Living the Dream of my Father: A Memoir

270 Pages·2014·4.43 MB·English

by  Sherrie Negrea

The College at Brockport: State University of New York

Digital Commons @Brockport

English Master’s Theses English

5-8-2001

Living the Dream of my Father: A Memoir

Sherrie Negrea

The College at Brockport

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Negrea, Sherrie, "Living the Dream of my Father: A Memoir" (2001). English Master’s Theses. 58.
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/eng_theses/58

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Living the Dream of My Father

A Memoir

by

Sherrie Negrea

A thesis submitted to the Department of English of the

State University of New York College at Brockport, in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

May 8, 2001
Living the Dream of My Father

A Memoir

by Sherrie Negrea

APPROVED BY:

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Chair, Graduate Committee

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Chair, Department ofEnglish
For myfather

Robert "Beno'' Negrea

and my mother

Marylin Esther Negrea
Table of Contents

Introduction......................................................................................i

Prologue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter One: Escape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter Two: A Match Made at Ostro's. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Chapter Three: When in Rome...............................................................41

Chapter Four: America, the Beautiful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..52

Chapter Five: Playing Possum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65

Chapter Six: Family Secrets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Chapter Seven: Of Pears, Guns and Falafel. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Chapter Eight: Beached Sandcrab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Chapter Nine: The Man I Couldn't Like. . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Chapter Ten: Exposing Pinky . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Chapter Eleven: Judeo-Irish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123

Chapter Twelve: Woman With(out) Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Chapter Thirteen: In God's Hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Chapter Fourteen: Israel, Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 172

Chapter Fifteen: Making a Choice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Chapter Sixteen: Waiting for Elvira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Chapter Seventeen: Ya Tvoya Mama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Chapter Eighteen: Our Landed Immigrant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 247
Abstract: This memoir is an account of the dream my father had for me and the way I

eventually came to embrace it after years of rebellion. My father was a Romanian

immigrant who lived through the Holocaust, a facet of his life that I never questioned

as a child. It was not until nearly twenty years after his death that I began a journey to

discover more about my father's past and what it meant to me.

As a child, I rejected my father's view of the role women should play in the

world-the 1950s version of the housewife who stayed at home rearing children. I was

determined to do something else with my life, and eventually I became a journalist. But

after finally marrying at the age of thirty-five, I found that my life seemed empty

without a family. Fulfilling my father's dream, though, became impossible as infertility

problems conspired against me. My desire to have a child finally led me back to my

father's corner of the world-Eastern Europe-to adopt a seventeen-month-old

orphan from Russia.

The memoir is divided into two sections. ''The Proud American" chronicles my

father's life in Romania, his escape from that country after the Communists took

control in 1944, his emigration to Canada and then America, and my childhood in

Florida. "Fulfilling the Dream" covers my career as a newspaper reporter, my struggle

with infertility, and my tortuous path toward adopting a child from an orphanage in

Moscow. With my return to Eastern Europe, the memoir traces how I finally

completed the circle my father began when he left Romania as a young man with no

money, education or family, but simply with the dream of a better life in America.
Introduction

Four years ago, I walked into my first creative writing class armed with a stack

of my best newspaper articles. While the other students arrived with personal essays, I

brought a story about a quadriplegic who had lived in a hospital for twenty years, a

story about a single mother who was struggling to survive in a drug-ravaged

neighborhood, and a story about empty nesters who had moved back to Rochester

after years of a dull existence in suburbia. This was a class on "creative nonfiction" and

I thought this sampling of my journalism would fit the bill.

But creative nonfiction, as I found out, turned out to be something entirely

different. My newspaper articles were well-crafted, the instructor said, but they were

missing an essential ingredient: me. As the class critiqued my article on the

quadriplegic, the instructor asked us to write an essay about meeting a disabled

person. How did I feel when I walked into that hospital room and met Bill White, the

man who became paralyzed after an accident in his high school gymnastics class? I

tried to put words down on paper, but the page remained stubbornly blank. After

fifteen years as a journalist, I had become so accustomed to writing about other people

that I couldn't write a single word about myself

The instructor suggested I write a personal essay, but I couldn't think of

anything to say. What did I have to write about? For one, I was in the middle of a

painful struggle with infertility, which would eventually lead my husband and me to

adopt a child from Russia. I had become disillusioned with my career as a newspaper
ii

reporter and was searching for something else to do. And I had an aching desire to

learn more about my father's experiences in Romania during the Holocaust, a subject

he had never discussed with me.

Looking back, I see that creative nonfiction workshop, as frustrating as it was

at the time, as the bridge between my journalism and this thesis, my memoir. The

novelist William Kennedy once said that it took him at least six years to make the

transition from journalism to fiction, when he finally concluded that novel writing went

beyond a mere 'lranscription of life." As Kennedy described it: ''What sets a good

fiction writer apart from the journalistic guppies is that he, or she, understands that the

truth comes up from below, that it develops from the perception of the significance of

experience and not from the experience itself' (38).

The same principles can apply to creative nonfiction. The most sacred rule of

journalism is to leave the writer out of the story because any opinion-or worse yet,

any invocation of the word /-can taint the reporter's objectivity. As I have made the

transition from journalism to creative writing during the past four years, I have forced

myself to step back and realize that what is important in creative nonfiction is, as Scott

Russell Sanders says, 'lhe first person singular''-the voice, the actions, and the

emotions of the narrator. For ''unlike scholars or journalists, who quote the opinions of

others and shelter behind the hedges of neutrality, the essayist," Sanders says, "has

nowhere to hide" (658).

This memoir grew out of three essays I wrote in my first ventures into the

murky waters of creative nonfiction. My life as a muckraking reporter in the small
iii

town of Geneva, New York, was the subject of my first essay. Following the maxim to

"write what you know,"I had naturally turned to journalism. But this overused bit of

writing advise ignores what Patricia Hampl calls "the real, the secret commandment"

of writing-to ''write about what matters"(/ Could 198).

What mattered more to me at the time was not journalism but something that

had become a major focus in my life-my inability to have a child. A short essay I

wrote about a miscarriage opened the floodgates for me to write about infertility, a

condition I had struggled with for five years. I had finally found a subject I could write

about from an emotional and experiential l�vel.

But there was also this nagging feeling that I had to write about my father-to

chronicle hi� past before it became lost forever. Uncovering my father's history in

Romania soon became an obsession, leading me to travel to Israel to interview his two

surviving sisters, to visit Holocaust museums and devour books by historians and

survivors. Yet along the way, I failed to see that what I was searching for was not my

father's story, but my own story. For two years, I had meticulously collected the facts

about his childhood in Romania, his forced servitude under the Fascist government and

his eventual escape from his homeland after the Communists took control. But I could

still not answer the question: What does it mean to me?

It was only after starting to write this memoir that I began to see the

connective threads weaving their way through my father's life and my own. My

father's deeply-felt patriotism, for example, had unconsciously led me to a career in

journalism, a profession where I could play a meaningful role in the democracy he so