Homes, Schooled

By ELIZABETH ROSNER

THE MISTRESSES'S DAUGHTER
By A. M. Homes
238 pages. Viking Adult. $24.95.

Many children, at some point or another, imagine themselves, even briefly, to have been “switched at birth,” given to be raised by the wrong family. Somewhere, their “real” parents are living in a fabulous castle, blissfully ignorant or perhaps tragically mournful, about the fate of their lost offspring. Somewhere, the Other Life That Might Have Been hovers just out of reach.

No doubt, adopted children experience this fantasy more fully than the rest of us, wrestling with what may be unanswerable questions about their biological origins and their inherited identity. A. M. Homes, in her memoir The Mistress’s Daughter, explores at great length what she calls “the difference or dissonance between the unknown or dormant biological self that I arrived with and the adopted, adapted self I became.”

Reading her book, I found myself pondering my own family mysteries, and yet wondering at what point we each make peace with who we are. What compels us to keep searching for clues to our “true” selves, DNA and destiny, nature and nurture? Am I the person made by my parents, my ancestors, my “people”? Do I make myself up along the way?

When I learned that my parents had met in Sweden as refugees after World War II, and had married in Israel before coming to America, immediately I began to wonder who I would have turned out to be if they had stayed in Sweden, or in Israel, or even if they’d remained in New Jersey, where they first settled, instead of New York, where my siblings and I were born.

Bigger questions loomed too: What if they had met and married other partners? What if my mother had lived out her days in Poland? What if my father had never left Germany? What version of me might exist in those alternate universes?

Homes, raised from birth by a couple who, a mere six months earlier, had lost a newborn, is contacted at the age of 31 by her birth mother. She begins to play a game of cat and mouse with her unstable mother, and, eventually, with her manipulative father, trading roles with each. Pursued by the mother, half-heartedly wooed and rejected by the father, she eventually becomes obsessed with a genealogical odyssey, until she’s researching not only the lineage of her biological parents but her adoptive parents too, gathering pieces of her identity by way of blood tests, documents, and photographs. She is part-Jewish and part-DAR, the product of abandonment and reclamation, a mosaic of lost and found. At one point, when she realizes that collecting has become a purpose of its own, she senses that even for those unrelated to her, “the stories won’t be forgotten.”

How many times have I felt the same way about the Holocaust victims who didn’t survive, the millions of names and faces on the faux-passports given to visitors at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum? Even in our imperfect attempts to reconstruct the past, we honor the dead. Thus, for Homes, the point is no longer “the technicality of biological relation” but her appreciation for the resilience and fortitude of all immigrants, the fragments of broken and stubbornly reinvented lives.

How do we discover who we are? As the daughter of two Holocaust survivors myself, I know all too well the anxious longing for the so-called truth, the story with every piece reassembled. From Moses to Madeline Albright, from that baby in a reed basket on the Nile to a belated self-discovery by way of the Washington Post, we recognize the archetype of a hidden identity unveiled at long last. Secrets and lies. Reconciliation and repair. Can there ever be enough digging to restore a narrative to anything finally whole?

It’s a familiar tale for almost all of us wandering Jews, especially when we consider the crypto-Jews dating to the Inquisition and onward, the hidden children of the Holocaust. Add here the ones who pretended to convert, and the Kindertransports, and the ones who changed their names, their noses.

Homes herself admits that even as she pursues the knowing in hope of becoming more complete, the very opposite outcome may result. Sometimes learning more ends up feeling like knowing less. I was always the one who asked questions, doggedly persistent to find out who and where, when, how, and why. And yet, like many other descendants of Holocaust survivors, I’ve found that the details are elusive; no sooner have I gathered them into something resembling a whole, than they dissolve between my fingers, disappearing like slippery fish. I ask the questions again, I write down the answers, and I forget each time.

Homes reminds me that the goal itself may be the problem: “the family narrative: we accept it as fact, not recognizing that it is a story, a multilayered collaborative fiction.”

Ultimately, I find along with Homes that self-recognition is all we can engage in with any hope of satisfaction. As writers, we define ourselves in pursuit of what’s missing, writing not what we already know but what we want to know. That path leads us under surfaces, behind closed doors, around obscuring veils of half-truths. Adopted or not, illegitimate or not, perhaps each of us faces the same lifelong dilemma, where the only true home can be found inside ourselves. Homes has the last word about this inescapable paradox: “Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.”