My Heritage Part IV: A Discovery

It was a summer night in the year 2000 and I was sitting at Naples 45 Restaurant in New York City with my parents and my sister. We had been called together because my father had something he wanted to share with us.

I had braced myself for three words: "I have cancer." Why else would my father call us into the City for dinner in this fashion?

Instead, he told my sister and I that my grandmother had had an affair during World War II with a man who was the foreman at the factory where she worked. My "grandfather," the alcoholic man who hurt both my father and my grandmother, turned out to be totally unrelated to me. Instead, I was the grandson of a man named Albert Dorfman.

My entire life I assumed that I was 1/4 Finnish. More importantly, however, I assumed I was 1/4 a part of the horror of a person that was the man who beat my father as a child. I'd been told all the stories about him. I feared I had a part of him inside of me.

It is no coincidence, then, that I had never even bothered to learn anything about Finland. While I had nothing against Finland or the culture of its people, the concept of being Finnish was a reminder of what was inside of me.

Imagine the release I felt, then, when I was told that it wasn't true. Suddenly, I wanted to know more about Albert Dorfman.

I knew he was Jewish. That was all. Immediately, I wanted to learn something of the Jewish people. Fortunately, it's an easy subject to research. Eventually, when we found my grandfather's oldest son, Herb, we discovered more. The family came from Odessa, in the Ukraine. That means that the final piece to the puzzle that makes up my heritage is Russian.

Or Jewish.

Something I have been trying to understand is which one. Or is it both? I know that being Jewish in Russia when my family was there was equivalent to being a second citizen -- if that. So, I am prone to think of the quarter as being Jewish. Also, unlike Christians and Muslims, the Jewish faith did not spread far beyond the descendants of the original Israelites. When the Romans forced the Israelites out of Israel, they didn't go "spreading the word of Moses" to the masses.

Another interesting point that came out of this discovery is the meaning of my last name. "Anderson" was the name given to the father of the man who assumed my Dad was his son. His real last name was Finnish and could not be translated into English. They changed his name in Ellis Island to "Anderson."

As it turns out, however, I am a descendant of Albert "Dorfman." So, biologically, my name should be Eric Dorfman.

I've thought of that a lot since I found out I have no blood relation to William Anderson. I've come to the conclusion, however, that it really doesn't matter. Whether I was Anderson, or Dorfman, or anything else, it wouldn't change who I am.

The Anderson family, then, begins with my father and mother. And that makes me, like my sister, a second generation Anderson, carrying on the traditions and passing them on to the next generation. We are a passionate people, we Andersons. We're writers. We're educators. We have a strong social conscience. Every single one of us -- Mom, Dad, my sister, my wife and myself -- strive either consciously or unconsciously to make this world a little better.

And that, ultimately, is who I am.