82: Haunted

Ira Glass

In his memoir, My Dark Places, James Ellroy writes about how he was haunted by the memory of his mother. She was murdered in 1958 when he was 10. 35 years later, he tried to track down her murderer. His mother was last seen in El Monte, California with a man Ellroy calls "the swarthy man" and with a blond woman. Ellroy hired a private investigator. He also tried to scare up some leads by having two papers do stories about the murder and having the TV shows, Day One and Unsolved Mysteries do segments. All of them but Day One gave out a phone number for people to call with tips and leads.

As the phone calls came in, Ellroy found it he wasn't the only one who was haunted. This is from his memoir.

"A man from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, called. He said the swarthy man looked like a guy named Bob Soans. Bob murdered his wife, Shari, and committed suicide. It was late '58. The crime occurred in North Hollywood. A man from Centralia, Washington called. He said his father was the swarthy man. His father was 6'6 and weighed 240 pounds." I should say this does not match the description of the real swarthy man. "His father carried a gun and lots of ammunition."

A man from Savage, Minnesota, called. He said the swarthy man looked like his father. His father lived in El Monte back then. His father was abusive. His father served prison time. His father was a gambler and a skirt chaser. A man from Rochester, New York, called. He said his grandfather was the swarthy man. Gramps lived in a nursing home. The man supplied the address and phone number.

A woman from Sacramento, California, called. She said the swarthy man looked like a local doctor. The doctor lived with his mother. The doctor hated women. The doctor was a vegetarian. A woman from Lakeport, California, called. She said the swarthy man looked like her ex-husband. Her ex chased women. She didn't know where he was now.

A woman from Covina, California, called. She said her sister was raped and strangled in El Monte. It happened in 1992. A woman from Paso Robles, California, called. She said the swarthy man looked familiar. She met a man like that in 1957. He wanted sex. She said no. He said he wanted to kill her. He lived in Alhambra then.

A woman from Benwood, West Virginia, called. She said a man stalked her and her brother in Los Angeles. She was six years old. The man had dark hair and good teeth. He drove a truck. He took off her clothes, fondled her and kissed her. She saw him on a TV game show several years later. It might have been The Groucho Marx Show."

Ellroy's list of callers goes on for pages.

Why don't more adults celebrate Halloween? Why don't adults go to horror movies in the same numbers that teenagers do? I believe it's because so many of us, we're already haunted, haunted by people who've harmed us, haunted by people we fear, haunted by people we've harmed, haunted by people who've gone.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose some theme. We bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Haunted. Haunted not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people, by reality. Act One, Hearing Voices. A girl gets a tape recorder for Christmas, loves to record her parents, but only when they fight. Her parents die. The tapes survive.

Act Two, why a Jewish family in New York embraces a Holocaust survivor as a member of their family without much evidence that he really is. Act Three, Ashes. David Sedaris says, I love you, to his mother, and she tells him that she's going to pretend that she did not hear him say it. The story of how he and his family reacted when she got lung cancer. Act Four, Ghost Story. Heather Woodbury demonstrates that there is no rock and roll heaven. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Hearing Voices. Lynnette Nyman is a reporter for Alabama Public Radio and uses a tape recorder in her regular job. But this story is about recordings she made as a kid-- 9, 10, 11, 12 years old.

Ira Glass

Lynnette Nyman in Alabama.

Ira Glass

Act Two, this is the story of a boy who was thrown into the concentration camps when he was three, lost his parents. And although he survived the war, he was so young when it ended that he couldn't remember his parents and wasn't sure of his own last name. He was adopted by a Swiss family, raised in Switzerland. His family gave him a German name. He was haunted by the past. When he saw a picture of William Tell in school, he thought it was an SS officer shooting a little kid. The apple on the kid's head just made it extra cruel.

In his 40's, he started to search for clues about who we was. He thought his real name might be Binjamin Wilkomirski from Riga. Last year, he published a book about his search called Fragments. In New York, writer Blake Eskin and his mother got their hands on the book. It turns out that Wilkomirski is a pretty unusual name. All the Wilkomirskis seem to descend from one town in Lithuania called Wilkomir. Some Wilkomirskis came to America, changed their name to Wilbur, married into other names. Blake and his mother are Wilburs descended from Wilkomirskis.

When Binjamin Wilkomirski came to the States on a speaking tour sponsored by the Holocaust Museum, they got together with him to figure out the past.

Blake Eskin

It's the Sunday afternoon before Rosh Hashanah, the holiday marking the Jewish new year, and my parents' apartment is full of Wilburs. It's mostly the Frum side of the family, the religious side. The men were yarmulkes, the women long sleeves.

Binjamin Wilkomirski arrived a half hour late with his wife and his handlers from the Holocaust Museum. He didn't look like a Wilbur to me, but then again, he didn't look like anyone I'd ever met before. He was wearing a yellow shirt. His light brown hair was styled into a curly, puffy Jewfro and he had extra-long sideburns that didn't quite meet at his chin.

The hairdo and the paisley scarf knotted around his neck tagged him as bohemian. He wreaked of stale cigarettes. There's a big turnout. Binjamin brought the Wilburs together in a way tradition and ritual have failed to do. The religious and secular sides of my family have very little contact. Bar Mitzvahs and weddings are too expensive to invite everyone. Funerals too sudden for everyone to drive or fly in. And the American style family reunion, with printed t-shirts and picnic coolers and tubs of macaroni salad, is simply unthinkable. But an audience with a Holocaust survivor who is both a family mystery and a minor celebrity is well worth the hassle of finding a parking spot in Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon.

At first, nobody knew what to do. Binjamin seemed affable, but also tired and a bit bewildered. After everyone introduced themselves, a couple of Wilburs approached him. They were carrying Ziploc bags, and in the bags were copies of Binjmain's book. They asked him for autographs. I felt embarrassed and worried about what Binjamin thought of us. But he signed their books as he would for any stranger. My relatives thanked him and sealed the books back in the Ziploc bags. Things had started on the wrong foot.

My mother decided to intervene. She sat Binjamin down next to my aunt Miriam. Miriam, who was wearing a smart purple suit and a lavender and white turban, is the matriarch of the orthodox wing of the family. She and her two brothers are the only living Wilburs who were born in Riga, where Binjamin thinks he came from. Miriam arrived in America in 1929, when she was 18 years old.

Blake Eskin

At a small folding table, Miriam flips the pages of her tattered photo album, a high school graduation gift from her teachers back in Riga. My mother and I are hoping that one of the photographs will jog Binjamin's memory like a mug shot. Binjamin's memory is patchy, but Miriam remembers the past, She is in her late 80's, old enough to remember the Jewish refugees who fled to Riga during the First World War.

Blake Eskin

Avram, Miriam's uncle, was the only Wilkomirski brother who remained in Riga. He is the number one candidate for missing link between Binjamin and the Wilburs. Avram could be Binjamin's uncle, or maybe even his father. Miriam is pretty sure, however, that Avram had only one son. His picture is in the scrapbook. That boy would have been 10 years older than Binjamin.

On the other hand, it's possible that the family in America might not have known about other children because it was difficult to communicate with Riga in the late '30's.

Blake Eskin

The more I learn about Binjamin, the less I believe we're related. Binjamin was separated from his family when he was two or three years old. He doesn't know exactly how old he was because he doesn't know when he was born, or where he was born, or even what his real name is. The only way he knows anything about who he is, is that on his way from Auschwitz to an orphanage after the war ended, a woman saw him and told him he was Binjamin Wilkomirski from Riga.

Binjamin tells me that recently, when he visited Riga, he stood on the spot in the ghetto where he remembers the Nazis murdered his father. Or maybe it was his uncle. He's not sure. I believe Binjamin when he says he remembers, but part of me thinks he's been looking for the place where his memory happened for so long, and he's read so much about Riga, that he subconsciously willed himself into finding it. For that matter, I'm not fully convinced that half a century later, he can honestly remember what some lady told him his name was. Or if he does remember correctly, that she even knew his real name to begin with.

One of the ironies of this situation is that Binjamin has invested years of his life in finding out who he is, and he still doesn't know. But he has learned a lot about who we are. He knows all about the Wilkomirskis, where they lived and where they came from. Binjamin has found other Wilkomirskis in Poland and Lithuania. In a register from the Vilna ghetto, Binjamin found a Sonya Wilkomirski. He asks if we've ever heard of Sonya, if she's a relative. Miriam says no, firmly, but everyone else in the room is looking for a way to make the answer yes.

Blake Eskin

All through the afternoon, people keep saying Binjamin has the Wilbur face. They say he looks like Miriam's brother, Haymi, that he looks a little like my cousin Steven, that he looks like me. Everyone has their theory.

Blake Eskin

That's my mother. She's an amateur sculptor.

Blake Eskin

Sitting in my parents' living room, Binjamin seems oddly uninterested in what is potentially his long lost family. His attention to Miriam's photo album comes and goes, and he doesn't ask any questions about us. I'm not sure why he's so detached. It could be fatigue or shyness, or maybe his weariness of getting entangled with us. In the end, Binjamin tells me he's sure we're family, though he isn't too concerned about where he fits on the Wilbur family tree.

Blake Eskin

After Binjamin and the Wilburs left my parents' house, there were five of us left-- me, my mother and father, my mother's cousin Susan and her husband. We talked about why so many Wilburs had showed up, and why they seemed so interested in Binjamin.

On one level, the Wilburs were seeking the same thing Binjamin was, a key to the past. For most American families, anything that happened before the boat landed is a blur. The Wilburs are an American invention, and Binjamin, if he is one of us, can show the Wilburs what we were before we got to Ellis Island. Susan flew in from Southern California just to meet Binjamin. She said that knowing he was a member of the family would give her, as she put it, "a sense of roots."

One person who doesn't need a sense of roots is Miriam, with her memories of Riga, her religious rituals and her 35 great grandchildren. Perhaps that was why she seemed the most skeptical that Binjamin Wilkomirski was one of us.

Ira Glass

Blake Eskin's story of Binjamin Wilkomirski continues. Also a story from David Sedaris. That's all in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Haunted, not by the supernatural, but by other people and reality and the past. We're in the middle of Blake Eskin's account of a man who may be a long lost relative of his. Or it might not be.

Blake Eskin

The next day, Binjamin was the guest of honor at a $150 a plate luncheon at the Carlyle, a ritzy hotel on the Upper East side that John F. Kennedy used to use as a sex pad. The Holocaust Museum comped our family an entire table, and ten Wilburs showed up. This was a different bunch of Wilburs than at my parents house the day before. No orthodox Wilburs came. The food wasn't kosher enough. These Wilburs were on the assimilated end of the spectrum, people I know pretty well.

Blake Eskin

There's a cocktail hour before lunch. Some of my relatives haven't even met Binjamin yet, but they're already willing to accept him into the family.

Blake Eskin

Everyone is willing to embrace Binjamin as a family member without any proof. And all of them are feeling a new-found closeness to the Holocaust. They all say, it could have been me. After an asparagus appetizer and a salmon entree, the MC of the luncheon, a major donor to the Holocaust Museum, gets up and introduces Binjamin. He doesn't need any proof either.

Blake Eskin

It bothers me that we are introduced as family without any qualification. I start to get upset. I won't fudge my family history for a lousy three-course lunch. But my mother calms me down.

Blake Eskin

Over the next week, we get to know Binjamin and his wife, Farina, a little better. My parents take them for a dim sum breakfast in Chinatown and a walk through lower Manhattan. Binjamin and Farina invite me to dinner. We have a good time. The hesitation and awkwardness of our first meeting is gone. After dinner, Farina goes to their room, and Binjamin and I sit down in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.

Blake Eskin

I ask Binjamin if he has considered taking a DNA test with us to determine if we're really family. Binjamin says he's not interested. He says that if we're distant relatives, the test might not tell us anything. And then he tells me a story about the man he calls Father Yaakov.

A woman who saw Binjamin's picture on television called him up to say that he looked exactly like her nephew, who she thought had died in the Holocaust. She said the father of this boy had survived and was living in Israel. Binjamin called the man in Israel and discovered that they had some memories in common. They decided to take a DNA test. It took about four weeks for the test results to arrive.

Blake Eskin

A week before the test results arrived, this man calls Binjamin.

Blake Eskin

The test results were negative. But Father Yaakov, a pious man in his 80's, helped Binjamin resolve something that had tormented him since the concentration camps.

Blake Eskin

As a boy in the camps, Binjamin had done something that led to the death of another boy, and he felt guilty. Yaakov told him he didn't have to.

Blake Eskin

Binjamin calls Father Yaakov every Friday morning, and they visit one another four or five times a year. Maybe we'll keep in touch with Binjamin too. I hope we do. Binjamin is haunted by his past and the uncertainty surrounding who he is in a way that my family can never be. But since he left, I feel more haunted by the present.

I keep thinking about what might have become of me if my great grandmother hadn't left Riga when she did. If I had been born at all, I might have ended up as an orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, or an unemployed engineer in Tel Aviv, or a Moscow mafioso with a gold tooth.

One of the luxuries of melting into the American mainstream is not having to think about where you came from, or what might have happened if you'd stayed there. You can ignore your past most of the time, but every once in a while, it comes back to haunt you.

Ira Glass

Blake Eskin first wrote about Binjamin Wilkomirski in The Forward. Wilkomirski's book is called Fragments. It's published by Shocken Books.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Ashes. We can be haunted by others, or we can be haunted by the way that we behaved ourselves. This is a story of both kinds of haunting. Several years ago, three weeks before his sister Lisa's wedding, David Sedaris got a phone call from his mom back home in Raleigh, North Carolina. She had lung cancer. She was a lifelong, unrepentant smoker.

David Sedaris

My sister Amy was with me when my mother called. We passed the phone back and forth across my tiny New York kitchen, and then spent the rest of the evening lying in bed, trying to convince each other that our mother would get better, but never quite believing it. I'd heard of people who had survived cancer, but most of them claimed to get through it with the aid of whole grains and spiritual publications that encourage them to sit quietly in a lotus position. They envisioned their tumors and tried to reason with them.

Our mother was not the type to greet the dawn or cook with oats and barley. She didn't reason. She threatened. And if that didn't work, she chose to ignore the problem. We couldn't picture her joining a support group or trotting through the mall in a warm-up suit. 62 years old, and none of us had ever seen her in a pair of slacks. I'm not certain why, but it seemed to me that a person needed a pair of pants in order to defeat cancer.

Just as important, they needed a plan. They needed to accept the idea of a new and different future free of crowded ashtrays and five gallon jugs of wine and scotch. They needed to believe that such a life might be worth living. I didn't know that I'd be able to embrace such an unrewarding future, but I hoped that she could.

If she'd had it her way, we would've never known about the cancer. It was our father's idea to tell us, and she had fought it, agreeing only when he threatened to tell us himself. Our mother worried that once we found out, we would treat her differently, delicately. We might feel obliged to compliment her cooking and laugh at all of her jokes, thinking always of the tumor she was trying so hard to forget. And that is exactly what we did.

The knowledge of her illness forced everything into the spotlight and demanded that it be memorable. We were no longer calling our mother. Now, we were picking up the telephone to call our mother with cancer. We realized that any conversation might be our last, and because of that, we wanted to say something important. But what could one say that hadn't already been printed on millions of greeting cards and helium balloons? "I love you," I said at the end of one of our late night phone calls. "I am going to pretend that I didn't hear that," she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass, and then she hung up.

I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if I had it to do over again, I would probably take it back. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed. Our mother had taught us this when we were no taller than pony kegs. I had known people who said such things to their parents, "I love you." But it always translated to mean, "I'd love getting off the phone with you."

We gathered together for the wedding, which took place on a crisp, clear October afternoon. I took my mother's arm and led her to a bench beyond the range of the other guests. The thin mountain air made it difficult for her to breathe, and she moved slowly, pausing every few moments. The families had taken a walk to a nearby glen, and we sat in the shade, eating sausage biscuits and speaking to one another like well-mannered strangers.

"The sausage is good," she said. "It's flavorful, but not too greasy." "Not too greasy at all. Still though, it isn't dry." "Neither are the biscuits," she said. "They're light and crisp, very buttery." "Very. These are some very buttery biscuits, They're flaky, but not too flaky. Not too flaky at all," she said. We watched the path, awkwardly waiting for someone to release us from the torture of our stiff and meaningless conversation.

I'd always been afraid of sick people and so had my mother. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant. Our complaints paled in the face of theirs and without our complaints, there was nothing to say. My mother and I had been fine over the telephone, but now, face to face, the rules had changed.

If she were to complain, she risked being seen as a sick complainer, the worst kind of all. If I were to do it, I might come off sounding even more selfish than I actually was. This sudden turn of events had robbed us of our common language, leaving us to exchange the same innocuous pleasantries we'd always made fun of. I wanted to stop it, and so, I think, did she. But neither of us knew how.

After the gifts had been opened, we returned to our rooms at the Econo Lodge, the reservations having been made by my father. We looked out the windows, past the freeway and into the distance, squinting at the charming hotels huddled at the base of other, finer mountains. This would be the last time our family was all together.

It's so rare when one knowingly does something for the last time, the last time you take a bath, the last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you knew you'd never do it again, it might be nice to really make a show of it. This would be it as far as my family was concerned. And it ticked me off that our final meeting would take place in such a sorry excuse for a hotel.

"What more do you want out of a hotel?" he shouted, stepping out onto the patio in his underpants. "It's clean. They've got a couple of snack machines In the lobby. The TV's working. It's near the interstate. Who cares if you don't like the damn wallpaper. You know what your problem is, don't you?" "We're spoiled," we shouted in unison.

My parents retired to their room, and the rest of us hiked to a nearby cemetery, a once ideal spot that now afforded an excellent view of the newly built Pizza Hut. Over the years, our mother had repeatedly voiced her desire to be cremated. We would drive past a small forest fire or observe the pillars of smoke rising from a neighbor's chimney, and she would crush her cigarette saying, "That's what I want right there. Do whatever you like with the remains. Sprinkle them into the ash trays of a fine hotel. Give them to smartass children for Christmas. Hand them over to the Catholics to rub into their foreheads. Just make sure I'm cremated."

"Oh Sharon," my father would groan, "you don't know what you want." He'd say it as though he himself had been cremated several times in the past, but had finally wised up and accepted burial as the only sensible option.

We laid our Econo Lodge bedspreads over the dewy grass of the cemetery, smoking joints and trying to imagine a life without our mother. If there was a heaven, we probably shouldn't expect to find her there. Neither did she deserve to roam the fiery tar pits of hell, surrounded for all eternity by the same [BLEEP] heads who brought us strip malls and theme restaurants. There must exist some middle ground, a place where one was tortured on a daily basis but still allowed a few moments of pleasure taken wherever they could find it.

That place seemed to be Raleigh, North Carolina, so why the big fuss? Why couldn't she just stay where she was and not have cancer? Ever since arriving at the motor lodge, we'd gone back and forth from one room to another, holding secret meetings and exchanging private bits of information. We hoped that by preparing ourselves for the worst, we might be able to endure the inevitable with some degree of courage or grace.

Anything we forecasted was puny compared to the future that awaited us. You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger. It is foolish even to try. The most you can do is eat up while you still can, stuffing yourself, shovelling it in with both hands and licking clean the plates, recalling every course in vivid detail.

Our mother was back in her room and very much alive, probably watching a detective program on television. Maybe that was her light in the window, her figure stepping out into the patio to light a cigarette. We told ourselves she probably wanted to be left alone. That's how stoned we were. We'd think of this later, each in our own separate way. I myself tend to dwell on the stupidity of pacing a cemetery while she sat, frightened and alone, staring at the tip of her cigarette and envisioning herself, clearly now, in ashes.

Ira Glass

David Sedaris's story, "Ashes," is from his book, Naked. His latest book is called Holidays On Ice. He was recorded by Time Warner Audio Books.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Ghost Story. Well, we figured we couldn't do a show about people who were haunted without at least one old-fashioned ghost story. This one is a very contemporary one. It's actually an excerpt from Heather Woodbury's amazing, eight hour, solo stage play, WhatEver. The play is this sprawling, epic story. Woodbury plays ten fully-developed characters and over 100 minor ones. We're just going to hear a tiny fragment of this thing here. Here is the set up.

A character named Clove is at a rave party on a beach, goes out in the water, goes under, start to drown. People think it's a suicide. Then, somehow, she wakes up in a Brussels sprouts field. This is a few scenes later.

[DIAL TONE] [PHONE RINGING]

Ira Glass

Well, Kurt Cobain wanders around haunting various characters throughout Heather Woodbury's WhatEver. The eight-hour version will be touring the United States in 1998. Her director, Dudley Saunders, has also produced an eight-hour radio play of the epic solo show from which this was excerpted.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Senior editor Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hit, Margie Rockland and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Alex Blumberg and Rachel Howard.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected]. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who says every week after our show--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.