My Grandma Betty’s garage, like the rest of her house, was always neat and well-labeled. The tools hung in their places. The floor was swept clean. Along the walls, DIY wood shelving was stacked high with boxes labeled according to their contents. Herb Toys. Xmas Decorations.
Somewhere amidst all the old slot cars and yearbooks, up by the rafters in a far corner, were three produce boxes filled with ephemera from her childhood in Toledo: a trophy from the Maumee River Yacht Club, a 1911 desk calendar printed by her adoptive father’s plumbing and heating company—“We’d like to be your plumbers just the same as Dr. Jones or Dr. Brown is your doctor”—get-well cards, bank books, newspaper clippings.
Growing up, I never thought much about Grandma Betty’s childhood or the WASPy Midwestern world she came from. When people asked about my family, it was always the other grandparents I talked about, the refugees and immigrants, the orphans and organizers, the Holocaust survivors who spent their teenage years on the run from the Nazis. Compared to them, Grandma Betty’s family history always seemed bland.
Then one day, a few years after she died, my dad’s brother, Uncle Herb, sent a one-sentence email to the entire family: “There’s more to the story than you might think.”
I was in Palm Springs at the time—our first family vacation after two years of lockdown—and had just gotten out of the pool. The reception wasn’t good, so it took a few moments to load the image below that single line of text. Eventually, though, it came through, a snapshot of three World War II medals laid out on a paper towel: a swastika surrounded by a circle of laurels; an iron cross bisected by swords; and, finally, the image of a soldier in a helmet. Nazi medals. Which, I later learned, had been sitting in Grandma Betty’s garage for the past fifty years, tucked inside one of those boxes filled with mementos from her childhood in Ohio.
“Don’t bury the lede,” Grandma Betty always told me. Classic journalistic advice, which, in this case at least, she seems to have ignored.
I never slept well at Grandma Betty’s. The bed in her guest room creaked, and the walls were covered with old family photos, gilt-framed portraits of dour Midwesterners in dark suits and long dresses. One visit, when I was ten or eleven, I woke up in the middle of the night screaming from a nightmare. It wasn’t surprising, my dad said as he tried to get me back to sleep, because “the house is full of ghosts.”
Grandma Betty’s house in Palos Verdes—a 1950s rancher less than a block from the bluffs looking out over the Pacific Ocean—is one of the few spaces from my childhood I can conjure just by closing my eyes: the living room decorated with posters from exhibits at European art museums, the wicker baskets placed just so next to the fireplace, the antique wall paper in the bathroom, the elegant silver tea service on a cart in the dining room. It had a certain homeyness. But make no mistake: Grandma Betty’s house was not comfortable.
She had limited patience for children, especially those—like myself—who didn’t know how to hold their utensils properly. Everything in her house had its place, its use. And nothing could be left unfolded. “The problem always remains,” she wrote to her brother, a few years after I was born, that “I expect things from others, and not everyone is able to live up to those expectations.”
For the most part, she was a woman of controlled passions. She had short-cropped hair and always kept a cup of extra-sharp pencils on her desk. She loved the Dodgers and the University of Michigan, a warm slice of apricot pie, a single cigarette after dinner. She yearned for “clear and coherent prose,” companionable silence, and the undivided attention of her gentleman callers, all three of which were in short supply. “What I want,” she wrote to a friend in the mid-1980s, more than a decade after she and my grandfather divorced, “is a guy … who’d come over once a week, bring me gardenias, lavish me with praise and great sex, repair what needed to be repaired and listen to me read poetry.”
Over the course of four decades in the newspaper business, much of it at the Los Angeles Times, she wrote travel articles and book reviews, public-interest features and profiles of local notables. But she was always a copyeditor at heart. When I sent her a column I wrote for my high school newspaper—the first piece of writing I was truly proud of—she mailed it back to me a few days later, marked up with red ink. When I became editor of the paper, she bought a yearly subscription and proofed the whole thing. That was her love language. Those red marks were her way of welcoming me into the society of those who understood the importance of words.
Growing up, Grandma Betty was the only person I knew who really cared about literature. She subscribed to Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, and regularly sent me clippings from both. When I was in college and graduate school, she quizzed me about the syllabi of my literature classes. When my first novel came out, she threw a party at her local library, invited all her friends, and ordered a sheet cake with a rendition of the book’s cover in icing.
In her retirement, Grandma Betty wrote two books of her own. The first was a short history of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where she lived for nearly fifty years—one of those slim sepia volumes you see in libraries and museum gift shops. The second was a collection of poems recounting a rather torrid affair with an unnamed Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter not much older than my dad.
Responsible journalist that she was, Grandma Betty knew the importance of protecting her sources. She knew how to tell a story without damaging the innocent, those she wanted to shield. Was that why she never said anything about those Nazi medals? Was that why she so rarely talked about those sepia-toned men and women looking down from the walls of her guest room?
I knew they were my family. I even knew some of their names: Uncle Doc, Grandma Benkhe, the Larsens. But I never felt much of a connection to any of them. Although my dad was raised Christian, went to church occasionally, and apparently sang in the choir, he converted to Judaism when he married my mom and stuck with the faith even after they divorced.
Growing up, I never considered myself anything but fully Jewish. I went to Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp. I spent a year living on a kibbutz after high school, studied Hebrew and Arabic literature in college. It wasn’t clear how Grandma Betty’s family fit into any of that. So, for the most part, I ignored them.
Until I couldn’t ignore them anymore.
For most of my childhood, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by grandparents (eight altogether if you count step-grandparents, which I do). Other than Grandma Betty, they were all immigrants and orphans, rabble-rousers and refugees, people who got where they were by the skin of their teeth. None of them had much in the way of family, let alone old family pictures. But there were enough stories to fill a small library.
Grandma Esther, my stepdad’s mother, lived through the Blitz in an old farmhouse outside London. Her husband, Grandpa Joe, was the child of Armenian immigrants who survived the Genocide and ran a successful Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles. There was Elizabeth, my stepmom’s mother, who grew up in a Mormon orphanage in Utah, and her husband, Grandpa Tom, a union organizer who spent much of his childhood on the streets of Depression-era San Francisco. Grandpa Hank, Grandma Betty’s husband, was raised by hardscrabble Polish immigrants in Detroit and almost died of scarlet fever when he was four. But the family history that shaped me most was that of my mom’s parents, Grandpa Abe and Grandma Guta, Holocaust survivors who fled the Nazis by way of Uzbekistan and built a new life in New Orleans.
I always felt the weight of that history, though it wasn’t until third grade that I really understood what people meant when they talked about World War II or the Holocaust. One night, after finishing my math homework, I walked into the family room and found my mom crying. On the TV there were black-and-white images of unimaginable things: piles of naked bodies, barbed wire fencing people into pens, chimneys spewing human smoke into the air. I asked her what she was watching, and she was quiet for a long time. Eventually, she said it was a documentary about a horrible thing that had happened a long time ago in Europe, when Grandma and Grandpa were teenagers.
“Were Grandma and Grandpa in a place like that?” My mom shook her head and started crying again.
I gave her a hug, tried to think of something reassuring to say. “They got away, didn’t they? They escaped.”
“They did,” my mom said, “but most of their family didn’t.”
It was then that I understood. Those dead bodies in the pile could very well have been my relatives. The smoke coming from those chimneys might once have been Grandma Guta’s brother or Grandpa Abe’s parents.
Aside from Grandpa Abe’s brother and a few distant cousins, my mom’s parents both lost their entire families in the war. After the war, they met in a Displaced Persons camp, got married, moved to Paris, had my mother, then moved again to New Orleans. They worked hard, saved, made good investments, and built a new life for themselves in America. This was the story they told about their lives, a story of perseverance and hard work, a little luck and a lot of sweat. A story that started in ruins and ended in a nice house not far from Lake Pontchartrain. And why not give them that, the right to tell their own story the way they wanted?
Grandpa Abe and Grandma Guta were by far my most grandparently grandparents. Gentle and loving, always doting on me and my siblings, beaming with pride at even the most insignificant of our accomplishments. They were happy, they always said, just to see us happy. And yet, even as a child, I knew there was more to the story. You could feel it in the careful way Grandpa Abe cut his apple with a pocket knife, how Grandma Guta snapped sometimes, the distance of her gaze when she was watching Jeopardy! or Larry King.
Neither of them talked much about the war. When they did, it was always Grandma Guta who did the telling. Over Grandpa Abe’s mumbled attempts to nudge the conversation in a happier direction, she would try—and always fail, it being an impossible task—to describe what it felt like that night she stood with her family on the hill outside Staszów, the Polish town where she was born and spent most of her young life, watching her synagogue go up in flames. It wasn’t a story, really—more like a distillation of a particular moment. When the past cleaved off from the present. The moment she understood, with perfect clarity, that the life she had left at the bottom of the hill was gone forever.
When we pressed for more—what it meant to be “on the run” for so long, how she evaded the authorities, where she lived, how she found food—there was another story she sometimes told: She was on a train, presumably somewhere in occupied Europe. Halfway through the journey, the train stopped and a high-ranking SS officer got on. He went down the car, checking to make sure everyone’s identification papers were in order. She didn’t have any papers, most likely. If she did, they would have been forgeries. What she did have were blue eyes and blonde hair. When the officer came to her, she put on her best German accent, turned up her charm, and said something vague about forgetting her papers at home. Silly her. Again the story ends at the climax, leaving us with the emotional truth, this tense moment of fear, but no concrete details.
Occasionally Grandpa Abe might say something offhand about the Russian work camp where he and his mother spent most of the war. Every once in a while, there might be a new detail, a new crumb of information. A picture of Grandma Guta’s youth group sparked a few memories about how they helped each other escape from her hometown. A documentary about work camps in Siberia helped explain Grandpa Abe’s account of walking across the steppe to Uzbekistan after his mom died of typhoid. But, for the most part, their stories were locked up out of view, the details left to our imaginations.
A few years after her parents died, my mom decided to write a book about their lives and spent the better part of a year trying to answer all the questions she hadn’t been able to ask when they were alive. She had their letters translated, found distant relatives on Facebook, and flew to Paris to interview an elderly cousin. At one point, I remember, she tracked down an old friend of Grandma Guta’s at an assisted-living community in Florida. When she was finally able to get a hold of her, after weeks of trying, she called me, triumphant, to report on her success. She had been able to pin down a few more concrete details: a sanatorium in Crimea where Grandma Guta may have worked, something about the bombardment of Lvov.
“That’s great,” I said, though I couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
Even after all that searching, there were more holes to the story than thread.
In the stories we tell about our families and ancestors, there are certain things we include and certain things we leave out. Not necessarily for malicious reasons, though that’s always a possibility. Sometimes we might forget a particular detail. Sometimes a particular detail is something we would rather forget. Sometimes the detail just doesn’t fit. Any story—any history, for that matter—is a series of inclusions and omissions, a series of truths and deceptions.
The story Grandma Betty liked to tell about her life was not dissimilar to the one Grandma Guta and Grandpa Abe told about theirs. A story of hard work and progress, another version of the American Dream.
She was born in 1925, just outside Columbus, Ohio. Her mother died soon after giving birth, and her father, overwhelmed by the grief and responsibility, sent her to live with a distant cousin in Toledo. She lived through the Depression and the war (though it’s hard to say she “lived through” the war, given what Grandpa Abe and Grandma Guta were living through at the same time). After high school, she went off to the University of Michigan, where she joined The Michigan Daily News and, one sunny day in spring, met my grandfather on the steps of the library.
When she asked him what he intended to do with his life—always straight to the point, that Grandma Betty—he responded, “Write the great American novel.” This, apparently, was all she needed to hear. They got married, had my dad, and moved to Southern California, driving west along Route 66 in a 1950 Plymouth station wagon with no seatbelts and a box of glass baby bottles clattering in the back seat.
She spent much of the next few decades raising my dad and his siblings in Inglewood while Grandpa Hank worked his way up at a string of big advertising agencies. (It isn’t difficult to imagine the two of them as minor characters on Mad Men, the overly sensitive artistic type and his tart, career-minded wife.) In the mid-1960s they moved from Inglewood to Palos Verdes, a planned community designed by John Charles Olmsted and Fredrick Law Olmsted Jr. with the intention of being an “ideal residential suburb … where one could build his home … without fear that the neighborhood would ever be unsightly or undesirable.” And, of course, everyone knew what they meant by “unsightly” and “undesirable.”
To Grandma Betty, the move represented a kind of arrival, a triumph over the difficulties of her early years. “It’s a tony zip code,” she used to say, with only a pinch of self-consciousness.
Not long after the move, she went to graduate school, got a master’s in journalism, and returned to the career she had “not so willingly, as I now recall,” set aside to raise her children. She landed a job at the Palos Verdes Peninsula News by “besieging the managing editor … with sample columns, cards, notes, and assorted billets-doux” and, in the years that followed, won a string of awards for her articles on the underbelly of suburban life, most notably a series about alcoholic housewives. Eventually, she became editor of the paper’s women’s section, which she promptly renamed Peninsula Scene. Soon after that, she got a job as one of the first female editors at the Times. (To her “the Times” was always Los Angeles. New York be damned.)
It’s a familiar story, one that weaves in and out of larger histories of American whiteness in the middle of the twentieth century. She and my grandfather went to college, moved west, worked hard, threw big boozy parties, had affairs, got divorced, and eventually came into their true selves, their lives buoyed along by forces hovering just beyond the edge of perception: the GI Bill and redlining, westward migration, Cold War consumerism, white flight, the self-help movement, and changing ideas about a woman’s place in the workforce.
There’s nothing untrue about this story. Even in her self-mythologizing, Grandma Betty never strayed too far from the facts. But, as with any narrative, there are those holes, pieces of information that have been elided or otherwise obscured.
Grandma Betty was not one to shy away from uncomfortable topics. She always spoke frankly about money, politics, and sex. (Once, when I was in my early thirties and she in her eighties, she showed me a sex book she was reading called She Comes First. “It’s a double entendre,” she said. “You understand what that means, right?” Yes, Grandma. I do.) Toward the end of her life, she was particularly open with me about her regrets and disappointments, the resentment she felt about all those years sacrificing her career to Grandpa Hank’s, the sense of mourning about how the nurses at the Cincinnati hospital where my father was born bound her breasts after labor because women like her weren’t supposed to breastfeed.
And yet, in all of our conversations, she almost never talked about her childhood.
Once, in fourth or fifth grade, I noticed that Grandpa Abe’s left pinkie finger was crooked. When I asked him what had happened, he went into a long story about playing soccer with friends, how the ball got stuck up in an apple tree and he foolishly went after it, only to fall on his hand. It was a good story, with a reassuring moral about the importance of being careful, of not chasing after things that aren’t worth chasing after.
Even then, I knew it was a lie. Still, I’d like to think there was some truth to it, buried in his description of the soccer ball made from an old shoe, the detail of the apple tree. Was there another important apple tree? Something else he fashioned from an old shoe? For a long time, I told myself that it was the feeling of the thing that mattered, the refraction of truth if not the truth itself.
Then I got that email from Uncle Herb—“There’s more to the story than you might think”—and emotional truth wasn’t nearly enough. Not by a long shot. I needed to know where those Nazi medals came from. Once I recovered from the shock of seeing that image on my phone, I found myself in much the same position as my mom a few years earlier, trying to ferret out facts that could easily have been answered when Grandma Betty was alive. If only I had known to ask.
According to my Uncle Herb, the medals came from the attic of Grandma Betty’s childhood home. He, Grandma Betty, and my Aunt Maria had found them up there amidst the “cigar scissors, lighters, pocket watches, etc.” after Grandma Betty’s adoptive mother died. And then, presumably, they had packed them in a box, which was then carted back to California, and promptly hidden away in the garage. But how did those medals get to the Ohio attic in the first place? And, more importantly, why? What did they signify to Grandma Betty’s adoptive parents? And what did they mean to her? For presumably she knew they were there. How could she not have? Why hadn’t Grandma Betty or Uncle Herb mentioned any of it until now? And what exactly was it I didn’t know? What was the “more to the story” Uncle Herb referred to?
In response to my barrage of questions, Uncle Herb wrote a long and somewhat rambling email about Grandma Betty’s adoptive father:
Mr. Larsen was a social guy and they had a lot of parties at that house. He was the commodore of the Maumee River Yacht Club. His photo is still on the wall. They raised Betty how they did. As a parent you are learning [that,] no matter what your best intentions are for your offspring, other powers that you cannot control become part of them too.
When I pressed for more, adding a little guilt into the mix—“As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, these questions feel especially urgent”—he responded with a few screenshots of old newspaper articles and ultimately concluded, “I don’t know.” I asked my dad, who Uncle Herb suggested “might know more than I do.” But he too was stumped.
For the better part of the afternoon, I convinced myself that Neil Larsen was a former SS officer hiding out in Toledo after the war. A bit of math—he was fifty-seven years old when the war started—revealed this to be nothing more than a fantasy. Besides, those three medals couldn’t have been awarded to a single person. According to a frantic string of Google reverse image searches, the medal with the swastika was an SA storm trooper Sports Badge; the iron cross bisected by swords was a Nazi War Merit Cross, reissued in 1957 without the original swastika; and the medal with the soldier in a helmet was actually a Fascist Italian badge. This was somewhat comforting, knowing there weren’t any actual Nazis hidden in the proverbial attic. But I was no closer to answering the questions of what the medals meant, where they came from, and how they made their way into that box of Grandma Betty’s childhood mementos.
Was Neil Larsen—the man who wanted to be your plumber like Dr. Brown was your doctor—a Nazi sympathizer? Maybe he was just “interested” in Fascist history. And what about Grandma Betty’s adoptive mother, Nettie? Who was to say the medals weren’t hers? She was German American, after all. (Neil was of Scandinavian heritage.) Maybe she had a cousin who fought in the war or an uncle who was a member of the pro-Nazi German American Bund. Would that explain it?
History, they say, is written by the victors. But when it comes to family history, the next generation is always victorious.
In the weeks following her death, Grandma Betty’s garage was strewn with boxes of old letters and photographs, recipe cards, newspaper clippings, and clothing (a scene I’m fairly certain she would have found horrifying). Within a month or two, all of her earthly possessions were processed and redistributed among the family. Most of the clothes went to Aunt Maria. The toys and collectibles, including those medals, went mostly to Uncle Herb. Her letters ended up in my dad’s basement.
In the process of being transferred from Palos Verdes to Berkeley, many of the papers seem to have been mixed up or lost. Still, you can see how hard Grandma Betty worked to curate her archive. There are hundreds of letters in those boxes, stretching from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end, letters from family and friends, lovers and colleagues, her brother, her college roommate. And not just letters she received. She also saved carbon copies of many letters she herself wrote, while collecting dozens—if not hundreds—of letters she had written to my Grandpa Hank and to her adoptive mother, Nettie.
Grandma Betty clearly expected someone to go through her papers. Great care was taken in separating out certain letters and annotating them with Post-it notes. There’s a manila folder labeled “Assorted letters. Interesting reading.” Another set of documents, related to her divorce and self-realization, can be found in a folder labeled “Important writings, 60s & 70s.” Someone, presumably Grandma Betty herself, placed pink sticky tabs on documents related to Grandpa Hank’s failings as a parent and the waning intensity of her orgasms.
And yet, in all those boxes, the voices of her adoptive parents, Neil and Nettie Larsen, are almost entirely absent. The only letters written by Neil are his terse love letters to Nettie in the 1910s—“I shall expect you at home on Sunday at the very latest so just make up your mind to come”—and there’s only one letter to Grandma Betty from Nettie. “Long one from Mother,” says the Post-it, “only one I have.”
There’s some dispute in my family about who exactly made the decision to send Grandma Betty to live with the Larsens. But one thing is for certain. For most of her childhood, she had no idea that her biological mother died in childbirth or that her biological father, Herb Chamberlin (not to be confused with my Uncle Herb), was living just a short train ride away with a new wife, two half siblings and her older brother. When she found out, she tried to run away from home, an episode which her Uncle John referenced in a letter many years later:
Remember back to your teens, when you found out Herb was your natural father, you want[ed] to leave Larsens, and live with him. He told me he had to get mean with you and make you mad at him, so you would go back to Larsens. Well it hurt him as bad as it did you, because he loved you and would have been glad to have had you with him, but he thought you and he owed the Larsens a lot, and did not want them to be hurt.
Grandma Betty kept this letter separate from the rest of her correspondence, in a manila folder labeled “Letters from Dad and Uncle John.” The letters from “Dad,” her biological father, are mostly from the mid-1940s. More than half of them begin with an apology—“Dear, dear, dear, where will I start?”—for forgetting her birthday or “putting on such a show as I did,” for signing his letters “Sincerely” instead of “Love,” “Uncle Doc” instead of “Dad.” And yet, the two of them seem to have had a real connection. Later in life—by which point she was calling him “my REAL father”—she often went out of her way to highlight the rhymes and resonances of their life stories. They both switched careers late in life. They both enjoyed a cigarette after dinner. Etc.
Her adoptive father was another question. Aside from a few reminiscences about minor-league baseball games, the Neil Larsen in Grandma Betty’s letters is almost always angry or silent or otherwise menacing. “Had a fight with Dad at brfst,” she writes. “Dad didn’t say a word—as usual.” “Dad was very angry because of my picture in the paper.” He disapproved of her career as a journalist. He disapproved of Grandpa Hank. He disapproved of her moving to California. And he wasn’t shy about making his opinions known.
Near the end of his life, Grandma Betty reflected on his weakened state and the long, difficult story of their relationship:
As I look at him now and remember all the meanness he has performed upon others in his life—my mother and my friends for example—there is the temptation to insert a little meanness of my own. But this would really accomplish nothing.
So he was an asshole, this Neil Larsen. But was he a Nazi?
A successful small business owner and member of the Republican party “in good standing,” Neil Larsen was, according to his death announcement, a Rotarian, a Mason, and an Elk, a director of the Heather Downs Country Club and founder of the Maumee River Yacht Club. A member of the Toledo Chamber of Commerce, the Toledo Small Business Association, the Toledo Health Board, the Toledo Municipal League, the American Society of Heating and Air Conditioning Engineers, the Toledo Association of Plumbing and Heating Contractors, and the South Toledo Branch of the YMCA, he was a Grand Mason (St. Omer Commandery #59), a Royal Arch Mason (Toledo Chapter #161), and a Zenobia Shriner.
An obituary published in the local Rotary newsletter lists all of these memberships and many more. A deep search on Ancestry.com revealed his membership in the semi-official American Protective League, a loose collection of vigilante “operatives” who seem to have spent much of their energy spying on suspect German Americans and harassing socialists during World War I. But in all my research, in the many weeks I spent going through Grandma Betty’s papers and scouring the internet for clues, there’s one organization I couldn’t find membership records for, a piece of the puzzle that would explain those Nazi medals while answering a whole lot of other questions at the same time.
In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was re-formed by an Atlanta doctor, failed entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed preacher by the name of William Joseph Simmons. Breaking with the organization’s secretive terrorist roots, this new iteration of the KKK (often called the Second Klan) advertised its gatherings, published newspapers, and even held exhibition baseball games. It was a “vast social, political and folk movement” fueled by racism and white supremacy.
Railing against the “degenerative” forces that threatened the “American way of life”—Black people and Jews, Catholics, immigrants, bootleggers, and so on—the Second Klan found especially fertile ground in the Midwest. In 1924, Klan-backed candidates (who often ran as Republicans) won every major Ohio election except for one. The headline in The New York Times proclaimed “Klan Candidates Swept Ohio Cities.” This was no surprise, according to the article: “In proportion to population, Indiana is the star State of Klandom, but numerically Ohio is probably in the lead with Indiana in second and Texas in third place.”
At the height of its influence, in the mid-1920s, the Klan had somewhere between four and six million members. Although membership varied from city to city, Klansmen were typically well-regarded members of middle-class Protestant society. (Imagine a 1920s version of the tiki-torch-wielding, Dockers-clad young men who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.) According to secret member rolls seized by state police, and later analyzed by archivist Timothy Rives, the three most common occupations among Kansas City Klansmen were small business owner, clerk, and railroad engineer. In many places, the Klan recruited directly from “patriotic” organizations like the Knights of Liberty and Larsen’s American Protective League.
Toledo had four local KKK chapters (or klaverns), all founded in the mid-to-late 1920s. There were two “Lucas County” chapters, along with the Commodore Perry Klan and the Fort Meigs Klan. One wouldn’t want to read too much into such a small detail. But, given that Neil Larsen fits the profile of a Klansman in pretty much every other way, it’s hard not to imagine him and his buddies at the Maumee River Yacht Club wanting to name their local klavern after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the War of 1812 naval hero who valiantly fought off the British just a few miles downriver at Fort Meigs—the name of the other Toledo klavern and of the local Royal Arch Masons lodge.
You could go on like this forever, reading into tiny historical details, imagining Neil and Nettie Larsen in various reprehensible circumstances. You could read through Klan newspapers and Henry Ford’s Nazi-sympathizing Dearborn Independent. (In 1938, Ford himself was given a Nazi medal, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.) You could spend hours looking through the book of “friends who called” at Neil Larsen’s memorial service, trying to match one of the signatures to that of a known Klansman or German American Bund member. You could call up the Lucas County Recorder’s Office trying to track down court papers. You could spend weeks lost down these and similar rabbit holes without ever finding the answer. Because every archive has its limits.
Scattered throughout Grandma Betty’s papers, there are hints and allusions to other untold stories: her adoptive parents’ disapproval of Grandpa Hank (and his subsequent change of last name, from Lukasik to Lukas), an unspecified run-in that Neil had with the law in 1908, a conflict over the sale of N. S. Larsen Plumbing and Heating, the months-long trip Nettie took to Buffalo soon after she and Neil started courting. No doubt there are many more stories I missed entirely, stories too shameful to record or even admit to oneself.
I’d like to know what happened to Nettie’s letters, what secret organizations—if any—Neil was a member of, how he or Nettie or whoever it was acquired those medals, what they thought when they picked them up and weighed them in their palms.
I don’t think I’ll ever know the story behind those medals, whether Neil was a KKK member or a Nazi sympathizer or just a World War II history buff. And that’s okay. I know what it means to carry the absence of a story inside you. Decades of Grandma Guta and Grandpa Abe’s silence taught me how to live with the uncertainty of the untold, how to make from it a meaning of my own.
In the past few years of searching and wondering about those medals, I’ve often been tempted to disavow Neil Larsen. He wasn’t blood, after all. Why spend so much time thinking about him? Wouldn’t it be easier to just sluff him off, to reimagine my family history without him? In a way, that’s what Grandma Betty herself started doing toward the end of her life, emphasizing the importance of her biological father while playing down the influence of the father she would rather forget.
Every time this temptation arises, I recall the now mythic, possibly apocryphal exchange that took place at my wedding between Grandma Betty and Grandma Esther (my stepdad’s mother, who I met when I was four and who was as much a grandparent to me as anyone). The story has been recounted to me numerous times by numerous different family members. Toward the end of the night, Grandma Esther was standing back from the festivities, watching with the tender and perhaps bittersweet remove of a woman who was married at the age of sixteen to an American GI she had just met. Perhaps she was thinking about the long, and at times difficult, arc of her own marriage. Maybe she was remembering the farmhouse where she lived with her younger siblings while London was mercilessly bombed. At this moment, Grandma Betty came up beside her and delivered the immortal line, so full of her own longing and loss:
“You know I’m the real grandmother, right?”
To me this story is a reminder not to fall into the trap of biological determinism, a reminder of how much my step-parents and step-grandparents have shaped me, how empty my life would be without my half siblings (the only siblings I have, the only siblings I could ever want). It’s a reminder of the family I’ve chosen, the thinkers and writers and friends whose stories live inside me, alongside the stories my family told and the stories they kept to themselves. The story of Grandpa Tom riding boxcars down Dolores Street, of Grandpa Hank showing up on the first day of basic training at Camp Maxey, of Grandma Guta saying goodbye to her family before stealing off into that horrible night, of Grandpa Abe walking across Siberia after burying his mother in the still-frozen earth. Whether I like it or not, those Nazi medals are right there too.
Michael David Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 2018, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the French Cercle de l’Union Interalliée (best foreign novel prize).
