March 19, 2020 • 46 mins
Growing up, Adam Frankel idolized his father and his father’s father, eventually following in their footsteps to become a successful speechwriter for politicians like John Kerry and Barack Obama. But at the age of 25, Adam discovered a truth that caused him to question everything—including his place in the lineage he’d molded his life around.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio throughout
my childhood. A pair of framed family trees hung on
an upstairs wall in Grandman Pause colonial style home, white
with black shutters, in the wealthy, largely Jewish suburb of Scarsdale,
a short commute from New York City. I'd go up
to them as a boy and stare at the rows
(00:22):
of generations spanning the two sheets of beige paper, feeling
a sense of pride. This is where I come from.
I think, this is who I am. That's Adam Frankel
reading from his first book, a memoir called The Survivors,
a story of war, inheritance, and healing full disclosure. I
(00:42):
met Adam because I sat next to a cousin of
his after I gave the keynote lecture at my alma mater.
After Adam's cousin heard what my memoir Inheritance is about,
she told me about her cousin, Adam, who had a
similar story, though our details are very different. When I
met Adam, I felt a powerful sense of connection. This
(01:04):
is a story of paternity, love, and belonging. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(01:25):
secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up on the
Upper west Side of New York. You know, it's a
pretty privileged upbringing, and for a long time when I
thought about it, I thought about it in that sort
of happy, privileged way. I grew up on pre war
building in the corner of West End. I went to
(01:47):
Trinity School in Old New York City, private school. I
was bar Mits footed ben a Jesserin on the Upper
west Side, sort of a liberal, progressive Jewish bastion on
the Upper west Side. If you'd asked me when I
was a kid, when I was a teenager, how is
your childhood? I would have just said I had a
great childhood, you know. It was just so I was
so lucky, fortunate, loved by my mom and dad, my grandparents,
(02:11):
and I still feel that way in many respects, even
though everything I've learned later sort of cast it in
a different light. So your parents separated when you were
four before several years later. Interesting that you would characterize
your childhood is happy even with that's a pretty traumatic
thing to kid, is you know, I think, uh, it
(02:35):
really wasn't until relatively recently, until I started revisiting my childhood,
that I realized there were these painful periods, and there
was much going on that I was absorbing but wasn't
fully dialed into, and my parents divorced. For a long
time I didn't think about Now, when I think about it,
(02:55):
it pains me to think about myself as a little kid.
At times, I think about fragments of memories of my
parents fighting, doors slamming, But I tried to block that
out as a kid, And I'm quite sure. I mean
I'm certain because I remember people asking me, how is it,
you know, not frequently, but you know, occasionally coming up
and me sort of referencing a very happy childhood as
(03:17):
if none of that had ever happened. So describe your
mom for me. My mother is, let's complicated. Um, she's
an extraordinary human being. She is warm and loving and
passionate and artistic and incredibly intelligent, deeply concerned with the world,
(03:42):
the arts. And she's also struggled with mental health issues
all her life. Um, you know, she's battle depression all
her life. Before I was born, she attempted suicide, was
hospitalized for a couple of weeks for it. Um. She
overdosed on pills, and she told me she would have
died if a friend hadn't come across her in time
(04:03):
and rush her to the hospital. My dad is just
a prince of a man. He is genuinely and earnestly
interested in people and the world. He is a book
lover who you know, his great hobby and one of
the great passions of his life is waking up at
(04:24):
the crack of dawn in Westchester and going to some
far flung estate sale somewhere so he can scour the
used books that are um you know, that are being sold,
hoping that he'll find something that is inappropriately priced. So
he's hoping he'll find a treasure that somebody didn't realize
was a treasure. This is his great passion, um and
(04:47):
growing up he you know, he was just as supportive
and loving a dad as you'd want. I mean, as
whenever I was interested in something, he would just feed
those interests regardless I was interested in they spall and
old timers like Shoelace, Joe Jackson. He'd take me to
the New York Historical Society and we look up newspapers
of the ninety nine White Sox. I was interested in
(05:10):
Custer's Last Stand, and we'd go, you know, look, go
to the library and get take out books on it,
and uh and whatever I was interested in. He he
would just feed those interests in every way he knew
how um and his family. So he's one of one
of three children my grandparents, who I always called Grandma Pa.
(05:30):
On that side, we're a big part of my childhood.
My Paw I was incredibly close to, and and my
grandma too, and my my grandma lived into her nineties.
Um My, my pap passed away when I was in college.
And he was just in a incredibly warm and also
deeply committed public servant, not in a formal sense. He
(05:53):
never served for any length of time and government He
had sort of appointments here and there, but he was
a part time speechwriter for at least Stevenson and Hubert
Humphrey and George McGovern and um, all of these sorts
of great progressive champions in the mid century. And so
I grew up wanting to be like Pa. You, at
(06:16):
one point in your book, describe a difference in the
way that you're connected to your dad's side of the
family and your mom's Can you talk a little bit
about about your Roseta And yeah, so my mom's family
are Holocaust survivor. So my mom is one of four children. UM.
(06:37):
Her parents what I always called Bobby and Zeta, we're
Holocaust survivors. Zeida was a prisoner a number of different camps,
including dot Cow. My bubby spent much of the war
in the woods of Eastern Europe with the Partisans and
the Jewish resistance. UM. And they were just a force
(06:59):
in my child pod. Zaida passed away only a couple
of years ago. UM, still going to his watch repair
shop in New Haven practically till the day he died.
Um Uh. And family gatherings when I was young, Uh,
you know the whole cause Ada and his and his
two sisters survived the war. Actually his father did too,
(07:19):
but his father passed away decades ago now. But when
I was growing up, he and his sibling, that the
survivor generation and their spouses and their families. We have
these sprawling Russia shawna um, young kid poor. Every Jewish
holiday we'd all get together, pass over sprawling affairs. And
that family was just a force. You know. They were
(07:42):
immigrants they were scrappy. But also I don't know, I
mean thick Yiddish accent, never had an education. I mean Zaida,
but Bubby got her g e d. In the nineteen seventies,
went back because she was never given the chance to
graduate from high school because of the war. And Zaida.
I don't even know the last grade Zaida had. Maybe
(08:03):
you know, um it's a middle equivalent in middle school.
But one of the smartest people I've ever met in
my life in terms of raw intelligence. But thinking about
them growing up versus my dad's side, you know, who
had gone to Northwestern and worked for these presidential candidates. Uh,
it was just a very There were two examples and
(08:24):
two very different ways of being, ways of living, experiences, opportunities.
Particularly on Adam's mother's side of the family, there was
the sense that a lot was unsaid, hidden away. There
was just stuff you simply didn't talk about. Secrets are
a family tradition, without a doubt, there have been secrets
(08:45):
in my family as long as I can remember being
a part of my parentsman family, I have remembered there
being secrets. Did you know that as a child, or
sense it that there were things that you didn't know.
Every family gathering on the on that side of the
family was sort of an exercise in an experience of
(09:06):
things said and unsaid, family members talking in English, suddenly
switching to Yiddish when they didn't want the kids to
know something. You know, somebody mentioning something that happened in
the war, somebody asked a question. Conversation ends. There was
also a very big secret which I got glimpses of.
Um I hear people talk about, but in that same
(09:27):
vein which shut off the conversation as soon as I
asked too many questions. Which was my family name itself.
Adam's middle name is Parrotsman, his bubby and Zaida's last
name his mother's name. That was the name they came
to this country with the name of the watch repair
shop that his Zaida ran for decades in New Haven,
Parrotsman Jewelers, it was called. It was the name on
(09:50):
all his government identification and it wasn't the name Zada
was born with. It was a name he either bought
or stole in a displaced since camp in Germany after
the war, under circumstances he was shady about. And then
there was a matter of a cousin who needed surgery
and was taken to Israel so no one would know
she was sick, or the cousin who was never told
(10:12):
she was color blind. You know, I think secrets are
a part of every family, but there is something kind
of very pronounced about the way in which polycaust survivor
families sort of tend to their secrets. So you grew
up on the Upper West Side, you go to Trinity,
(10:33):
you have this quote unquote charmed life, you know, through
high school, and you go to college and you're aspiring
to our emulating the Frankel side of your family. You
graduate from college and go into politics. Yeah, like the
generations before you. Yea, at some point in your twenties,
(10:54):
tell me when you're living in New York City. Yeah,
I was, you know Junior. He tried on the Carry campaign,
and after Carry lost, you know, for um, I moved
back to New York City and was staying with my
mother at the time. You know, I was helping Ted Sorenson,
was President Kennedy's speechwriter and close advisor on his memoirs,
and I was sort of living at home while I
(11:15):
was doing that, spending more time with my mother than
I had since high school since I love for college.
And at some point while I was there, I just
started asking questions about family history. And it was totally innocuous.
I didn't have sort of deep suspicious I mean, looking back,
there are dots I didn't connect, there are these sorts
of things, but I didn't have any sort of burning
(11:37):
questions or suspicions. I just wanted to ask some family history.
And why did you and dad get divorced? I asked
my mom and she said, you know, why do you
want to know the answer to that? You know that
that sort of thing. I kept pushing and pushing, and
you know, ultimately she says, well, I never really wanted
to marry your father. Again, not really an answer to
the question. And so this sort of thing I kind
(12:01):
of probe and I get these answers that didn't. I
go to my father and I said, why do you
and mom get divorced? And he said, oh, your mom
had an affair with Jason, and I sort of that
was just a bombshell to me because Jason, a man
in the book I called Jason Black, was a presence
in my life growing up. He was a quote unquote
(12:22):
family friend, I'd known him all my life. He was
one of my mother's professors in grad school. I'd stayed
with his daughter in Los Angeles at the two thousand
convention Democratic National Convention. I stayed with Jason's mother in
Los Angeles when I had a tiny part in Robin
Williams movie called Toys. You know, when I was in
(12:42):
middle school. My immediate question my dad was, how do
you know him? Your son? And he said, oh, I
remember the night of conception, didn't didn't miss a beat.
I said, oh, that's well, kind of interesting, all right,
but okay, you know, you seem very confident about that.
And I go back to my mother. Dad said, you
had an affair with Jason. And the whole thing quickly
(13:04):
started to unravel. And I asked, you know, did it
begin after I was born? No, okay, And I'm sort
of remember sitting with her in her apartment, apartment i'd
grown up and grown up in sort of having this
conversation and feeling, you know, like you're getting closer to
just a crazy revelation. But I had no idea, you know,
(13:27):
going into this. I thought I was going to get
the same reassurance that my dad had given me. You know,
my dad had been almost dismissive of my question. Yes,
of course you're my son. I remember the night of conception,
which what everyone thinks about that answer, like he he
seemed very confident delivering that, and I sort of just assumed,
I don't. It didn't even dawn on me that my
mom might actually not give an answer that was this reassuring.
(13:49):
But I just kept pushing and I was, you know,
I was asking her, how do you know, um, dad's
you know, my my father, Like, who's who's my father?
I kept asking this question, who's my father? And at
one point she says, you know, Um, first she was like,
why do you need to know that? You know, she says,
Stephen is the man who raised you. Why do you
need anything more than that? And then I, you know,
(14:15):
that was I think. I think that was the answer
that just kind of blew me over because I realized
at that point, Holy Ship, this conversation is just going
in a direction I never could have possibly anticipated, and
she just she kept refusing to answer the question I got.
I started getting very upset or and and finally sort
of kept demanding, like, who's my who's my Father's my father?
(14:35):
And she said, Jason, who do you think it is?
I should you know? Who do you think? So? I
don't know for sure this and that, who do you
think it is? I kept insisting, you know, I remember, um,
mother is a sense who do you think it is?
Even if you never did a DNA, because I could
get the sense she was hiding behind this kind of
veneer of the lack of certainty, medical certainty or something.
So who do you think it is? Jason? Okay? That
(14:57):
answer just um totally floored me. And I remember looking
looking down at my hand. I mean, it's still recent enough.
I mean that conversation was in two thousand six, but
the impact of it lasted so many years after and
still still lasts that I can I sort of remember,
I can put myself in a frame of mind of
what that did to me, And I just sort of
(15:19):
had this experience then, as I had many times later
of just like looking at my hands, looking at my body,
looking in a mirror, and just feeling like, who is this?
What is this body that I'm inhabiting? This doesn't feel
like this is not it doesn't feel like my body anymore.
It feels like a stranger's body. Um, and I it
(15:40):
just totally upended my and shook my sense of identity,
my sense of self in ways that I had not
even faintly begun to grasp in that moment. I mean,
I don't think it took me many many years to
begin to process just how devastating a revelation that was,
and that in that moment I didn't even know how
(16:01):
to process it. And in that moment, you were how
old we'll be right back. The trauma expert Rachel Yehuda,
(16:22):
who Adam interviews years later for his book, describes trauma
as best understood as a water shed event that defines
your life and divides it into a before and after.
It strikes me that for Adam, this moment of realizing
that his beloved dad and his dad's family, whom he
emulated and so greatly admired, were not his biological family,
(16:46):
that he comes from someone and somewhere else entirely, that
he hasn't known the truth of himself all his life,
is precisely that traumatic watershed event, the divide, as Dr
Yehuda describes it, between before and after. I think it
sort of gave me permission in a way to acknowledge
(17:07):
the pain of what I'd experienced and to find a
way forward because I thought about trauma UM in many
other ways. First of all, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, right, nothing,
And it is true, there's no comparison to be made
between that and any other, you know, anyone any other
(17:27):
form of trauma apart from genocide or war and conflict.
And in a time where we have people going and
serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and overseas, that's trauma. You know,
when when I thought, when I think about trauma PTSD,
I think about that, I think about gun violence, all
of these sorts of things, and I was very reluctant
(17:48):
to think about this as a trauma. For that reason,
I didn't want to, would never and still would never
try and compare. It's not about comparing any of these things.
It's about just acknowledging that there are different forms of trauma. Uh.
And I was wary to do that. It almost felt,
you know, indulgent self pity, I don't know something, um.
(18:09):
But when when Rachel said that to me, it did
it like it sort of lightened me up. And how
many years had elapsed between this before and after moment
was your mother and that conversation with Rachel's a decade.
A decade, right, it's a decade. So you absorb this
(18:29):
pretty unabsorbable information about yourself and then you continue on
with your life. You don't talk about it, You don't
tell your dad, and what do you do. Well, it's
like secrets in our family. You absorbed the secret and
you move on. You don't, you don't deal with it.
I mean, you know, it's that you don't ask. You know,
the family name is not the family name. Don't ask questions.
(18:50):
I don't tell anybody. You know. When I was a kid,
there was a story about my grandmother in the war,
was hiding in a bunker that they dug out behind
the house, and a baby was smother because the baby's
cries they feared might attract the Nazis who were sticking
their bayonets into the walls in the house while they
were in hiding. And so the baby's own mother my
you know, one of my great aunts smothered her own child.
(19:11):
I'd hear this question. You start to ask questions, don't
know questions, you know, don't don't ask any more about this.
You know, these sort of secrets, this is my frame
of reference for processing secrets, but those are other people's secrets, frankly.
And then this, so there's that layer of just sort
of when there's a secret, you don't kind of probe,
You just kind of absorb and move on. And then
there was the just the overwhelming intensity of this. I
(19:34):
didn't know what to do with it, and one of
my many reactions to it was fury at my mother.
Um so I more or less stopped talking to her.
She proceeded to have a very bad response to whether
it's to that and a combination of other things, you know,
But she called me up in a in a very
bad state, and I rush her along with my uncle,
(19:56):
and I rushed to a psychiatric emergency room because we
were fearful for that you might try to take her life.
I really just tried to bury this and move on.
Right around that same time, not you know, several months later,
I got a call from a friend of mine from
the Carry campaign, John Favreau, who had gone to work
for Barack Obama in the Senate after Carry lost and
(20:19):
fat we always called him Faves. Faves said, Hey, it
looks like I'm getting a deputy on the Obama campaign,
you want to join, you want to come move out
to Chicago. So I literally literally called me up while
I was leaving a therapist office with my mother because
she'd insists she pleaded with me to gum to see
a therapist with a or repair of relationship or literally
walking out and FABS calls me up and say, hey,
(20:40):
you know you want to move to Chicago, and I'm
thinking of at that time. This call could not be
better time to get me out of New York City.
I don't want to deal with this. First of all,
I'm inspired by Barack Obama. I want to be a
part of that, and also get me get me out
of here. I don't want to. I just need to
remove myself from this situation. And I moved to Chicago
go in March of two thousand seven, a few weeks
(21:02):
after Obama announced his candidacy, and I was with him
through the first term. And so for that entire time
in Chicago, I I just buried this and didn't deal
with it. I didn't tell anybody on the Obama campaign,
I mean, which is remarkable in retrospect, because I don't,
you know, presidential campaigns are incredibly intense and the speechwriting
(21:24):
team was very small. I mean, the whole campaign in
the early days was small, but speechwriting team. You know,
we all sat inches feet from each other for years, literally,
and even when we weren't at work, which was all
the time, we were hanging out together. And at no
time did I um breathe a word about any of
this to anybody, And I just kind of hope nobody
(21:45):
would catch on that. I you know, I didn't really
talk about my parents. They didn't come to visit like
other people's parents did. And what was it like for
you during that time? I mean, in your book you
write about running a lot, and you know you're you're mad,
like trying to manage your own identity crisis and anxiety.
To talk a little bit about that, Like you can
push something away, but ultimately the harder you push it away,
(22:10):
the more force with which it returns. Absolutely, and it
would there's no way to um deny hide pushed down
something like this. I mean, you can only succeed for
so long, but it's a race against time before it
starts popping up in all kinds of ways, and and
and it popped up in all kinds of ways over
that period of time. I mean, at one point, I remember,
(22:33):
I remember sitting in an airport bookstore just sort of crouching,
paralyzed with indecision and uncertainty about what book to buy.
I mean, I had these weird just anything I felt
um at times, like I just I didn't know what
I thought about anything like my like this had rattled
me and shaken me. It's such a profound way, this
(22:54):
revelation that I didn't know who I was or what
I thought about anything anymore. It's been hours online, you know,
at night, sometimes going through Facebook and googling Jason's family,
my half siblings, just staring at these photographs, and I'd
go for runs to try and make myself feel better,
(23:15):
and it would work for a short period of time,
but then all this stuff would start creeping back in
the anxiety. It was like it felt like a like
a like a chronic panic attack at times. So during
that time, you're you're in this kind of protracted panic attack.
What happens? How do how do you what's your next
step in terms of either facing this or finding some
(23:38):
way to continue to absorb it. You know, I don't
know that I would have had the courage to face
it had it not sort of smacked me over the head.
I mean, I think what what end up happening was
I started, um dating somebody who was now my wife, Stephanie.
We were dating for you know, a few months, and
I broke up with her, and I was just sort
(24:01):
of heartbroken after breaking up with her and sort of
puzzled and about why why I broken up with her
and going through all these kinds of emotions and stuff,
and tried to backtrack and called her up to try
and win her back, and as part of that conversation
(24:22):
with her, you know, said look, there's just like a
lot going on with me, okay. Um. So she she
had not known. She she didn't know. I didn't tell Steph.
It was really a secret that I just carried alone,
and I was just afraid to talk about it. I
felt like talking about it made it real, so I
kept it to myself. Um, And so I shared this
with Steph, and Steph very wisely suggested that I see
(24:46):
a therapist and start just trying to deal with some
of the stuff. And so I did, And that was
the sort of began the very early stages of me
just beginning to face it. Part of what Adam must face,
of course, is the fact that his biological father, Jason
Black family Friend, has been hiding in plain sight all
(25:09):
his life. He's spent time with Jason, spent time with
Jason's own children, his half siblings, spent time with Jason's mother,
in fact, his genetic grandmother. What was he supposed to
make of this and how was he supposed to metabolize it?
For a long long time, he worked to understand the
mechanisms of this secret, but not to share it, not
(25:32):
with his dad, not with Jason. In a sense, he
was now keeping the very secret that had been kept
from him. The idea of broaching the subject that my
father was unthinkable. When I at first had the conversation
with my mom, I said, does Dad know? And she
said no, it would, you know, break his heart or
destroy him or something like that. And I thought you
was right. So I was terrified of my dad finding out.
(25:56):
I every conversation with him that I had from when
I was in Chicago and d C. While he lived
in New York. You know, I felt like we're just
we're having these surface conversations. But I was trying to
make sure that somehow, in some way, you know, this
crazy secret didn't kind of spill out because he'd ask
a question, I'd give an answer, and somehow it would
(26:17):
lead to that. I was just terrified of the average
when I'd see him, the same thing I was. I
was just constantly worried about this and any interaction it
just felt with him and with my grandma, who was
still alive at the time, and who I'd have, you know,
regular Saturday check ins with my you know, eighties something
then I need something in your old grandmother. I just
felt like I was keeping a secret from them, this
(26:38):
horrible secret from them. I felt like complicit in this
whole thing. I just couldn't imagine. It was unthinkable to
me to to raise it with my dad, and so
I kept the secret from him for for almost a decade,
and reaching out to Jason only came about, you know,
many years after I just I learned the secret only
(27:00):
after I was married and we were thinking about having kids,
and I said, you know, look, I first of all,
I've gone through all this, this painful experience. Let's just
make sure it's not all for not that like I
haven't been that. My mom didn't give me the you
know what she thought was the truthful answer. But actually
wasn't that somehow I am my my dad's son, so
(27:21):
and also I want the medical history. So let's just
go sit down with him and let's get a paternity test.
So we did that. I reached out to him out
of the blue, well I thought it was out of
the bay. I sent him an emails there was along
the lines of, you know, this may seem like it's
coming out of the blue. I don't know whether my
mother is shared any of this with you, but you
know she disclosed a secret. And would you be willing
(27:41):
to have a paternity test for these reasons? And he
wrote back this just supremely confident reply of well, I'm
quite sure you'll have a positive result to the test,
so you should decide whether you want to live in
the safety of uncertainty rather than the burden of the
infinitive knowledge or something like that. Some like very kind
(28:03):
of abstract philosophical response, and you know whatever. So I
was like, yes, let's just get this attorney test done, um,
And we went to meet him, and stuff came with
me and he opened the door and I hadn't seen
him in years. I mean, I grew up, I know
what he looks like. Of course I grew up, grown
up um seeing him, but I hadn't seen him in many,
(28:24):
many years. And I also I hadn't seen him with
any of this context. So when the last time I'd
seen him, the thought of him as as my biological
father wasn't even anywhere in my consciousness. But when he
opened the door, both Steph and I were just sort
of stunned because I miss spinning image. And I mean
we we dressed similarly, we have similar mannerisms, our hair
(28:48):
was cut some, I mean it was uncanny um and
and we proceeded to go get a patorney test and
it came back positive. For a while after that initial
lunch with Jason and where we went and got the
paternity test done, we would have this regular contact, and
I felt I wanted to get to know him a
(29:09):
little bit in this context and sort of see, I
didn't know what I thought of him. I'd known him
kind of all my life in one way, but not
at all in another way, and I just sort of
wanted to figure out what I thought of this whole situation.
I mixed in with that, we're feelings of almost betrayal
against my dad that I was even sitting across the
table from this man um and so I carried that.
(29:30):
But I did want to get to know him a
little bit because I didn't know what I thought of him.
And they were, you know, a strange conversation. I mean,
on the one hand, we're having these we have these talks,
and almost all of them took place in the Carlisle
Hotel on the Upper East Side. I mean, it's like
that of some Woody Allen movie or something. And I'd
(29:50):
find myself laughing at his jokes from time time, feeling,
you know, I'd almost be seduced, and there is this
sense of kinship. It's it was unmistakable. And then he
would start revealing things to me about his perspective, how
he had seen my mom, how I came to be,
And at one point he said, you know you were
(30:13):
you were wanted, and I sort of took me aback,
and I, what do you mean wanted? Your planned pregnancy?
So I sort of took a beat because he was
married at the time, he had kids, my mom was
married to my dad. I said, okay, so I go
to my mother after that, and I say, Jason said,
I was wanted, and my mother says, well, I wouldn't
(30:33):
say it was my idea, okay. Um. So then I
go back to Jason with that information. I mean, this
was the whole process, was just sort of triangulating and
trying to piece this together because I would never get
the whole story from anybody. And I say to Jason
over the next lunch, I say, my mother said, I
was your idea. Why did you you know? Why why
(30:56):
did you want to have me? And he said to totally, nonchalantly, casually,
almost the idea of having a secret baby appeal to
my sense of mystery and the erotic mystery and the
erotic who speaks like that? And I just, I mean,
(31:18):
I don't even know. I still don't even know what
to say to that. My life and existence is pawn
in this man's intellectual like game. I don't know. Um.
And it's darker than that, because you know, he also
said to me, at one point, you know, I was
attracted to your mother because I was attracted broken women. Um.
(31:40):
He knew that she you know, she'd been hospitalized for
suicide attempt a couple of years before they met. And
later my mother shared with me in very painful and
personal terms the their relationship. While it ultimately transitioned into
something that she would describe as caring, I think began
(32:01):
in a very ugly way when she was when my
mother was his student. So I learned all of this stuff,
and I over time, you know, I did figure out
what I thought about him, and you know, it wasn't great. Ultimately,
I decided that the only way that I could move
(32:22):
forward with my life would be to talk to my dad.
So tell me about talking to your dad, and also
about what your fear was about talking to your dad.
For almost a decade, it was unthinkable to me to
talk to my dad about any of this. It wasn't
that I know my dad loves me. It wasn't that
(32:45):
I thought he would kind of pick up and leave
or something, or you know, be hateful or angry at
me or something. I never thought that. It was much
more subtle but very frightening to me, which was I
worried that he would just look at me a little differently,
and that nobody would even it would be totally indiscernible
(33:07):
to everyone except the two of us, that you wouldn't
know that it did mean something that I would know
that he would just it would be a glance, you know,
just be like a tone of voice or just something
change in any change. Honestly, any change that I could attribute,
I would attribute to that. Uh, you know, I was
terrified of that. And no matter, you know, even if
(33:29):
he would say it doesn't change a thing, but I
could send something in his voice had shifted or whatever.
That's what I was really terrified of. And therapists over
time would kind of broach the subject with me. I
think it was obvious to them earlier because I saw,
you know, a couple of therapists between living in d
C in New York, and they had raised this, and
I had it was clear to them earlier that much
(33:51):
much earlier than it was to me, that I might
need to do this, that I might need to talk
to my dad about it. And eventually I came around
to that. I mean, it was a very long time
before I felt open to that, but I realized that
this was just a blockage in my life, that it
was there's no way for me to move on with
(34:13):
my life, and that it will continue to haunt me
just kind of distract absorbed my whole emotional psychological being
with great consequence. I feared not just for me, but
like my wife, our family, my kids, my professional career, everything.
I mean, it's you know, it's so big. The spillover
(34:35):
effect is huge in a life. I took the train
up to Hastings and he picked me up at the
train station. Uh. And I mean I started tearing up
in the car, and he started to get really worried.
But I didn't want to get into it in the car,
So let's just get back to your house. And his wife,
my stepmom, Helen, had stepped out. I think she she
(34:57):
knew there was some kind of important conversation. UM, I
shouldn't know what, but she'd given us some space. So
we're talking, and uh, I kind of gove right in
and I said, um, you know a number of years ago,
you may remember that, um, my uncle and I Mendela
Um took my mom to the psychiatric emergency room. Yes,
(35:17):
he remembered that. I told him that at the time
and said, well, the reason um, that that we did that,
the reason that she'd had that kind of break is
that I basically stopped talking to her. I was furious
at her. And oh, okay, and the reason that I
was furious at her. Uh, And I had a trouble
(35:38):
kind of getting getting the words out, but I said,
you the reason I the reason I was so furious
at her was because she told me that I'm Jason
Black's biological son. And I'm bawling at this point. I
just hear him say uh huh. He's kind of processing
the information, and then I hear him say I know,
(36:01):
and I'm just I'm like, I'm sobbing. I'm listening to him,
but I'm just, you know, my tears are just pouring
down my face. Um, and I'm not I'm not even
sure I'm hearing him right, like what through the you know,
you know? And he's looking at me, nodding, and he's saying,
you know, yeah, I know, I know. He said, I've
(36:23):
always known it was possible, and I'm just I'm just staggered.
You know what you have I've always known as possible.
And then he says, and I made a decision a
long time ago. It doesn't matter either way. You're my son.
And then I gave him the biggest hug. But any
kids ever given their dad? And he said, well, now
(36:44):
at least I know not to come to you for
a blood transfusion. You know, I even now it's just
stagger's I mean, we I talked about it with my dad,
and it's just the other thing that I regret about
this whole saga is that I just didn't talk to
him straight out of the gate. I mean, it's just
what a what unnecessary, needless heartache I created for myself,
(37:10):
and just strains and other relationships because they manifested as
a result, because all this stuff was wound up because
I hadn't I hadn't talked to my dad about it,
because that was such an important piece of moving through this,
and he he suspected it all along, you know. Of
course he knew about the affair. He's the one who
told me about it. And I learned that the reason
(37:33):
that he had said to me UM that he remembered
the night of conception was because he and my mother
had stopped having a physical relationship by that point in
their marriage, with the exception of one night during the
summer of UM which in retrospect, my dad and I
(37:54):
think was probably an act of misdirection by Jason and
my mother too. UM so doubt as to who my
father was, and he said that he considered getting a
paternity test, but he decided, he decided he didn't need
the results at that point. You know that first, that
conversation just unlocked the whole thing for me, and I
(38:16):
finally felt liberated to talk to people about this, to
open up to myself about it, to talk to starting
with a small group but widening out friends, family, um.
Because it just hadn't felt right. I think part of
the reason I kept it such a secret was it
didn't feel right to tell anyone if my dad didn't know.
But once he knew, then there were different considerations of play.
(38:39):
When I learned the whole thing, there was a shadow
of biography that emerged, of dots that I hadn't known
exists to connect. But then my dad even saying, you know,
I'd considered a paternity test, It's sort of like, hey,
I mean, this is my life, Like, this is this
is my life, and all this information has been withheld
from me about my own life. This isn't anyone else's life,
(39:00):
Like I have a right to information about my life.
But like every story of a massive family secret, there
are layers and layers that unfold over time. What has
been hidden for so long doesn't just end with a
revelation tied up in a neat and tidy bow. Adam
had family members who didn't know about any of this
(39:21):
until just very recently. The imminent publication of his book
necessitated that he and his dad reach out, So his
dad called his sister, Nancy, Adam's aunt. She was very
empathetic and understanding, and then they hung up. She called
and Nancy called my dad back a few hours later
and shared with him a story. And the story was,
(39:46):
when I was very young, I must have been around
four or five or so, after coming back from a
family trip to Bermuda, where I go growing up, I'd
always go to Bermuda with my grandmom, Paw and my dad.
My pa was sitting with my aunt Nancy, and my
Pa said to Nancy, you know, it's possible Adam is
(40:09):
not Steve's son. But and this is very similar to
what my dad had said to me. He said, but
it doesn't matter one way or another. He's my grandson,
he's my other child, and I love him. He'll always
a dore him. And uh so you get that gift
from I got a gift from beyond the grave. I mean,
it was just extraordinary because I never thought I would
(40:32):
ever have an answer to the question of how they
would have responded. And then Pa. I mean, it's almost
as if PA did it deliberately, just planted a seed
without any conscious sense. I mean, you know, no, he
was a brilliant guy and the most empathetic, emotionally intelligent.
I mean, he was a way just an incredible human being.
(40:56):
And you know, a part of me does wonder whether
he just kind of left it there knowing that maybe
someday that piece of information might be useful in some way.
When my dad called and told me he shared that story,
I practically collapsed on the street in tears. Adam didn't
(41:20):
set out to write The Survivors to share his story
with the world. He initially started working on a book
about his four grandparents, Bubby and Zeta, his Grandma and Pa,
and their experiences, but as he wrote, he sensed that
it would be helpful to write about his own experience
as well. After all, whether you're a writer or not, expressive,
(41:43):
writing writing about feelings that are weighing on us helps.
It really does. It has physical benefits. There's ample and
very rigorous scientific research and evidence pointing to this. As
I started writing about it, it became overwhelmingly clear to
me that writing about this, you know, was essential to
(42:04):
my healing and being able to move on and just processing.
And I mean part of the part of what was
so difficult for me was that there was it was
like a jumble of information that I didn't know how
to disentangle the relationship with Jason, these crazy comments that
he's making to me about my mom and this information
my mom sharing my identity and my dad and how
(42:26):
does all this stuff fit together? Who am I? And
when it's just in your head? It was just where
in my head? It was like a jumble of information
that I didn't know how to make sense of that.
The process of writing it allows you to understand it,
or allowed me to understand it and tease out the
different threads see how they are connected um and ultimately
(42:46):
kind of repair my sense of self in the process.
The last section of the book is called Healing, and
you use as a quote, as sort of an epigraph
for that section an ancient Greek inscription on the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi and the phrases know thyself, What
(43:08):
does that now mean to you? In light of everything
that you've discovered and absorbed and processed, and is knowing
yourself what is ultimately healing. I think for me, knowing
myself has allowed me to pursue healing. I feel now
(43:30):
more grounded and sure of who I am than maybe
ever in my whole life. I think there was a
time before this revelation where I might have thought I was,
but it was, you know, on shaky ground. And then
there was a period after this revelation where I felt
the ground shaking, And now I can I know all that,
(43:53):
I have all this information, and it is who I am,
all of it, you know. And that was part of
my way through It was kind of accepting and recognizing that, Ah,
you know, I'm not just the product of the parts
of my family story that I want to be a
part of. A product of that, you know, the my
(44:13):
the heroic Holocaust survivors experience, or you know, my family
members and the Franklin and minnoside who were public servants
and and you know, contributed to the life of this country.
I was very proud of, and I'm very proud of.
I'm a product of all of that. I'm also a
product of some ugliness in the relationship between my mother
(44:38):
and Jason. I'm a product of the cruelty of mental
mental illness that my mother has struggled with for much
of her life. You know, I'm a product of all
of it, you know, good, bad, ugly, heroic, and some
of it, I don't know, shameful, some of it behavior
that that that it's hard for me to, at least
when I think about Jason forgive. But it's who I am.
(45:01):
And you know, I can't do anything about that now,
and I'm okay with that. That's that's fine, you know,
that's okay. It took me a long time to get
to this point, but here I am, and having that
recognition and understanding is actually, in a way that I
never could have foreseen, extraordinarily empowering. I'd like to thank
(45:32):
Adam Frankel for sharing his story. Adam is the author
of The Survivors, a story of war, inheritance, and healing.
You can find Adam on Twitter at A P. Frankel
Family Secrets is an iHeart Media production. Dylan Fagin is
the supervising producer and Julie Douglas and beth Anne Macaluso
are the executive producers. If you have a family secret
(45:55):
you'd like to share. You can get in touch with
us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI
Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
(46:27):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio throughout
my childhood. A pair of framed family trees hung on
an upstairs wall in Grandman Pause colonial style home, white
with black shutters, in the wealthy, largely Jewish suburb of Scarsdale,
a short commute from New York City. I'd go up
to them as a boy and stare at the rows
(00:22):
of generations spanning the two sheets of beige paper, feeling
a sense of pride. This is where I come from.
I think, this is who I am. That's Adam Frankel
reading from his first book, a memoir called The Survivors,
a story of war, inheritance, and healing full disclosure. I
(00:42):
met Adam because I sat next to a cousin of
his after I gave the keynote lecture at my alma mater.
After Adam's cousin heard what my memoir Inheritance is about,
she told me about her cousin, Adam, who had a
similar story, though our details are very different. When I
met Adam, I felt a powerful sense of connection. This
(01:04):
is a story of paternity, love, and belonging. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(01:25):
secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up on the
Upper west Side of New York. You know, it's a
pretty privileged upbringing, and for a long time when I
thought about it, I thought about it in that sort
of happy, privileged way. I grew up on pre war
building in the corner of West End. I went to
(01:47):
Trinity School in Old New York City, private school. I
was bar Mits footed ben a Jesserin on the Upper
west Side, sort of a liberal, progressive Jewish bastion on
the Upper west Side. If you'd asked me when I
was a kid, when I was a teenager, how is
your childhood? I would have just said I had a
great childhood, you know. It was just so I was
so lucky, fortunate, loved by my mom and dad, my grandparents,
(02:11):
and I still feel that way in many respects, even
though everything I've learned later sort of cast it in
a different light. So your parents separated when you were
four before several years later. Interesting that you would characterize
your childhood is happy even with that's a pretty traumatic
thing to kid, is you know, I think, uh, it
(02:35):
really wasn't until relatively recently, until I started revisiting my childhood,
that I realized there were these painful periods, and there
was much going on that I was absorbing but wasn't
fully dialed into, and my parents divorced. For a long
time I didn't think about Now, when I think about it,
(02:55):
it pains me to think about myself as a little kid.
At times, I think about fragments of memories of my
parents fighting, doors slamming, But I tried to block that
out as a kid, And I'm quite sure. I mean
I'm certain because I remember people asking me, how is it,
you know, not frequently, but you know, occasionally coming up
and me sort of referencing a very happy childhood as
(03:17):
if none of that had ever happened. So describe your
mom for me. My mother is, let's complicated. Um, she's
an extraordinary human being. She is warm and loving and
passionate and artistic and incredibly intelligent, deeply concerned with the world,
(03:42):
the arts. And she's also struggled with mental health issues
all her life. Um, you know, she's battle depression all
her life. Before I was born, she attempted suicide, was
hospitalized for a couple of weeks for it. Um. She
overdosed on pills, and she told me she would have
died if a friend hadn't come across her in time
(04:03):
and rush her to the hospital. My dad is just
a prince of a man. He is genuinely and earnestly
interested in people and the world. He is a book
lover who you know, his great hobby and one of
the great passions of his life is waking up at
(04:24):
the crack of dawn in Westchester and going to some
far flung estate sale somewhere so he can scour the
used books that are um you know, that are being sold,
hoping that he'll find something that is inappropriately priced. So
he's hoping he'll find a treasure that somebody didn't realize
was a treasure. This is his great passion, um and
(04:47):
growing up he you know, he was just as supportive
and loving a dad as you'd want. I mean, as
whenever I was interested in something, he would just feed
those interests regardless I was interested in they spall and
old timers like Shoelace, Joe Jackson. He'd take me to
the New York Historical Society and we look up newspapers
of the ninety nine White Sox. I was interested in
(05:10):
Custer's Last Stand, and we'd go, you know, look, go
to the library and get take out books on it,
and uh and whatever I was interested in. He he
would just feed those interests in every way he knew
how um and his family. So he's one of one
of three children my grandparents, who I always called Grandma Pa.
(05:30):
On that side, we're a big part of my childhood.
My Paw I was incredibly close to, and and my
grandma too, and my my grandma lived into her nineties.
Um My, my pap passed away when I was in college.
And he was just in a incredibly warm and also
deeply committed public servant, not in a formal sense. He
(05:53):
never served for any length of time and government He
had sort of appointments here and there, but he was
a part time speechwriter for at least Stevenson and Hubert
Humphrey and George McGovern and um, all of these sorts
of great progressive champions in the mid century. And so
I grew up wanting to be like Pa. You, at
(06:16):
one point in your book, describe a difference in the
way that you're connected to your dad's side of the
family and your mom's Can you talk a little bit
about about your Roseta And yeah, so my mom's family
are Holocaust survivor. So my mom is one of four children. UM.
(06:37):
Her parents what I always called Bobby and Zeta, we're
Holocaust survivors. Zeida was a prisoner a number of different camps,
including dot Cow. My bubby spent much of the war
in the woods of Eastern Europe with the Partisans and
the Jewish resistance. UM. And they were just a force
(06:59):
in my child pod. Zaida passed away only a couple
of years ago. UM, still going to his watch repair
shop in New Haven practically till the day he died.
Um Uh. And family gatherings when I was young, Uh,
you know the whole cause Ada and his and his
two sisters survived the war. Actually his father did too,
(07:19):
but his father passed away decades ago now. But when
I was growing up, he and his sibling, that the
survivor generation and their spouses and their families. We have
these sprawling Russia shawna um, young kid poor. Every Jewish
holiday we'd all get together, pass over sprawling affairs. And
that family was just a force. You know. They were
(07:42):
immigrants they were scrappy. But also I don't know, I
mean thick Yiddish accent, never had an education. I mean Zaida,
but Bubby got her g e d. In the nineteen seventies,
went back because she was never given the chance to
graduate from high school because of the war. And Zaida.
I don't even know the last grade Zaida had. Maybe
(08:03):
you know, um it's a middle equivalent in middle school.
But one of the smartest people I've ever met in
my life in terms of raw intelligence. But thinking about
them growing up versus my dad's side, you know, who
had gone to Northwestern and worked for these presidential candidates. Uh,
it was just a very There were two examples and
(08:24):
two very different ways of being, ways of living, experiences, opportunities.
Particularly on Adam's mother's side of the family, there was
the sense that a lot was unsaid, hidden away. There
was just stuff you simply didn't talk about. Secrets are
a family tradition, without a doubt, there have been secrets
(08:45):
in my family as long as I can remember being
a part of my parentsman family, I have remembered there
being secrets. Did you know that as a child, or
sense it that there were things that you didn't know.
Every family gathering on the on that side of the
family was sort of an exercise in an experience of
(09:06):
things said and unsaid, family members talking in English, suddenly
switching to Yiddish when they didn't want the kids to
know something. You know, somebody mentioning something that happened in
the war, somebody asked a question. Conversation ends. There was
also a very big secret which I got glimpses of.
Um I hear people talk about, but in that same
(09:27):
vein which shut off the conversation as soon as I
asked too many questions. Which was my family name itself.
Adam's middle name is Parrotsman, his bubby and Zaida's last
name his mother's name. That was the name they came
to this country with the name of the watch repair
shop that his Zaida ran for decades in New Haven,
Parrotsman Jewelers, it was called. It was the name on
(09:50):
all his government identification and it wasn't the name Zada
was born with. It was a name he either bought
or stole in a displaced since camp in Germany after
the war, under circumstances he was shady about. And then
there was a matter of a cousin who needed surgery
and was taken to Israel so no one would know
she was sick, or the cousin who was never told
(10:12):
she was color blind. You know, I think secrets are
a part of every family, but there is something kind
of very pronounced about the way in which polycaust survivor
families sort of tend to their secrets. So you grew
up on the Upper West Side, you go to Trinity,
(10:33):
you have this quote unquote charmed life, you know, through
high school, and you go to college and you're aspiring
to our emulating the Frankel side of your family. You
graduate from college and go into politics. Yeah, like the
generations before you. Yea, at some point in your twenties,
(10:54):
tell me when you're living in New York City. Yeah,
I was, you know Junior. He tried on the Carry campaign,
and after Carry lost, you know, for um, I moved
back to New York City and was staying with my
mother at the time. You know, I was helping Ted Sorenson,
was President Kennedy's speechwriter and close advisor on his memoirs,
and I was sort of living at home while I
(11:15):
was doing that, spending more time with my mother than
I had since high school since I love for college.
And at some point while I was there, I just
started asking questions about family history. And it was totally innocuous.
I didn't have sort of deep suspicious I mean, looking back,
there are dots I didn't connect, there are these sorts
of things, but I didn't have any sort of burning
(11:37):
questions or suspicions. I just wanted to ask some family history.
And why did you and dad get divorced? I asked
my mom and she said, you know, why do you
want to know the answer to that? You know that
that sort of thing. I kept pushing and pushing, and
you know, ultimately she says, well, I never really wanted
to marry your father. Again, not really an answer to
the question. And so this sort of thing I kind
(12:01):
of probe and I get these answers that didn't. I
go to my father and I said, why do you
and mom get divorced? And he said, oh, your mom
had an affair with Jason, and I sort of that
was just a bombshell to me because Jason, a man
in the book I called Jason Black, was a presence
in my life growing up. He was a quote unquote
(12:22):
family friend, I'd known him all my life. He was
one of my mother's professors in grad school. I'd stayed
with his daughter in Los Angeles at the two thousand
convention Democratic National Convention. I stayed with Jason's mother in
Los Angeles when I had a tiny part in Robin
Williams movie called Toys. You know, when I was in
(12:42):
middle school. My immediate question my dad was, how do
you know him? Your son? And he said, oh, I
remember the night of conception, didn't didn't miss a beat.
I said, oh, that's well, kind of interesting, all right,
but okay, you know, you seem very confident about that.
And I go back to my mother. Dad said, you
had an affair with Jason. And the whole thing quickly
(13:04):
started to unravel. And I asked, you know, did it
begin after I was born? No, okay, And I'm sort
of remember sitting with her in her apartment, apartment i'd
grown up and grown up in sort of having this
conversation and feeling, you know, like you're getting closer to
just a crazy revelation. But I had no idea, you know,
(13:27):
going into this. I thought I was going to get
the same reassurance that my dad had given me. You know,
my dad had been almost dismissive of my question. Yes,
of course you're my son. I remember the night of conception,
which what everyone thinks about that answer, like he he
seemed very confident delivering that, and I sort of just assumed,
I don't. It didn't even dawn on me that my
mom might actually not give an answer that was this reassuring.
(13:49):
But I just kept pushing and I was, you know,
I was asking her, how do you know, um, dad's
you know, my my father, Like, who's who's my father?
I kept asking this question, who's my father? And at
one point she says, you know, Um, first she was like,
why do you need to know that? You know, she says,
Stephen is the man who raised you. Why do you
need anything more than that? And then I, you know,
(14:15):
that was I think. I think that was the answer
that just kind of blew me over because I realized
at that point, Holy Ship, this conversation is just going
in a direction I never could have possibly anticipated, and
she just she kept refusing to answer the question I got.
I started getting very upset or and and finally sort
of kept demanding, like, who's my who's my Father's my father?
(14:35):
And she said, Jason, who do you think it is?
I should you know? Who do you think? So? I
don't know for sure this and that, who do you
think it is? I kept insisting, you know, I remember, um,
mother is a sense who do you think it is?
Even if you never did a DNA, because I could
get the sense she was hiding behind this kind of
veneer of the lack of certainty, medical certainty or something.
So who do you think it is? Jason? Okay? That
(14:57):
answer just um totally floored me. And I remember looking
looking down at my hand. I mean, it's still recent enough.
I mean that conversation was in two thousand six, but
the impact of it lasted so many years after and
still still lasts that I can I sort of remember,
I can put myself in a frame of mind of
what that did to me, And I just sort of
(15:19):
had this experience then, as I had many times later
of just like looking at my hands, looking at my body,
looking in a mirror, and just feeling like, who is this?
What is this body that I'm inhabiting? This doesn't feel
like this is not it doesn't feel like my body anymore.
It feels like a stranger's body. Um, and I it
(15:40):
just totally upended my and shook my sense of identity,
my sense of self in ways that I had not
even faintly begun to grasp in that moment. I mean,
I don't think it took me many many years to
begin to process just how devastating a revelation that was,
and that in that moment I didn't even know how
(16:01):
to process it. And in that moment, you were how
old we'll be right back. The trauma expert Rachel Yehuda,
(16:22):
who Adam interviews years later for his book, describes trauma
as best understood as a water shed event that defines
your life and divides it into a before and after.
It strikes me that for Adam, this moment of realizing
that his beloved dad and his dad's family, whom he
emulated and so greatly admired, were not his biological family,
(16:46):
that he comes from someone and somewhere else entirely, that
he hasn't known the truth of himself all his life,
is precisely that traumatic watershed event, the divide, as Dr
Yehuda describes it, between before and after. I think it
sort of gave me permission in a way to acknowledge
(17:07):
the pain of what I'd experienced and to find a
way forward because I thought about trauma UM in many
other ways. First of all, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, right, nothing,
And it is true, there's no comparison to be made
between that and any other, you know, anyone any other
(17:27):
form of trauma apart from genocide or war and conflict.
And in a time where we have people going and
serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and overseas, that's trauma. You know,
when when I thought, when I think about trauma PTSD,
I think about that, I think about gun violence, all
of these sorts of things, and I was very reluctant
(17:48):
to think about this as a trauma. For that reason,
I didn't want to, would never and still would never
try and compare. It's not about comparing any of these things.
It's about just acknowledging that there are different forms of trauma. Uh.
And I was wary to do that. It almost felt,
you know, indulgent self pity, I don't know something, um.
(18:09):
But when when Rachel said that to me, it did
it like it sort of lightened me up. And how
many years had elapsed between this before and after moment
was your mother and that conversation with Rachel's a decade.
A decade, right, it's a decade. So you absorb this
(18:29):
pretty unabsorbable information about yourself and then you continue on
with your life. You don't talk about it, You don't
tell your dad, and what do you do. Well, it's
like secrets in our family. You absorbed the secret and
you move on. You don't, you don't deal with it.
I mean, you know, it's that you don't ask. You know,
the family name is not the family name. Don't ask questions.
(18:50):
I don't tell anybody. You know. When I was a kid,
there was a story about my grandmother in the war,
was hiding in a bunker that they dug out behind
the house, and a baby was smother because the baby's
cries they feared might attract the Nazis who were sticking
their bayonets into the walls in the house while they
were in hiding. And so the baby's own mother my
you know, one of my great aunts smothered her own child.
(19:11):
I'd hear this question. You start to ask questions, don't
know questions, you know, don't don't ask any more about this.
You know, these sort of secrets, this is my frame
of reference for processing secrets, but those are other people's secrets, frankly.
And then this, so there's that layer of just sort
of when there's a secret, you don't kind of probe,
You just kind of absorb and move on. And then
there was the just the overwhelming intensity of this. I
(19:34):
didn't know what to do with it, and one of
my many reactions to it was fury at my mother.
Um so I more or less stopped talking to her.
She proceeded to have a very bad response to whether
it's to that and a combination of other things, you know,
But she called me up in a in a very
bad state, and I rush her along with my uncle,
(19:56):
and I rushed to a psychiatric emergency room because we
were fearful for that you might try to take her life.
I really just tried to bury this and move on.
Right around that same time, not you know, several months later,
I got a call from a friend of mine from
the Carry campaign, John Favreau, who had gone to work
for Barack Obama in the Senate after Carry lost and
(20:19):
fat we always called him Faves. Faves said, Hey, it
looks like I'm getting a deputy on the Obama campaign,
you want to join, you want to come move out
to Chicago. So I literally literally called me up while
I was leaving a therapist office with my mother because
she'd insists she pleaded with me to gum to see
a therapist with a or repair of relationship or literally
walking out and FABS calls me up and say, hey,
(20:40):
you know you want to move to Chicago, and I'm
thinking of at that time. This call could not be
better time to get me out of New York City.
I don't want to deal with this. First of all,
I'm inspired by Barack Obama. I want to be a
part of that, and also get me get me out
of here. I don't want to. I just need to
remove myself from this situation. And I moved to Chicago
go in March of two thousand seven, a few weeks
(21:02):
after Obama announced his candidacy, and I was with him
through the first term. And so for that entire time
in Chicago, I I just buried this and didn't deal
with it. I didn't tell anybody on the Obama campaign,
I mean, which is remarkable in retrospect, because I don't,
you know, presidential campaigns are incredibly intense and the speechwriting
(21:24):
team was very small. I mean, the whole campaign in
the early days was small, but speechwriting team. You know,
we all sat inches feet from each other for years, literally,
and even when we weren't at work, which was all
the time, we were hanging out together. And at no
time did I um breathe a word about any of
this to anybody, And I just kind of hope nobody
(21:45):
would catch on that. I you know, I didn't really
talk about my parents. They didn't come to visit like
other people's parents did. And what was it like for
you during that time? I mean, in your book you
write about running a lot, and you know you're you're mad,
like trying to manage your own identity crisis and anxiety.
To talk a little bit about that, Like you can
push something away, but ultimately the harder you push it away,
(22:10):
the more force with which it returns. Absolutely, and it
would there's no way to um deny hide pushed down
something like this. I mean, you can only succeed for
so long, but it's a race against time before it
starts popping up in all kinds of ways, and and
and it popped up in all kinds of ways over
that period of time. I mean, at one point, I remember,
(22:33):
I remember sitting in an airport bookstore just sort of crouching,
paralyzed with indecision and uncertainty about what book to buy.
I mean, I had these weird just anything I felt
um at times, like I just I didn't know what
I thought about anything like my like this had rattled
me and shaken me. It's such a profound way, this
(22:54):
revelation that I didn't know who I was or what
I thought about anything anymore. It's been hours online, you know,
at night, sometimes going through Facebook and googling Jason's family,
my half siblings, just staring at these photographs, and I'd
go for runs to try and make myself feel better,
(23:15):
and it would work for a short period of time,
but then all this stuff would start creeping back in
the anxiety. It was like it felt like a like
a like a chronic panic attack at times. So during
that time, you're you're in this kind of protracted panic attack.
What happens? How do how do you what's your next
step in terms of either facing this or finding some
(23:38):
way to continue to absorb it. You know, I don't
know that I would have had the courage to face
it had it not sort of smacked me over the head.
I mean, I think what what end up happening was
I started, um dating somebody who was now my wife, Stephanie.
We were dating for you know, a few months, and
I broke up with her, and I was just sort
(24:01):
of heartbroken after breaking up with her and sort of
puzzled and about why why I broken up with her
and going through all these kinds of emotions and stuff,
and tried to backtrack and called her up to try
and win her back, and as part of that conversation
(24:22):
with her, you know, said look, there's just like a
lot going on with me, okay. Um. So she she
had not known. She she didn't know. I didn't tell Steph.
It was really a secret that I just carried alone,
and I was just afraid to talk about it. I
felt like talking about it made it real, so I
kept it to myself. Um, And so I shared this
with Steph, and Steph very wisely suggested that I see
(24:46):
a therapist and start just trying to deal with some
of the stuff. And so I did, And that was
the sort of began the very early stages of me
just beginning to face it. Part of what Adam must face,
of course, is the fact that his biological father, Jason
Black family Friend, has been hiding in plain sight all
(25:09):
his life. He's spent time with Jason, spent time with
Jason's own children, his half siblings, spent time with Jason's mother,
in fact, his genetic grandmother. What was he supposed to
make of this and how was he supposed to metabolize it?
For a long long time, he worked to understand the
mechanisms of this secret, but not to share it, not
(25:32):
with his dad, not with Jason. In a sense, he
was now keeping the very secret that had been kept
from him. The idea of broaching the subject that my
father was unthinkable. When I at first had the conversation
with my mom, I said, does Dad know? And she
said no, it would, you know, break his heart or
destroy him or something like that. And I thought you
was right. So I was terrified of my dad finding out.
(25:56):
I every conversation with him that I had from when
I was in Chicago and d C. While he lived
in New York. You know, I felt like we're just
we're having these surface conversations. But I was trying to
make sure that somehow, in some way, you know, this
crazy secret didn't kind of spill out because he'd ask
a question, I'd give an answer, and somehow it would
(26:17):
lead to that. I was just terrified of the average
when I'd see him, the same thing I was. I
was just constantly worried about this and any interaction it
just felt with him and with my grandma, who was
still alive at the time, and who I'd have, you know,
regular Saturday check ins with my you know, eighties something
then I need something in your old grandmother. I just
felt like I was keeping a secret from them, this
(26:38):
horrible secret from them. I felt like complicit in this
whole thing. I just couldn't imagine. It was unthinkable to
me to to raise it with my dad, and so
I kept the secret from him for for almost a decade,
and reaching out to Jason only came about, you know,
many years after I just I learned the secret only
(27:00):
after I was married and we were thinking about having kids,
and I said, you know, look, I first of all,
I've gone through all this, this painful experience. Let's just
make sure it's not all for not that like I
haven't been that. My mom didn't give me the you
know what she thought was the truthful answer. But actually
wasn't that somehow I am my my dad's son, so
(27:21):
and also I want the medical history. So let's just
go sit down with him and let's get a paternity test.
So we did that. I reached out to him out
of the blue, well I thought it was out of
the bay. I sent him an emails there was along
the lines of, you know, this may seem like it's
coming out of the blue. I don't know whether my
mother is shared any of this with you, but you
know she disclosed a secret. And would you be willing
(27:41):
to have a paternity test for these reasons? And he
wrote back this just supremely confident reply of well, I'm
quite sure you'll have a positive result to the test,
so you should decide whether you want to live in
the safety of uncertainty rather than the burden of the
infinitive knowledge or something like that. Some like very kind
(28:03):
of abstract philosophical response, and you know whatever. So I
was like, yes, let's just get this attorney test done, um,
And we went to meet him, and stuff came with
me and he opened the door and I hadn't seen
him in years. I mean, I grew up, I know
what he looks like. Of course I grew up, grown
up um seeing him, but I hadn't seen him in many,
(28:24):
many years. And I also I hadn't seen him with
any of this context. So when the last time I'd
seen him, the thought of him as as my biological
father wasn't even anywhere in my consciousness. But when he
opened the door, both Steph and I were just sort
of stunned because I miss spinning image. And I mean
we we dressed similarly, we have similar mannerisms, our hair
(28:48):
was cut some, I mean it was uncanny um and
and we proceeded to go get a patorney test and
it came back positive. For a while after that initial
lunch with Jason and where we went and got the
paternity test done, we would have this regular contact, and
I felt I wanted to get to know him a
(29:09):
little bit in this context and sort of see, I
didn't know what I thought of him. I'd known him
kind of all my life in one way, but not
at all in another way, and I just sort of
wanted to figure out what I thought of this whole situation.
I mixed in with that, we're feelings of almost betrayal
against my dad that I was even sitting across the
table from this man um and so I carried that.
(29:30):
But I did want to get to know him a
little bit because I didn't know what I thought of him.
And they were, you know, a strange conversation. I mean,
on the one hand, we're having these we have these talks,
and almost all of them took place in the Carlisle
Hotel on the Upper East Side. I mean, it's like
that of some Woody Allen movie or something. And I'd
(29:50):
find myself laughing at his jokes from time time, feeling,
you know, I'd almost be seduced, and there is this
sense of kinship. It's it was unmistakable. And then he
would start revealing things to me about his perspective, how
he had seen my mom, how I came to be,
And at one point he said, you know you were
(30:13):
you were wanted, and I sort of took me aback,
and I, what do you mean wanted? Your planned pregnancy?
So I sort of took a beat because he was
married at the time, he had kids, my mom was
married to my dad. I said, okay, so I go
to my mother after that, and I say, Jason said,
I was wanted, and my mother says, well, I wouldn't
(30:33):
say it was my idea, okay. Um. So then I
go back to Jason with that information. I mean, this
was the whole process, was just sort of triangulating and
trying to piece this together because I would never get
the whole story from anybody. And I say to Jason
over the next lunch, I say, my mother said, I
was your idea. Why did you you know? Why why
(30:56):
did you want to have me? And he said to totally, nonchalantly, casually,
almost the idea of having a secret baby appeal to
my sense of mystery and the erotic mystery and the
erotic who speaks like that? And I just, I mean,
(31:18):
I don't even know. I still don't even know what
to say to that. My life and existence is pawn
in this man's intellectual like game. I don't know. Um.
And it's darker than that, because you know, he also
said to me, at one point, you know, I was
attracted to your mother because I was attracted broken women. Um.
(31:40):
He knew that she you know, she'd been hospitalized for
suicide attempt a couple of years before they met. And
later my mother shared with me in very painful and
personal terms the their relationship. While it ultimately transitioned into
something that she would describe as caring, I think began
(32:01):
in a very ugly way when she was when my
mother was his student. So I learned all of this stuff,
and I over time, you know, I did figure out
what I thought about him, and you know, it wasn't great. Ultimately,
I decided that the only way that I could move
(32:22):
forward with my life would be to talk to my dad.
So tell me about talking to your dad, and also
about what your fear was about talking to your dad.
For almost a decade, it was unthinkable to me to
talk to my dad about any of this. It wasn't
that I know my dad loves me. It wasn't that
(32:45):
I thought he would kind of pick up and leave
or something, or you know, be hateful or angry at
me or something. I never thought that. It was much
more subtle but very frightening to me, which was I
worried that he would just look at me a little differently,
and that nobody would even it would be totally indiscernible
(33:07):
to everyone except the two of us, that you wouldn't
know that it did mean something that I would know
that he would just it would be a glance, you know,
just be like a tone of voice or just something
change in any change. Honestly, any change that I could attribute,
I would attribute to that. Uh, you know, I was
terrified of that. And no matter, you know, even if
(33:29):
he would say it doesn't change a thing, but I
could send something in his voice had shifted or whatever.
That's what I was really terrified of. And therapists over
time would kind of broach the subject with me. I
think it was obvious to them earlier because I saw,
you know, a couple of therapists between living in d
C in New York, and they had raised this, and
I had it was clear to them earlier that much
(33:51):
much earlier than it was to me, that I might
need to do this, that I might need to talk
to my dad about it. And eventually I came around
to that. I mean, it was a very long time
before I felt open to that, but I realized that
this was just a blockage in my life, that it
was there's no way for me to move on with
(34:13):
my life, and that it will continue to haunt me
just kind of distract absorbed my whole emotional psychological being
with great consequence. I feared not just for me, but
like my wife, our family, my kids, my professional career, everything.
I mean, it's you know, it's so big. The spillover
(34:35):
effect is huge in a life. I took the train
up to Hastings and he picked me up at the
train station. Uh. And I mean I started tearing up
in the car, and he started to get really worried.
But I didn't want to get into it in the car,
So let's just get back to your house. And his wife,
my stepmom, Helen, had stepped out. I think she she
(34:57):
knew there was some kind of important conversation. UM, I
shouldn't know what, but she'd given us some space. So
we're talking, and uh, I kind of gove right in
and I said, um, you know a number of years ago,
you may remember that, um, my uncle and I Mendela
Um took my mom to the psychiatric emergency room. Yes,
(35:17):
he remembered that. I told him that at the time
and said, well, the reason um, that that we did that,
the reason that she'd had that kind of break is
that I basically stopped talking to her. I was furious
at her. And oh, okay, and the reason that I
was furious at her. Uh, And I had a trouble
(35:38):
kind of getting getting the words out, but I said,
you the reason I the reason I was so furious
at her was because she told me that I'm Jason
Black's biological son. And I'm bawling at this point. I
just hear him say uh huh. He's kind of processing
the information, and then I hear him say I know,
(36:01):
and I'm just I'm like, I'm sobbing. I'm listening to him,
but I'm just, you know, my tears are just pouring
down my face. Um, and I'm not I'm not even
sure I'm hearing him right, like what through the you know,
you know? And he's looking at me, nodding, and he's saying,
you know, yeah, I know, I know. He said, I've
(36:23):
always known it was possible, and I'm just I'm just staggered.
You know what you have I've always known as possible.
And then he says, and I made a decision a
long time ago. It doesn't matter either way. You're my son.
And then I gave him the biggest hug. But any
kids ever given their dad? And he said, well, now
(36:44):
at least I know not to come to you for
a blood transfusion. You know, I even now it's just
stagger's I mean, we I talked about it with my dad,
and it's just the other thing that I regret about
this whole saga is that I just didn't talk to
him straight out of the gate. I mean, it's just
what a what unnecessary, needless heartache I created for myself,
(37:10):
and just strains and other relationships because they manifested as
a result, because all this stuff was wound up because
I hadn't I hadn't talked to my dad about it,
because that was such an important piece of moving through this,
and he he suspected it all along, you know. Of
course he knew about the affair. He's the one who
told me about it. And I learned that the reason
(37:33):
that he had said to me UM that he remembered
the night of conception was because he and my mother
had stopped having a physical relationship by that point in
their marriage, with the exception of one night during the
summer of UM which in retrospect, my dad and I
(37:54):
think was probably an act of misdirection by Jason and
my mother too. UM so doubt as to who my
father was, and he said that he considered getting a
paternity test, but he decided, he decided he didn't need
the results at that point. You know that first, that
conversation just unlocked the whole thing for me, and I
(38:16):
finally felt liberated to talk to people about this, to
open up to myself about it, to talk to starting
with a small group but widening out friends, family, um.
Because it just hadn't felt right. I think part of
the reason I kept it such a secret was it
didn't feel right to tell anyone if my dad didn't know.
But once he knew, then there were different considerations of play.
(38:39):
When I learned the whole thing, there was a shadow
of biography that emerged, of dots that I hadn't known
exists to connect. But then my dad even saying, you know,
I'd considered a paternity test, It's sort of like, hey,
I mean, this is my life, Like, this is this
is my life, and all this information has been withheld
from me about my own life. This isn't anyone else's life,
(39:00):
Like I have a right to information about my life.
But like every story of a massive family secret, there
are layers and layers that unfold over time. What has
been hidden for so long doesn't just end with a
revelation tied up in a neat and tidy bow. Adam
had family members who didn't know about any of this
(39:21):
until just very recently. The imminent publication of his book
necessitated that he and his dad reach out, So his
dad called his sister, Nancy, Adam's aunt. She was very
empathetic and understanding, and then they hung up. She called
and Nancy called my dad back a few hours later
and shared with him a story. And the story was,
(39:46):
when I was very young, I must have been around
four or five or so, after coming back from a
family trip to Bermuda, where I go growing up, I'd
always go to Bermuda with my grandmom, Paw and my dad.
My pa was sitting with my aunt Nancy, and my
Pa said to Nancy, you know, it's possible Adam is
(40:09):
not Steve's son. But and this is very similar to
what my dad had said to me. He said, but
it doesn't matter one way or another. He's my grandson,
he's my other child, and I love him. He'll always
a dore him. And uh so you get that gift
from I got a gift from beyond the grave. I mean,
it was just extraordinary because I never thought I would
(40:32):
ever have an answer to the question of how they
would have responded. And then Pa. I mean, it's almost
as if PA did it deliberately, just planted a seed
without any conscious sense. I mean, you know, no, he
was a brilliant guy and the most empathetic, emotionally intelligent.
I mean, he was a way just an incredible human being.
(40:56):
And you know, a part of me does wonder whether
he just kind of left it there knowing that maybe
someday that piece of information might be useful in some way.
When my dad called and told me he shared that story,
I practically collapsed on the street in tears. Adam didn't
(41:20):
set out to write The Survivors to share his story
with the world. He initially started working on a book
about his four grandparents, Bubby and Zeta, his Grandma and Pa,
and their experiences, but as he wrote, he sensed that
it would be helpful to write about his own experience
as well. After all, whether you're a writer or not, expressive,
(41:43):
writing writing about feelings that are weighing on us helps.
It really does. It has physical benefits. There's ample and
very rigorous scientific research and evidence pointing to this. As
I started writing about it, it became overwhelmingly clear to
me that writing about this, you know, was essential to
(42:04):
my healing and being able to move on and just processing.
And I mean part of the part of what was
so difficult for me was that there was it was
like a jumble of information that I didn't know how
to disentangle the relationship with Jason, these crazy comments that
he's making to me about my mom and this information
my mom sharing my identity and my dad and how
(42:26):
does all this stuff fit together? Who am I? And
when it's just in your head? It was just where
in my head? It was like a jumble of information
that I didn't know how to make sense of that.
The process of writing it allows you to understand it,
or allowed me to understand it and tease out the
different threads see how they are connected um and ultimately
(42:46):
kind of repair my sense of self in the process.
The last section of the book is called Healing, and
you use as a quote, as sort of an epigraph
for that section an ancient Greek inscription on the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi and the phrases know thyself, What
(43:08):
does that now mean to you? In light of everything
that you've discovered and absorbed and processed, and is knowing
yourself what is ultimately healing. I think for me, knowing
myself has allowed me to pursue healing. I feel now
(43:30):
more grounded and sure of who I am than maybe
ever in my whole life. I think there was a
time before this revelation where I might have thought I was,
but it was, you know, on shaky ground. And then
there was a period after this revelation where I felt
the ground shaking, And now I can I know all that,
(43:53):
I have all this information, and it is who I am,
all of it, you know. And that was part of
my way through It was kind of accepting and recognizing that, Ah,
you know, I'm not just the product of the parts
of my family story that I want to be a
part of. A product of that, you know, the my
(44:13):
the heroic Holocaust survivors experience, or you know, my family
members and the Franklin and minnoside who were public servants
and and you know, contributed to the life of this country.
I was very proud of, and I'm very proud of.
I'm a product of all of that. I'm also a
product of some ugliness in the relationship between my mother
(44:38):
and Jason. I'm a product of the cruelty of mental
mental illness that my mother has struggled with for much
of her life. You know, I'm a product of all
of it, you know, good, bad, ugly, heroic, and some
of it, I don't know, shameful, some of it behavior
that that that it's hard for me to, at least
when I think about Jason forgive. But it's who I am.
(45:01):
And you know, I can't do anything about that now,
and I'm okay with that. That's that's fine, you know,
that's okay. It took me a long time to get
to this point, but here I am, and having that
recognition and understanding is actually, in a way that I
never could have foreseen, extraordinarily empowering. I'd like to thank
(45:32):
Adam Frankel for sharing his story. Adam is the author
of The Survivors, a story of war, inheritance, and healing.
You can find Adam on Twitter at A P. Frankel
Family Secrets is an iHeart Media production. Dylan Fagin is
the supervising producer and Julie Douglas and beth Anne Macaluso
are the executive producers. If you have a family secret
(45:55):
you'd like to share. You can get in touch with
us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI
Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
(46:27):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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