was his father whose story we were trying to trace.

 

SR: I always had a wonderful relationship with my father. Early in his professional life he had written and published children's books, so he was a man of words. His younger brother, for whom our son, Lee, is named, had also been a writer, and after my uncle was killed in a plane crash, I felt strongly that I was carrying on a family tradition by becoming a journalist. Dad was always my best editor and biggest supporter, and the day my first professional article was published in
The Nation
magazine—I was eighteen at the time—he drove me into New York and we scoured every newsstand in lower Manhattan looking for a copy. When we finally found one, with my name on the cover, I think he was more excited than I was. In later years, when I started appearing on television, I would call home every time I was on, and I still do. Since Cokie had lost her father so young, I knew how blessed I was and tried not to take that blessing for granted. I would look around at my friends and realize that I was one of the very few people at my age to have both parents alive and healthy, and we made a big effort to see them every chance we could. When Dad turned eighty in December of 1996, we had a party for him at our house.

 

CR: It was a great party. He loved it.

 

SR: Some of the most touching speeches were made by his children-in-law, who talked about what a loving figure he had been in their lives. We tried to think of something special to mark his birthday, something more permanent than a set of golf clubs, and we decided to honor his lifelong interest in books and libraries. Right near my parents' winter home in Palm City, Florida, was a branch of the county library that they would visit several times a week.

 

CR: They were still in the library habit. They had been active supporters of public libraries.

 

SR: We decided to raise some money within the family and name the children's reading room at this local library in honor of my parents, but we were having trouble finding a date when everybody could come to a dedication ceremony. I didn't have a premonition, but I did say to my sister, who was doing most of the planning, “Let's not wait.” So we picked a date that worked for most of us, and about a hundred people came, including some of my parents' oldest friends. Dad was deeply touched. My mother even joked that it was a pleasure to unveil a plaque honoring people who were still alive. A few weeks later they came to Passover on their way back to New Jersey for the summer and in early May I called my parents late one afternoon…

 

CR: To say you were going to be on TV.

 

SR: Actually, to say I wasn't going to be on TV, as I had expected to be. I reached my mother, and before I could speak she said in a rush, “Steven, I have something to tell you, your father has had a stroke.” He had had a stroke the night before but she hadn't called me.

 

CR: Any of us. She hadn't called any of us.

 

SR: If you didn't call, it wasn't serious, it wasn't real.

 

CR: He was in intensive care but the doctors led us to believe that he wasn't in a life-threatening situation.

 

SR: I consulted with my siblings and we agreed that Mom would need help over a period of time.

 

CR: Everyone would take turns visiting her.

 

SR: It so happened Cokie and I were free the next day, so we took the first shift.

 

CR: We walked in the hospital and I tried to prepare Steven for a terrible shock because I'd spent a good deal of time with people in intensive care units. I thought, we're going to get in there and Steve's going to be undone by this. His father's not going to be communicating, there are going to be wires and monitors everywhere, he's not going to look like himself, and it's going to be so unsettling and disorienting and sad. But when we walked in the room, we found his father joking and talking, asking about the stock market and the ball scores. Totally 100 percent with it. His speech was slurred but that was about it.

 

SR: Also, he was having trouble swallowing. Throughout the day he actually seemed to be recovering, and it was heartening for everybody. Late in the afternoon I went to a pay phone down the hall from his room and got my messages, and one was from the president of George Washington University, calling to follow up on conversations we had been having about my taking a full-time faculty chair. When I returned the call he said that everything was set, my appointment
would be approved the next day. I went back to Dad's room and relayed the news and he was very pleased and excited. It turned out to be the last thing I ever told him.

 

CR: He had been talking nonstop and he needed some rest, so we took Steve's mother out to dinner, leaving instructions for the nurse: “We're only two minutes away, call us if there's any reason at all.” At three o'clock in the morning the phone rang. Nobody heard it at first. Finally, I shook Steven awake: “The phone's ringing.” I think his mother didn't want to hear it, because it couldn't be good.

 

SR: I raced into the kitchen and picked up the phone and it was the intensive care nurse saying, “Your father has coded.” I didn't know immediately what that meant…

 

CR:…he had had another stroke…

 

SR:…it meant that the code had gone out for emergency personnel. She wanted to know whether he had a living will and I said, “Is he still alive?” She said, “Yes, but it doesn't look good.” And then her voice caught: “Oh dear, they've just come out of his room. He's gone.”

 

CR: It was very sudden, almost like a traffic accident. From Monday morning till Tuesday night…

 

SR: He was still so vigorous that he was planning to captain his boat in a race on Wednesday.

 

CR: In fact, his crew called on Wednesday morning to ask what time to pick him up.

 

SR: I had to turn to my mother and tell her that my father was dead. I just thank God we were there. Cokie was holding
Mom. I can't imagine her getting that phone call all alone. Then I had to call my siblings. I felt very bad that by the luck of the draw, I had had that last day with Dad and they had not.

 

CR: And they did, too.

 

SR: It was very unfair. I have memories they don't have. We were allowed to go to the hospital and see him for the last time that morning. I'm still haunted by the sight of him.

 

CR: Well, it's such a strong visual image. For a long time after Barbara died, I couldn't remember her alive. I could only see her dead. My sister died at home and it took a while for the funeral home to arrive to collect her. I thought she looked lonely all by herself in the bed while everyone else was rushing around making preparations, so I got in bed and sang to her. It's almost impossible to erase that image. Steve's parents had been married fifty-seven years. His mother had to somehow find the strength to tell her husband good-bye. When she did, the nurse in the intensive care unit who must have seen this countless times broke down in tears herself. She was a kind, sensitive soul.