EPISODE 5: What We Choose to Build
[1] We thought a lot about how this story ends. Is it with one of Miriam’s children, the next generation? Is it by returning to Simon’s voice? Who gets to hold the final piece of this turning of the story? And in the end, we decided that there is no end, it intentionally hangs, unbalanced, unfinished, a thread that both continues to be pulled and woven at the same time.
[2] What was it that we inherited? What gift came of this line of life that should never have been? We think it’s one another. The choice to continue to choose each other, to be one another’s best friends and learn to love each other as best as we can. In that spirit, we share a few sweet memories - of lives well lived, joys tangled with sorrows, and the freedom that comes with the birth of new branches on the tree of our family story.
[3] This is one of the photos that Simon stole from the Nazi archives while he was in the US army and stationed in Germany, just a few minutes drive from his home town. It is a photo of his uncle and cousins being deported to a concentration camp, and hangs in every one of Simon’s descendants' homes.
[5] Simon traveled to Israel with his son Gary and grandson Shane. Here they are at the Western Wall (with more cameras than you can imagine!)
[4] These are some early photos of Simon and Miriam with their children.
[6] Simon and Lou, loving any chance to take a photo, pose here at the Houston Holocaust Museum where Simon was active as a docent and speaker.
[7] Simon was an incredible grandparent. He had a unique relationship with each of his grandchildren. Here he is reading to Miriam and Julia in his home on Wigton Street.
[8] Pierre spoke briefly about Simon’s reaction to Nadine’s daughter carrying the name Miriam. Here is Nadine’s speech from Miriam’s naming, and you can see at the end, the connection between birth and this moment - the cycle of story as inheritance.
[9] Julia and Miriam made their first pilgrimage when they were traveling through Europe on a summer break in college. Here they are in Simon’s home town of Wachenbuchen.
[10] When we finished recording and editing this podcast, Miriam made one final pilgrimage, this time, with her daughter’s to Simon’s final resting place. Thanking him for this gift of life, of family, and with a story that belongs to all of us.
-
NEAL: I wanna make sure I have a community to lean on and to support through whatever they're going. So I think this trip also reminded me of how important that community is, and how much more I want to keep building for not just for myself and for, for future generations of my family, but also for my neighbors across the states and across the world where I wanna make sure they have that opportunity as well to find their community, in whatever shape or or form that looks like to them.
MIRIAM: Welcome to Door to Door: A multi-generational story of memory, trauma, and identity. I am Miriam Terlinchamp. In this five-episode series we follow how my family, over four generations, metabolized a history of survival, trauma and hope, and reclaimed a story nearly erased.
This is our final episode in the series, Episode 5: What we choose to build.
We all have foundational myths in our consciousness that drive our worldviews. The ways in which those stories are told and retold connote a sense of singularity that makes them larger than life, essential to our identity. Part of belonging to a lineage is the act of finding ourselves within the story, claiming a particular link in the chain of inheritance, as testimony to our merit for inclusion. This is particularly true for those of us with marginal identities, shaped by missing information, a gap in biological data, and the presence of habits and coping mechanisms that equipped the protagonist to survive against the odds.
The shift happens when the story moves beyond the primary trauma, with the birth of new generations, and the effort is made to synthesize identity and disentangle from habits which no longer serve us. This is my mother Nadine…
NADINE: He left his mother and his beloved aunts behind and it was something that followed him because he felt both pride and guilt at sending his youngest brother at age 14 to an uncharted land called Palestine who was. Forever traumatized by it. So he was constantly second guessing himself. But what didn't waiver, and you've probably heard this in other interviews, was his strong faith in God and that there was some kind of rhyme or reason to why we do what we do. But in terms of trauma or what did we infuse or inculcate from his experience? I think it was a generalized sense of you need to be ready to flee at any moment. So a concern about financial security, a concern about what others think about us, a concern, make sure that we were surrounded by other Jewish people. This is a common response that you wanna live in a neighborhood or have your children go to school where you're not the only Jew. That's how I think we lived out those fears. Go look at the grocery store to make sure there's some Jewish foods, there are holiday foods there, so you know that you could live Jewishly openly. That's not something that we articulated. That is something that myself and everyone I know does when they wanna relocate or when they're choosing a school or when they're choosing a university for their children, are there other Jews there? And so I think that might be one way that we ingested and metabolized his experience.
MIRIAM: It feels disingenuous to claim that this story of my grandfather’s suffering, imprisonment and escape from Nazi Germany, is wholly mine in the same way that it belonged to him. Yet, the experiences during the Holocaust have shaped Jewish identity and consciousness across all of Jewry. There is no way to approach the current political moment, or religious one, without navigating a relationship to genocide.
What does it mean to be part of a people who, in every generation, experienced persecution? More, what does it mean to be part of a people, who have not metabolized the trauma of persecution - but instead - have passed from generation to generation, l’dor v’dor, unprocessed trauma?
What does safety look like?
And at what cost?
How do we unravel the trauma from the meaning, so that we are not just calling out, “never again,” but also living that adage in all ways for all people?
There is no singular Holocaust story, like there is no singular story of any other trauma, each story belongs to itself and the way it is told and retold by the family who experienced it.
This is Neal…
NEAL: I would recommend everyone in our family trying to take advantage of the stories and the time we have to, to keep those stories alive. And also just to like reground ourselves in, here's what happened, here's what it actually looks like. And like that is still over there. We have all of our lives over here now, and these are such important stories to build on and remember and, and be able to tell hopefully our future generations as well.
MIRIAM: There’s something I haven’t told you something about Simon yet.
Here’s my cousin Shane…
SHANE: after my grandfather escaped. To England. He then immigrated to the United States and was drafted and ended up being drafted into the US Army and going right back to Europe.MIRIAM: In the army, Simon had a pen pal. Her name was Miriam. Letter after letter after letter, in my grandfather’s perfect lilting handwriting he told her of the wonders of Europe, of finding possibility even in places dark with despair, and signed each letter with the words, “all my love, Simon.” They met, married, moved to Texas to open a business, start a family, and live the American dream.
SIMON (JENNIFER’S INTERVIEW 1998): And we didn't know anybody in Houston. So we went to his synagogue, which happened to be the very liberal synagogue here in Houston. Temple Beth Israel, very liberal, and it was Pesach (Passover), which is a Jewish, uh, holiday. So we went in there and said, we are newcomers to Houston, uh, can, can you help us? The name of the Rabbi was Tel, he was very famous in Houston. And, um, he said, stand aside, I have to talk, shake hands with my congregants. And after he was finished shaking hands, this was a very illustrious synagogue and he invited to his house. He's unusual. Mm-hmm. Some strangers came in there and he was very friendly. We were very impressed by him. And, my brother-in-law got a job and he cam with us and introduced me to a lot of the influential people in Houston as his cousin. So I got a job too… we found an apartment. It was very hard to find an apartment in Houston, then, then got started life here. I always liked Houston. from the very beginning. We got our first house for the GI House. At that time, the government helped you buy a house. Then we got a bigger house and things like that, and I went business for myself.
MIRIAM: Somehow, it actually worked. After a few fits and starts, Simon launched a company selling bulk coffee. Miriam helped him every day at work, and at night she volunteered for a social group and the synagogue. She seemed to collect all the city’s wayward souls around her dining room table.
Three children arrived, healthy and strong. They attended Jewish summer camp and played baseball.
Despite the blistering heat, Simon grew plants in the backyard of their three-bedroom home on Wigton Street. He danced with Miriam in the kitchen. He wrote her love letters, still. And he brought her gold charms to hang on a bracelet.
She cooked his favorite foods, wore this blue dress that made him blush and mobilized the women at the synagogue to give back to the community.
They traveled with their children to the Grand Canyon and Colorado. Simon’s youngest didn’t even hear his German accent, so American was their life.
This is my father Pierre…
PIERRE: My name is Pierre Terlinchamp. I am Simon's son-in-law and I've known him for many, many years. I worked with him for probably 10 years. I now live in Belgium. I'm Miriam’s father. And, uh. I'm at the end of my life as well. It's interesting to reflect on someone who has influenced you and someone did, Sorry to become emotional...
MIRIAM: What's so emotional in this moment?
PIERRE: Good memories.
MIRIAM: Good memories. Yeah. I know.
PIERRE:When I, I think a lot about Simon is a person who taught me many things. He taught me how to adapt in a foreign country. Basically, You read the news, you get involved in the language. You don't forget your past. But, you have to go on with life and what life has to offer in the new country. And uh, that way you basically get, more integrated faster. so to me it was a very good time. So it is emotional, because these are people I loved and I respected.
MIRIAM: At the end of the Biblical story of Job, after he has lost everything — his home, his friends, his wealth, his family — God blessed Job by doubling his gain over his losses. As though more children, more wealth, more friends can make up for the pain of losing them in a miserable game of Divine chance. For Simon, maybe those years in the Texas sun, being his own boss, living openly as a Jew, and birthing healthy children felt like a doubling of riches — a reward for being a person of faith and hope.
Maybe he even allowed himself to believe he was getting his happily ever after. But this isn’t that kind of story. Miriam became sick — something to do with her heart. And at 44, she died, leaving Simon to raise their young children as a widower in 1960’s Texas.
Back to Nadine…
NADINE: my father was a single parent when it was less vogue than it is now. My mother died when we were young, when we were in grade school, and he was a traveling salesman. So we were on our own a lot.
MIRIAM: He handled Miriam’s death the way he handled all the unrighteous loss that came before it. But worse.
Here’s Pierre…
PIERRE: Simon had many, uh, negative aspects. I didn't, even to this day, I don't agree with the fact of how he treated his children with his new wife. But that was personal. People survive. People do what they have to do. I mean, Sylvia was completely nuts. And, Simon never defend his kids. It frayed a bit, our relationship. It was why we left Houston. It was, a very negative aspect in our lives. And I guess it followed us for a long time.
MIRIAM: This is my cousin Marika…
MARIKA: The traumas that all three of those kids experienced in that household, both intergenerational trauma from my grandpa's own traumas, their stepmom's traumas, and how those infiltrated the household, in the day-to-day living., the nature of survival in that home of just like getting through the day, being able to afford to, to put food on the table and hustle. And my grandpa hustled, you know, he was a hustler. He was, whether it meant knocking on doors to sell clothes or whatever it meant for my grandpa at the time. there was a lot of trauma in that home. And now all three of his children, including my father, my aunts, I mean, it shows up in so many ways still and then in my own body, how do I experience some of that intergenerational trauma? I notice it. I can notice the way it shows up in my daily, in the way I live and the way I parent and the way I show up in my marriage. it's all there. but I'm able to notice it, which is helpful.
MIRIAM: It’s one thing to take everything from a man. It’s a whole other thing to make him feel like he’s returned to life, that he is safe, that he is blessed, and then to rip that second chance away, too.
Simon burned her pictures. He gave away her clothes. And the name Miriam and the stories that went with her were silenced in their home. Simon continued to be a loving and kind father, and he remarried a few years later.
But his will to make change and his ability to return from loss was lost.
This is my cousin Mark…
MARK: and then creating this life in Houston and his first wife passing away and then marrying his second wife and going through all the turmoil of that.
MIRIAM: Until the day when his youngest, Nadine, who was just 8 years old when her mother died — the girl who was raised with only whispered stories, the one forbidden to ask questions, the daughter fiercely loyal to her father — had her own baby.
The baby arrived on an auspicious date in the Jewish calendar: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. When Simon heard that Nadine was in labor, he fled the synagogue in the middle of services and rushed to her bedside.
He reached for Nadine’s firstborn.
“What is her name?” Simon asked.
Nadine did not flinch.
“Miriam.”
No one could say my name without thinking of my namesake.
Pierra again…
PIERRE: We had discussion before you were born and, uh, Nadine even she didn't want to upset anyone to add any complication, or whatever. But, she wanted a name. A name? HER Name. Okay. And when you were born, we decided, started crying. Simon had a certain link to his first wife who passed away. Having a baby linking him to that story was so important to him. So we did not name the baby Miriam for Simon or for some sake that it really touched him very deeply. It was a, um, very significant for him.
MIRIAM: They saw in me all of those forgotten stories — the hidden price of survival. And so it felt like I was born with two souls: both the new Miriam and the past Miriam, in a singular body.
It helped, I’m sure, that I was blond and dimpled, joyful and obsessed with my grandfather. It was as though I knew, even as a baby, that I belonged to him more than anyone.
On Fridays, we’d go to Sabbath services together. Just the two of us. We’d sit towards the front, where he’d sing loudly. We’d walk the hallways and look at old pictures — one that included my namesake. He’d point her out to me, sharing tiny morsels of memory.
And then he’d say.
Jews are responsible for each other.
We all heard that phrase from him. It was the partner to his positivity.
Forgive in your heart, and take your inheritance of survival, your legacy of peoplehood, seriously. And we did.
Here’s Marika…
MARIKA: My grandpa taught me that no matter like. What you've been through. So no matter the level of trauma or again, horrors, there's always a choice, right? In how you respond to the world. And I think that lesson is kind of a guiding light…I think that forgiveness became this huge part of his philosophy, but not forgetting. And so he transferred that and it showed up again in my dad showed up through the generations, choosing to carry hatred forward isn't getting you anywhere, it's not about forgetting, it's about forgiving and that that's possible. And he was able to believe in this idea that we can live with dignity… Yeah, I think one of my grandpa's like greatest gifts that I feel and I can see in all of us, so through the lineages was this deep understanding that while forgiveness does not mean forgetting ultimately what it really means is choosing to build something better in the wake of pain. And especially right now in a world that is often feeling like it's crumbling around us, that we get to choose how we build. How we build something better. And because I'm standing on the shoulders of. Someone who chose love in a world that gave him every reason not to like you. His story is one that you're like, how what you chose love. Like, that's amazing. that's the kind of legacy that I think can change lives. And like all the songs and all of the cultural artifacts around us that speak to this concept that seems so broad and almost unbelievable, I actually think is what is going to change lives. And it's definitely what changed mine. And it is what allows me to live and raise a human right now in a world that is pretty, pretty scary to be raising the next generation in. But it's that like, like I Have in my lineage, in my ancestry, this really profound lesson that if we choose love, even when everything around us tells us, that's totally crazy. that is the legacy of his story to me and, and the legacy that I'm trying to instill in my own family, in my own child, my own daughter. That with resilience and love and the choice of kindness and how we treat people like that is kind of the gift of his story
MIRIAM: What the story means to us, in every generation, changes. It is handed to us, then shaped by us, and we get to decide what it means for each of us, in our own time.
Here’s Dr. Sarah Crane visiting professor at UC in Holocaust and Genocide studies:
SARAH CRANE: We should take the fact that it can mean multiple different things has meant multiple different things, and that there is a rebuilding that happened there. Like it isn't just a story of suffering because that doesn't speak to the many decades that came after. It's a story of a historical kind of fact and reality and discomfort that's never gone away, and these things just exist together that every family member who comes after has to confront the darkness themselves as well, but then also acknowledge all of the efforts that have been done. Have been done in the aftermath…What I'm trying to emphasize is that the story is different parts and there are different things to be taken away from each part, and some of it is darkness and destruction, and some of it is sitting with darkness and destruction and living life anyway.
MIRIAM: Here’s Jackie Congedo, Chief Executive Officer of the Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center
JACKIE CONJEDO: There's like a level of stamina to be able to hold like the tragedy singularly. and it, you know, really allow that to create a deeper level of appreciation for resilience. That's a hard thing to do. I think people who get the most out of that experience have the capacity to do that. I just think so often Holocaust education is so boiled down into black and white and oversimplified. That we can come in with expectations about what we're gonna learn and this is the same story we've heard and that cuts off the opportunity to be transformed. So I think best case scenario, we have visitors who come in with an appetite for complexity and an appetite to feel challenged personally and an appreciation for the fact that there was a lot of complexity.
MIRIAM: And, Dr. Sarah Crane again
SARAH CRANE: There is not one explanation for why this happened at the time that it happened in the way that it happened. But I think it teaches us some interesting lessons about social solidarity, about the way that people understand themselves in national communities. I think it teaches us about how we, the power of public discourse to describe other people, other agendas, the kind of temptations of polarization. Of reductive narratives about why the world is the way it is today. I think it's very easy in those moments when the reality is complicated to reach towards easy answers. And I think these are kind of the lessons that we can bring into the moment. How do we talk about and think about the social questions that the Holocaust brings? I mean, I think I come to this question also from the place of studying these two trials that happened in the 1960s that were designed to show the extent to which the Holocaust was not just perpetrated by a small group of people by elites, but was enabled by wide scale social complicity. And I think the kind of limits and lessons of that is something that we can bring to our study of the Holocaust today, which is not necessarily, I think, a dark story. I think there are also remarkable instances of social solidarity, of stories of rescue, or kind of stories of possibility that people did find for themselves within this incredibly oppressive, fascist, authoritarian system of Nazi Germany. But again, I don't think we should take those on their own just because some people stood up to the Nazi regime is remarkable. But the Holocaust happened because there were many people who did not.
MIRIAM: It took a long time to tell this story. First it showed up in nightmares.Then whispers. Then in lectures and tours, and visits to sacred places.
We passed it like a gemstone, reconfiguring the setting with each owner, but maintaining truths: We almost never were. It is by sheer luck that we are here. And since we are, we better not waste it.
Hold fast to gratitude. Remember that you are part of something bigger than yourself. And wrap this story around your heart, walk with it in the streets, and tell it as often as you can, as loud as you can, as resonantly as you can, until your voice grows hoarse with the words, “Never again.”
SHANE: Never again. Never again. We need to make sure we prevent this.
NADINE: That's way you honor what happened, and we actually believed in those days never again. That if you make sure that memory stays active and that people, live up to that memory, in other words acknowledge it happened much like the German government did, then it can't happen again. We know now that's not true, but that's how we grew up.
MIRIAM: We do not get to decide what we inherit. Only, what we do with that inheritance. Suffering on its own is meaningless. It’s the story that happens afterwards, the way it changes us, that has meaning.
Reverend Serene Jones shares, “In trauma, when one is able to come to grips with what happened, not resolve it, not fix it … but to move from grief to mourning is to move from a place of sheer loss to a place of acknowledging the loss.” And this “creates a space, in mourning, for you to make sacred the pain so that the rest of your life is transformed by it … [allowing] … the possibility of a future.”
She said, “Pure grief just locks you in the eternal present… You can move into a place where it is something that you can find a place for in your soul and in your heart, but not in such a way that it immobilizes you but actually propels you into the future, through love.”
I can’t imagine a time when this story will cease to be resonant in our family. Perhaps that’s because there’s no way to explain who I am without it, and therefore cannot conceive of a time I won’t yearn to turn this story over again, to watch it blossom in the next generation. Not as a seed of anxiety or trauma responses, but as blooming family myth that allows for the choice to integrate difficult family stories.
The legacy Simon leaves behind is less about this story, and more about the fervent wish on each of his descendants' hearts to embody the lessons he imparted.
Back to Marika
MARIKA: My grandpa taught me that no matter like. What you've been through. So no matter the level of trauma or again, horrors, there's always a choice, right? In how you respond to the world. And I think that lesson is kind of a guiding light… he was able to believe in this idea that we can live with dignity, we can. Treat people with respect and we can always come from a place of understanding of, of compassion rather than judgment. And so to have that, those lessons really instilled, and especially in these conversations I'd have with him. It was incredibly impactful. I think that the pilgrimage for me is like actually in the daily of how I like, continue to bring forward the lesson that he instilled, the lessons that he's instilled in me and how when I find myself shaky in my own capacity to choose love or to choose kindness. That's when I experienced my grandpa, and that's the pilgrimage, like getting to that place.
MIRIAM: To love in the face of loss, to choose life, and to make a pilgrimage to a place that will never belong to us but will connect us in the lineage of our ancestors.
This is my sister Julia..
JULIA: I don't know if he ever realized how incredibly loved he was… I don't think I realized until after he was gone how unique, we were as a family to be able to love someone that much… our world kind of revolved around making sure we were all together. I don't know any other families that had that kind of bond, and I think I attribute that to him.
MIRIAM: At some point, the life of this story changed from one of survival to one of processing trauma, into a shared commitment to descendants through a legacy of justice and love. To sing out the prayers of the heart, with full bravado, in gratitude, in wonder, and in hope.
Here’s Nadine…
NADINE: I have a feeling my grandchildren will one day make that pilgrimage like all of us have done because they are growing up in a family that talks openly about our history. About the history of other people around us, about justice and injustice, and that justice has to come with action and witness witnessing is an action. Protesting as an action, writing letters, making calls as an action, and they're growing up in that particular world. But that's a very rarefied world that I don't believe their contemporaries are growing up in. So yes, I think that they will in some way make that pilgrimage. It'll look different than the one I just did.
MIRIAM: The stories you’ve heard in these five episodes have lived in whispers, in memories, and in the chase for meaning through pilgrimage across generations.If this journey moved something in you —
if you’ve ever felt the weight of inherited memory,
or the pull to understand where you come from —Let this be part of your story, too.Thanks for Listening, this has been Door to Door.
****
Ohio Humanities made this episode of Door to Door possible. Door to Door is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound. Created by Miriam Terlinchamp, directed by Joey Taylor, produced at Monastery Studios, original music by Ric Hordinski, and art by Katie Kaestner.
Check the show notes for bonus material and resources.
We'd love to hear from you, so you can email us at miriam@judaismunbound.com or find us at: wwwjudaismunbound.com/doortodoor.
