Sometimes the hardest wounds to heal are the ones we can't see. Sometimes, the wounds aren't even our own. Adam Frankel was a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama.
His grandparents survived the Holocaust, and he says that trauma was passed on to his mother and then to him in unexpected ways. While working in the White House, he discovered a secret that would set him on a path to confront the echoes of the past.
He tells his story in his book, The Survivors: A Story Of War, Inheritance, And Healing.
Adam Frankel with Barack Obama working on a speech Photo: CC 3.0 BY-SA / Pete Souza
Frankel was living in New York in 2006, not long before joining the Obama campaign as deputy speechwriter, when he learned his father was not his biological father.
“This was a secret that my mother kept from me and my dad and our whole family.”
Secret-keeping, Frankel says, runs deep in his family.
“Secrets are common to many families, not just Holocaust survivor families, not just Jewish families, but I do feel and believe that secrets were an important part of how my grandparents survived.
“They had to be very careful about who they trusted at all times to just survive every minute, every hour during those years when my grandfather was in concentration camps and ultimately Dachau, when my grandmother was hiding in the woods of Eastern Europe with members of the Jewish resistance and Russian partisans. These secrets were part of how they survived.”
When his grandparents emigrated to the United States after the war the secrets came with them.
“They emigrated United States with an assumed name that they bought or acquired somehow in a displaced persons camp in post-war Germany.
“And came to this country under that name, raised a family with that name, passed that name on to me as my middle name.
“That was another secret that my family kept because they feared they would not be able to immigrate to United States under their true names because my grandfather had evidently gotten into some trouble with the law in post war Germany.”
His grandparents’ Holocaust experience contributed to a larger family story, Frankel says.
“We now know more about trauma, the impact that it can have on us, than we've ever known in history.”
There is an emerging science called epigenetics, he says, which believes trauma is carried through the generations.
“The epigenome is a layer of information that sits on top of the gene and is subject to external factors including chronic stress and trauma.”
He says research shows that children of Holocaust survivors are three times as likely to display PTSD as demographically similar Jews whose parents are not holocaust survivors.
“It's a new science and the research does speak to the ways in which trauma does not just affect those who directly experience it, but can play itself out for many generations after.”
Frankel is the product of a politically progressive family, he says. His father was a part time speech writer for the likes of Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy.
“I think that is part of why learning that my Dad is not my biological father, why that family, my family is not my blood was so painful to me, because I identified so closely with him because I drew so much of my identity from them.
“I sometimes wonder if I hadn't, if I wanted to be different from them felt different from them, whether the revelation would have caused me as much difficulty.”
The trauma of learning the truth about his father was buried for some time as he was thrown into the intensity of political campaigning.
“The fact is working as a speechwriter in a presidential campaign in the White House is an incredibly demanding job. And it almost allowed me, required me, to not focus on all these personal issues, I didn't have the bandwidth to focus on them.”
Not that the stress wasn’t lurking in the background. Frankel says it manifested in physical symptoms.
“At one point, I went to see a doctor because I had lumps in my arms. And he said it was because of stress. So, there were ways in which it continued to eat at me.”
Once the hectic political merry go round calmed down, Frankel started to grapple with his “identity crisis”.
“I decided to focus on it squarely. And the result was total confusion and pain and lack of understanding about who I was.”
The revelation by his mother put great strain on their relationship, Frankel says. His grandfather, who was still alive at this point, was greatly troubled by the rift between his daughter and grandson.
“The secret led to a lot of strains in my relationship with my mother and with her whole family frankly, because they saw me as mistreating my mother, because they didn't understand why I had gotten distant from her.
“Nobody told them, I didn't tell them because I wanted to protect my mom's relationships with them and, and none of us told her father “For the same reason, even after her siblings found out, none of us told my grandfather because it seemed like it was too difficult - a man who was in his 90s, a Holocaust survivor, why trouble him with this sort of thing? But as a result, he didn't understand it until his final days.”
Eventually, after ten years, Frankel went to see the man who had raised him as a son to tell him the secret of his identity.
“When I got to his home I just launched into it. I said ‘you remember some years ago I told you my relationship with my mother was strained? He said ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, what I didn't share was that the reason for a lot of those difficulties was because she told me that I'm not your biological son.’
“And I told him who my mother told me was my biological father, which was a man that I've known all my life, and my father knew, a presence in my life growing up.”
Frankel says he was “bawling” throughout the conversation.
“I can barely get the words out as I'm airing this with my Dad. And through the tears, I hear him say, ‘I know, I know’. And I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
“And he said, ‘Adam I've always known it was possible, and I made a decision a long time ago that it doesn't matter one way or another, you’re my son and you always will be. And I was just, I couldn't believe it. And I went up and hugged him very tightly for a long time.”
