I’ve Always Known
In my garden, spring 2023.
It’s strange, but I don’t remember that conversation, that exact moment when my mother tells me our family hero, my great-aunt Dora, financed the family’s journey to America by working in a brothel.
Even after all these years, I can still see my mother spinning around our kitchen, steamy and fragrant from her cooking. With her apron on and a wooden spoon in her hand, tales of my mother’s family accompanied the alchemy, the stirring, the seasoning, and the tasting. Was it after adding that final pinch of salt that my mother told me about Dora? One would think that our first conversation about Dora would be memorable, but alas . . . And because I can’t remember that conversation, I feel like it’s something I’ve always known.
We are a colorful family and we love to share our stories. Family gatherings always included talk of a cigar store, a brothel, selling stolen goods, a back-room bookie operation, and belonging to “the mob.” These weren’t secrets, but the tales that traversed my childhood. As a child, I accepted these stories as true. After all, they were told to me by my family, people I loved and trusted. But as I grew older and the skeptic in me matured, I wanted more. I wanted proof.
Every novice genealogist quickly discovers that many passed down family stories are fiction, tales fabricated to enhance the family pedigree. When most people embellish their ancestry, their lineage miraculously transforms back to ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, or fought as patriots in the American revolution. No one makes up a family story like mine, filled with criminals and a hero that worked in a bordello. Refined through the prism of lineage enhancement, my great-aunt Dora could easily have been remembered not as a prostitute, but as a successful entertainer. Why not? Perhaps through the lenses of love and gratitude, the family chose to remember Dora as she was, complicated, a hero with a dark side.
It’s said that the victors write the history, but in most Jewish families it’s the ones who were lucky enough to survive. Had it not been for Dora, things would have turned out very differently for us. I’m not here to tell our story due to any merit of my own, but because I am descended from one of the lucky ones. By accident of birth, my maternal grandmother’s future became entangled with her sister Dora’s recklessness, determination, and quest for redemption.
