February 17, 2022 • 31 mins
Dani recalls some of her favorite Family Secrets moments in this special bonus episode put together by Hark. Watch for more bonus content as we continue work on the next season.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
so hard to believe that we have now reached the
end of the sixth season of Family Secrets. Not that
anyone's counting, but at ten episodes each season, that's sixty
(00:21):
episodes so far, sixty stories of inspiring, illuminating, honest explorations.
As we get to work on a seventh season, I
have a special treat for all you Family Secrets listeners.
You're about to hear a playlist put together by Hark
of some favorite moments in these first six seasons. If
you haven't been listened to every single episode, well here's
(00:44):
a taste. I'm Danny Shapiro, and here are a few
of my favorite moments from Family Secrets. The tagline for
the show is the secrets that are kept from us,
(01:04):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. The very first episode of Family Secrets
begins with my own story of my life altering discovery
about my own family's deepest secret. I felt I had
to share my own secret if I was going to
(01:25):
be asking my guests to dig into their own. One
of the first big pieces of journalism I ever wrote
as a young writer, was a story for The New
Yorker called The Secret Wife. My dad had been dead
for a few years, and I was trying to understand
him better. From a chance throwaway comment, I had learned
(01:47):
that before my dad met my mother, he had been
briefly married to a young woman named Dorothy. She died
shortly after they wed. As I researched and reported the story,
I felt I was covering the truth of my own
father's sorrow and depression. I interviewed people who told me
that Dorothy had been the love of his life. I
(02:08):
began to understand, or so I thought, the reasons he
was so distant, the source ultimately of the pain killers
he swallowed by the dozen each day. When I finished
The Secret Wife, I thought I was done. Like a detective.
I had gotten to the bottom of things. I had
(02:28):
solved the case of my beloved, sad, dead dad. It
could have happened like this. I could have skipped the
whole DNA testing thing because I had no curiosity about it. Really,
I didn't need to spit into the plastic vials sent
by ancestry dot Com. I wasn't going to discover new
(02:49):
branches on my family tree. So why didn't I Why
didn't I skip it? I've learned something knew about family
secrets in the three years that have elapsed between that
moment in my kitchen in Connecticut, that cold winter evening,
Like so many other cold winter evenings, I've learned that
(03:11):
when we discover a family secret is as important as
the how and the why of what we discovery. It
could have happened like this, that most subtle whisper, that
place in the deepest interior that we feel when we
know something isn't right, there's something we're missing, some piece
(03:33):
of elusive information that has been withheld from us. That
subtle whisper can become so subtle that we almost don't
hear it at all. We brushed by it as we
go about our lives. We're so busy. Our to do
lists are endless. There are jobs, bosses, spouses, kids, always
(03:54):
something louder clamoring for our attention. On the day that
I DNA results were returned to me by ancestry dot Com,
I was fifty four years old. I had been married
for nearly twenty years. I was the mother of a
teenage son. I lived with my family in a house
in the Connecticut countryside. I was a writer who had
(04:15):
just finished my ninth book, Woman, wife, mother, cousin, niece, granddaughter,
great granddaughter, daughter. I stared at the results of my
DNA test on my computer screen. The numbers, letters, words,
(04:36):
names were a nonsensical blur. They arranged and rearranged themselves
as I tried to make any kind of sense of them.
But I couldn't make sense of them. They made no
sense the results of the DNA test. I almost didn't
take those results, spelled out in crystal clear scientific black
(04:57):
and white, meant only one possible thing. My father was
not my father. My guest in this episode is David Kasinski,
brother of the man known as the UNI bomber Ted Kasinski.
What do you do when bombings are happening all over
the country, it's national news, and you suspect that the
(05:19):
UNI bomber is your own brother part of it. It
wasn't only that I modeled myself and Ted um. You know,
our family sort of had this framework of values that
it was around the life of the mind, the arts.
But even though David idealized and idolized Ted, there was
(05:41):
also a sense that there was another side to ted
that had nothing to do with the families shared values
or academic achievement. There was a time a little bit
later when I asked my mom what's wrong with Teddy?
And she was a little taken it back, you know,
what do you mean? And David, there's nothing your brother,
(06:01):
And I said, well, he doesn't have any friends. Why
is that? Doesn't he like people? And sometimes he did
seem to shy away from folks, you know, somebody would
come over unannounced and he would sort of leave the
room quickly, like he was upset that they arrived, a
little frightened. And it was then that Mom said that,
(06:26):
you know, ted had had an experience as a child.
He is at the age of nine months, he had
gotten sick. They took him to the hospital. Some kind
of rash had covered his body, apparently an allergic reaction,
but they couldn't diagnose it, and they kept him there
for I think well over a week, and our parents
(06:46):
were only allowed to visit during the regular visiting hours.
Mom always faulted the hospital for for that, and you know,
she felt that when they brought Teddy help from the hospital,
he was a very a different child, at least for
a while. He didn't smile anymore, he didn't make eye contact.
(07:06):
And it was at that point that my mom had
said to me, Dave, whatever you do in your life,
don't ever abandon your brother, because that's what he fears
the most. And of course I love Teddie, I said, oh,
I love Teddy. I'd never abandoned Teddy. And I remember
crying thinking about the pain he had suffered this a
(07:28):
little baby. And I think there was another lesson that
my mom sort of wove into that sort of teachable moment,
and the lesson was that it takes some compassions empathy
to try to understand another human being. And how old
were you when she imparted this lesson more or less
would thank I'm not exactly sure, probably somewhere between seven
(07:51):
and nine years old. And when you said, your mom,
what's wrong with Teddy? What? What was it beyond that
he didn't seem to have any friends? What prompted you
to say that? Do you think? Oh? I don't know that.
I've been asked that question, and it's an interesting one. UM.
I think there were times when Teddy just seemed like
(08:14):
kind of shut down, UM, like something was bothering him.
But he wouldn't express it. A strong sense of privacy,
an introversion that was unusual, I think, at least in
my experience, and I tended to be a fairly social person.
I mean I had friends, you know, it was natural
(08:35):
for me to to be interested in people, and too,
I want to interact with people, And with Teddy it
was quite different. So probably I was trying to explore
why or Teddy and I different in this way. My
guest in this episode is no Ah Letterman, who uncovers
the extraordinary and moving story of his grandparents, who had
(08:57):
been Holocaust survivors who had never spoken of their experience.
Noah grows up in suburban Great Neck, but always in
the shadow of what had transpired two generations before him.
Haunted by the stories his grandparents carried and the impact
of those stories, he begins to internalize it as some
(09:17):
kind of responsibility. If anyone in the family is going
to unpack the history of his grandparents and what they
went through, it's going to be him. Then, when Noah's eighteen,
his grandpa dies and he's afraid that all of his
Grandpa's stories will die with him. I'd always been the grandchild,
(09:38):
I think with the most questions when it came time
to uh, you know, to sit around at the meals.
I was always trying to get nearest to my grandfather
and ask the question. But it wasn't until I think
my grandfather died and I'm standing in the cemetery burying him, um,
(09:59):
and I I'm sort of looking around, and I'm noticing
that all of the all of the gravestones have the
Stars of David on them, appropriately at the Jewish cemetery,
but inside those stars of David, a lot of the
tombstones had Holocaust survivor Holocaust survivors written within the star.
(10:21):
And I looked over at my grandfather's casket and then
out at the cemetery. It really felt like we were
burying all of these stories, you know, all these things
that I would never learned, or so I felt at
the time. Then later on that that day and week UM,
(10:42):
when we had to Shiva, all of my grandparents friends
started to come to the apartment. And you know, these
Holocaust survivors, they would like shuffle in and sit at
the table. And for all the years I had known them,
they always sat there and spoke in this like coated
Yiddish and you know, it's probably comfortable for them to
(11:03):
speak in Yiddish, but also it was convenient for them
to not have to, you know, have this kid snooping
in on their conversations and not have the burden of
like damaging another another young kid in the family. So
they spoke in Yetish. But at the Shiva, and you know,
at this point, I'm eighteen years old. I think for
my benefit, they started speaking in English and they started
(11:26):
telling all of these stories about my grandfather. Noah hears
two incredible stories during the Shiva as the old Jews
sit at the table, nothing on bagels and locks. In
the first story, his grandfather, who's working on the ship
that's taking him and Noah's grandma to America, is accosted
by a sailor. My grandfather had a job on the ship,
(11:48):
and this other sailor came up to him and he
was an anti Semi and basically just said it's a
shame that you should see the end of this war.
And then my grandfather knocks them out, and you know,
to me, that was just such like a phenomenal moment
because it's this little Jew who's standing up to this
like six ft six anti Semite, and then you know
(12:11):
when when he's taken to the ship's captain, the ship's
captain just looks at the giant sailor and the little
jew and he laughs. But you know, in my mind,
I'm realizing, Wow, this is like a really brave and
tough man. And then that was confirmed for me even
more when when I learned this story that took place
(12:31):
in the barn, and the barn story takes place during
the Holocaust, when my grandfather is essentially hiding in this
barn with a friend and um a Nazi walks in
on him and he demanded my grandfather's boots. My grandfather, Poppy,
he doesn't wanna, he doesn't want to turn over his boots,
so instead he tells his friend to extinguish the light,
(12:54):
and he runs the pitchfork through the Nazis throat and
he leaves him dead there. My guest in this episode
is Lacey Schwartz, and Lacey's is a story about secrets
and identity and ethnicity and the length to which we
sometimes go to avoid seeing the truth that is as
plain as our own face. When Lazy is sixteen, her parents,
(13:17):
who had been having issues, split up. This fissure in
the foundation of her family is the first step in
a fissure inside of Lacey. She can't articulate it, but
she knows that something doesn't make sense. The fall of
her senior year, when she applies to colleges, she leaves
the box that would identify her ethnicity unchecked. Back in
(13:41):
those days, I don't think college is still do this.
Lacey would have sent a photograph along with her application.
So Lazy is admitted to Georgetown as a black student.
Do you remember anything about that moment? Was that a
conscious choice? Was that a moment of I really just
(14:01):
don't even know what the foot here? Or you tell me,
like you know, it almost feels like a challenge, like
you tell me who who am I. I've spent to
a fair amount of time analyzing this and discussing it
with the people that were close to me. But I
think in retrospect that what I was, even if it was,
as you said, the the unknown truth or what what
was that you said? What was that crazy? The unsought known,
(14:24):
the unsought known? And that was really so my parents
went around six team a junior year in high school, right,
So I was sending my applications more or less that
summer fall afterwards. At that point I was really my
bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down. At
that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was
very much prioritizing the issues I was dealing with my life,
(14:48):
but at the same time, largely around I wish with
one person, a guy that I was dating at that
time who had already gone off to college, who he
himself was also bi racial black and had come from
the same town as me, and was just saying, like,
yo is one thing that you think walking around in
this relatively small community that we grew up in and
(15:08):
saying that you're white or you know, identifying as such.
But you know, when you go out into the bigger world,
like people are going to laugh at you, like it
doesn't add up. And so I was conscious enough to
know at that point that there were things that weren't
adding up, but I wasn't prepared to really do the
deep dive at that point under my you know, but
still the time my parents root, I wasn't in the
(15:31):
proximity of my parents ready to do that diving a
cigarette like, well, then who am I if I am
not the daughter of both of my parents. Lassie goes
off to college and begins to try on her new identity,
living in what she describes as a racial closet. She
doesn't say a word to her mother, she doesn't say
a word to her father. It isn't until she's been
(15:53):
away from home for her entire freshman year that she
broaches the subject with her mother for the first time.
So I went to my mother and was like, with then,
I wanted as a truth, like why do I look
the way I did? And my mother, as she tends to,
kind of comes in haught and it took a while
me pushing her for her to finally kind of sit
down and really have the conversation about what haccurred around
(16:14):
me being conceived and how likely it was that my
father was not my biological Bama. So by the time
I found out and really fundamentally again, it was more
a confirmation process than it was a revelatory process, because
by the time I went to my mother and stuff
to her, I was ready just to have the imition
(16:35):
firm so I could confirm my own identity and be
able to figure out who I was. Lacy's mother does
not want to talk about it. At first she denies it,
but eventually she tells Lazy the truth her mom had
had a long affair was an African American man named Rodney,
a friend of the family that Lacy has known growing
(16:57):
up and who Lacy resembles to such a point friends
have pointed it out, and so kind of at that point,
she shared the information and shared what is basically outline,
and it's not that she had had a relationship with
my biological father and there was a very good chance
that I would to his child. And for me, I
mean again, based on the time that I really physically
(17:18):
looked fairly similar to him, it seemed pretty obvious what
the truth was. Once Lazy has the truth of her
identity confirmed, you'd think she'd pay her dad a visit
go talk to him. Lazy's mom tells her that the
two of them have never discussed it. My parents never
talked about the truth to this day. They haven't actually
really pull out had a conversation about the truth for
(17:40):
a long time. Obviously listeners my mother, But now at
this point my father has made it clear to her
that he doesn't want to sit down and talk it out,
that he just doesn't want to talk to her about it,
and they had never had a moment with each other
when you were born or in your childhood. There wasn't
that when when he moved out, like when they were
pretty much in the pop him moving out. One one
(18:01):
moment he said, you know, I know, lazy is not
my biological child. And according to her, you know, she
cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But
they didn't actually have a conversation like that was the
extent of the competition. How long after the hemming and
hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting to
you that it was possible, how long before you then
(18:23):
ended up speaking with your father about it? A decade?
A decade. Steve Romo, a polished newscaster, spent much of
his life hiding his shame about his upbringing, which resided
just beneath his completely pulled together exterior and his big career.
(18:45):
Stephen goes to school dressed in mismatched clothes, dirty clothes,
and sometimes the roaches hitch a ride in his backpack,
crawl out of his lunchbox. Other kids notice, of course,
but Stephen invents stories around why that's the case. I
was just a liar, and I thought I was really
(19:07):
good at it, But now looking back, it just seems
ridiculous the stuff I would say. But it was anything
too disconnect me from the way I was growing up.
I watched so much TV as a kid, uninterrupted hours
upon hours of TV, any and everything, but we didn't
have cable, so it's just what I could get on
(19:28):
the antenna. But because of that, I invented so many
stories that were just completely made up about trips to
Europe and stuff that would have never happened in a
million years with enough detail. I thought that I was
completely tricking all these kids to think that I was
actually like one of them or just wealthy. And I
(19:48):
was made to dress poor because my parents wanted to
keep me humble. Just just ridiculous stories that I made
up just to try to defend myself. And I was
made fun of, of course, because that's what happens when
you're a kid. But I really feel like the kids
were easier on me than they could have been. I
could have had it much worse than I did. You know,
(20:10):
it's interesting the whole idea of education through TV, you know,
and and through reading as well, and the way in
which I mean so often on this podcast I think
about my guests stories and the way that if the
story had been playing out during a time when the
Internet existed, where there was so much readily available information,
(20:35):
you could look something up, you could call it by
its name, you could find out what it was, you
could connect with other people who might be going through
something similar. And there are things that are not so
great about that, but there's so many things that are
that really pierced people's sense of isolation. Whereas when you
were growing up, that didn't exist, and so your education
(20:55):
was Mr. Rogers neighborhood. That's such a ordered, gentle kind place,
a place where there would never be a cockroach, a
place where there would never be anything out of place
or out of order? Did you find all of that?
It was like sort of part of your coming of age. Absolutely.
(21:16):
I can't imagine what my childhood would have been like
without television. It's how I knew that the way I
was living was unacceptable and would make me start as
a young child, trying to fight against it, trying to
force my parents to allow us to move was just
from the story that I saw on TV. They made
(21:38):
me feel less lonely I felt more connected to the
characters on TV. Mr. Rogers, Neighborhood and even shows that
weren't actually geared towards me was. I was a super
young child watching the Oprah Winfrey Show and seeing people
who had gone through trauma had come just fine. It
(22:01):
was not geared to our nine year old boy, but
watching it made me realize that if these people can
overcome horrible things that happened to them, uh, the same
could be true of me. And then getting a library
card and reading diary of Anne Frank and seeing like,
this is nothing that I'm going through. This is nothing
compared to what some people have survived. It was invaluable
(22:24):
that connection. I feel like stories really did save me.
I think that's why I'm a a storyteller now. When
John Melman's wife Marlow was first diagnosed with cancer, they
shielded their young daughters from this painful fact. But then
years later, Marla's cancer returned and was now terminal, and
(22:46):
they continued to hide the truth of her condition from
their now college age daughters. We gotta crab sandwich and
we had to deal with it. We never looked back.
What was me? Why us? We never said that to
each other. We never wondered, like, you know, I wish
it had it just we just accepted it. But we
tried to accept it in a manner that we fought
(23:08):
it as fiercely humanly possible. We used every access point
that we possibly could, from a relationship standpoint, from an
involvement standpoint, from traveling around two different hospitals to meet
different doctors, to learn and to educate ourselves. So um,
(23:29):
but there was nothing we could do. This is not hey,
I broke my leg and it's gonna mend. We thought
the first time that we'd get it. We knew this
statistics were against us. Um and then even the second time,
she out performed and pushed the boundaries no. Three and
(23:54):
a half times more than somebody else should have and
enabled our kids. It's two go through their puberty, their
adolescent teenage years, their high school years, you know, tough
times for girls, not easy time for any girl. Saw
them get into their colleges of their dreams. They all
(24:19):
were academically very strong students. They were also incredible athletes,
and they all played at a Division one level, which
for Scarsdale Jewish girls was rare, so they were able
to stay on track at a very very high level.
That is probably only because of Marla that they saw
(24:42):
this fierceness in her to fight their early days and
the way that she lived her life knowing that she
always had potentially had this cancer that was lingering. So
it worked for us, it's not for everybody. It was
uneasy fibbing. Could you describe that a little bit? For instance,
(25:07):
we'd go on a vacation, but Marlo, we always had
to schedule our vacations on scans or treatments, and they
were all being done in Boston. So we would leave
from New York the day after she had her scan
in Boston. She literally run back and then get on
a plane. We go away. But then we go back
and we come back to New York and Marla go
(25:28):
back to Boston. Why is mommy going back to Boston? Oh,
she asked to you know, she's part of this trial. Yes,
she's true, she was part of a trial. The piece
of the truth, the piece of the truth. It wasn't
like it wasn't as though this trial is keeping her alive. Kids.
We never said that, and that was the truth. We
called it the loving choice to provide them enough information
(25:51):
that they knew what was going on, but not every detail.
So Marla really was fine, totally fine for years. She's
fine years in which she requires a tremendous amount of
medical attention. Sometimes she wears a wig, but otherwise you
(26:11):
really wouldn't suspect that she's dealing with a terminal illness.
No one knows. But then, with her girls now all
highly competent young adults, Marla starts running out of options.
She's turned through every possible clinical trial and conventional medicine.
(26:32):
She begins to develop tumors around her clavical again, and
these are pinching her vocal cords. She has radiation and
a port is put in. This, of course, becomes harder
and harder to keep hidden. She has to change the
way she dresses. No more summary outfits, nothing low cut
or sleeveless. She wears scarves around her neck. I just thought,
(26:55):
because she had this ability to to regenerate, even when
the trial they didn't think of tribal was gonna work,
it would work for six or nine months, and which
was unheard of. Most trials really work eight or sixteen weeks.
I just figured we'd get through this holiday season. We
have two graduations this year, one of which we had already.
We had one in a month. I just figured she
(27:16):
would plow through this and make it because the red
letter days for her were so important to her. She
lived for those, She lived for those days. I just
figured she'd do it. But Maria in September and October
could see that we were headed down a trickier place,
and she decided, I'm done keeping this secret. I can't
(27:39):
do it anymore. The guilt was was writing, and she
wasn't sure what the timeline was when you say guilt,
was it because at that point she was facing her
own mortality. Facing her mortality, she didn't want to walk
around the house covering the port or the fact that
(28:01):
she had different red spots because of the radiation. She
just didn't want to hide anymore. She was certain she
wanted to do in October, when the kids were home
for the fall break and she felt then she felt better.
She said, okay, I'll just wait till Thanksgiving. Then she
doesn't bad news in November that really there wasn't much
left in terms of the even the conventional medicines, and
(28:23):
there was one last Jefford. But the doctors were saying
you need to start to get ready here. But I
just figured she would do it for another six or
eight months and to be a crappy summer of nineteen.
I thought the summer nineteen would be really grappy. They're older,
two daughters are away in college, and the youngest is
a high school senior. When John and Marla set them
down over Thanksgiving to break some of the news to them,
(28:47):
not all of the news. So we told the kids
and Thanksgiving that we were concerned, not worried, but we
were concerned that mom had taken a turn and some
things had occurred that we did not expect, and that
we were working through them, but that we were basically
flashing a yellow light not to worry, and we had
(29:08):
a script that we had come in our mind, and
it went really well. And then Marla pushed the envelope
a little bit in the conversation, and we had the
girls in a pretty good place, because I don't think
that they were totally surprised by all of this, that
there was something going on, because the little one was
at home and I'm sure she was telling the sisters that,
you know, my mom has been running around a little
(29:29):
bit more, and she said in this conversation, and we
had talked about this line, which was, you know, there's
the likelihood that I'm gonna make it to eight is
very low. And then she said, and I was shocked
by and I did a turn with my neck on
and forget, she said, and it's unlikely that I'm gonna
make it to sixty. And that's when we had a
(29:52):
little bit of bedroom in the house. The girls were
not expecting that, and that sort of changed the vibe
and the rhythm to the conversation. But she had had
enough of the gamesmanship that she had and the brinksmanship
that she had. Okay, Family Secrets listeners, that's all we've
(30:22):
got for now. As for what's to come, we'll be
back with all new extraordinary stories to share with you.
We've just begun recording them now, so stay tuned. In
the meantime, keep an eye and an ear out for
occasional bonus interviews, and keep calling us with your own stories.
At One Secret zero, We're listening, and we're so grateful
(30:45):
you are too.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
so hard to believe that we have now reached the
end of the sixth season of Family Secrets. Not that
anyone's counting, but at ten episodes each season, that's sixty
(00:21):
episodes so far, sixty stories of inspiring, illuminating, honest explorations.
As we get to work on a seventh season, I
have a special treat for all you Family Secrets listeners.
You're about to hear a playlist put together by Hark
of some favorite moments in these first six seasons. If
you haven't been listened to every single episode, well here's
(00:44):
a taste. I'm Danny Shapiro, and here are a few
of my favorite moments from Family Secrets. The tagline for
the show is the secrets that are kept from us,
(01:04):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. The very first episode of Family Secrets
begins with my own story of my life altering discovery
about my own family's deepest secret. I felt I had
to share my own secret if I was going to
(01:25):
be asking my guests to dig into their own. One
of the first big pieces of journalism I ever wrote
as a young writer, was a story for The New
Yorker called The Secret Wife. My dad had been dead
for a few years, and I was trying to understand
him better. From a chance throwaway comment, I had learned
(01:47):
that before my dad met my mother, he had been
briefly married to a young woman named Dorothy. She died
shortly after they wed. As I researched and reported the story,
I felt I was covering the truth of my own
father's sorrow and depression. I interviewed people who told me
that Dorothy had been the love of his life. I
(02:08):
began to understand, or so I thought, the reasons he
was so distant, the source ultimately of the pain killers
he swallowed by the dozen each day. When I finished
The Secret Wife, I thought I was done. Like a detective.
I had gotten to the bottom of things. I had
(02:28):
solved the case of my beloved, sad, dead dad. It
could have happened like this. I could have skipped the
whole DNA testing thing because I had no curiosity about it. Really,
I didn't need to spit into the plastic vials sent
by ancestry dot Com. I wasn't going to discover new
(02:49):
branches on my family tree. So why didn't I Why
didn't I skip it? I've learned something knew about family
secrets in the three years that have elapsed between that
moment in my kitchen in Connecticut, that cold winter evening,
Like so many other cold winter evenings, I've learned that
(03:11):
when we discover a family secret is as important as
the how and the why of what we discovery. It
could have happened like this, that most subtle whisper, that
place in the deepest interior that we feel when we
know something isn't right, there's something we're missing, some piece
(03:33):
of elusive information that has been withheld from us. That
subtle whisper can become so subtle that we almost don't
hear it at all. We brushed by it as we
go about our lives. We're so busy. Our to do
lists are endless. There are jobs, bosses, spouses, kids, always
(03:54):
something louder clamoring for our attention. On the day that
I DNA results were returned to me by ancestry dot Com,
I was fifty four years old. I had been married
for nearly twenty years. I was the mother of a
teenage son. I lived with my family in a house
in the Connecticut countryside. I was a writer who had
(04:15):
just finished my ninth book, Woman, wife, mother, cousin, niece, granddaughter,
great granddaughter, daughter. I stared at the results of my
DNA test on my computer screen. The numbers, letters, words,
(04:36):
names were a nonsensical blur. They arranged and rearranged themselves
as I tried to make any kind of sense of them.
But I couldn't make sense of them. They made no
sense the results of the DNA test. I almost didn't
take those results, spelled out in crystal clear scientific black
(04:57):
and white, meant only one possible thing. My father was
not my father. My guest in this episode is David Kasinski,
brother of the man known as the UNI bomber Ted Kasinski.
What do you do when bombings are happening all over
the country, it's national news, and you suspect that the
(05:19):
UNI bomber is your own brother part of it. It
wasn't only that I modeled myself and Ted um. You know,
our family sort of had this framework of values that
it was around the life of the mind, the arts.
But even though David idealized and idolized Ted, there was
(05:41):
also a sense that there was another side to ted
that had nothing to do with the families shared values
or academic achievement. There was a time a little bit
later when I asked my mom what's wrong with Teddy?
And she was a little taken it back, you know,
what do you mean? And David, there's nothing your brother,
(06:01):
And I said, well, he doesn't have any friends. Why
is that? Doesn't he like people? And sometimes he did
seem to shy away from folks, you know, somebody would
come over unannounced and he would sort of leave the
room quickly, like he was upset that they arrived, a
little frightened. And it was then that Mom said that,
(06:26):
you know, ted had had an experience as a child.
He is at the age of nine months, he had
gotten sick. They took him to the hospital. Some kind
of rash had covered his body, apparently an allergic reaction,
but they couldn't diagnose it, and they kept him there
for I think well over a week, and our parents
(06:46):
were only allowed to visit during the regular visiting hours.
Mom always faulted the hospital for for that, and you know,
she felt that when they brought Teddy help from the hospital,
he was a very a different child, at least for
a while. He didn't smile anymore, he didn't make eye contact.
(07:06):
And it was at that point that my mom had
said to me, Dave, whatever you do in your life,
don't ever abandon your brother, because that's what he fears
the most. And of course I love Teddie, I said, oh,
I love Teddy. I'd never abandoned Teddy. And I remember
crying thinking about the pain he had suffered this a
(07:28):
little baby. And I think there was another lesson that
my mom sort of wove into that sort of teachable moment,
and the lesson was that it takes some compassions empathy
to try to understand another human being. And how old
were you when she imparted this lesson more or less
would thank I'm not exactly sure, probably somewhere between seven
(07:51):
and nine years old. And when you said, your mom,
what's wrong with Teddy? What? What was it beyond that
he didn't seem to have any friends? What prompted you
to say that? Do you think? Oh? I don't know that.
I've been asked that question, and it's an interesting one. UM.
I think there were times when Teddy just seemed like
(08:14):
kind of shut down, UM, like something was bothering him.
But he wouldn't express it. A strong sense of privacy,
an introversion that was unusual, I think, at least in
my experience, and I tended to be a fairly social person.
I mean I had friends, you know, it was natural
(08:35):
for me to to be interested in people, and too,
I want to interact with people, And with Teddy it
was quite different. So probably I was trying to explore
why or Teddy and I different in this way. My
guest in this episode is no Ah Letterman, who uncovers
the extraordinary and moving story of his grandparents, who had
(08:57):
been Holocaust survivors who had never spoken of their experience.
Noah grows up in suburban Great Neck, but always in
the shadow of what had transpired two generations before him.
Haunted by the stories his grandparents carried and the impact
of those stories, he begins to internalize it as some
(09:17):
kind of responsibility. If anyone in the family is going
to unpack the history of his grandparents and what they
went through, it's going to be him. Then, when Noah's eighteen,
his grandpa dies and he's afraid that all of his
Grandpa's stories will die with him. I'd always been the grandchild,
(09:38):
I think with the most questions when it came time
to uh, you know, to sit around at the meals.
I was always trying to get nearest to my grandfather
and ask the question. But it wasn't until I think
my grandfather died and I'm standing in the cemetery burying him, um,
(09:59):
and I I'm sort of looking around, and I'm noticing
that all of the all of the gravestones have the
Stars of David on them, appropriately at the Jewish cemetery,
but inside those stars of David, a lot of the
tombstones had Holocaust survivor Holocaust survivors written within the star.
(10:21):
And I looked over at my grandfather's casket and then
out at the cemetery. It really felt like we were
burying all of these stories, you know, all these things
that I would never learned, or so I felt at
the time. Then later on that that day and week UM,
(10:42):
when we had to Shiva, all of my grandparents friends
started to come to the apartment. And you know, these
Holocaust survivors, they would like shuffle in and sit at
the table. And for all the years I had known them,
they always sat there and spoke in this like coated
Yiddish and you know, it's probably comfortable for them to
(11:03):
speak in Yiddish, but also it was convenient for them
to not have to, you know, have this kid snooping
in on their conversations and not have the burden of
like damaging another another young kid in the family. So
they spoke in Yetish. But at the Shiva, and you know,
at this point, I'm eighteen years old. I think for
my benefit, they started speaking in English and they started
(11:26):
telling all of these stories about my grandfather. Noah hears
two incredible stories during the Shiva as the old Jews
sit at the table, nothing on bagels and locks. In
the first story, his grandfather, who's working on the ship
that's taking him and Noah's grandma to America, is accosted
by a sailor. My grandfather had a job on the ship,
(11:48):
and this other sailor came up to him and he
was an anti Semi and basically just said it's a
shame that you should see the end of this war.
And then my grandfather knocks them out, and you know,
to me, that was just such like a phenomenal moment
because it's this little Jew who's standing up to this
like six ft six anti Semite, and then you know
(12:11):
when when he's taken to the ship's captain, the ship's
captain just looks at the giant sailor and the little
jew and he laughs. But you know, in my mind,
I'm realizing, Wow, this is like a really brave and
tough man. And then that was confirmed for me even
more when when I learned this story that took place
(12:31):
in the barn, and the barn story takes place during
the Holocaust, when my grandfather is essentially hiding in this
barn with a friend and um a Nazi walks in
on him and he demanded my grandfather's boots. My grandfather, Poppy,
he doesn't wanna, he doesn't want to turn over his boots,
so instead he tells his friend to extinguish the light,
(12:54):
and he runs the pitchfork through the Nazis throat and
he leaves him dead there. My guest in this episode
is Lacey Schwartz, and Lacey's is a story about secrets
and identity and ethnicity and the length to which we
sometimes go to avoid seeing the truth that is as
plain as our own face. When Lazy is sixteen, her parents,
(13:17):
who had been having issues, split up. This fissure in
the foundation of her family is the first step in
a fissure inside of Lacey. She can't articulate it, but
she knows that something doesn't make sense. The fall of
her senior year, when she applies to colleges, she leaves
the box that would identify her ethnicity unchecked. Back in
(13:41):
those days, I don't think college is still do this.
Lacey would have sent a photograph along with her application.
So Lazy is admitted to Georgetown as a black student.
Do you remember anything about that moment? Was that a
conscious choice? Was that a moment of I really just
(14:01):
don't even know what the foot here? Or you tell me,
like you know, it almost feels like a challenge, like
you tell me who who am I. I've spent to
a fair amount of time analyzing this and discussing it
with the people that were close to me. But I
think in retrospect that what I was, even if it was,
as you said, the the unknown truth or what what
was that you said? What was that crazy? The unsought known,
(14:24):
the unsought known? And that was really so my parents
went around six team a junior year in high school, right,
So I was sending my applications more or less that
summer fall afterwards. At that point I was really my
bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down. At
that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was
very much prioritizing the issues I was dealing with my life,
(14:48):
but at the same time, largely around I wish with
one person, a guy that I was dating at that
time who had already gone off to college, who he
himself was also bi racial black and had come from
the same town as me, and was just saying, like,
yo is one thing that you think walking around in
this relatively small community that we grew up in and
(15:08):
saying that you're white or you know, identifying as such.
But you know, when you go out into the bigger world,
like people are going to laugh at you, like it
doesn't add up. And so I was conscious enough to
know at that point that there were things that weren't
adding up, but I wasn't prepared to really do the
deep dive at that point under my you know, but
still the time my parents root, I wasn't in the
(15:31):
proximity of my parents ready to do that diving a
cigarette like, well, then who am I if I am
not the daughter of both of my parents. Lassie goes
off to college and begins to try on her new identity,
living in what she describes as a racial closet. She
doesn't say a word to her mother, she doesn't say
a word to her father. It isn't until she's been
(15:53):
away from home for her entire freshman year that she
broaches the subject with her mother for the first time.
So I went to my mother and was like, with then,
I wanted as a truth, like why do I look
the way I did? And my mother, as she tends to,
kind of comes in haught and it took a while
me pushing her for her to finally kind of sit
down and really have the conversation about what haccurred around
(16:14):
me being conceived and how likely it was that my
father was not my biological Bama. So by the time
I found out and really fundamentally again, it was more
a confirmation process than it was a revelatory process, because
by the time I went to my mother and stuff
to her, I was ready just to have the imition
(16:35):
firm so I could confirm my own identity and be
able to figure out who I was. Lacy's mother does
not want to talk about it. At first she denies it,
but eventually she tells Lazy the truth her mom had
had a long affair was an African American man named Rodney,
a friend of the family that Lacy has known growing
(16:57):
up and who Lacy resembles to such a point friends
have pointed it out, and so kind of at that point,
she shared the information and shared what is basically outline,
and it's not that she had had a relationship with
my biological father and there was a very good chance
that I would to his child. And for me, I
mean again, based on the time that I really physically
(17:18):
looked fairly similar to him, it seemed pretty obvious what
the truth was. Once Lazy has the truth of her
identity confirmed, you'd think she'd pay her dad a visit
go talk to him. Lazy's mom tells her that the
two of them have never discussed it. My parents never
talked about the truth to this day. They haven't actually
really pull out had a conversation about the truth for
(17:40):
a long time. Obviously listeners my mother, But now at
this point my father has made it clear to her
that he doesn't want to sit down and talk it out,
that he just doesn't want to talk to her about it,
and they had never had a moment with each other
when you were born or in your childhood. There wasn't
that when when he moved out, like when they were
pretty much in the pop him moving out. One one
(18:01):
moment he said, you know, I know, lazy is not
my biological child. And according to her, you know, she
cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But
they didn't actually have a conversation like that was the
extent of the competition. How long after the hemming and
hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting to
you that it was possible, how long before you then
(18:23):
ended up speaking with your father about it? A decade?
A decade. Steve Romo, a polished newscaster, spent much of
his life hiding his shame about his upbringing, which resided
just beneath his completely pulled together exterior and his big career.
(18:45):
Stephen goes to school dressed in mismatched clothes, dirty clothes,
and sometimes the roaches hitch a ride in his backpack,
crawl out of his lunchbox. Other kids notice, of course,
but Stephen invents stories around why that's the case. I
was just a liar, and I thought I was really
(19:07):
good at it, But now looking back, it just seems
ridiculous the stuff I would say. But it was anything
too disconnect me from the way I was growing up.
I watched so much TV as a kid, uninterrupted hours
upon hours of TV, any and everything, but we didn't
have cable, so it's just what I could get on
(19:28):
the antenna. But because of that, I invented so many
stories that were just completely made up about trips to
Europe and stuff that would have never happened in a
million years with enough detail. I thought that I was
completely tricking all these kids to think that I was
actually like one of them or just wealthy. And I
(19:48):
was made to dress poor because my parents wanted to
keep me humble. Just just ridiculous stories that I made
up just to try to defend myself. And I was
made fun of, of course, because that's what happens when
you're a kid. But I really feel like the kids
were easier on me than they could have been. I
could have had it much worse than I did. You know,
(20:10):
it's interesting the whole idea of education through TV, you know,
and and through reading as well, and the way in
which I mean so often on this podcast I think
about my guests stories and the way that if the
story had been playing out during a time when the
Internet existed, where there was so much readily available information,
(20:35):
you could look something up, you could call it by
its name, you could find out what it was, you
could connect with other people who might be going through
something similar. And there are things that are not so
great about that, but there's so many things that are
that really pierced people's sense of isolation. Whereas when you
were growing up, that didn't exist, and so your education
(20:55):
was Mr. Rogers neighborhood. That's such a ordered, gentle kind place,
a place where there would never be a cockroach, a
place where there would never be anything out of place
or out of order? Did you find all of that?
It was like sort of part of your coming of age. Absolutely.
(21:16):
I can't imagine what my childhood would have been like
without television. It's how I knew that the way I
was living was unacceptable and would make me start as
a young child, trying to fight against it, trying to
force my parents to allow us to move was just
from the story that I saw on TV. They made
(21:38):
me feel less lonely I felt more connected to the
characters on TV. Mr. Rogers, Neighborhood and even shows that
weren't actually geared towards me was. I was a super
young child watching the Oprah Winfrey Show and seeing people
who had gone through trauma had come just fine. It
(22:01):
was not geared to our nine year old boy, but
watching it made me realize that if these people can
overcome horrible things that happened to them, uh, the same
could be true of me. And then getting a library
card and reading diary of Anne Frank and seeing like,
this is nothing that I'm going through. This is nothing
compared to what some people have survived. It was invaluable
(22:24):
that connection. I feel like stories really did save me.
I think that's why I'm a a storyteller now. When
John Melman's wife Marlow was first diagnosed with cancer, they
shielded their young daughters from this painful fact. But then
years later, Marla's cancer returned and was now terminal, and
(22:46):
they continued to hide the truth of her condition from
their now college age daughters. We gotta crab sandwich and
we had to deal with it. We never looked back.
What was me? Why us? We never said that to
each other. We never wondered, like, you know, I wish
it had it just we just accepted it. But we
tried to accept it in a manner that we fought
(23:08):
it as fiercely humanly possible. We used every access point
that we possibly could, from a relationship standpoint, from an
involvement standpoint, from traveling around two different hospitals to meet
different doctors, to learn and to educate ourselves. So um,
(23:29):
but there was nothing we could do. This is not hey,
I broke my leg and it's gonna mend. We thought
the first time that we'd get it. We knew this
statistics were against us. Um and then even the second time,
she out performed and pushed the boundaries no. Three and
(23:54):
a half times more than somebody else should have and
enabled our kids. It's two go through their puberty, their
adolescent teenage years, their high school years, you know, tough
times for girls, not easy time for any girl. Saw
them get into their colleges of their dreams. They all
(24:19):
were academically very strong students. They were also incredible athletes,
and they all played at a Division one level, which
for Scarsdale Jewish girls was rare, so they were able
to stay on track at a very very high level.
That is probably only because of Marla that they saw
(24:42):
this fierceness in her to fight their early days and
the way that she lived her life knowing that she
always had potentially had this cancer that was lingering. So
it worked for us, it's not for everybody. It was
uneasy fibbing. Could you describe that a little bit? For instance,
(25:07):
we'd go on a vacation, but Marlo, we always had
to schedule our vacations on scans or treatments, and they
were all being done in Boston. So we would leave
from New York the day after she had her scan
in Boston. She literally run back and then get on
a plane. We go away. But then we go back
and we come back to New York and Marla go
(25:28):
back to Boston. Why is mommy going back to Boston? Oh,
she asked to you know, she's part of this trial. Yes,
she's true, she was part of a trial. The piece
of the truth, the piece of the truth. It wasn't
like it wasn't as though this trial is keeping her alive. Kids.
We never said that, and that was the truth. We
called it the loving choice to provide them enough information
(25:51):
that they knew what was going on, but not every detail.
So Marla really was fine, totally fine for years. She's
fine years in which she requires a tremendous amount of
medical attention. Sometimes she wears a wig, but otherwise you
(26:11):
really wouldn't suspect that she's dealing with a terminal illness.
No one knows. But then, with her girls now all
highly competent young adults, Marla starts running out of options.
She's turned through every possible clinical trial and conventional medicine.
(26:32):
She begins to develop tumors around her clavical again, and
these are pinching her vocal cords. She has radiation and
a port is put in. This, of course, becomes harder
and harder to keep hidden. She has to change the
way she dresses. No more summary outfits, nothing low cut
or sleeveless. She wears scarves around her neck. I just thought,
(26:55):
because she had this ability to to regenerate, even when
the trial they didn't think of tribal was gonna work,
it would work for six or nine months, and which
was unheard of. Most trials really work eight or sixteen weeks.
I just figured we'd get through this holiday season. We
have two graduations this year, one of which we had already.
We had one in a month. I just figured she
(27:16):
would plow through this and make it because the red
letter days for her were so important to her. She
lived for those, She lived for those days. I just
figured she'd do it. But Maria in September and October
could see that we were headed down a trickier place,
and she decided, I'm done keeping this secret. I can't
(27:39):
do it anymore. The guilt was was writing, and she
wasn't sure what the timeline was when you say guilt,
was it because at that point she was facing her
own mortality. Facing her mortality, she didn't want to walk
around the house covering the port or the fact that
(28:01):
she had different red spots because of the radiation. She
just didn't want to hide anymore. She was certain she
wanted to do in October, when the kids were home
for the fall break and she felt then she felt better.
She said, okay, I'll just wait till Thanksgiving. Then she
doesn't bad news in November that really there wasn't much
left in terms of the even the conventional medicines, and
(28:23):
there was one last Jefford. But the doctors were saying
you need to start to get ready here. But I
just figured she would do it for another six or
eight months and to be a crappy summer of nineteen.
I thought the summer nineteen would be really grappy. They're older,
two daughters are away in college, and the youngest is
a high school senior. When John and Marla set them
down over Thanksgiving to break some of the news to them,
(28:47):
not all of the news. So we told the kids
and Thanksgiving that we were concerned, not worried, but we
were concerned that mom had taken a turn and some
things had occurred that we did not expect, and that
we were working through them, but that we were basically
flashing a yellow light not to worry, and we had
(29:08):
a script that we had come in our mind, and
it went really well. And then Marla pushed the envelope
a little bit in the conversation, and we had the
girls in a pretty good place, because I don't think
that they were totally surprised by all of this, that
there was something going on, because the little one was
at home and I'm sure she was telling the sisters that,
you know, my mom has been running around a little
(29:29):
bit more, and she said in this conversation, and we
had talked about this line, which was, you know, there's
the likelihood that I'm gonna make it to eight is
very low. And then she said, and I was shocked
by and I did a turn with my neck on
and forget, she said, and it's unlikely that I'm gonna
make it to sixty. And that's when we had a
(29:52):
little bit of bedroom in the house. The girls were
not expecting that, and that sort of changed the vibe
and the rhythm to the conversation. But she had had
enough of the gamesmanship that she had and the brinksmanship
that she had. Okay, Family Secrets listeners, that's all we've
(30:22):
got for now. As for what's to come, we'll be
back with all new extraordinary stories to share with you.
We've just begun recording them now, so stay tuned. In
the meantime, keep an eye and an ear out for
occasional bonus interviews, and keep calling us with your own stories.
At One Secret zero, We're listening, and we're so grateful
(30:45):
you are too.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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