October 10, 2019 • 33 mins
Growing up in suburban New York, Joanna was always aware of two pastel portraits of children she assumed were just part of her parents’ art collection. But sometimes she would hear her mother on the phone, crying, and referencing “the accident.”
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. People
came racing out of their houses in their backyards, and
(00:20):
these are all people who knew everyone involved and saw
these children. I mean young teenagers children. My sister was
told my brother was fourteen in the street, you know,
essentially dead. This is Joanna Raykoff. Joanna is a novelist
(00:40):
and memoirist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Picture a woman
with dark, curly hair, lively eyes, an easy smile, a
woman you might pass on the cobblestone streets of Cambridge
and imagine that she has had a simple, lovely life.
But Joanna's life has been shaped by an enormous secret.
It a family tragedy that she was shielded from until
(01:03):
well into adulthood, a secret that cast a long, sad
shadow over her childhood. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the
(01:25):
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves. I was born in the Hudson River Valley
in a town that a lot of people know. It's
sort of a popular town outside the city called Nayak.
So Nayak sits on the river sits on the Hudson River.
(01:46):
It's a very beautiful, beautiful place. It's a place that
you know, Manhattan Night's like to come visit for the day.
There are wonderful restaurants and beautiful shops and lovely walks
along the river, seafood restaurants, boats, that kind of thing.
It's a lovely place to live. Kids all walked to
school there at sort of a utopian place. So I
(02:09):
was born in this town and my father had a
dental practice in the town. And when I was about three,
for reasons that were were not quite clear to me,
my family moved to a few towns over. We moved
to a very different place. We moved inland to the
(02:29):
kind of mountains a few miles up from nyack Um
to a very very tiny town called Pomona that was
more a very new town. It was kind of a
fake town that catered to people fleeing the city as
they did in the seventies, and was filled with brand new,
(02:49):
modern glass houses. We moved to one of these houses,
a very large house that was kind of surrounded by forest.
It couldn't have been more different than nyak which was
this tiny The ancient town where the houses are very
close together, and we knew all our neighbors and kind
of ran back and forth between their houses and this
(03:10):
new town Pomona, the houses were sent much farther away,
and you couldn't see your neighbors. And in retrospect, I
realized that was what my parents wanted. They wanted privacy,
they wanted to be anonymous in this town. At the time,
I didn't understand it, And what I did understand was
that this felt like a kind of scary, strange place
(03:30):
to me. And I also understood that my mother was
sort of unhappy in this place, and I didn't understand why.
You know, I would walk into the kitchen and find
my mother crying, or I would do some small thing
that didn't seem at all like a big deal to me,
(03:51):
like take my security blanket out of the dryer on
my own, or said this this really happened, um, and
my mother would you know, go crazy and start screaming
at me in this sort of hysterical way and grow
so angry at me that I truly couldn't understand it. Um,
you know, screaming get away from me. I can't look
(04:13):
at you, I can't see you get away from me,
and as a small child, I spent a lot more
time with my father. There's a way in which, you know,
some people maybe are just by nature kid people, and
some people are not. And my father just was a
kid person, and he just loved doing stuff with me.
(04:35):
And so my childhood, when I think back on it,
and as I as I experienced it at the time
as well, had these kind of polarities to it. I
have such vivid memories of being of kind of trapsing
around this giant cold house, not quite knowing what to
do with myself, or sitting by myself playing with my
million barbie dolls, um wishing that my mom would sit
(04:57):
on the floor and play with me. And then also
have these memories of going to the park with my dad,
going to this lake nearby and feeding duck. Joanna has
a much older sister, Amy, who no longer lives at home.
By the time Joanna is a toddler, this is familiar
to me. I grew up that way too, the feeling
on the one hand of having a sister and on
(05:19):
the other of being alone, surrounded by the eyes of
all your toy animals, your barbies, staring back at you,
I had those barbies to army of barbies, army of
barbies who are like your friends and only friends or
so would feels exactly making up stories for them and
(05:40):
so Um. Yes, So I did grow up feeling like
an only child. So I had an older sister who
was eighteen years my elder, Amy. I didn't really understand
where she lived or what she did. Amy Um basically
graduated from college by the time I was born, and
(06:04):
in a way, the role she played in my life
was more of an aunt, a kind of fond but
distant aunt. She would occasionally come to our house on
my birthday, you know, give me a little present. She
would often show up at her house unexpected. So I
didn't I just didn't understand. And I think, if I'm
(06:27):
really honest, which I'm sorry, I often try to kind of,
I will be honest here and say I really often
try to sugarcoat our life and make excuses for everyone.
But the truth is I'm sort of struggling that to
cry here. You know, I I was just filled with longing.
I wanted I so badly, just wanted her to be
(06:49):
a sister, sister too, despite her age to come back
and live with us and be there every day. We're
going to take a quick break, we'll be back in
a moment. What Joanna didn't realize was that there was
(07:10):
an entire tragic history surrounding her sister Amy. Sometimes Joanna
would walk in on her mother crying or looking horribly sad,
and she would ask what was wrong, because Joanna presumed
that she she must have done something wrong that her
mother's sadness had to do with her. In general, I
(07:31):
knew not to ask anything of more depth than what's wrong,
you know, to not kind of probe at all. And
as an adult it's actually been I'm forty six years old,
and it's still very very hard for me to probe deeply,
(07:51):
to ask my mother difficult questions or to tell my
mother difficult things. But it also is difficult for me
to talk I realized to talk to other people, to
kind of probe deeply into other people's lives, and it's
affected my friendships. There's this way in which I was
kind of raised in this environment of just pretending that
(08:13):
everything is fine. This is the work of a lifetime,
isn't it. Sometimes we're able to look back, or we're
forced to look back. And see all the ways in
which our childhood selves have formed the adults we've become.
Especially when we discover a secret that has been kept
(08:34):
from us, we can look back and see the isolation,
the loneliness, the walking on eggshells that we once had
to do. And finally we understand all the ways we
were shaped by the unsaid. Because here's the thing. We
feel the things that are hidden from us, they live
in our bodies, in our bones, but as children we
(08:56):
don't understand. It's only later that the piece has fallen
a place. And for Joanna, one of those pieces was
a trio of portraits that hung in her childhood home.
One was a boy, dark hair in a style that
dated the portraits, neatly parted on the side and kind
(09:17):
of brushed to the side. It was sort of nineteen
fifties look, though I didn't quite understand that. I just
knew that this was a different thing from a different era.
And then there were two girls who did not look
like at all. One girl had dark brown hair and
bright green eyes and kind of olive skin, and um
(09:39):
was looking at the artist in a very kind of
I don't want to say ferocious because that's too extreme,
but a kind of bold way and smiling, but not
a smile of joy, a kind of smile of engagement.
More and um an intelligence. There was a fierce intelligence
to this girl, really captivating. And then the third one
(10:02):
was also a girl younger who had beautiful blonde hair,
kind of ash blonde um that kind of curled softly
to her shoulders, and bright blue eyes and a much
kind of softer expression on her face. She looked kind
of shy, almost kind of bashfulled. Both girls were matching
(10:25):
blue ribbons in their hair. The children were of indeterminate age,
like it wasn't quite clear to me. Maybe the older
girl was on the cusp of adolescence, like ten or eleven,
maybe twelve. The other two kids, it wasn't clear. Um,
they weren't little kids, but nor were they teenagers. So
these portraits um sort of gazed down at me for
(10:49):
a lot of my day as I watched TV, as
I did everything, and I had no idea who they
were of I honestly thought that they were art. We
had a lot of art in her house, uh, you know,
a lot of original art of all from all different eras,
all different types. I told myself that these were just
beautiful paintings, and so what did I do with this?
(11:11):
I I loved them, and I would gaze at them.
I would sit there on the sofa. I was a
huge reader, and I spent a lot of time just
lying on the sofa eating an apple, and I would
kind of gaze at them and make up stories about
them in my head. And I would when I read books,
I would kind of imagine the characters as as looking
(11:32):
like these kids. Joanna also recalls a mysterious photograph in
a home that has no family photos at all. There's
one picture in Joanna's dad's office, a place he retreats
to to smoke his pipe and do paperwork, of a family,
but whose family. These people are strangers to her still,
(11:54):
they pull her in and she knows in a bone
shaking way that she'd better not ask about it. But
when she's about ten years old, her need to know
wins out. So finally, one day, after contemplating it for
a very long time, I said, who are these people
in the photo? And my father said, you you really
(12:21):
don't know who these people are? And I said no,
But I felt there's a horrible guilt, This horrible guilt
because and I thought, I guess I should know who
they are. And he he said, even sort of incredulous,
(12:41):
and he took the photo from me, and he pointed
to the woman in it and he said, that's your mother.
And then he pointed to the man in the photo,
who was also smiling and laughing and looked very happy,
and he said, you and that handsome devil is me.
And then he pointed to the teenagers, the children in
(13:01):
the photo, and he said, this boy right here is
your brother Mark. And so one of the people in
the photo who I had perceived as being a girl,
was a boy who had very long hair and you know,
kind of delicate features. Um, and I suddenly went the
(13:23):
minute he said boy, I realized, oh my gosh, that
is a boy. I hadn't realized it, but in my
mind was reeling because of course I didn't know that
I had a brother. And then he went on and said,
in this girl right here, that's your sister Amy. You
know your sister Amy, And I said yes. And then
(13:46):
he pointed too the other girl, the third girl who
had could have blond, curly hair, and he said, and
this beautiful girl is your sister Anita. And his voice broke,
and it never seen my father cry and all my
father was always happy, and it just kind of held
(14:10):
me close to him, and you, I just said oh.
And he helped me for a long time, and then
I it was my bedtime and I said good night
and I left. So in all the years between that
first conversation Joanna and her father had in which he
(14:31):
told her of her brother and sister, those pastel portraits
on the family room wall, they never again spoke of
her siblings, Anita and Mark. If people asked Joanna if
she was an only child, she would respond that she
had one sister, a much older sister. She just didn't
allow herself to go there. In a way, she unconsciously
(14:54):
conspired with her parents to allow the secret to go
back into its hiding place. After all, this is a
secret kept not only by Joanna's parents, but by her
entire large extended family. If you think about it, it's
kind of amazing Joanna never learned more about her siblings.
(15:14):
Think of the many many cousins of Joanna's, the aunts
and uncles, the satyrs, the thanksgivings, the reunions, the Mother's
day lunches. Not one mention of her vanished brother and sister.
Was it a conspiracy of silence? Did my parents ay
to my whole family, we don't want Joanna to grow
(15:35):
up with the specter of the lost children? Is that
what happened? Or was it just kind of an unspoken
rule in my family, a very talkative, kind of stereotypical
Woody Allen movie Jewish family in which people were always
(15:56):
talking and arguing. Was it just an uns oken rule
that no one was ever going to talk to me
about this? I still don't know. It's one of the
things I'm struggling to find out. I know my mother
very much did not want me to be tainted by
this tragedy or to feel like a replacement child in
any way. She's told me this explicitly, that she didn't
(16:18):
want me to be known as the girl whose brother
and sister died, or the girl whose parents had this
horrible tragedy happened to them. She wanted me to be
my own person, free from the burden of this tragedy.
And I really I respect her so much for that.
I understand that I do, I really really do. The
(16:40):
only clues that Joanna has as to the fate of
her siblings is when as a child she eavesdrops on
her mother's telephone conversations. My mother, almost every evening, like
so many mothers of her generation, would spend the evening
talking on the phone to her friends and so. Then
she would sit in her bedroom using her blue rotary
dial phone talking dif friends, and I would be reading
(17:02):
or watching QV and I would catch these glimpses of
the subject. I would hear these these little bits and
pieces of things. And one of the things that would
often jump out at me, probably because the tone of
her voice changed, would be this term the accident. So
she would say, you know, oh, we weren't at that
(17:22):
wedding that was right after the accident, or oh, I
didn't do X y Z, you know with the synagogue
that was right after the accident. I just couldn't do
anything at that time, or oh I lost touch with
so and so after the accident, I just couldn't see
her anymore. So my child brain started to realize that
(17:44):
there had been there the accident meant something to do
with my brother and sister. It took some time, but
I made the association, though I was, of course afraid
to ask what the accident was, and I developed a
whole story in my head it which was that my
parents had been driving a car. I imagined it as
(18:07):
the car that we had at that point, which may
have been a giant chevery cabrief classic um. And it
had been snowing, and they had been in an accident
on the highway and something had happened. I couldn't envision
the actual accident, but I would lie in bed at
night and kind of run through this scenario, the story
(18:29):
of my parents driving the car in the snow and
some sort of accident happening that resulted in my brother
and sister somehow dying. Um. And it would somehow simultaneously
terrify me so that I couldn't fall asleep, but also
comfort me so that I could. But I of course
never asked what the accident was. Imagine growing up without
(18:54):
critical information about your family. Imagine creating your own story,
one that feels satisfying enough and survives into adulthood until
someone shatters that story. That is exactly what happened in
two thousand ten. Joanna is married and the mother of
two young kids. Her first book, a novel, is about
(19:15):
to come out and paperback and one of her first
events is at a small independent bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey.
When she gets there, the audience is packed a great thing, obviously,
and there are quite a few staff members lined up
to greet her. So I was going down the line
as if I were at a wedding, shaking their hands.
And I get to this one particular man and he
(19:41):
shake my hand and tears welled up in his eyes,
and he, with his voice breaking, said to me, can
get very nervously. Can you do you come with me?
Could you? Could you come with me for a second.
Could you just come to the office for a second.
So I went with him, and we got to the
office and he was actually sweat adding really profusely, and
(20:02):
he handed me some water and was kind of hunting
and hawing, and then finally he said, I'm Jonah Zimless,
and he sort of looked at me. I'm not really conveying.
He said it to me in this kind of pretendous way,
you presuming that I would know who he was, but
I did not. And and then he said I'm the
(20:23):
owner of this bookshop. And I thought, oh no, this
is going to be a terrible thing about my book
he's telling me he's the owner of the bookshop, and
all of these thoughts were raising through my mind. But
then he sort of looked perplexed, and he said, you
don't know my name. You don't know who I am.
And I said, no, I'm you know, I'm sorry. He
said I was your brother Mark's best friend. And that
(20:48):
was when sort of the tears really let loose, and
he said, my family lived, we were neighbors in Nayak.
I was your brother Mark's best friend, and I was
in love with your sister Anita. And then he just
fawn started crying and we sort of sat there. I
started crying too. I had never met anyone who knew
my brother and sister, because of course I did. All
(21:09):
my cousins, my aunts, and uncle's family friends, they all did,
but they didn't speak of them to me. So I
had never been in this situation before with someone who
was a peer of my brother and sister and knew
them really well, and for who like who had sort
of suffered a loss himself, you know, to use the
contemporary parliance. And he just started talking about the accident,
(21:33):
about our town, Nayak, and how the accident had affected
our town, but he I didn't understand anything that he
was saying. He was naming people's names and discussing repercussions
and all sorts of things, but I didn't know any
of this. And he kept saying, I know you know this,
and I knew you knew this, and I finally said,
(21:55):
I just I I need to tell you something. I
actually don't know anything. And he looked at me a
little bit like I was crazy, and I explained, I said,
you know, I know that I have his brother and sister,
but my parents have never ever talked to me about them.
And I don't even know what happened. I I sort
(22:19):
of know that there was an accident, but I don't
know what that accident was. And he was so stunned,
I mean, his jaw dropped open, and he just kind
of stared at me for a very long time. And
you know, then he of course said what I guess
any empathic, normal person would say, which was he was like,
oh god, oh God, And he felt horrible, and it
(22:42):
was clear that he didn't know how much to say
to me, like he wanted to talk to me about
all this, but he didn't necessarily feel that it was
his place to tell me about this horrible tragedy in
my own family. He basically said, you know, this was
a tragedy for the whole town. The whole town was
in mourning, the whole town was affected by it. And
(23:04):
then he said, you know, I know there was obviously
a tragedy for your family. I'm not in any way
comparing our grief and sorrow to your family is. I'm not.
Please don't think that I am. This conversation between Joanna
and Jonah is the first of several talks they have
in which the horrific truth of the accident that killed
(23:24):
her siblings slowly reveals itself. On that first evening, she's
so shaken by the conversation that she sits in the
office of his bookstore sobbing. Later, he contacts her again
and makes himself available to her should she want to
know more. Jonah also asks Joanna if he can put
her in touch with others, some people from Nayak who
(23:47):
want to connect with her. It turns out that there
was a world of people affected by this accident. They've
spent their lives devastated by it talking about it all
the while. Joanna's family moved into their glasshouse and lived
in complete silence. We're going to take a quick break.
(24:12):
Here are the bare bones of what happened. In June
of nine, the year before Joanna's birth, her parents went
on a vacation to Grand Bahama Island to celebrate their anniversary.
It was not a trip Joanna's mom wanted to make,
but her dad convinced her that it would be fun.
They left Mark and Anita, both middle schoolers, along with Amy,
(24:34):
a high school student, in the care of their maternal grandmother, Pearl,
a sweet, sweet person, but not someone who could necessarily
control teenagers. Before their trip, Amy had turned seventeen and
they had given her a car, a red Mustang convertible.
Amy decided to take her younger siblings, along with a
(24:54):
family friend named Rachel Finer, to the beach in Westchester
and then passa blee to a rickety old amusement park
called Ride plain Land. So this was a Sunday night
at the end of June. It was a beautiful day
out and you know, it got dark very late at
(25:15):
that point. Nayak is a pedestrian town. It's a real,
as I said, utopian, old fashioned American town where kids
play in the streets. There's not a lot of traffic.
There were tons of families and kids in the town,
and at this time, there were all of these kids
playing on their lawns, you know, having barbecues, all sorts
(25:39):
of stuff was happening. As Amy and the kids drove
along Broadway, a large sedan that had gotten off the
thru away from a different exit, crashed into the convertible.
Joanna researches the coroner's report and discovers that the kids
weren't killed on impact, but were gravely injured. So this accident,
(26:01):
you know, which was just brutal, it was loud, you know,
the impact was heard literally throughout the town. That's not
just a kind of thing to say like, it was
actually heard throughout the whole town. And people came racing
out of their houses in their backyards. And and these
are all people who knew everyone involved and saw these children,
(26:25):
I mean young teenagers, children. My sister was child, my
brother was fourteen, as was Rachel in the street, you know,
essentially dead and um, the finders who lived right there,
it's so horrible. They were waiting for Rachel to come home,
waiting for her, getting angry. You know the parents were
(26:48):
getting angry, thinking where is she, Why isn't she home yet?
Why isn't she home yet? What's wrong? They thought she
was going to be back butch earlier, and they heard
the accident and they went running out into the street. Yeah,
there are some secrets that, even when revealed, unpacked, understood,
will never fully be put to rest. How can a loss,
(27:10):
this violent and profound, one that affected an entire town
and devastated two families ever be made Okay, time heals
all wounds, it is said, or God doesn't give us
more than we can handle, or my personal favorite, everything
happens for a reason. These are the things well meaning
(27:30):
people say to those who are grieving. We don't like
to acknowledge that there are some wounds that will always
remain at least somewhat open, that it is our job
to bear them, to transform them slowly over time by
making meaning out of them, something Joanna is doing. And
the writing, research and reporting of this story she has
(27:51):
never known, and it haunted her all the more because
of not knowing. Healing all of us back as in
honestly pretty unbearable. I have three kids now. They are fourteen,
ten and three and it's simultaneously is causing me to
(28:16):
remember so much about my own childhood, which then of
course forces me to think about how I am as
a mother and makes me so conscious of every choice
that I make while simultaneously feeling strangely vulnerable, you know,
sort of remembering all of these moments from my own
(28:41):
childhood when I felt so alone and afraid, or confused
or sometimes happy. Honestly, just but just remembering my way
back into my childhood is a really profound thing to
do as a parent, particularly a parent with kids at
these very developmental ages. Also my son and daughter being
(29:04):
about the ages that my siblings were when they were killed.
I have been doing this research very very slowly, because
each time I uncover something, it just eviscerats me in
a matter that I was not prepared for. You know,
(29:26):
I have a history as a journalist or reporter. You know,
I've done a huge amount of research for you know,
fiction projects, for my last memoir project, and I thought,
I'm ready for this. I'm ready to to sort of
lay bare these secrets. I'm ready to kind of talk
about all this with my family. But maybe you're never ready.
(29:52):
Can you imagine a world in which you had never
known this, where the secret remained very in those portraits
on the wall. You know, imagine a past in which
you would never ask the question. I mean, do you
in any way I wish that you didn't know this?
(30:12):
Maybe a little part of me does and wishes that
my relationship with my mother and my sister could be
less complicated. You know that, because my relationship with my mother,
whom I love dearly and I love like in this
animal love, and you also feel so protective of in
so many ways, But my relationship with her is very fraught,
(30:35):
and I just wish that it could be less complicated.
So it's not so much that you wish you didn't
know the secret as that you wish the secret had
never existed. Yeah, I either wish I had never existed,
or I wish that maybe they had. But the truth
(30:57):
is you can never truly shut the door. Right. Here's
Joanna reading from the manuscript of her upcoming memoir. Where
do I start? How do I begin? How do I
tell a story that begins before my birth? Or rather
I should say the story that resulted, grim and improbable
(31:20):
as it sounds, in my existence, it's a story that
now I'm called upon to tell this explanation of my life,
of my family, of how I came to be. Nearly
every day, every time someone innocently asks do you have
brothers and sisters? Or are you from a big family?
But there's no easy answer, no response that won't lead
(31:42):
to further questions at best, or at worst make the
inquirer uncomfortable or horrified, or sad or filled with regret
that she'd brought up such painful memories. There's no answer
that won't lead to an awkward social moment, a tragic
silence within a gay part, and after the shockwas off,
(32:03):
there will still always be more questions, questions I can't
necessarily answer. I'd like to thank my guest, Joanna Raykoff.
You can find out more about Joanna and her books
(32:24):
at Joanna Rakoff dot com. Family Secrets is an I
Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Lowell
Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share with us, you can get in touch at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you
(32:46):
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, visit the
(33:21):
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. People
came racing out of their houses in their backyards, and
(00:20):
these are all people who knew everyone involved and saw
these children. I mean young teenagers children. My sister was
told my brother was fourteen in the street, you know,
essentially dead. This is Joanna Raykoff. Joanna is a novelist
(00:40):
and memoirist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Picture a woman
with dark, curly hair, lively eyes, an easy smile, a
woman you might pass on the cobblestone streets of Cambridge
and imagine that she has had a simple, lovely life.
But Joanna's life has been shaped by an enormous secret.
It a family tragedy that she was shielded from until
(01:03):
well into adulthood, a secret that cast a long, sad
shadow over her childhood. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the
(01:25):
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves. I was born in the Hudson River Valley
in a town that a lot of people know. It's
sort of a popular town outside the city called Nayak.
So Nayak sits on the river sits on the Hudson River.
(01:46):
It's a very beautiful, beautiful place. It's a place that
you know, Manhattan Night's like to come visit for the day.
There are wonderful restaurants and beautiful shops and lovely walks
along the river, seafood restaurants, boats, that kind of thing.
It's a lovely place to live. Kids all walked to
school there at sort of a utopian place. So I
(02:09):
was born in this town and my father had a
dental practice in the town. And when I was about three,
for reasons that were were not quite clear to me,
my family moved to a few towns over. We moved
to a very different place. We moved inland to the
(02:29):
kind of mountains a few miles up from nyack Um
to a very very tiny town called Pomona that was
more a very new town. It was kind of a
fake town that catered to people fleeing the city as
they did in the seventies, and was filled with brand new,
(02:49):
modern glass houses. We moved to one of these houses,
a very large house that was kind of surrounded by forest.
It couldn't have been more different than nyak which was
this tiny The ancient town where the houses are very
close together, and we knew all our neighbors and kind
of ran back and forth between their houses and this
(03:10):
new town Pomona, the houses were sent much farther away,
and you couldn't see your neighbors. And in retrospect, I
realized that was what my parents wanted. They wanted privacy,
they wanted to be anonymous in this town. At the time,
I didn't understand it, And what I did understand was
that this felt like a kind of scary, strange place
(03:30):
to me. And I also understood that my mother was
sort of unhappy in this place, and I didn't understand why.
You know, I would walk into the kitchen and find
my mother crying, or I would do some small thing
that didn't seem at all like a big deal to me,
(03:51):
like take my security blanket out of the dryer on
my own, or said this this really happened, um, and
my mother would you know, go crazy and start screaming
at me in this sort of hysterical way and grow
so angry at me that I truly couldn't understand it. Um,
you know, screaming get away from me. I can't look
(04:13):
at you, I can't see you get away from me,
and as a small child, I spent a lot more
time with my father. There's a way in which, you know,
some people maybe are just by nature kid people, and
some people are not. And my father just was a
kid person, and he just loved doing stuff with me.
(04:35):
And so my childhood, when I think back on it,
and as I as I experienced it at the time
as well, had these kind of polarities to it. I
have such vivid memories of being of kind of trapsing
around this giant cold house, not quite knowing what to
do with myself, or sitting by myself playing with my
million barbie dolls, um wishing that my mom would sit
(04:57):
on the floor and play with me. And then also
have these memories of going to the park with my dad,
going to this lake nearby and feeding duck. Joanna has
a much older sister, Amy, who no longer lives at home.
By the time Joanna is a toddler, this is familiar
to me. I grew up that way too, the feeling
on the one hand of having a sister and on
(05:19):
the other of being alone, surrounded by the eyes of
all your toy animals, your barbies, staring back at you,
I had those barbies to army of barbies, army of
barbies who are like your friends and only friends or
so would feels exactly making up stories for them and
(05:40):
so Um. Yes, So I did grow up feeling like
an only child. So I had an older sister who
was eighteen years my elder, Amy. I didn't really understand
where she lived or what she did. Amy Um basically
graduated from college by the time I was born, and
(06:04):
in a way, the role she played in my life
was more of an aunt, a kind of fond but
distant aunt. She would occasionally come to our house on
my birthday, you know, give me a little present. She
would often show up at her house unexpected. So I
didn't I just didn't understand. And I think, if I'm
(06:27):
really honest, which I'm sorry, I often try to kind of,
I will be honest here and say I really often
try to sugarcoat our life and make excuses for everyone.
But the truth is I'm sort of struggling that to
cry here. You know, I I was just filled with longing.
I wanted I so badly, just wanted her to be
(06:49):
a sister, sister too, despite her age to come back
and live with us and be there every day. We're
going to take a quick break, we'll be back in
a moment. What Joanna didn't realize was that there was
(07:10):
an entire tragic history surrounding her sister Amy. Sometimes Joanna
would walk in on her mother crying or looking horribly sad,
and she would ask what was wrong, because Joanna presumed
that she she must have done something wrong that her
mother's sadness had to do with her. In general, I
(07:31):
knew not to ask anything of more depth than what's wrong,
you know, to not kind of probe at all. And
as an adult it's actually been I'm forty six years old,
and it's still very very hard for me to probe deeply,
(07:51):
to ask my mother difficult questions or to tell my
mother difficult things. But it also is difficult for me
to talk I realized to talk to other people, to
kind of probe deeply into other people's lives, and it's
affected my friendships. There's this way in which I was
kind of raised in this environment of just pretending that
(08:13):
everything is fine. This is the work of a lifetime,
isn't it. Sometimes we're able to look back, or we're
forced to look back. And see all the ways in
which our childhood selves have formed the adults we've become.
Especially when we discover a secret that has been kept
(08:34):
from us, we can look back and see the isolation,
the loneliness, the walking on eggshells that we once had
to do. And finally we understand all the ways we
were shaped by the unsaid. Because here's the thing. We
feel the things that are hidden from us, they live
in our bodies, in our bones, but as children we
(08:56):
don't understand. It's only later that the piece has fallen
a place. And for Joanna, one of those pieces was
a trio of portraits that hung in her childhood home.
One was a boy, dark hair in a style that
dated the portraits, neatly parted on the side and kind
(09:17):
of brushed to the side. It was sort of nineteen
fifties look, though I didn't quite understand that. I just
knew that this was a different thing from a different era.
And then there were two girls who did not look
like at all. One girl had dark brown hair and
bright green eyes and kind of olive skin, and um
(09:39):
was looking at the artist in a very kind of
I don't want to say ferocious because that's too extreme,
but a kind of bold way and smiling, but not
a smile of joy, a kind of smile of engagement.
More and um an intelligence. There was a fierce intelligence
to this girl, really captivating. And then the third one
(10:02):
was also a girl younger who had beautiful blonde hair,
kind of ash blonde um that kind of curled softly
to her shoulders, and bright blue eyes and a much
kind of softer expression on her face. She looked kind
of shy, almost kind of bashfulled. Both girls were matching
(10:25):
blue ribbons in their hair. The children were of indeterminate age,
like it wasn't quite clear to me. Maybe the older
girl was on the cusp of adolescence, like ten or eleven,
maybe twelve. The other two kids, it wasn't clear. Um,
they weren't little kids, but nor were they teenagers. So
these portraits um sort of gazed down at me for
(10:49):
a lot of my day as I watched TV, as
I did everything, and I had no idea who they
were of I honestly thought that they were art. We
had a lot of art in her house, uh, you know,
a lot of original art of all from all different eras,
all different types. I told myself that these were just
beautiful paintings, and so what did I do with this?
(11:11):
I I loved them, and I would gaze at them.
I would sit there on the sofa. I was a
huge reader, and I spent a lot of time just
lying on the sofa eating an apple, and I would
kind of gaze at them and make up stories about
them in my head. And I would when I read books,
I would kind of imagine the characters as as looking
(11:32):
like these kids. Joanna also recalls a mysterious photograph in
a home that has no family photos at all. There's
one picture in Joanna's dad's office, a place he retreats
to to smoke his pipe and do paperwork, of a family,
but whose family. These people are strangers to her still,
(11:54):
they pull her in and she knows in a bone
shaking way that she'd better not ask about it. But
when she's about ten years old, her need to know
wins out. So finally, one day, after contemplating it for
a very long time, I said, who are these people
in the photo? And my father said, you you really
(12:21):
don't know who these people are? And I said no,
But I felt there's a horrible guilt, This horrible guilt
because and I thought, I guess I should know who
they are. And he he said, even sort of incredulous,
(12:41):
and he took the photo from me, and he pointed
to the woman in it and he said, that's your mother.
And then he pointed to the man in the photo,
who was also smiling and laughing and looked very happy,
and he said, you and that handsome devil is me.
And then he pointed to the teenagers, the children in
(13:01):
the photo, and he said, this boy right here is
your brother Mark. And so one of the people in
the photo who I had perceived as being a girl,
was a boy who had very long hair and you know,
kind of delicate features. Um, and I suddenly went the
(13:23):
minute he said boy, I realized, oh my gosh, that
is a boy. I hadn't realized it, but in my
mind was reeling because of course I didn't know that
I had a brother. And then he went on and said,
in this girl right here, that's your sister Amy. You
know your sister Amy, And I said yes. And then
(13:46):
he pointed too the other girl, the third girl who
had could have blond, curly hair, and he said, and
this beautiful girl is your sister Anita. And his voice broke,
and it never seen my father cry and all my
father was always happy, and it just kind of held
(14:10):
me close to him, and you, I just said oh.
And he helped me for a long time, and then
I it was my bedtime and I said good night
and I left. So in all the years between that
first conversation Joanna and her father had in which he
(14:31):
told her of her brother and sister, those pastel portraits
on the family room wall, they never again spoke of
her siblings, Anita and Mark. If people asked Joanna if
she was an only child, she would respond that she
had one sister, a much older sister. She just didn't
allow herself to go there. In a way, she unconsciously
(14:54):
conspired with her parents to allow the secret to go
back into its hiding place. After all, this is a
secret kept not only by Joanna's parents, but by her
entire large extended family. If you think about it, it's
kind of amazing Joanna never learned more about her siblings.
(15:14):
Think of the many many cousins of Joanna's, the aunts
and uncles, the satyrs, the thanksgivings, the reunions, the Mother's
day lunches. Not one mention of her vanished brother and sister.
Was it a conspiracy of silence? Did my parents ay
to my whole family, we don't want Joanna to grow
(15:35):
up with the specter of the lost children? Is that
what happened? Or was it just kind of an unspoken
rule in my family, a very talkative, kind of stereotypical
Woody Allen movie Jewish family in which people were always
(15:56):
talking and arguing. Was it just an uns oken rule
that no one was ever going to talk to me
about this? I still don't know. It's one of the
things I'm struggling to find out. I know my mother
very much did not want me to be tainted by
this tragedy or to feel like a replacement child in
any way. She's told me this explicitly, that she didn't
(16:18):
want me to be known as the girl whose brother
and sister died, or the girl whose parents had this
horrible tragedy happened to them. She wanted me to be
my own person, free from the burden of this tragedy.
And I really I respect her so much for that.
I understand that I do, I really really do. The
(16:40):
only clues that Joanna has as to the fate of
her siblings is when as a child she eavesdrops on
her mother's telephone conversations. My mother, almost every evening, like
so many mothers of her generation, would spend the evening
talking on the phone to her friends and so. Then
she would sit in her bedroom using her blue rotary
dial phone talking dif friends, and I would be reading
(17:02):
or watching QV and I would catch these glimpses of
the subject. I would hear these these little bits and
pieces of things. And one of the things that would
often jump out at me, probably because the tone of
her voice changed, would be this term the accident. So
she would say, you know, oh, we weren't at that
(17:22):
wedding that was right after the accident, or oh, I
didn't do X y Z, you know with the synagogue
that was right after the accident. I just couldn't do
anything at that time, or oh I lost touch with
so and so after the accident, I just couldn't see
her anymore. So my child brain started to realize that
(17:44):
there had been there the accident meant something to do
with my brother and sister. It took some time, but
I made the association, though I was, of course afraid
to ask what the accident was, and I developed a
whole story in my head it which was that my
parents had been driving a car. I imagined it as
(18:07):
the car that we had at that point, which may
have been a giant chevery cabrief classic um. And it
had been snowing, and they had been in an accident
on the highway and something had happened. I couldn't envision
the actual accident, but I would lie in bed at
night and kind of run through this scenario, the story
(18:29):
of my parents driving the car in the snow and
some sort of accident happening that resulted in my brother
and sister somehow dying. Um. And it would somehow simultaneously
terrify me so that I couldn't fall asleep, but also
comfort me so that I could. But I of course
never asked what the accident was. Imagine growing up without
(18:54):
critical information about your family. Imagine creating your own story,
one that feels satisfying enough and survives into adulthood until
someone shatters that story. That is exactly what happened in
two thousand ten. Joanna is married and the mother of
two young kids. Her first book, a novel, is about
(19:15):
to come out and paperback and one of her first
events is at a small independent bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey.
When she gets there, the audience is packed a great thing, obviously,
and there are quite a few staff members lined up
to greet her. So I was going down the line
as if I were at a wedding, shaking their hands.
And I get to this one particular man and he
(19:41):
shake my hand and tears welled up in his eyes,
and he, with his voice breaking, said to me, can
get very nervously. Can you do you come with me?
Could you? Could you come with me for a second.
Could you just come to the office for a second.
So I went with him, and we got to the
office and he was actually sweat adding really profusely, and
(20:02):
he handed me some water and was kind of hunting
and hawing, and then finally he said, I'm Jonah Zimless,
and he sort of looked at me. I'm not really conveying.
He said it to me in this kind of pretendous way,
you presuming that I would know who he was, but
I did not. And and then he said I'm the
(20:23):
owner of this bookshop. And I thought, oh no, this
is going to be a terrible thing about my book
he's telling me he's the owner of the bookshop, and
all of these thoughts were raising through my mind. But
then he sort of looked perplexed, and he said, you
don't know my name. You don't know who I am.
And I said, no, I'm you know, I'm sorry. He
said I was your brother Mark's best friend. And that
(20:48):
was when sort of the tears really let loose, and
he said, my family lived, we were neighbors in Nayak.
I was your brother Mark's best friend, and I was
in love with your sister Anita. And then he just
fawn started crying and we sort of sat there. I
started crying too. I had never met anyone who knew
my brother and sister, because of course I did. All
(21:09):
my cousins, my aunts, and uncle's family friends, they all did,
but they didn't speak of them to me. So I
had never been in this situation before with someone who
was a peer of my brother and sister and knew
them really well, and for who like who had sort
of suffered a loss himself, you know, to use the
contemporary parliance. And he just started talking about the accident,
(21:33):
about our town, Nayak, and how the accident had affected
our town, but he I didn't understand anything that he
was saying. He was naming people's names and discussing repercussions
and all sorts of things, but I didn't know any
of this. And he kept saying, I know you know this,
and I knew you knew this, and I finally said,
(21:55):
I just I I need to tell you something. I
actually don't know anything. And he looked at me a
little bit like I was crazy, and I explained, I said,
you know, I know that I have his brother and sister,
but my parents have never ever talked to me about them.
And I don't even know what happened. I I sort
(22:19):
of know that there was an accident, but I don't
know what that accident was. And he was so stunned,
I mean, his jaw dropped open, and he just kind
of stared at me for a very long time. And
you know, then he of course said what I guess
any empathic, normal person would say, which was he was like,
oh god, oh God, And he felt horrible, and it
(22:42):
was clear that he didn't know how much to say
to me, like he wanted to talk to me about
all this, but he didn't necessarily feel that it was
his place to tell me about this horrible tragedy in
my own family. He basically said, you know, this was
a tragedy for the whole town. The whole town was
in mourning, the whole town was affected by it. And
(23:04):
then he said, you know, I know there was obviously
a tragedy for your family. I'm not in any way
comparing our grief and sorrow to your family is. I'm not.
Please don't think that I am. This conversation between Joanna
and Jonah is the first of several talks they have
in which the horrific truth of the accident that killed
(23:24):
her siblings slowly reveals itself. On that first evening, she's
so shaken by the conversation that she sits in the
office of his bookstore sobbing. Later, he contacts her again
and makes himself available to her should she want to
know more. Jonah also asks Joanna if he can put
her in touch with others, some people from Nayak who
(23:47):
want to connect with her. It turns out that there
was a world of people affected by this accident. They've
spent their lives devastated by it talking about it all
the while. Joanna's family moved into their glasshouse and lived
in complete silence. We're going to take a quick break.
(24:12):
Here are the bare bones of what happened. In June
of nine, the year before Joanna's birth, her parents went
on a vacation to Grand Bahama Island to celebrate their anniversary.
It was not a trip Joanna's mom wanted to make,
but her dad convinced her that it would be fun.
They left Mark and Anita, both middle schoolers, along with Amy,
(24:34):
a high school student, in the care of their maternal grandmother, Pearl,
a sweet, sweet person, but not someone who could necessarily
control teenagers. Before their trip, Amy had turned seventeen and
they had given her a car, a red Mustang convertible.
Amy decided to take her younger siblings, along with a
(24:54):
family friend named Rachel Finer, to the beach in Westchester
and then passa blee to a rickety old amusement park
called Ride plain Land. So this was a Sunday night
at the end of June. It was a beautiful day
out and you know, it got dark very late at
(25:15):
that point. Nayak is a pedestrian town. It's a real,
as I said, utopian, old fashioned American town where kids
play in the streets. There's not a lot of traffic.
There were tons of families and kids in the town,
and at this time, there were all of these kids
playing on their lawns, you know, having barbecues, all sorts
(25:39):
of stuff was happening. As Amy and the kids drove
along Broadway, a large sedan that had gotten off the
thru away from a different exit, crashed into the convertible.
Joanna researches the coroner's report and discovers that the kids
weren't killed on impact, but were gravely injured. So this accident,
(26:01):
you know, which was just brutal, it was loud, you know,
the impact was heard literally throughout the town. That's not
just a kind of thing to say like, it was
actually heard throughout the whole town. And people came racing
out of their houses in their backyards. And and these
are all people who knew everyone involved and saw these children,
(26:25):
I mean young teenagers, children. My sister was child, my
brother was fourteen, as was Rachel in the street, you know,
essentially dead and um, the finders who lived right there,
it's so horrible. They were waiting for Rachel to come home,
waiting for her, getting angry. You know the parents were
(26:48):
getting angry, thinking where is she, Why isn't she home yet?
Why isn't she home yet? What's wrong? They thought she
was going to be back butch earlier, and they heard
the accident and they went running out into the street. Yeah,
there are some secrets that, even when revealed, unpacked, understood,
will never fully be put to rest. How can a loss,
(27:10):
this violent and profound, one that affected an entire town
and devastated two families ever be made Okay, time heals
all wounds, it is said, or God doesn't give us
more than we can handle, or my personal favorite, everything
happens for a reason. These are the things well meaning
(27:30):
people say to those who are grieving. We don't like
to acknowledge that there are some wounds that will always
remain at least somewhat open, that it is our job
to bear them, to transform them slowly over time by
making meaning out of them, something Joanna is doing. And
the writing, research and reporting of this story she has
(27:51):
never known, and it haunted her all the more because
of not knowing. Healing all of us back as in
honestly pretty unbearable. I have three kids now. They are fourteen,
ten and three and it's simultaneously is causing me to
(28:16):
remember so much about my own childhood, which then of
course forces me to think about how I am as
a mother and makes me so conscious of every choice
that I make while simultaneously feeling strangely vulnerable, you know,
sort of remembering all of these moments from my own
(28:41):
childhood when I felt so alone and afraid, or confused
or sometimes happy. Honestly, just but just remembering my way
back into my childhood is a really profound thing to
do as a parent, particularly a parent with kids at
these very developmental ages. Also my son and daughter being
(29:04):
about the ages that my siblings were when they were killed.
I have been doing this research very very slowly, because
each time I uncover something, it just eviscerats me in
a matter that I was not prepared for. You know,
(29:26):
I have a history as a journalist or reporter. You know,
I've done a huge amount of research for you know,
fiction projects, for my last memoir project, and I thought,
I'm ready for this. I'm ready to to sort of
lay bare these secrets. I'm ready to kind of talk
about all this with my family. But maybe you're never ready.
(29:52):
Can you imagine a world in which you had never
known this, where the secret remained very in those portraits
on the wall. You know, imagine a past in which
you would never ask the question. I mean, do you
in any way I wish that you didn't know this?
(30:12):
Maybe a little part of me does and wishes that
my relationship with my mother and my sister could be
less complicated. You know that, because my relationship with my mother,
whom I love dearly and I love like in this
animal love, and you also feel so protective of in
so many ways, But my relationship with her is very fraught,
(30:35):
and I just wish that it could be less complicated.
So it's not so much that you wish you didn't
know the secret as that you wish the secret had
never existed. Yeah, I either wish I had never existed,
or I wish that maybe they had. But the truth
(30:57):
is you can never truly shut the door. Right. Here's
Joanna reading from the manuscript of her upcoming memoir. Where
do I start? How do I begin? How do I
tell a story that begins before my birth? Or rather
I should say the story that resulted, grim and improbable
(31:20):
as it sounds, in my existence, it's a story that
now I'm called upon to tell this explanation of my life,
of my family, of how I came to be. Nearly
every day, every time someone innocently asks do you have
brothers and sisters? Or are you from a big family?
But there's no easy answer, no response that won't lead
(31:42):
to further questions at best, or at worst make the
inquirer uncomfortable or horrified, or sad or filled with regret
that she'd brought up such painful memories. There's no answer
that won't lead to an awkward social moment, a tragic
silence within a gay part, and after the shockwas off,
(32:03):
there will still always be more questions, questions I can't
necessarily answer. I'd like to thank my guest, Joanna Raykoff.
You can find out more about Joanna and her books
(32:24):
at Joanna Rakoff dot com. Family Secrets is an I
Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Lowell
Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share with us, you can get in touch at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you
(32:46):
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, visit the
(33:21):
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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