How does one write a family history when almost no documentation can be found, and when one’s relatives refused to speak about the past — or if they did, they told stories that could not be verified?
This is the situation author Philip B. Uninsky faced when he set out to write this book. Trying to research his family background, he encountered a story of “chronological discontinuity and mystery” with significant gaps that he could only bridge by conjecture.
Starting in the 1970s, Uninsky took trips to Europe, where he met numerous times with his father’s three siblings in an attempt “to better understand the confabulated and expand the confirmable.” To his disappointment, he found they shared his parents’ “penchant for invention, deflection, and omission.” The purpose of these tactics, he surmises, was “to immunize or isolate the next generation from their past.”
The result is what he calls “a hybrid history” — part memoir, part family history, part anecdote, filled in with his own speculation, interpretation, and psychological analysis. Uninsky has set down, as the title describes it, his relatives’ “invented lives from troubled times.” Those troubled times are pogroms, revolution, and the Holocaust, all of which, for the Jews of Europe, meant frequent migration, social and financial setbacks, the severance of families, the need for resilience, and continued insecurity. Over and over, the past was left behind and lives were remade.
What Uninsky does know about his parents, Alexander and Lucie Uninsky, is that before they were married, they each separately managed to escape Europe. In a rare instance of documentation, he learned that his paternal grandparents died in Auschwitz. Family lore has it that Alexander rode a bike from Nazi-occupied Paris to Spain and on to Portugal, then by ship to South America.
Alexander and Lucie arrived in New York in 1942, married, and settled there in 1952. This was an opportunity for “a rewritten personal history,” as it was for so many immigrants. Alexander Uninsky was a gifted pianist, who, in 1932, when he was living in Paris, won the International Chopin Competition, and in New York made his debut at Carnegie Hall, earning a living by touring and concertizing. That ended, however, during the McCarthy era, when he was blacklisted.
In 1962, the family moved to Dallas, Texas, where Alexander took a position as an academic artist at Southern Methodist University. But the couple felt isolated, and missed the cultural community of Jewish immigrants they had known in New York.
Alexander died in 1972, Lucie in 2012. Their son has reconstructed their invented lives and those of their siblings, seeking to understand the reasons for the identities they chose. They deserve to be remembered, he concludes, “these survivors of unimaginable trauma who managed … to be resilient, vibrant and humane throughout their lives.”
