My cousin Manya, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, passed away on June 10, 2024, a day before the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, and two months before what would have been her 100th birthday. I hadn’t even known of her existence until 2004, when Manya wrote me a letter care of The New York Times. She had read an article I’d published there about the emergency quintuple bypass surgery that had saved my life.

“This is a long shot,” Manya’s letter began, “but I can lose nothing, maybe gain a lot.” She wrote that she had spent three years in Auschwitz, had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen, had lost her mother and father and eight siblings (four sisters, four brothers) to the camps, and had come to America in 1947. When she was a young girl, at the time of her father’s sister Sarah’s wedding, she heard her grandfather speak of a sister in the United States who had married a man with an unusual name—Neugeboren —and she “had always wanted to search into this matter, since there is not a soul left on my father’s side of the family.” She had never forgotten the name, she wrote. She added that her “grandfather’s name was Mendel Gerlich, and he came from Rimanov.” Would I please respond, “regardless of whether there is a connection or not.”

My grandmother’s family name was Gerlich, and she and my grandfather came from Rimanov, a shtetl in what is now Poland, near the present Ukraine border and not far from Kyiv. I telephoned Manya, and we talked for a long time. Manya lived in Ellenville, New York, a town in the Catskills about two hours north of New York City, where she had made her home for more than 50 years. Her husband, Herman Eisner, also a survivor of the death camps, had been the rabbi at Congregation Ezrath Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Ellenville, from 1949 until his retirement in 1988. He had died in 1995. By chance, Manya said, she was coming to New York City the next day to see an opthalmologist who was treating her for macular degeneration.

We met in the doctor’s waiting room. “Neugeboren?” she asked when she emerged from the doctor’s office and saw me. We embraced, after which she asked me to return to the doctor’s office with her so he could meet me—she had told him the story of how she’d found me, just as, in the days, weeks, and years to come, she would tell the story to others. Then we went to a coffee shop. The evening before, after I talked with Manya and telephoned my children and several cousins to tell them about her, I’d gone through folders that contained information about the Neugeborens and Gerlichs, and I’d brought some of the information with me—a page from my “baby book” in which my mother had written my grandmother’s name (“Bela née Gerlich Neugeboren”); a page from the 1910 U.S. Census that listed the names of my grandparents and their children, and provided data about them.

Both Neugeboren and Gerlich are rare names. Any Neugeboren I’ve ever met has come from Rimanov or a village near Rimanov, and for Manya the same was true of the name Gerlich. In the coffee shop, we talked, and we laughed, and we sat there astonished—“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Manya kept saying as we tried to comprehend our story’s obvious and wonderful conclusion: her grandfather and my great aunt had been brother and sister.

“Then we are cousins!” Manya said, and after I told her that she had lots of cousins now, she talked of the family she’d lost and, holding my hand, recited the names of her mother and father, and of each of her eight brothers and sisters.

My father, like Manya, was one of nine children, and I had grown up with 22 first cousins on his side of the family (and with more than a dozen cousins on my mother’s side). A month or so after Manya and I met, I held a gathering in my Upper West Side apartment to which I invited as many Neugeboren cousins as I could locate, and on that afternoon, Manya kept saying what she would say each time she told the story of how we met: “It’s a miracle! After all the years … it’s a miracle …”

Manya and I got together whenever she came to New York for a medical appointment, and we talked by phone regularly. When she and her friend Sherry Solomon came to see a play about the Holocaust, the three of us went together, and Manya and Sherry stayed over in my apartment. The play was based on a book by Primo Levi—Manya had called me as soon as she heard about it on NPR—and we talked about Levi, whom we both admired, as a writer and a man, much more so than Elie Wiesel, a writer Manya considered “too much the showman” to be trusted.

On another visit, when I had lunch with Manya and her granddaughters, Rachel and Ilana, I presented her with an advance copy of a new book of mine: News From The New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile, a collection of short stories whose dedication page read, “For my cousin Manya Gerlich Eisner.”

I visited Manya several times in Ellenville, in the house located across the street from Congregation Ezrath Israel. The synagogue was situated on a small knoll the town had named Rabbi Herman and Manya Eisner Square. In earlier years, Ellenville had been a vibrant town with a substantial Jewish population—home to The Nevele, one of the largest borscht-circuit hotels, and a hotel some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had stayed in while on vacation. By the time I first visited Ellenville in 2005, however, the hotel had fallen on hard times (it closed in 2009), many of the town’s stores had closed, and most of the young Jewish families had moved away.

Manya’s friendship with Sherry Solomon had spanned more than 60 years. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” Manya’s granddaughter Rachel wrote me, “and yet that is exactly what they were: they spoke every single day … walked together and supported one another through all that life is.” Sherry had been a high school English teacher, a college instructor, a secondary school principal, and had earned two doctorates, and when, one afternoon Manya accompanied Sherry to the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz, where Sherry was registering for several classes, Sherry urged Manya to register for a course. When she arrived in the United States, Manya spoke no English and had only an eighth-grade education, but she signed up for a course that day, and subsequently took one or two courses a semester until, in 1979, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree, with honors.

When Sherry’s health began to decline, she moved to Florida with her husband, and after he died, she moved to California, where she lived with family, and then, her memory failing, in a nursing home. In 2009, not long after Sherry left Ellenville, Manya asked if I could visit her for a weekend and help her go through documents, correspondence, paintings, and photos because she’d decided it was time to leave Ellenville. Sherry was gone, the synagogue often did not have a minyan on the Sabbath, and her eyesight was failing in a way that made ordinary chores increasingly difficult.

Manya loved to read, and the good news, she reported—Manya was forever finding good news in situations that made others despair—was that she had discovered books on tape. She had recently finished listening to Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was now about to listen to the third of six short novels by Anton Chekhov. We talked about our great love for these two writers: James, who’d been born in New York City but had spent much of his early life in upstate New York, not far from Ellenville, and Chekhov, who’d been born in Taganrog, Russia, but who’d spent some of the happiest years of his short life in Odessa, where my mother’s family had come from. We talked, too, about a recently published novel of mine, 1940, which was, in part, about Hitler’s childhood doctor, Eduard Bloch, a Jewish man who had been able to emigrate from Linz, Austria, to the United States—due to Hitler’s intervention.

While we went through items Manya had gathered, including photos of her and her husband with Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and other notable politicians, Manya talked about how much she missed Sherry, about the vanishing of Ellenville’s Jewish community, and about her plans to relocate, probably to New Jersey, where relatives on her mother’s side of the family lived.

In 2010, Manya moved into a three-room apartment at The Lakewood Courtyard, an Orthodox Jewish assisted-living facility in Lakewood, New Jersey, where Rachel and I would visit with her until shortly before her 99th birthday. Then, unable to care for herself, Manya moved into a Lakewood nursing home, The Leisure Chateau.

In Ellenville, New York City, and Lakewood—on walks, in her homes, and on the phone—Manya and I talked endlessly and easily. She always asked first about my children and grandchildren, and when I’d report that they were all well, she’d always say a quick “Thank God” before asking for details. She talked with me about her only child, Moshe, who was living in Florida, and was, like my son Eli, an artist and illustrator. She talked about Moshe’s family—his wife and their three children—and about her two granddaughters and her hope that each of them would meet and marry “a nice young Jewish man.” And she talked about her childhood in Czechoslovakia, and about her years in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen.

In one of the courses Manya took at SUNY–New Paltz, a man gave a lecture on the Holocaust in which he talked about Holocaust deniers, at which point, Manya told me, she stood up and said, “I was there and I will talk about my experience whenever you need me.” And so she began talking about her time in the camps to schoolchildren, and also to interviewers from the USC Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg, and the Holocaust Memo...

My Cousin Manya

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