“Just one photo of him holding me - then I can stop.” “I don’t really know, maybe a photo,” I said and choked up, realizing just how badly I wanted exactly that. “What more are you hoping to find?” Ruth asked me. Still, I wasn’t satisfied and couldn’t explain why to anyone, not even my sister. I discovered more about my parents than most adult children ever find out. How incongruous to feel gratitude for all these things, and yet I did, as gaps in my family’s timeline were filled in.
Then, although I knew reading it would be painful, I spent a year fighting for the right to see the police report detailing the lurid details of his final moments. My next step was to track down and interview elderly friends and family who recalled a noble and friendly man who loved to sing American country songs from his mother’s Jerusalem balcony. In the letters my parents wrote to each other, the struggles of their tumultuous marriage were laid bare. They painted a portrait of a sensitive man who was always pushing himself to get ahead. I read through the hundreds of letters to and from him that my mother had saved in a cardboard box. Now I became the obsessed daughter, looking for him everywhere. But the man I heard, so intimate and close - this was my father! Hearing him speak and laugh startled my soul out of a deep slumber, and it was both scary and revitalizing. I had seen photos of my father and heard a few stories, but none of them brought him nearer to me. In my office, I cried alone, first in anger at him for leaving us, and then out of a long-quashed longing. I made an excuse of getting back to work and hung up. Realizing I wasn’t ready to talk, she filled in the silence with her reactions of joy and awe. I didn’t want to break down in front of them. Ruth and the sound engineer were staring at me over the Skype screen, waiting for my reaction. I had gone my entire life without realizing that I didn’t know. Until that moment, I hadn’t known what my father sounded like. Hearing his voice, my indifference evaporated. My father’s laugh was high and spirited, but his speaking voice was lower - a mellifluous, accented baritone. We heard him laugh in delight and then there was a wet, mouth-on-skin, vibrating sound, as if he was giving her a tummy raspberry, followed by an explosion of giggles. The voices were so clear it was as if they were in the room with me. Ruth was 3 years old, and she and our father were looking at photos together.
I closed my office door, and Ruth played for me a reel that had been recorded in 1963. “You have to listen to this now,” she said. She was in a room with the sound engineer. One day Ruth called me on Skype while I was at work. The reels were mostly of him playing piano and singing in a variety of languages. As she listened, she sent me regular updates via WhatsApp. I was curious but also worried that Ruth would be disappointed by their contents. Three years ago, Ruth found a sound engineer to digitize the 25 audio reels of our father. There was no space for my loss, and so I assumed that it did not exist. She never had to worry about reciprocating I had no similar longing of my own. Even after we were grown and living in different countries, she would call whenever her feelings of loss bubbled up, and I would listen and console her. I took on the role of my sister’s comforter from an early age. “Some other time,” she would say, or “When you’re older.”Ĭrushed, Ruth came to me, crying. Our mother refused to talk, always countering my teenage sister’s questions with tears and deferral. Ruth was tormented by her inability to remember our father and obsessed with wanting to know more about him. Yet there remained a feeling of otherness that bound Ruth and me. Our mother had wiped the slate as clean as she could, intent on overwriting our previous life with new memories. Two more children were born and our new family of six coalesced and looked toward the future.
“Real” adoptees, we ignorantly assumed, were children who had been placed with other families because of desperate circumstances. Growing up, we never registered this as significant. Our stepfather adopted Ruth and me, resulting in the legal erasure of our last names. But that’s where their similarities ended.
Two years after our father’s suicide, our mother married another struggling artist - this time a poet. “He’s more your father than mine,” I said to her as explanation for not keeping any of it. I didn’t think again about the photo of the young man. Don’t you see it?”Īfter returning to Toronto with my father’s belongings, I shipped them all to Ruth, who was by then living in another country. My father had died by suicide when I was three months old and, unlike my older sister Ruth, I felt little connection to him. “I guess he looks a bit like me,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.
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