Letters from Our Roots

My dear children—Maria, James, and Samuel,

As the autumn leaves begin their dance outside my window, I'm reminded of how swiftly the seasons of life change. This year marks my seventieth birthday, and while I hope to have many more years to share with you all, I feel compelled to commit to paper certain truths about our family that might otherwise be lost to time.

You know pieces of our story, of course—anecdotes shared over holiday dinners, bedtime stories from your childhood, fragments of conversations with grandparents long gone. But these scattered memories don't capture the full tapestry of where you come from, the rich soil from which your roots extend.

Our family story begins not with wealth or prestige but with extraordinary resilience. Your great-grandmother Esther arrived at Ellis Island in 1921, fleeing the pogroms that devastated her village in Eastern Europe. Just nineteen years old, she carried nothing but a small cloth bundle containing a wooden comb, a faded photograph of her parents, and the wedding ring her mother pressed into her palm as they said their final goodbyes. That ring now sits on Maria's finger—a small circle of gold that survived war, displacement, and the reconstruction of an entire life.

Esther worked as a seamstress in a Lower East Side shop where the air was thick with lint and the hours stretched from dawn until well after dusk. Her fingers grew calloused from the needle, but her spirit remained remarkably tender. She taught your grandmother Rebecca that strength means maintaining your capacity for compassion even when the world gives you every reason to harden.

Rebecca met your grandfather David at a community dance in 1946. He had just returned from the war with nightmares that would wake him for the rest of his life. When I asked him once why he chose her from all the young women in New York, he said, "She looked at me and saw past the damage. She didn't pretend the broken pieces weren't there—she just wasn't afraid of them." Their love wasn't the stuff of fairy tales; it was something far more valuable: a patient, everyday devotion that weathered five decades of joy and hardship in equal measure.

You all remember the small garden David kept behind our first house. What you might not know is that each type of flower represented a relative lost in the Holocaust. The yellow roses were for his mother, the daisies for his younger sisters, the irises for his father and brothers. Every spring, as he turned the soil and planted new seeds, he was performing an act of remembrance and defiance. "They tried to erase us," he once told me, "but as long as something blooms in our name, they failed."

Your father and I tried to honor this legacy in how we raised you. We wanted you to understand that you come from people who transformed suffering into wisdom, who rebuilt again and again without losing faith in the possibility of beauty. When James was bullied in school for his speech impediment, when Samuel struggled with anxiety that kept him awake at night, when Maria questioned whether she was strong enough to pursue medicine—in these moments, you were drawing on a wellspring of ancestral resilience whether you realized it or not.

The family traditions we observe—the special challah recipe at Passover, the reading of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" on Christmas Eve, the planting of a tree at each birth and death—these aren't merely sentimental habits. They're rituals of continuity, silent assurances that we belong to something larger than our individual lives.

I've saved every letter you've written to me, every handmade card, every school essay. They're bundled in the cedar chest at the foot of my bed. Someday they'll be yours again, physical reminders of your own becoming. Perhaps your children will read them and recognize echoes of themselves in your childhood thoughts.

As you move forward in your lives, building careers and families of your own, remember that you never walk alone. You carry the DNA of survivors, dreamers, and builders. When life challenges you—and it will, repeatedly—listen for the whispers of those who came before. Their blood runs in your veins, their stories are embedded in your bones.