San Rafael resident Francine Falk-Allen may never know if she ever would have found out the deeper, hidden parts of her family history if it weren’t for an offhand comment made by her Aunt Dorothy during a relative’s memorial service in Southern California in the early 2000s.
“When we were in the orphanage,” she said as an aside during a story on another topic.
The orphanage? Falk-Allen and her nearby cousins looked at each other stunned.
San Rafael author Francine Falk-Allen wrote “A Wolff in the Family.” (Courtesy of Francine Falk-Allen)
“I said, ‘Aunt Dorothy, what are you talking about? She’s like, ‘When Daddy put the five of us youngest kids in the orphanage,’” she says. “And she also said, ‘They wouldn’t take Frank Jr. because he was 14. He was just out on the street.’ Everything about it was just totally shocking. It was really stunning.”
These stories — and her research she did about them — of what she uncovered about her family would become the inspiration for “A Wolff in the Family,” her historical fiction book that launches Tuesday. In it, she tells of her grandmother, Naomi — some names have been changed — who lives a lonely, stressful life carrying for her many children while her husband, Frank, a railroad engineer, is gone often for his job — and who also has affairs with women along his stops.
But, after finding out that Naomi was in love with her parent’s foreman, Charley, Frank kicks her out off the house and gets the courts to declare her unfit as a mother, giving him full custody of the kids, and not allowing her a divorce, which eventually leads him to put his five youngest kids in an orphanage in Kansas so he could move into his mistress’ boardinghouse and live with her and her kids.
And that’s not even where the story ends.
While this book is a piece of historical fiction, “the skeleton of this story is real,” she writes in the epilogue.
“The narrative I pieced together from these fragments from my aunt, the vaguely related stories I was told by my mother, Frances, and various facts or opinions supplied by several family members has only served to make me wonder what other secrets my mother took to her grave. All of this was kept from my sister and me so successfully, even though I used to see my grandfather several times weekly, that I have since thought my mother missed her calling; she should have worked for the CIA.
“I knew that my grandfather had eventually married my German step-grandmother, the only woman I ever personally knew as Grandma. I had, as a child, wanted to know why Mother had no trace of a German accent, unlike her youngest brother — her half brother, actually. Subsequent to my asking if ‘Grandma’ was really Mother’s mother, I learned that my maternal grandmother (the real ‘Naomi’ in this story) had died before I was old enough to remember her. My mother always met these questions from her …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
