Annette Gendler | Connecting Parallel Stories in Your Family History

Stories in Our Roots  00:03

Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today, discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connected deeply with ourselves, those we love and the world around us.

Heather Murphy  00:26

Hello, thank you for joining me for another episode of Stories in Our Roots. I am glad that you have decided to listen to this conversation with Annette Gendler. She discovered that aspects of her life corresponded with aspects of one of her ancestors. And in the process of researching and working to get out the details in order to write a book about their different experiences. She also came to more deeply understand her family and different aspects of it. In this episode, she shares the things that she learned when she was researching her book and what it meant to her to find out those things. Here's the interview with Annette Gendler.

Heather Murphy  01:05

Hi, Annette, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. I'm looking forward to hearing your experiences in family history.

Annette Gendler  01:13

Thank you.

Heather Murphy  01:15

Could you start and introduce yourself a little bit, please?

Annette Gendler  01:18

Sure. I'm the author of the memoir Jumping Over Shadows, which tells the story of a love that overcame the legacy of the Holocaust, a German Jewish love. And that story started looking closely into my family history. And based on the experience of writing that book, I had been already teaching how to write memoir for a long time. But based on that particular experience of taking family history and documents and creating the story from that I've been teaching a workshop on how to shape family history into compelling stories. And that subsequently became a book of the same title. I live in Chicago most of the time, although during the pandemic, I've been mostly out at our country place in Indiana, and I have three children. Yeah, that's me. Thank you.

Heather Murphy  02:14

So how did you start becoming interested in learning your family stories?

Annette Gendler  02:19

So it all started with a trip. So in 2002, my brother and I traveled to our grandparents hometown in the Czech Republic. He had been there before, but I hadn't. You'll remember that the Iron Curtain came down in the you know, in 8990. And so even though I grew up, we grew up my siblings and I in what used to be West Germany, you know, we had never traveled there, at least I hadn't. My brother and sister had traveled there, even during communist times. We still had an uncle there. a cousin of my father, as of our fathers, they came back with tales of you know, Oh, wow. You know, now we know where all that food comes from, you know, we think it's grandma's food, but they're, you know, it's like an every bakery.

Annette Gendler  03:07

And so I was always curious, but I had moved to the United States and 88 and so, you know, traveling to the Czech Republic was not exactly a priority. But anyway, so in 2002, it so happened that I had some time and my sister could watch my kids and my brother had time. So we just took a weekend trip to the Czech Republic to visit the hometown of our grandparents so and where our father had been born and lived until he was 13. The house is Sylvain always has been still is the house that they own.

Annette Gendler  03:39

That trip was just monumental for me, because you know, it was only like two days. But I felt so many undercurrents during that trip, you know, I felt so connected in sort of a weird way, you know, because I'd never been there before. Nobody that I was close to live there anymore in the past. And yet, you know, I just had this connection to this place.

Annette Gendler  04:02

When I got back Germany to my sister's house. She's sort of the keeper of all family documents. So I asked her to dig up our grandfather's memoirs. So he thankfully had written down a little bit about his life. He was actually a poet and dramatist and, and a really good writer. And so I thought, okay, let's, let's read that and see what I can find out. And so that started me on on that journey of figuring out what had happened. Exactly, you know, how the family ended up where they ended up.

Annette Gendler  04:31

And while I was reading through his writings, and one particular short story that he had written, he was talking all about high marks in German that that means homeland, the place you're from. And for me, if you ask me where you're from, it's always a very problematic question, because, you know, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up in Germany, but my father is actually not from Germany. You know, I grew up in an area where nobody was from I grew up in Munich. And then violence of Munich. And you know, we're not from there. My mother is from the Midwest, my dad is from what's now the Czech Republic. And so, you know, that was always a loaded question for me. When I read my grandfather's short story on this sort of longing for a homeland, I realized he had something I didn't have, and my siblings don't have, I'm probably the one that has it, the least my sister, who's much younger than me has it the most, she's probably more more grounded in the area where we grew up. And so then I thought, wow, I thought sort of that was a trait of the family, you know, because I'm bi-national, you know, on my, my parents moved countries, right.

Annette Gendler  05:40

But it wasn't when I was like, you know, and I knew, I knew that the big event had been a family was deported after World War Two, when all Germans were expelled from the eastern territories. That was an agreement of the allies. I knew that that had happened. And I knew stories of my grandmother when she had told us about their time as refugees. And they had a hard beginning and post war Germany, but so did everybody back then after the war. But I, you know, I realized that they had had something that we hadn't, and that that deportation, that expulsion was sort of a hinge in the family history that changed everything, you know, it changed who we were going to be that connection to place that had been there before was gone. And my mother kind of never had it, because she grew up in a family even though her family's from the Midwest, but she herself moved around a lot, because my American grandfather was in the Navy. And so you know, all three kids were born in a different place. And so, so she has sort of that Yankee, very mobile background. So so for me that that was a real revelation, you know, that that deportation had such an impact on who we were going to be and how we were going to live. And I don't think my father would have ever sort of packed up in the late 50s. And, you know, pursued a PhD in the United States and not my mom, like, you know, if they obviously, if we had been stopped by the iron curtain, that would not have been happen that it happened. So that kind of started me off.

Annette Gendler  07:10

And then, you know, the other thing that was always in the back of my mind is that when I met my husband in Germany, in the mid 80s, I was always very conscious of the fact that I was not the first woman in our family to fall in love with a Jewish man. You know, that, that my great aunt, still my grandfather's sister had been married to a Jew, and I was actually very close to their daughter, my own heritage out. But I, you know, I sort of knew that story. My grandmother mentioned stuff here and there, but I never really, I could not have retold it, you know, in any details in his memoirs, you know, I sort of dug in and then, you know, I was able to piece it together, you know, what exactly had happened during the pre war years and during the war, and I don't want to divulge too many details, but I was able to kind of see what, I'm not sure I could see, I know why history repeating itself, in some way, shape, or form.

Annette Gendler  08:09

But I still felt like there's got to be a reason there's certain patterns and families, right, that sort of repeat themselves and some like, weird, you know, for me to meet the Jewish man and post World War Germany, it wasn't just like finding a needle in a haystack, I was so unlikely, right? Because there was so few Jews in post war Germany. And so for me to marry someone like that, you know, and whose family had survived the Holocaust was just extra ordinary, something like this gotta be like, there's something going on here. And so, you know, I really find the concept of post memory very interesting. So that the concept of our ancestors, and particularly our grandparents, and parents, memories affecting us, and I have to say, like World War Two for me, because I grew up very close to my German grandmother, my father's mother, World War Two was just very much a reality. And a lot of her thinking, you know, was sort of embedded in how I operate, you know, in terms of, you know, you always have to have all your papers in order, and you always make sure that you have, basically, you always make sure that you have whatever you need know, in case you got a fleet, you know, or in case something, something big happens, right. It's just interesting, right, that it's not something that happened to me that I experienced, but still influenced me in the way I approach life so much.

Heather Murphy  09:35

Absolutely. We kind of start off without anything, and it's our family that teaches us how to function in the world. And so we learn from their experiences, how to function in our reality, even if their methods don't match the current situations.

Annette Gendler  09:51

Right. It's a frame of reference for me, you know, like World War Two is same for my husband. I mean, you know, he comes from a family of survivors. So Of course, that had a huge impact on on how they raised their children and sort of what kind of attitudes they had.

Heather Murphy  10:08

And I think understanding the context in which they lived and in that time in place can help us understand our ancestors better when we look at them kind of as a whole person in a world that doesn't always function the way you want it to, and can understand why certain relatives act the way that they do.

Annette Gendler  10:29

Right. Like, for me, writing Jumping Over Shadows was actually revelatory in my view of my great aunt. And that's something I didn't anticipate. So I began from my grandfather's point of view, and he was writing about his sister who whom he was always close to, but with whom he also had a very tenuous relationship. And that relationship became more tenuous under the Nazi rule due to the choices that she made. And he always saw her as an opportunist, someone who did whatever needed to be done. Rather than stick to principles. My grandfather was more of a principled person.

Annette Gendler  11:06

But as I wrote this, and as I got feedback from, you know, people and workshops and also later, you know, when when I did book talks, it was quite interesting that many people, particularly Jewish audiences, saw her as a hero. It was totally stunning to me. But from another viewpoint, she was a hero, because she got her two half Jewish kids through the Holocaust. And through World War Two, without anyone being harmed, it wasn't always easy, easy. And you know, my uncle recently ended up being enforced labor and all of that, but they survived, everybody survived. And she was able to keep the business. You know, the flipside was that she divorced her husband, you know, and it's unclear whether that was a mutual decision to save the business and save her and the kids or whether she abandoned him, right?

Annette Gendler  11:57

My grandparents always, they really look down on that. And they also, you know, they bore the brunt of them taking care of this Jewish brother in law, whom they were really close with, particularly my grandfather, and he, they had served on the city council together, they were really close. And so so my grandparents were the ones who visited him who bribed people to take care of him, you know, they ended up being the ones who buried them. And so it also makes sense that they have resentment, right for her choices. So it was really interesting, once I put together a story, then obviously, it's up to the readers to make their sense of it. And then you, you get a whole new appreciation for who these people were, and what they accomplished. And it might be it might put them in a totally different light from what you're used to seeing them. And,

Heather Murphy  12:44

Yeah, because we all look at our ancestors through our own experiences, and that colors, everything. I think that's one of the reasons why it's good to share stories with other family members and have other family members research family as well, because then they can give their perspective and not just mirror back your perspective.

Annette Gendler  13:07

Right, exactly right. Because I was sort of, you know, I started out based on my grandfather's perspective, right, because that's what I had. But once she became sort of our character in my book, and other people reacted to what she had done was like, that's a totally different way of seeing her, which of course, makes for an interesting character and a story. So I lucked out there.

Stories in Our Roots  13:29

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Heather Murphy  14:11

What other things were you able to learn about your family as you were researching them and connecting more with this story that in your words, you ended up paralleling?

Annette Gendler  14:24

On on a subsequent trip to liberis accounts called liberal arts now, you know, I was already writing the book and I had sort of a list of things I wanted to research places I wanted to visit because I wanted to be able to describe them. And so I sister actually, because I had visited her for the Czech Republic. And she said, You know why you're there, try to find the family grave. And that would have not been on my list. What do I care? Right? But I had on my list, the crematorium because my grandfather had written about his brother in law's funeral and so and he's been very detailed about all the locations So that was one of the locations I went to. I'm like, okay, yeah.

Annette Gendler  15:03

So I went, I went to this crematorium, which actually had is beautifully located on top of a hill. And you know, very, I had seen on the map that they're sort of, they're all these process indicated over on the map around this building. And I thought maybe there's a cemetery there. So long story short, I located the family grave by asking someone in the office there who I didn't really share language with, but somehow we figured out and she took me to the grave. It's a very small group. It's, it's an urn grave on the tombstone, if you can even call it that, it only says, well, Dina Can you know, Nina, which means family cleaner, which is our uncle who had passed away there, and he would have been the last person to pass away in the early 90s. So that was his last name. That was actually the Jewish last name.

Annette Gendler  15:52

Then I asked the lady there at the at the cemetery office for the ledger of that grave. Like who who is buried in that grade, six people are buried in that grave. So it was my great aunt, her son, her husband, the Jewish husband, that she had divorce, and my uncle who had died of tears during World War Two, and my great grandparents, different family, different last names, so are they and I knew that my uncle who had passed away last there had, at some point, put what he called the Czech grave. So his family grave, and our German family grave together, because after the war, a lot of German gravestones had been vandalized, and he sort of wanted to protect the dead. I guess.

Annette Gendler  16:39

It was an interesting research experience for me, because I had to, if you just looked at the gravestone you would think, okay, family came that was buried here, right? And then if you looked at the ledger, then you got more information that there were actually six people of other families buried there. Nowhere does it say that my great uncle was Jewish, nowhere. So it was a very interesting experience of putting together location research family lore of what I'd heard about, and actually, you know, documentation from from the grave side, the woman then came while I was sort of out there taking pictures of the grave and thinking about this whole thing. She came back, and she gave me a letter, which I couldn't read, because it wasn't a check. But it was obvious to me that it was the bill. And it had been addressed to my aunt who passed away like two three years prior to visit. And so I pieced it together. And then I got I got someone at the hotel to translate it for me. Yes. And it was a bill to buy the grave again for 10 years.

Annette Gendler  17:42

So so in that country, and actually Germany, it's the same like you have to renew a graveside, like every 10 years or so you have to be rented, otherwise, it gets obliterated. And so I ended up totally unexpected, I ended up taking responsibility for this grace, I didn't know I paid the fee, which was like $180, it was not much at all, I was a very grounding sort of experience and taking on taking on responsibility for something of people that meant something to me whose story I was writing, like, I almost felt like I could give back a little bit like contribute a little bit. And in family histories, you know, graves are obviously very important. They sort of road markers, and they help us find things that otherwise we wouldn't.

Heather Murphy  18:28

Yeah. And I think that it's good for us to look for those little ways that we can, in a way serve or remember our ancestors differently, like taking responsibility for their grave, you said like giving back a little bit to them. So I think that's a nice little different way to look at things and show gratitude for what our ancestors did for us.

Annette Gendler  18:51

Right? It's kind of a way of honoring them. You know, like, I mean, my direct line, like my great grandparents are buried there. Like without them, I wouldn't be around. And for me, also, you know, I just, I feel it gives me a little bit of a physical connection to that place, like a little piece of real estate that I'm responsible for that that I can honor.

Heather Murphy  19:12

Oh, you mentioned something else that you learned about your great grandfather. Can you share that story?

Annette Gendler  19:18

Yeah. So as you do family research, you know, I think most of us stumble across something that we didn't anticipate at all. I had been This was also on that trip. So that was in 2009. And I was on my little research trip. And I went to the public library there to find newspapers from like 38 because that was sort of one of the key years I was writing about, and I did get them like they did actually a lot of their software down but I was lucky they had a huge ledger of newspapers from Nike 38 which in and of itself is amazing. It's just an amazing I mean, I think if you want under And your grandparents or great grandparents or what situation they were in, right to read newspapers from that time because there's no hindsight whatsoever. And so you know, you you get the feeling even though you know, the the newspapers I was reading were already Nazi organs and you could clearly tell the slammed but still there was a lot of coverage about the Spanish Civil War, for instance, don't like heroes, right? But that was the topic back then.

Annette Gendler  20:25

Anyway, so I found my my grandmother's Father, I found his death notice back then, and still here, actually, it was sort of customary to, to post an obituary, but it's a Death Note, as you know, so died. And these are the people that survived and better this year in there. And so I found his death notice, and why was this interesting? I knew that he had shot himself in November of 1938. Rumor had it that he shot himself on the family grave, but it was never, my grandmother talked about everybody else's death. And I wasn't kind of morbid kids when I was like, interviewed her about so and so and so and so how did they die. But already as a kid, I knew not to ask her about her father. And as a teenager, at some point, I asked my dad, no, my dad was five when this happened. So it's not like he knew himself.

Annette Gendler  21:19

But he said that he had heard or pieced together he had on the family graves, and that he had done it because his family was in German, you say for you that. So it meant had a Jewish component to it, which I always thought was the connection to my great aunt who had married a Jew. But once you think about if you're like, wait a minute, like that was not It wasn't like his daughter had married a Jew, you know, this was his son in law's family. So anyway, that was sort of the the family taboo. And that was the knowledge I kind of had.

Annette Gendler  21:53

And then I was researching the history of the Jewish community in that town, because I was trying to figure out a little bit more about my great uncle's family and who had these people been. And so I found a lot of stuff like he had been the first Jewish city councilman, which was amazing, because Jews had only been emancipated IE gotten full since citizen rights in 1861. And he served in my early 1920s. But as I was reading up on the history of Jews in that town before 1860, so before they had been emancipated, expanded across a list of people who in the 1840s, had gotten what they call, like, asked books to be able to trade. But most of those towns were either industrial towns where things were manufactured, or they were marketplaces, trade places. So in this town, like the main square was like a big marketplace. And so a bunch of Jews had gotten the right to do business during the day in that town. And one of the people on that list from early 1840s, had the same last name, my great grandfather, and I almost fell off my chair.

Annette Gendler  23:07

Wow. And then, you know, I started piecing stuff together. And I thought if he was Jewish, in the sense that I knew his mother wasn't, but I knew very little about his father. I only knew that he had had that he came from, but he had a weaving business, like textile weaving business with his mother on Jewish kind of trade. So I was sort of left with, wow, you know, maybe he had Jewish roots. And that's why he killed himself to take that secret to the grave. And if that was the case, he was very successful. Because the family told the truth, right, what my father had told me like he killed himself because of the family having a Jewish influence. Like if that was true about him, that was the truth, even though you know, there was this de Koi of, you know, my great aunt and all of that, which, you know, was the more obvious thing. So long story short, I discovered a possible a very plausible reason why he would have killed himself and he was also that kind of, from what I can tell he because he wasn't a depressed person. He had a he had a successful career. He had two grandsons. Yes. And he had hardships like his younger daughter passed away when she was 16. But like, there was no other intrinsic reason, you know, but then what do we know? You know, that was a real shocker. I have done a DNA test since However, once I figured out what that actually works.

Heather Murphy  24:37

And what did it mean to you to find that possible explanation?

Annette Gendler  24:43

It's like a piece of the puzzle falls into where should be like, you know, it, it completes the picture is like, Oh, that makes sense. You know, like, it's, of course, a horrible decision to make, but who knows, that might have been the right decision to make because everybody had to prove that they were have arion blood. And if that's something he could not have proved, it would have made life very, very difficult for the family. It was almost consoling, in a way.

Heather Murphy  25:10

So as you wrote this memoir and looked at these pieces of your family's past, and then your present and moving forward, what are some things that you learned about? Or your takeaways from learning about your ancestors and this Jewish in German? And what did that mean for you moving forward in your life?

Annette Gendler  25:34

It had a very settling affect. Like, I feel like I put that part of the past and have my own story, because my own love story was so dramatic while it happened right in it, the more time passes, the less, you're like, oh, whatever, you know, because you have people yeah, like 30 years piled on it and other experiences. But I think just like my grandfather had written down his thoughts about his life. Now, it was only like a draft, he never got the chance, like I did to polish it into a book, but I, I just feel it's a great gift to have put something that was really important to me, and that has a huge impact on my children are.

Annette Gendler  26:17

My children are, in some ways, very similar to my husband and me, and that they, they are first and foremost Americans, but they have immigrant parents, at least in my husband's sense. And in my sense, you know, I'm not an immigrant, because I'm half American. And I, you know, I was born here, but I grew up in another country. And so they have this eclectic sort of cosmopolitan background. And they, you know, they grew up speaking two languages. And so it, it was important, and I dedicated the book to them, because, you know, it was important to me, for them to have something that is this organized, and that puts my viewpoint and my experience and my interpretation of events forward. And I think that it puts forward those hinges in the family history, because that made them who they are, you know, like, that's why my husband and I made the decisions that we made. And that's why our kids are the people that they are, are so important to me to write that book. And to get it out there. I'm just really, really happy about having said my piece and explain that to them. And I'll you know, and who knows, as the generations move on, there might be someone 100 years from now, who will look me up and be like, why am I who I am, there's this next person, you know, 100 years ago, and I am who I am because of decisions that she made. And so it's wonderful to know why someone made the decisions I made like, like in case of my great grandfather, nobody knows, like, or we can always allies. But at least I've left, I've left the story of why I am who I am,

Heather Murphy  27:54

One of my other guests had a similar mentality. She said, You know, I can leave why I did, the things I did, and my thoughts, things that no records are going to tell anybody else. Or I can just leave it for future generations to surmise and maybe make their own wrong judgments of me and not know the story and the why.

Annette Gendler  28:14

Exactly. And I'm very much so that's great. I'm very much a white person like it, you know, like, I can figure out the how and the walk and the way or all that stuff, but I'm always pumped, like, Why Why are we doing this? You know, why am I doing this? You know, why is this happening? So yeah, so that's beautifully put, actually.

Heather Murphy  28:32

And I think it's important, a lot of times people don't think that their lives are that significant. But a few generations down the road, somebody is going to want to know who you were. And so why not tell it in your own words?

Annette Gendler  28:46

Right. You know, and so that's what I've kind of made that my life mission, you know, for people to, you know, write down something, it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, my grandmother told most of her stories orally and so I had to remember them, but, but she did leave some handwritten notes about the meal that she always spent her summers at. And then you know, a few years ago, my sister and I went there and it was just awesome, because we could kind of retrace her steps, be in the same play, she hasn't because a lot of this stuff is still the same.

Heather Murphy  29:16

Well, thank you enough for sharing your stories and your experiences. I will have links to your website and other ways people can contact you in the show notes. And thanks again.

Annette Gendler  29:27

Thank you. It's a great project very worthwhile in my opinion.

Stories in Our Roots  29:33

Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback, or would like to recommend someone to share their story head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.