When I got home, I sat cross-legged on my bed and called Mom.
“Noah’s grandma says the woman who raised O’ma called her once a week forthe rest of her life,” I told her without preamble. “Is that true? Have you ever heard of her?”
“I don’t think so.” Mom sounded startled.
“Seriously? How can you not have known?”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“I’m not yelling at you! I’m just surprised.”
Mom was silent a minute. “I remember she used to get these phone calls when I was a little kid from some woman named Eva, who I’d never met, and whenever she called, your aunts and I knew to get O’ma. But we didn’t think about it too deeply.”
“You didn’t ask?”
Mom made atsking noise. “And what do you ever ask me?”
“I don’t know! Do you have any secrets about surrogate mothers you haven’t told me?”
Mom laughed. “I don’t think so. Doyouhave any secrets?”
I hesitated, then decided to throw her a bone. “Don’t freak out. But Noah and I are dating. It’s not a big deal.”
Mom freaked out.
And I didn’t hate it.
Twenty-Four
From: The New York Jewish Archives
To: Abigail Schoenberg
Hi Abby,
Thanks for your interest in our archives! While our records aren’t searchable, we do have an intern currently working on a digitalization project, and she’ll be scanning and digitizing the 1938–39 records from the Holtzman House soon—we can have her send you a link when it’s all online.
Noah and I spent the next week all over Nantucket.
We walked across the moors as storms threatened, the heavy air carrying the particular fresh scent preceding summer rain. Dramatic lighting scored the sky: dark, striking clouds, and white light on the horizon. We walked through Nantucket’s protected forests, where golden rays filtered through tall trees and swept across the oceans of ferns blanketing the forest floors. We went out in his boat and, out of sight of everyone, he pulled me into his lap, and we kissed and kissed until we fell flat on the boat’s floor, laughing.
I could say things to Noah I couldn’t say to anyone else, inane, incomplete things. I plucked unfinished thoughts straight from my head and gave them to him. We stood at the edge of the water andtalked about the vastness of sky and sea, of feeling infinite and small. We played keep-away with the waves, dashing as close to the water as possible, then back before the inward tide could touch our feet.
It felt like the island belonged to us.
On rainy evenings, we curled up in Mrs. Henderson’s living room with Ellie Mae at our feet. Noah browsed through Harvard’s biological-diversity-related classes and looked up their professors. I combed through German censuses, searching for my great-grandparents’ names. I checked my email intermittently, in case the records had arrived from the Holtzman House.
Interns! Who knew!
“Have you talked to your dad again?” I asked one day. Humidity hung in the air and painted a sheen of sweat across our faces, even though today wasn’t intolerably hot. I was scrolling idly through yet another census, and had found I could hold a conversation while scanning for O’ma’s parents.
“I mentioned one of the classes I’m thinking of taking. He grunted instead of saying anything, which I’m taking as a win. I figure if I plant the seed and keep mentioning it as a possibility, at least it won’t come as a surprise.”
“Do you feel better having mentioned it?” I opened another town’s census: Lübeck, Germany, from 1912. Germany had done minority censuses in 1938 and 1939 to help them locate Jews; I’d looked at the 1938 census before, but to no avail, which had made me think my great-grandparents might have headed for Luxembourg by then (perhaps immediately after putting O’ma on the train to Paris). 1912 seemed a littletooearly, but it was accessible, so here we were. Like most of the other documents, it was a PDF and not searchable, so I scrolled endlessly with an eye out for Goldmans.
“Yeah, a little.”
Herman Goldman.
