An Untold (or Seldom Told) Story

Every family has its history and its stories. The stories are often shared on special occasions—at birthday parties, holiday gatherings, weddings, major anniversary celebrations, even funerals. The stories are passed to the next generations, who become responsible for keeping these parts of the family history alive.

Many families also have stories that are never or seldom shared. Perhaps, there is something painful about them or embarrassing or just forgettable for some reason. But I think they deserve to be told also.

In my family, a story that was went unshared for many years involved my grandmother Sarah Heyman when she was still Sarah Scheinerman and not yet my Nana. She was a tiny, courageous teenage immigrant trying to build her life in a new country with very little English and very little money but a strong sense of self preservation. Nana never shared the story with me or any of her other grandchildren during her lifetime. And it might be still hidden, if her daughter (my mother Bea) hadn’t shared it with me almost inadvertently one day long after Nana had died. And I have a big mouth and a certain reverence for history. So I am retelling the story now, with some new insights because it involves a major event that occurred 110 years ago this week.

There are lots of holes in the story, but the basics are that my 18-year-old Nana came to the United States from Brest Litovsk (now in Belarus) by herself in 1908. She was supposed to live with relatives in Brooklyn, but she was fiercely independent and refused to put up with their strict rules. So she found an apartment with some roommates in lower Manhattan and a job at a notorious sweatshop in Greenwich Village, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The factory became even more notorious on March 25, 1911, when a fire broke out in the ninth floor of the building, causing the horrific deaths of 146 people, most of them young women like my Nana. Luckily, six weeks before the fire, Sarah Scheinerman had left New York, going with her soon-to-be-husband Morris Heyman to Savannah, Georgia, where she would live for the rest of her life and begin a new family that would eventually include me.

Sarah and Morris in New York
in 1910 or 1911

When did Sarah learn about the fire, and what did she feel about the horror that she had narrowly escaped? Those are just a few of the holes in the story. As far as I know, she never talked about the event, though she must have told my mother about it at some time. But it was not a story that was ever shared at any family gathering that I or any of my cousins attended. Not by Nana, nor her husband, nor any of her children. Perhaps if Nana and Granddaddy had remained in New York, they might have been caught up in the labor union struggles that were part of the aftermath of the fire. But I never heard them say anything political while I was growing up. Instead, they labored in their own small food store that was famous in my mind for the assorted penny candies that were available there.

Why the secrecy about the fire? I can only speculate. Perhaps my grandmother felt some “survivor’s guilt.” Why was she spared when many of her former workmates were not? Or maybe her whole attention was focused on starting her new life in a location that was even farther from Belarus and even less culturally Jewish than New York. And she did have a new husband and would soon have her first baby. Or maybe the story was too overwhelming for her to dwell on or to want to pass on to the next generations.

Remembering the fire at 23 Washington Place 

I can see definite similarities between my grandparents’ decision to keep the horrors of the March 25^th fire inside themselves with the decision of Audrey’s relatives and her parents’ German immigrant friends to never discuss the condition of their lives in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. “I wouldn’t want to worry you,” my mother-in-law might say. Or “It’s not something I ever want to think about again.” Or “What would be the good of talking about it now?”

And those may all be good reasons, but they are not reason enough to keep these stories hidden because the stories are part of our history too. My grandmother’s courage in coming to New York on her own, nearly coming face-to-face with death, and building a new life through all of that is not just inspiring, it is an essential part of my life too.

So I am retelling this somewhat secret family story. Again!—my friend Harvey might comment with just a touch of sarcasm because I am known for occasional repetition. It is what we who have big mouths and a reverence for family history do.

The fire occurred behind locked doors on the
ninth floor; 146 died, many from jumping
to escape the flames.