These are the ghosts we need

When my mother died of pancreatic cancer in my arms at home in East Rockaway, I was devastated. My friends urged me to see some Long Island psychic who was all the rage. I was skeptical. I've since forgotten his name, but I remember thinking: He looks like an accountant.

What he said stayed with me: He could hear my mother's Israeli accent, sense her feisty spirit. It gave me some peace. My 6-year-old daughter loves to hear this "ghost story" about her grandma, her namesake, Rachel Grunberger.

Fast forward 27 years. I'm adopted. When I did a genealogy test, I discovered my maternal grandmother, Eva Bass — a woman whose face mirrored mine. Those were my eyes, my hands, even my Jewish nose staring back at me from a 1944 Life magazine photograph. The headline reads "Refugees Arrive from Europe" and there's Eva carrying her baby girl.

I became obsessed with Eva's story when I learned my birth mother, Susan Morris, was born in an internment camp in Oswego, New York, on Feb. 10, 1945. Eva was one of 982 mostly Jewish refugees whom FDR permitted to enter the United States as "casual baggage" — living as "guests" behind barbed wire. Eva was two months pregnant with Susan in that Life photo.

In this moment of rising antisemitism, xenophobia and political division, Eva's story feels urgent. When politicians debate who belongs and doesn't belong in America, I think of Eva — shipped here as "casual baggage."

Susan was conceived in Italy, traveled in utero across the ocean, and arrived in the liminal space of an internment camp. The attorney general expressly stated that internees "did not legally exist in the U.S." She was illegitimate on multiple counts.

Caseworkers deemed Eva "unfit to mother" her three children. My hunch is that she suffered from postpartum depression. They took 6-month-old Susan and placed her in foster care.

James Baldwin once wrote, "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." Eva was trapped inside that internment camp for 18 months, and never saw Susan again. When I remember her, I'm exercising a modest freedom to live inside history rather than be effaced by it.

A private investigator found Susan's cousin: "Susan stole her father's car in the middle of the night and drove to a seedy bar in Buffalo. She just felt this urge to sing." A frisson ran through me. Susan stole away to sing just like Eva, who'd left the confinement of an Orthodox Jewish life in Switzerland for Paris jazz clubs.

My aunt sent me a CD. Eva sang in Yiddish; Rachel and I danced.

There's voting and civic participation; there's personal rituals of memory. We need both, because the personal is political.

Susan, who gave me life, took her own life in 1974.

This year, I lit memorial candles for Eva, Susan and my mother Rachel. Their photos are among all our family photos on the piano.

Eva's story galvanized my attention to something I knew intellectually, but had not felt viscerally: The work of memory is not a given. It has to be cultivated. This is a key to linking past and present. Forces like antisemitism and xenophobia are assaults against memory precisely because they deliberately efface these connections.

We can't afford to let those deemed to "not legally exist" disappear again by forgetting. Refuse to let the state's official story silence their voices.

Here's my challenge: Set up a call with a relative. You'll be amazed at the stories you unearth.

Don't despair. Your ghosts are waiting to become ancestors. All they need is someone willing to listen.

This guest essay reflects the views of East Rockaway native Lisa Grunberger, a professor of English at Temple University and author who is working on a memoir.