I FINALLY MET MY LONG LOST FAMILY—BUT IT WAS TOO LATE
A stupid family feud 50 years ago about $200 deprived me of a family.
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I never thought I’d find them, but on a whim I decided to search for my father’s family on the Internet. It was 15 years ago--I was in my sixties, recently divorced, both my parents gone. My father had been estranged from his three brothers and my grandparents since before I was born. I’d never met them.
I am an only child who always wanted a big family. Growing up, I felt lonely and deprived, envying friends with large, contentious families who fought but remained close. I married very late in life and never had children. My mother’s death fifteen years after the death of my father, left me terribly bereft. Despite our often explosive arguments, she was the only family member I’d ever been close to and I was extremely devoted to her.
I knew they were from Detroit, so I plugged our family name, “Katzman,” and Detroit, into the internet White Pages and voila, about three Katzmans turned up, all in the same area. It turned out that Katzman was a fairly unusual name in Detroit. I called one Katzman and discovered she was my aunt Betty. She was overjoyed to hear from me and invited me to visit her, my surviving uncle and my cousins when I came to town.
I wound up in Detroit over Thanksgiving and they invited me to dinner. Finally, I would get to spend Thanksgiving with my family. My trip to Detroit felt surreal. Here I was traveling to a city I’d never seen, to meet my father’s last surviving brother for the first time.
He was 92, I was 62, my father had been dead for twenty years and his other two brothers and sister were also long gone. I’d never met any of them, nor any of my myriad first cousins on my father’s side.
The reason: a family feud over $200 back in the 1930s.
My father and his brothers were all extremely poor back then—it was during the Great Depression. They traveled to New York City from Detroit together to make their fortune, but wound up more destitute than they’d been when they had arrived. They were reduced to selling fruit on the street to survive. My father never spoke about the feud, but my mother claimed that my grandfather and my father’s brothers took all his belongings and decamped to Detroit, leaving him in New York with nothing.
Another version of the story is that my father loaned them $200 before they left that they never repaid.
I visited them in their huge, beautiful home in a wealthy Detroit suburb. They were thrilled to meet me at long last, and kept telling me how beautiful I was and how much I looked like my father.
It was eerie to look into the face of Barney, my father’s brother, who resembled my long dead father, and instead of the sour, nasty person my parents had portrayed, there sat a sweet, soft-spoken man who was still haunted by that long ago feud.
“What was my dad like?” I asked my uncle.
“He didn’t talk much,” Barney responded. “We weren’t close. He always was a queer duck. He was angry and resentful and no one in the family knew what to make of him.”
That sounded about right—my father spent his life being depressed and withdrawn.
“He felt that he had been taken advantage of by all of you,” I told Barney. “That he was the victim—that you were materialistic and he was the high minded one.”
In reality my father was the black sheep of the family. His father and brothers all got wealthy in the construction business while he was an unsuccessful architect-- the artist, the dreamer, the one who couldn’t keep a job. He and my mom were communists, trade union activists who lived to overturn capitalism. They were the ruling class.
My dad resented them all, but especially his father. I remembered that he flew to Detroit when I was twelve to see his father on his deathbed, but he’d never told me anything about that trip. I asked Barney what had happened.
“When Pa Katzman, your grandfather, was dying,” Barney said, “his final request was to see your father, one last time. Your father walked into the hospital room and, without taking off his hat or coat or sitting down, said a quick goodbye. He then turned around and took a cab to the airport and flew back home.”
I could see my father doing that. He was not a forgiving man. I’m surprised he showed up at all, but my mother probably told him to go.
“What was the feud about?” I asked Barney. I couldn’t imagine what had happened that was awful enough to cause a lifetime estrangement. “What happened when you went back to Detroit without my dad?”
He told me that they hadn’t split amicably, there was a lot of ill will on both sides, but the final rift occurred in the 1940s when my parents discovered that Barney and Sidney had gone into business together, done very well for themselves, and subsequently lived in comfortable circumstances, yet still had never repaid the $200.
“Your mother wrote us a letter asking for $5,000 for a down payment on a house,” Barney told me. A whiz at math, my mom had figured out that the $200 with interest would have appreciated to about that much.
“Her position was that since we had nice houses, your family should have one too,” he said, knitting his brows as if he couldn’t understand the logic.
“I wrote back a nasty letter which I regret to this day, telling them to get lost,” Barney told me. “I know they thought it was because we were cheap but that really wasn’t the reason. Sidney and I took care of Ma and Pa Katzman into old age. Your dad never took an interest in them, and refused to help when we asked. That really hurt and we never forgave him. I guess he never forgave us either”
Barney kept repeating how sorry he was he’d written that letter, as if he expected me to forgive him.
It was my father I couldn’t forgive. What a waste! I’d lost out on so much. My father’s family were just the kind of relatives I’d been longing for. There were lots of cousins, close and loving despite different backgrounds and interests and having moved to far flung parts of the country. They’d grown up together in Detroit and that was what bound them—a childhood together, memories that couldn’t be replaced.
I’d been brainwashed that all they cared about way money—that they were materialistic and “uncultured,” not highbrow museum and theater goers like us--but the reality was the opposite. They were all artsy and intellectual…just with more money! My cousin Ellen was on the board of a museum. She was still smarting about my father’s visit when she was a teenager.
“I was desperate to meet him, the uncle I never knew,” she told me when we met for a day in New York in an attempt to catch up. “So I got all dressed up and waited and waited. He never called. How could he have just gone back to the airport without even seeing me? It seemed impossible that I had an uncle that I couldn’t even meet, let alone get to know.” She still sounded hurt although 50 years had passed.
I got together with Ellen once more but then we lost touch. I haven’t seen or heard from any of the rest of them since that visit. My uncle Robert friended me on Facebook but that’s about it.
I felt proud to be part of such a charismatic and successful clan. But they were strangers to me and would basically remain so. There was no replacing all those childhood and adolescent years when you make memories that last a lifetime--all those years that we could have spent holidays and summers together, all those years that we could have stayed close.
I will always be an outsider in the Katzman family.
The internet brought us together, but it can’t make us a family.
Thanksgiving is a time to think about family. Blood relatives are special, irreplaceable, and should be nurtured and treasured, or we lose our past, our family history, our sense of having a unique place in the world.
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