Family Walk-

a multi-channel performace narrative.

A few years ago I decided that I needed to find a Hebrew name for my daughter.  She wasn’t given one at the time she was born nor at that time was I I living a life that was associated with jewish culture.  But by the time she was 6, some of my parenting philosophies had changed along with my marital status and I found that I wanted her to know a little about her side of the family that came from Israel.  

I had always felt more connected to my Ashkenazi heritage, despite not knowing that side of my family,  than my other classic american mix of german, irish, scottish, french and english blood.

Perhaps it was because of my middle name's, Rachel and Rebecca; two quintessential jewish female names. Or perhaps it was because of growing up in a small town in upstate new york where there were no other jewish families.  My family already stood out since we were newcomers to the town and both of my parents were classical musician, but to make it worse,  my father was the kind of israeli man who thought you could try to bargain down the grocery bill with the store clerk.   I always thought that if  I had grown up on the upper west side of Manhattan, I probably wouldn’t feel jewish at all, but in upstate ny, my small amount of jewish blood was amplified and hung over the family name.

The Ashkenazi naming tradition is to name the child after a deceased relative.  This should be someone loved and cherished from your family whom you want to keep the memory alive of by naming the new child after them. It seemed logical that this should be someone from my father’s side, since he was  Ashkenazi , not my mother.  He didn’t have any sisters, so my first thought was to name my daughter after his mother, Haya.  

I met Haya once as a very small child, and truth be told, I didn’t like her.  My brother’s didn’t particularly like her either and to complicate things more, my father never spoke well of her.

But all of this I decided to take with a grain of salt, after all, I was only 3, my brother’s were children as well, and my father may have provoked the problems he had with his mother.  He was a very quarrelsome person and was quick to fight.  

I knew my grandmother’s maiden name was Berman, and I knew that her family had had  a bakery in Israel, with this bit of information, I googled her name to see if I could find out something more about her:, Haya Berman, bakery, israel.  

Much to my surprise the first line that came up was for: The Berman Bakery in Israel.  The website showed a very large bakey; there was a history of the bakery page, which I went to immediately.  There, I read the story of Keshe Berman who came to Israel in the 1870’s from Lithuania.  Her husband was a rabbinical scholar who spent his days studying Torah.  Kreshe decided to take it upon herself to bring in money for the family.   Seeing the British tourists passing by every day, she decided to start baking bread and selling it to the tourists….  I knew this story….I read on: she had  sons, one of whom carried on the bakery making it the largest bakery in the middle east. He had 10 children, and there was a photo of him with his 10 children, and there was my grandmother Haya.  

This was rather exciting.  I didn’t have any pictures of my grandmother and although I had grown up hearing stories about her family, I never knew anyones names, I didn’t know the bakery still existed and that it was so large. In fact, I had never thought that I would get to know anything about that side of the family.  Although my parents were married 17 years and had 5 children, by the time I came around, the last one, my father had cut his connections altogether with his family in Israel and after my parents divorced we only heard from him a few times.  In fact it had been 31 years since I had seen him. I felt a wave of emotion as I looked at my grandmother’s picture and scanned the faces of these great aunts and uncles for family resemblances. Looking at the picture of her as a young girl, I started to think maybe I could name my daughter after her.  I continued to read about the Berman family and the bakery-which was rather notable.  They built the first grain mill in Israel, and were the first to have a store outside of the old town.  Most exciting was the fact that this large bakery had been started by my great, great, grandmother.  Perhaps she was the one i should name my daughter after.  

After getting my fill at the Berman Bakery website, I went back to google to see what other hits I got.

The second line was for geni.com- a family tree website.  Entering into that site, I found a complete family tree of my grandmother’s family.  There it listed all of her 9 siblings, their spouses, their children and the family line back to my great, great, grandmother Kreshe.  I was overwhelmed- I felt like I had found a long lost family- these were my blood relatives- and there were so many.  After exploring all of these new found relatives and examining the female names for possible candidates, I returned to my grandmother's page.  Listed as her relatives where her husband, Ernst Davis, and son, Yoav Davis.  

Now I had to assume that Yoav was my father since I knew Haya and Ernst were my grandparents and they didn’t have any other children.  However, I had never heard that my father’s name was Yoav.  What I knew was that he had been born Arthur Davis,- that is what is listed on my birth certificate and then in the 70’s he wanted a more jewish sounding name so he created the name Maximillian Mendel.  We all became Mendel- although it was never legal.

After some years, the school system realized that we were not legally Mendel and made us go back to being Davis but my father kept the name Maximillian Mendel. And from then on was known as Arthur Davis aka Maximillian Mendel.  

Of course I was curious to see what information was listed for my father although,  I was pretty sure I already knew it.  I assumed he was living somewhere in the city or brooklyn since the last we heard was that he was in an orthodox neighborhood in brooklyn.  I planned to look him up one days…...but time flies….and now it had been 31 years.   Unfortunately, both his profile and my grandfather's profiles were private, preventing me from reading their information.

Determined to see what was behind those hidden profiles, I contacted the manager for the site.  I explained who I was ( daughter of Yoav) and although my father had been estranged from the family for many years, I would like to add my family and siblings to the tree. Within a day, I received an email back welcoming me to the family! Shirley Saban was the profile manager and perhaps a cousin as well.  She explain that they always knew Yoav had had children but we were the missing Davis tribe. She promised to add me to the tree, which would then allow me to add my family and also see the profiles of my father and grandfather.

The morning I received the message that I was added to the tree, I was sitting by myself, the first up at 6 am. I eagerly clicked on my father’s profile- nothing there.  It didn’t say anything about his whereabouts or really anything at all.  Quickly losing interest, I decided to look at my grandfather’s profile, although I didn’t expect much.  On the first page, it listed him and his relatives, Haya Berman, Yoav Davis but not even his birthday or death date. I noticed a tab for Discussion, I clicked it and at the bottom of the page it was written:

Ernst and Haya Davis lived and died in Koln germany.  They had one son, Yoav who was born in jerusalem and died in the Dominican Republic.

A slight pain shot through my stomach, followed by  nausea.  I read it again- died in the Dominican Republic. How was this possible? I calculated  his age, he would have been 81, why would he be dead?  that’s too young to die. Why was he in the Dominican Republic? Without having any answers, I accepted his death- throughout the day I cried, I mourned.  I mourned the loss of an idea of a father, the loss of the fantasy that I would one day see what he looked like. I had a secret hope that my husband knew my desire to have a picture of my father and would one day arrange to hire a private investigator to find him and take his picture.  Without real reason, I mourned but it only lasted a day.

In the following days, I received more emails from Shirley and then from 2 other cousins, Ella and Shlomit.. they were all very excited to hear from the lost Davis tribe but at the same time,  I felt like they were checking my credentials- to see if I really was  who I said I was- I assumed this had to do with general internet precautions..  Our conversations were polite and inquisitive.   We asked about each other’s professions and families and they shared with me the knowledge they had about my grandparents. Haya was considered stern, Ernst was a soft spoken gentleman from Germany.   

After some time exchanging emails, I finally got the message why they were testing me to make sure I was indeed a child of Yoav’s.  There was an inheritance- a small amount I was told, probably lots of trouble but lets say 100k.  I was encouraged to speak to another cousin, Isaac and he would explain everything.  We should stake the claim, not for the money, but because this was our inheritance.  

I was pretty nervous about calling Isaac, how do I start this conversation...hello, I am the daughter of Yoav, I hear that you can help me claim an inheritance…? I fretted for days. I called my Israeli friend and asked him to coach me: how do you talk to old israeli men? What if Isaac was orthodox, and what can I do so I don’t sound like a gold digger? the truth was, I wasn’t very interested in the inheritance, I wanted to connect with these relatives and I hoped to find out more about this family, including Haya.

I put off calling him until eventually, he contacted me. I received an email from him a week into my fretting saying that he was a cousin of my father’s and he would like to speak to me on the phone because writing in english was very difficult for him.  We exchanged some emails and settled on a time that he would call me.

The 5 minutes before the call, my heart was beating heavily, as, the realization hit me that in speaking to this person about an inheritance  I was also receiving a confirmation that my father was dead. The advice i had been given by my Israeli friend was don’t ask questions, just listen, don't push.  

Isaac called at exactly 9 am as scheduled.  He had a nice voice, soft spoken and a sweet israeli accent quite unlike my father’s.  Max’s voice ached with a whining accent.  Of course, i don’t really remember him speaking, but he did make a record that accompanied his book The Revolutionary Piano Method of Maximillian Mendel  and as children my brothers and  I would have a lot of fun playing the record at various speeds, laughing hysterically as we changed the pitch of his voice from very slow and low to extremely high and fast.  Perhaps my memory is slightly tainted by those experiences, maybe his voice wasn’t that bad.

We talked for a long time before the inheritance came up.  I asked him about his memories of my father and his parents growing up in Israel. He was much younger than Max so he barely remembered him- my father left Israel in 1948- but he remembered my grandparents. Haya was the prettiest of the girls and a pianist. But other than that, he didn’t know more.  Ernst had become a lawyer while in jail.  He was jailed by the British for his Zionist activities.   After getting out of jail he became the lawyer for the bakery but eventually went back to germany to represent victims of the Holocaust.

Isaac explained what the inheritance was- his grandparents house ( also my father’s grandparents house) had been sold and split between the heirs of the 10 children.  Since my grandmother had passed away, and my father was dead, the share of the Davis inheritance was being help by the state waiting for us.

Isaac had tried to contact my father in the dominican republic but Max refused to speak to him.  But he explained the rather amusing procedure that one had to go through to get in contact with him: The procedure was to call a grocery store, and the owner of the store would go next door to get Max. If Max wanted to speak to you, he would go to the store, if not he would tell the grocery store owner he wasn’t there.   Isaac knew that max had a lawyer in Israel and it was from him that he received the telephone number and was explained the grocery store procedure.

He also shared with my a story of a man in Israel who went to the dominican republic during the high holidays.  This man went into a synagogue on Yom Kippur and there he met my father who introduced himself as an Israeli from the Berman family.  Upon telling the story, we realized that we were on the eve of Yom Kippur, in a few hours, the sun would set and the holiday would start.

Immediately after finishing the phone call I received another call, -  from another Isaac. This Isaac, known in the family as izzy, was my father’s age, they grew up together in Israel,  and seemed to be the only person my father had kept up contact with.

  His voice was different, very low and gruff with an accent that was reminiscent of what I remember to be my father’s accent.  Speaking to him, I realized that my voice was changing, perhaps I started to sound more jewish- I made certain to talk about my role in the jewish community- my brothers went to yeshiva, my daughter goes to hebrew school. He had been in contact with Max during the years that my parents were married, so I didn’t know if he knew that my mother wasn’t jewish. I avoided the topic- how can I explain the fact that our mother wasn’t jewish but yet we had lived a completely jewish life at one point.  Or why I was a sending my child to jewish sunday school.  My mother never converted, she simply said- I'm jewish.  It was the only way my brothers could get into yeshiva. She was interrogated by the rabbi about her family history and names. She tried not to lie but averted the truth. She never felt that the Rabbi believed her but she stuck to her story and acted like a jewish housewife.  It was too complicated to explain all of this and further more I didn’t really want to have to defend my jewish identity.  

My conversation with the first Isaac left me with many questions and few answers.  He didn’t remember the name of the person who saw Max in the DR. He didn’t remember the name of his lawyer.  He didn’t remember how long ago he heard that he died. He didn’t remember where max was living.  I hoped that i could get some more answers from this Isaac.

Izzy and I talked for an hour or more.  . He told me about growing up in israel with my father and going to the family shabbat dinners together. He painted a rather lovely scene of these family gatherings and gave me the impression that they had been close. they stayed in touch over the years up until his last days in the dominican republic.  He described my father as spending his days playing the piano and not particularly happy.  He also described the method of calling the grocery store next door to ask for Max, and then one day they told him he had died.  How long ago was this, I asked, 3, 4, 5 years ago?  Izzy’s voice softened, “oh no dear” he said, “this was 20 years ago”.  

After a few days of absorbing the new information I had received, I decided that i wanted to know where he was buried, and how he died.  My first contact was with a Lubavitcher rabbi in the dominican republic.  Actually, he was the only Rabbi in the Dominican Republic, Rabbi Shimon.  He thought that he had heard of my father, he at least knew that he had been a musician so he promised to go to the jewish cemetery and look at the gravestones to see if he could find him.  There were no records of the graves, he said.  incidentally, when rabbi Shimon wanted to get started on a kosher bakery in the Dominican republic, he brought back from Israel pastry from the Berman Bakery to show the people.

Izzy also contacted Rabbi Shimon, and to Izzy he revealed that actually he thought my father was buried in a mixed cemetery- for jews and non-jews.  Rabbi Shimon didn’t want me to know this but Izzy told me, since I was mishpucka.

i continued to explore the jewish connected but to no avail, too much time had passed. Since my father had become a German citizen after he left Israel,  I  contact the german embassy  in the Dominican Republic but they said they didn’t have any records from that far back. I was at a dead end and considered getting on a plane and going to down there- it seems to be the only way I would get anywhere.  

However, life intervened and I discovered that I was going to be expecting another girl-

I couldn’t help but feel that this was all connected in some way- discovering that my father was dead, connecting with all of the new family, all happening at the new year and from this came another child.  

My husband and I met with our rabbi to talk about hebrew names for the expected one.  I rambled the story of how I had found out that my father was dead and I met these new relatives and all of this happened at Rosh Hashana so i wanted to find a name that summed all of that up.  I still hadn’t settled on a Hebrew name for my older daughter.

Plans to go to the Dominican Republic were on hold while I was pregnant.  During that time, I scanned thousands of death certificates from the DR.  Amazingly, they are all online.  However, without  knowing the region, or year, the task was unrealistic.

After almost 2 years of dead ends, I decided to go visit Izzy. Maybe being there could help trigger his memory.

Sure enough the first night there he found the phone number that he used to contact max in the dominican republic.

Izzy’ wife, Gloria, spoke spanish so she called the number. Not surprisingly, it was no longer a grocery store but seemed to be someone’s cell number. That person didn’t know anything about it.  The next step was to google the number to see what region in the dominican republic it was assigned to and then call some business in that area.  gloria’s daughter took the initiative to follow through with this plan- the first business she called was a restaurant in the small town of Cambita Garabito- the owner of the restaurant answered- christina asked if by any chance she knew a maximillian mendel who had lived there some 20 years ago- and he answer yes!

The restaurant owner, Harold Mossle, never met my father but this was the 2nd time in his life that he had been approached by a stranger asking about him.  15 years ago, he said, he was asked by a lawyer to go to the german embassy on the behalf of the so called widow of Maximilian Mendel.  Harold was German.  The widow- who Harold said was never married to my father, was trying to get german citizenship for her 2 daughters and to be declared his legal heir to claim his funds in Germany.  He obliged the request but said the German embassy believed that the papers with my father’s signature, stating he was the legal father of these 2 girls was forged. The woman, he thought, was just after money.

Harold joined my side in this quest without me even asking him, he asked around the town if anyone knew where he was buried. At first, the news was that he was buried in a large cemetery in Santo Domingo, then it was that he was in the local cemetery in Cambita Garabito.   I asked if he knew what Max died of, he had heard that it was drink.  The impression he had, from the lawyer who had contacted him, was that he had been very poor and had died in a terrible state.  He had invested a lot of money in South Africa and lost it all.

Years ago- in a google search for my father, I did see his name listed under property without wills but I couldn’t image that he had anything to do with that.

Rosh Hashanah was coming, and I felt confident that with the new year, I would finally get some answers.  Sure enough, the day before Rosh Hashanah, Harold contacted me that he met someone in the German Embassy who remember the case of Maximillian Mendel. They needed to see proof of my kinship before revealing anything to me, which is always a complicated matter.  I put together my documents, showing Arthur J Davis on my birth certificate and since I was born Kyra Davis, my official name change documents to Kyra Garrigue and since he may have died as Maximillian Mendel, the only evidence I had that this was the same person were some court documents from my parents divorce listed the defendant as Arthur Davis aka Maximillian Mendel.  

A day later, I received the news...Maximilian Mendel died december 25, 1997 in Las Palmas, Canary Island, Spain.

The entire story shifted.

-to be continued......