by Helene Stapinski
Most of my career has been spent writing stories about my family. My first book, Five-Finger Discount, was about growing up in Jersey City among low-level criminals and working-class heroes. My next book was about my marriage, playing in a rock band with my husband on the Lower East Side. My last book was the story of my great-great grandmother who escaped from Southern Italy in the 19th century after being involved in a murder.
As a memoirist, I knew I would one day run out of material.
Thankfully, I work part time as a teacher and as a journalist, so I’m constantly coming across other people’s stories. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for The New York Times about a man named Jules Schulback, who escaped from Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in New York City. An amateur film maker, Jules was always shooting home movies of his family, a family that barely made it out of Europe alive. Jules created a celluloid testament to their survival. Nearly two decades later, Jules was there with his movie camera the night Marilyn Monroe’s dress blew up on an Upper East Side subway grate. His footage is the last surviving film footage of that night.
While writing the story, I became close friends with his granddaughter, Bonnie. Last year Bonnie asked if I’d like to write a book about Jules. So we embarked on research just around the time the pandemic closed down everyone’s world. But it wound up opening the world to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Our book, The American Way, will be a testament to Jules’ survival and the generations that followed.
Since the lockdown, we have slogged through World War II history, Marilyn Monroe biographies and Nazi archives. We’ve learned about Monroe’s conversion to Judaism after marring Arthur Miller. With the help of researchers at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, we’ve traced Jules’ sister, Golda, who survived four concentration camps. We discovered things about Bonnie’s relatives that no one in her family had ever found. Things that were maybe too painful to look for.
We’ve also learned that Jules’ financial sponsor to come to America was a man named Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of DC Comics – and of Superman, the world’s first superhero, who was created by two Jewish kids from Cleveland.
But the most illuminating facts have come from Bonnie’s family. Through in-person and zoom conversations, I’ve interviewed her parents, her siblings, her cousins, aunts and uncles. I’ve gotten to know Jules, the family patriarch, even though he’s no longer alive. Bonnie’s grandfather has become my grandfather. Her Opi, my Opi. I’ve been adopted by this family – a Jewish family that has taken in this lapsed Catholic, arms wide open, teaching me about their faith, their culture and their history.
I’ve learned Yiddish lullabyes and Israeli folk songs, about keeping carp in the bathtub and what tzimmes is. Yiddish has become part of my vocabulary, particularly the word mishpucha. Extended family.
I’ve learned about the horror of the Holocaust from the inside out, from one family’s perspective, not just in some history book. I have enlisted survivors, all in their 80s and 90s, to talk to my journalism students to teach them lessons I didn’t know before embarking on this book project, lessons that have been fading these past 80 years.
I thought I was done with family memoir. But it seems I’m just getting started.
Helene Stapinski is a New York Times contributor and author. She can be reached at hstapinski@gmail.com