A Secret Gift Read online

  But Pittsburgh authorities informed Sam’s lawyers that there was no such record of his birth on that page or any other page. There was indeed a famous Pittsburgh midwife named Hannah Sandusky, known variously as “Bobba Hannah” (Bobba is Yiddish for “Granny”), “the Angel,” and “the Saint.” The Lithuanian immigrant delivered more than thirty-five hundred babies in Pittsburgh, the last one in 1909 when she was eighty-two. But she had died in November 1913, eight years before Sam submitted the birth certificate. With her death and the absence of any public record, there was no support for the legitimacy of his certificate. Finn and his associates conducted a thorough search of Pittsburgh records and found nothing to bolster Sam’s claim. They apparently were unaware that they had been sent on a fool’s errand. Sam knew full well that his documents were fabricated.

  Two decades earlier, in creating this fictional autobiography and the records to support it, he had allowed himself to act out of fear or impatience, or both. Whether he had been spooked by the hysteria of the Red Scare or duped himself into thinking that he could confer citizenship on himself with a drawer full of false documents, I will never know. What is clear is that the decisions he made that had once seemed expedient would later cause him untold anxiety. B. Virdot had been a role he could assume one week and discard the next. He defined that part; it did not define him. That was not so with the tangled autobiography he had created as a young man. What he had authored long ago would not release him from its grip. In middle age and later years it continued to threaten him, to put his public reputation, his stature in the family, and even his personal freedom at risk. By the 1940s, he recognized it for what it was: a Faustian bargain that could come due at a moment’s notice.

  It appears that Minna and Sam had a heart-to-heart about what to do. Among Minna’s papers is the alien registration form, filled out in pencil. In it, Sam wrote that he was born in Pittsburgh, but added this revealing sentence: “My family and my personal recollections are these: my parents had emigrated in or about 1888 and during their residence here I was born but having no proof am registering in a desire to comply with the law in any eventuality.” But by then Sam had become hopelessly ensnared in his own scheme. He could not fall back on a faulty memory when he had personally fabricated a fraudulent birth certificate, complete with forged signatures, and then par-layed that into a series of passports and other sworn declarations that were patently false and contradictory. The registration form filled out in pencil was never submitted.

  There was now no innocent explanation and no way to invoke confusion or faulty memory as a defense. The record was one of deliberate and calculated deception. At that late date, the web of lies would not admit good-faith error or parental miscommunication. In the end, he fell back on his old strategy: holding fast to the lie. And he got away with it, if you can call living decades in uncertainty and anxiety getting away with it.

  Reading the correspondence between Minna and the attorneys, I finally understood why she had felt so threatened by my inquiries into Sam’s past, and was so insistent that I give her my word that I would not pursue it. It was not only Sam’s good name at stake but her own as well. Out of her desire to protect her husband, she had allowed herself to be compromised, to enter into a kind of conspiracy with him. Her entire life, Minna had been a model of probity and forthrightness. Taking up Sam’s cause must have pained her greatly. The prospect of having the truth discovered by her own grandson, an investigative reporter, the one in whom she had invested so much ethical energy and teaching, would have pained her greatly. The promise she extracted did not bar me for life from pursuing the truth, but only protected her for the duration of her life from having to answer to me.

  AT THE SAME time that Sam fretted over the Alien Registration Act, a world away in Dorohoi, things were quickly unraveling for the remaining five thousand Jews. The Christians in town received warning that the Jews were to be targeted and were advised to put religious icons in their windows so that the mayhem would pass them by. The next day, July 1, 1940, as many as two hundred Jewish residents were murdered, their homes looted, their bodies picked over and left in the streets. The victims’ families were forced to sign statements that the assailants had been unknown to them. The pogrom was only the first step in what would become a systematic effort to exterminate Dorohoi’s Jews. Such actions were being played out across the continent. Hitler was on the move. For Sam Stone, such news rekindled his worst childhood nightmares.

  Sam and his siblings, indeed even many of their descendants, were so scarred by the experience of Romanian persecution and the accounts of Nazi horrors that they forever feared being sent back. Among them there was a sense that no matter how calm the surface, there always stirred, just beneath, the very real threat of a violent anti-Semitic eruption—even here in America. My grandfather said as much to me more than once. Call him paranoid or irrational, but history suggested otherwise. Against this wider canvas, the specter of persecution and the fear of prison or deportation, baseless or not, rose up inside him. The dread of being returned to that world against his will—or of it now reaching into the New World—was part of the Stone family’s emotional makeup. There weren’t enough miles to place them beyond such fears.

  But rather than cower at the news, Sam chose to express his solidarity with those who were trying to stop Hitler and put an end to his maniacal anti-Semitism. In late May and early June hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers had been evacuated from the shores of Dunkirk, and London had become a target of German bombing. So on October 5, 1940, even as he was mired in his own citizenship issues, Sam Stone wrote a letter to the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian:Honorable Sir:-

  The punishment and torture inflicted on the London civilians seems incredible for human beings to endure, and yet these civilians endure them with a courage that compels admiration for everyone that still values freedom.

  Impelled by such admiration plus the realization that your struggle today is a barrier to our struggle tomorrow, it is my desire that in addition to a cash contribution (see enclosed copy of letter) to forward direct to London civilians fifty new overcoats, and I will greatly appreciate your informing me of the proper agencies to whom these garments can be forwarded so that they can be distributed to London civilians,

  I pray for your worthy cause. . . .

  That week, Sam Stone anonymously paid for an Allied Relief Fund ad to appear in the October 13, 1940, Canton Repository, which produced additional contributions. And though the British Embassy in Washington knew his identity—a concession he made to the necessity of arranging the shipment of wool coats—no one else did. Once again, the Canton Repository wrote an article about this anonymous donor, under the headline, A GESTURE OF FREEDOM—DEMOCRACY LOVING CANTONIAN SENDS 50 COATS TO ENGLAND.

  Into a pocket of each of the coats bound for London, Sam Stone placed a typed letter. It read:CANTON, OHIO, U.S.A.

  DECEMBER 26, 1940

  To a Briton:-

  This gift comes to you from one who is fortunate to live in a country where faith in democracy—in decency and dignity of men can still be reaffirmed.

  Please accept it not in a spirit of appreciation, but as a humble thanksgiving for your heroic efforts, so the enslavement, the political and social regimentation would not be extended throughout the continent of Europe and possibly the world.

  Here in the United States we realize that our heritage of Democracy and freedom is at stake, and greatly depends upon the outcome of the battle across the sea, impelled by such realization, Americans who believe in the things which make life worth living for free men, have banded together in a great cause of

  “AID TO BRITAIN”.

  . . . I hope that you continue your spirit, high and strong, and with firm belief in “THAT WHICH IS RIGHT WILL SURVIVE, THAT WHICH IS WRONG WILL PERISH”, I will close with unshaken faith in the British, who have risen as by a single impulse—to Defend.

  YOURS FOR VICTORY, I AM
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  Sam was an able wordsmith, especially considering his limited formal education, and he often spoke in dramatic tones about the virtues of democracy. But the eloquence of this letter, with its rhetorical flourishes, was likely also the work of my grandmother Minna, who was widely read and had a formidable vocabulary. Most likely, they authored the letter together, Sam providing the passion, and Minna, the oratorical high notes. From Sam’s point of view, the British were all that stood between the darkness he had grown up with and the America he had grown to love.

  But Sam Stone’s concern for the British was not unique. By the end of 1940, the English War Relief Society reported that some twenty-five thousand coats were ready to be shipped from America to England, many of them coming from this nation’s clothiers and manufacturers. And among those who pitched in to aid the Brits were Sam’s daughters, Virginia and Dorothy, then twelve and ten. They are pictured in the Canton Repository among twenty-five girls “bending earnestly over knitting needles, working white, navy blue and olive green colored yarns into sea boots, scarfs, sweaters, wristlets and caps and mufflers,” all of which were to go to the British War Relief Society.

  It was not only the individuals of Canton who reached out to the vulnerable but businesses as well. The Hoover Company arranged for eighty-four British children of its employees in England and Scotland to live with Hoover Company families and others in Canton for the duration of the war. Around town that Christmas Eve, in keeping with their homeland’s customs, the children hung pillowcases from the bedposts (instead of stockings) in expectation of Santa’s arrival.

  VIII.

  A Merry and Joyful Christmas

  Not long after the war ended, Sam and Minna bought a home in Florida, wintering in Golden Beach and spending their summers at the lake house in Ohio. Sam sold his clothing stores and, taking advantage of the real estate boom in Florida, helped develop Hollywood and Miami Shores. By the early 1950s they were living in an oceanfront apartment in the Carlton Terrace in Bal Harbour. That a man whose childhood was rooted in such hardship should come to enjoy such a retirement was a testament to his resourcefulness but also to that of the country that had made a place for him and so many other immigrants undesired by other nations. Throughout Florida, there were others from Canton who had written to B. Virdot in the terrible years of the Depression and who now, two decades later, shared in a retirement that had once seemed unattainable.

  For Sam, those years were filled with irony. From his balcony he could look out across the Atlantic from where he had come half a century earlier. But in another sense, he did not have far to look to see where he was from. The building next door was the eight-story Kenilworth House, and it was, in the vernacular of the late fifties, “restricted.” That meant Jews were not allowed to live there. It was something of an anomaly in that area, which had drawn so many Jews, including many Holocaust survivors, that here in plain view was a testament to the New World’s brand of gentrified anti-Semitism.

  From his terrace, the building nearly filled Sam’s southern view, but he chose to look past it. Its residents were affluent. Some were prominent, including restaurateur Howard Johnson and radio and television celebrity Arthur Godfrey. It is said that years earlier a sign was posted at the Kenilworth that read, NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED. The story may well be apocryphal, but it reflected the fears and experiences of many of the Jews who lived in its vicinity.

  Sam was well aware of the building’s status, but seemed to accept the idea of living next door to people who would rather be much farther away from his kind. The same could not be said of me. As a child visiting my grandparents, I was always hyperaware that I was unwelcome next door. When I took walks down the beach and crossed the Kenilworth’s property or came within its chill shadow, my pace quickened and I felt a tremor as if I were standing in some forbidden area.

  But the ironies of Sam Stone’s residence did not end there. In 1974, my father, the son of a rabbi, dropped dead of a heart attack. He was fifty. My mother left Canton and moved in with her parents, Sam and Minna. A year after my father’s death, my mother, then a slim and attractive forty-seven-year-old, met a man on the beach and fell in love. His name was Donald Sharpe. They were married on Valentine’s Day, 1976.

  But there was a problem. Don lived in the Kenilworth. Worse yet, he was a member of its co-op board, which had enforced the policy against Jews. If my mother—Sam Stone’s daughter—were to live there, concessions would have to be sought from the board. A waiver was granted (to my chagrin), and my mother moved in. Equally troubling was the fact that Don, now my stepfather, belonged to La Gorce Country Club, which was notorious for excluding Jews. For Don, the club was his home away from home.

  Given my grandfather’s traumatic youth in Romania and his obsession with Hitler and the Nazis, one might imagine that he and Don would have had a frosty relationship. In fact, they quickly became best friends. They were both from humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, had no stomach for pretense, and enjoyed a good joke. When Don told my mother he was going to give Sam a present—a light blue windbreaker with the crest of La Gorce Country Club emblazoned on the pocket along with the letters “LGCC”—my mother predicted he would refuse it on principle.

  But when Don jokingly told Sam the letters LGCC stood for “Large Gains Could Come,” Sam laughed and proudly donned the jacket. By then, Sam was well into his eighties and had made a curious peace with the world and its prejudices. The jacket became a favorite of his, a symbol of an unlikely friendship between my grandfather, the refugee Jew, and Don, the Gentile who lived where Jews were not welcome.

  Years later, the Kenilworth fell to the wrecker’s ball. I made no attempt to conceal my pleasure to know that the building had been reduced to rubble. Much has changed. In 1990, La Gorce Country Club admitted its first Jews. Today the club is 40 percent Jewish, and in 2008 it hosted its first Seder dinner.

  For Sam and Minna, memories of the Depression and their years in Canton gradually faded, though their friendships there did not. Even after so many years, neither of them shared with me the story of B. Virdot. There were occasional vague references to Sam’s generosity, and in later years I was told of his gift of wool coats to the British in World War II, but nothing of B. Virdot. The passage of time also wiped away Cantonians’ memory of that gift. It seemed obvious that all those who wrote the letters had since gone to their graves. But the years have yet to fully erase the last vestiges of the good that B. Virdot did.

  The Doll

  It is hard to measure the impact of even the smallest unexpected gift on a child who has nothing. Against the dire landscape of the Depression, holidays often went unmarked, and were occasionally marked by violence. At Easter of 1930, a ten-year-old Canton boy was shot to death by an eleven-year-old playmate in a dispute over a chocolate bunny. Such treasures were all but unheard of in many homes. For hundreds of parents and children that Christmas of 1933, B. Virdot was their only hope of having something on the Christmas dinner table, in the stockings, or under a tree. Twenty-eight-year-old Olive Hillman asked for little and had even less. She wrote:Dear Mr. B. Virdot,

  Read your announcement in this evening’s paper about wanting to spread Xmas cheer among 75 families. We are Americans.

  My husband is a cripple and hasn’t worked for seven years. But had a good job when he did work. I have two children and my husband dependent on me.

  I am employed at Timken’s factory. Manage to live on my salary but winter is always so tough.

  The children need so many things and the extra coal and light bills to pay. Don’t have any money to buy the children any thing for Xmas this yer. We have our own home. Was left to us by Mr. Hillman’s mother. Also had a few hundred dollars but that has been gone a couple years ago.

  I get very much blue and discouraged when you work and then never have only your eats and nothing extra for clothing. We all need clothes bad. I don’t mind myself but am writing this in hopes that my children may have a nice Xmas.

 
Certainly would appreciate your good will and Xmas cheer in our home this year. My little girl is 8 years old, the little boy is 10.

  Glad to know that the depression is over for you and prosperity is back. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a brighter New Year.

  MRS. PAUL HILLMAN

  1431 3RD ST S.E. CITY

  B. Virdot’s check arrived just days later and Olive Hillman sat down on Christmas Day and wrote this note in response:Dear Mr. B. Virdot,

  Your check you sent us was received and want to thank you kindly for it.

  We have had a Merry Xmas through your kindness. We also received a basket from the church.

  The children were made happy by the things they received from the check. I bought the girl a pair of shoes and stockings also a doll.

  The boy a pair of stockings a new cap and a train.

  Thanking you again for your Xmas cheer and wishing you a happy New Year.

  MRS. PAUL HILLMAN.

  Today, that little girl is eighty-four. Her name is Geraldine Laura Hillman Fry and she lives just eighteen miles east of where she lived as a child, in the hamlet of Minerva, Ohio. “Gerry,” as she is called, knew nothing of her mother’s letter to B. Virdot, but she does remember the doll—it was to be the only doll she would have as a child. She remembers its arms and legs of leather and its porcelain face. That surprise gift could hardly have been forgotten in such a childhood as hers. The only other gift she could hope for came from the mission—some candy and a few oranges.