In on a little secret or two-

The secret of the Unknown Uncle Nathan  

          When my Bahby died in 1978, the story of Uncle Nathan, the communist and the vegetarian died too. And with the death of my mother, just 15 years ago, just, no more can ever be known about him.

          All I knew as a little girl was that mom loved this uncle Nathan and Bahby, my grandmother didn’t. Why was his story always shrouded in secrecy and mystery making me so eager to find out about it?

          Uncle Nathan was mom’s father Joseph’s brother. Both had come around 1910 to Ellis Island, USA, with nothing, in steerage class. Joseph Hyman, for whom I am named, came from Austria to the US as a button hole maker; he was tall dark and handsome I can tell from a few pictures. No one seems to know how my Bahby met him and found romance. I have a studio photo of the three. My mother who was beautiful looked like him.

          Nathan came too, I assume at the same time, and was a worker in leather. That’s all I found about him. Not a single word more. Where did he live? Who were his friends?

          Joseph and my Bahby Esther married and together opened a candy store on 125 and 2^nd avenue, in Harlem, in 1924. There they lived and there my mom, Florence, to be an only child, was born.  My mother always told us how much she was loved.  But, “the beloved husband and dear father, Joseph Fierberg” died on Feb. 19, 1927 at age 38 from TB. My mom was only 7. The candy store failed. By the way, my Bahby had two other husbands over the years. What a gal! Bahby and mom in typical poor immigrant fashion went from family to family getting help from those Bahby helped bring to the US, and from apartment to apartment, avoiding weekly rent payments. Eventually they settled on the lower east side.

          Uncle Nathan was a “border” someplace. It seemed he never married and had no other family than his brother’s. When he died, and I do not know where or why or what year, Bahby sent him to Potter’s field, that place for the poor and the unknown and maybe the unloved. Mom said she wasn’t allowed to go to a funeral and was told little about it. “Don’t ask, Baby” my grandmother must have said, shaking her finger in mom’s face. She called my mother "baby" for her whole life. No relatives ever talked about Nathan either. Another secret in the treasure box of family secrets. If we were able to open it, a Pandora’s box might open. An Uncle Nathan’s box.

          My sister’s middle name, Naomi, is for Uncle Nathan, the disappeared, but I guess the so loved man that mom, even with her mom still alive and seemingly furious about the man, chose to celebrate his life with my sister’s middle name.

          I often asked about him, loving as a young girl to uncover secrets and make up stories. The idea of a vegetarian and a communist who was a loner or maybe a homosexual, I decided, was a tale of awe and wonder. No one told me a lot. No one even had a picture of him. His burial went unhonored- no shiva, no unveiling. Everything remained a secret that died with Uncle Nathan. Probably my stories are better than the actual life of the man himself.

          So I think he secretly loved my mother more than my Bahby thought reasonable; maybe she was jealous. Maybe secretly she loved Uncle Nathan. Maybe she had an affair with him.  I think his odd ways as a vegetarian way back then scared and confused this family. I think being a communist at a time when many Jews were in fact communists and socialists and very involved in the garment industry, ever thriving and growing, was just something my grandmother didn’t understand. When you don’t understand, you are afraid. When afraid, you just make that person disappear. And Uncle Nathan didn’t even have an address. He was already a disappeared.

          Recently Hart’s Island and Potter’s Field in NYC, USA, have been reopened the burial sites of the unknown, the sick, the criminals to the public.  Those of us who can prove a relative lies there can reserve a place on the ferry leaving occasionally from City Island and pay their respects and offer their stories. If we don’t find the grave, we can pretend and honor the person in our own way anyway.

           And recently Ancestry.com has begun to open the sealed pages of so many families’ secrets, maybe some of them belonging to Uncle Nathan. Of course that was another “THEN” and this is a NOW, the era of Covid-19. Hart’s Island now is a resting place that holds secrets for many victims of this virus scourge, each with his or her story. Uncle Nathan is just another body waiting to be properly mourned, waiting for his secret to be revealed.

We were not really a family of secrets. I almost sometimes wished we were since that would have added some intrigue to our ordinary family life. I always thought when my mom and dad jabbered in Yiddish, things they talked about were really mysteries. But no, they were more about plans my sister and I shouldn’t hear; they were more about money things; and they were more about troubles with my grandparents. We were really an ordinary family.

But. When my mother was in her 80’s and the Uncle Nathan story long forgotten, she let drop that she carried a secret. “Tell us, tell us” we said, we the now grown-ups. We hoped she’d had some affair- after all my father, although I loved him, was waning in attractiveness. My mother I thought was a beauty. “Tell us, tell us.” Maybe she squandered some long deserved money.  Maybe she was taking a vacation on her own. And just maybe she was going to visit her cousin Harry in Florida, in his 80’s too, who was really the love of her life.

When we were little kids we learned that mom had a crush on her first cousin. But first cousins could be friends, daters even, but not people to marry. Their children would be deformed, like the hydro-cephalic child lying in a carriage in my Bahby's neighborhood. They’d be outcasts. And so these two star-crossed relatives were never to be more than that. And then mom met dad and Harry met his wife and the rest is well, rested.

“I have a secret,” she’d say when life seemed dull or the moment was right. She had that twinkle in her still alert chocolaty brown eyes. She had that head lilt with her pretty white hair. But she said no more than that. 

When at 87 she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer we were closer than ever. “I’ll tell you if you tell me” my sisters and I said. “I had sex before my marriage, “I said. “I tried drugs,” my little sister said. “I never wanted to be the middle one,” the middle one said. But mom remained mum. As her cancer became worse, we pleaded more. She said nothing. She surely could keep a secret. Her own.

Mom was however quick to reveal someone else’s secret. In the hospital that January, actually a week before she died, my son and his wife felt the need to share their secret with her. They were going to have a baby in many months. Mom would not know her. “Don’t tell my mom,” the son and the d.i.law said. “It is too early in the pregnancy.” 

The next morning when I traipsed to the hospital as I did every day, a nurse friend ran up and congratulated me, calling me gramma. “What, me?” “Yup”, she blurted out. “Your mom announced this to everyone who entered her room that her grandkids were going to have a baby.” Yikes. Their secret was out. Someone else’s secret that is. 

Mom died a few days later. She died peacefully. She died as beautifully as she lived. And she died, damn, damn with her secret intact, leaving all of us and now even her great grand daughter to guess. We'd never know it and never know about dear old Uncle Nathan either.

Judith Veder- 630 West 246 Street, apt. 1423, Bronx, NY 10471

JUDISAUL@AOL.COM