Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

ACCEPT scrambled and found a smaller, less centrally located venue for the lecture at the National University of Theater Arts and Cinematography. After I spoke there, the question-and-answer session lasted nearly an hour. Many of the questions pertained to my family life: what it was like to have a husband and children; how it felt to find acceptance from my father and in a wider social context, a situation as unimaginable to them as my life of relative affluence would have been to my great-grandparents. Several attendees said that they dreamed of emigrating someplace where they could find such acceptance. Too many described severe depression as a result of social oppression, and several alluded to the change of venue for my lecture as an example of such persecution. While it was hardly comparable to a pogrom, the incident helped me imagine what it might have been like for my family to belong to a group that their countrymen found repugnant.

The next day, Leslie and I drove seven hours to a horse farm in the northern Moldavian highlands, where we stayed overnight, eating rustic food and drinking homemade blackberry brandy. In the morning, we picked up one of the few remaining Jews in the region, who runs a sideline in genealogy, and proceeded to Dorohoi. It was haunting to look at the gently rolling landscape on our approach and think of my grandfather and his grandfather seeing those same hills. Life seemed to have changed little in the elapsed century. Farmers in oxcarts were going about their labor, and women in head scarves were hoeing the fields by hand. Their faces had the cracked skin that comes from brutal summers and winters in close succession. We followed a long dirt road up to Dorohoi’s Jewish cemetery, locked behind a tall metal fence. A man who lived nearby had the key, and for about $5 each he let us in, explaining enthusiastically, “I am not Jewish, but I like Jews.”

The cemetery had been profoundly neglected—like virtually everything else near Dorohoi. A lowing cow wandered among tombstones swathed in nettles. Leslie spotted the first Solomon grave. Soon we found more—many those of people born after my grandfather had emigrated. It’s impossible to know whether these belonged to my relatives, but the Jewish community was never enormous (the county has about forty-five hundred Jewish graves), so it seemed plausible that these namesakes were my relatives. I put pebbles on some of the graves, following the Jewish tradition of placing a stone instead of laying flowers. I thought about these people who could have left but didn’t. We went into the funeral chapel, which was just a small barn with a Star of David on it, where we saw an old horse-drawn hearse.

One of the graves had an inscription memorializing the Solomons who had died “at the hands of Hitler”; many of those dead had first names familiar from my own extended family. A memorial at the center of the burial ground commemorates the five thousand Jews who were taken from the area, never to return. I heard Aunt Rose saying, “We were lucky to get out of there.” I had hoped she might not be entirely right: that this wellspring of my family would be at least picturesque, that I’d have a surprising sense of identification with the place. I didn’t know how despondent it would make me to imagine being trapped in what still looked like a reduced life, with none of the intellectual excitement of Bucharest anywhere apparent. I’ve reported from war zones and deprived societies for decades, but they have always seemed profoundly other, and this felt shockingly accessible. I could have been born here and lived and died like this.

As we left, we passed five sour-cherry trees, tall at the edge of the cemetery, and we rushed over to pick their ripe fruit. The dark red juice stained my hands, and I wondered who in my family might have stood beneath these trees and relished the same taste, so sharp and so sweet. I thought of how my own children would have scarfed down those cherries if they had been with me. I suddenly understood that my forebears had been children, too, in their day—that this place had been visited not only by the old men with beards whom I’d pictured as my ancestors, but also by boys and girls who would have climbed the trees to reap the plenty of their upper branches.