Who Understand

No. 118 | Michael Moritz asked about my family first. It took him 20 years to tell me about his.

“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories.” — Will Bloom, Big Fish (2003)

In the early fall of 2006, Michael Moritz came to see us. Lisa was at the doctor with our daughter Katie, born that June, so I was on my own. POPSUGAR had started as a hobby in 2005. Now it was a business. The iPhone was still a year away.

Mike asked for tea. Someone on our team, who had clearly never made a cup, tore the bag open, poured the leaves into a mug of warm tap water, and handed it to the most important investor in Silicon Valley.

I have never wanted a floor to open more. Mike drank it anyway, steering around the leaves and the occasional twig. I asked if I could make him another. He said no, it was fine, he had never had it this way.

Then Mike interviewed me. He didn’t start with our traffic. He started with my family, and how I grew up.

So I told him. My mother’s parents were not born here. They got out ahead of the Nazis. My grandfather had owned a chain of shoe stores. My father spent 25 years at Bell Labs / AT&T and told me, more than once, to work for myself. Sequoia became our first investor, and Mike was our partner until we sold POPSUGAR to Group Nine Media.

My radar said Mike was Jewish. Wales kept jamming the signal. Over the years I tossed him a Shana Tova in the fall and a mazel tov when there was cause. Nothing came back. I didn’t push.

Then came October 7, and a lot of us stopped blending. I wrote about it here at the time. Mike writes that it was the first time he felt bound to Israel’s fate. By then he was living with a blood cancer that runs in Ashkenazi families, and the boxes of his mother’s papers that arrived from Cardiff during the pandemic had been opened.

What came out of them is Ausländer, his memoir of the family that got out and the family that didn’t.

He can tell you the minute his mother’s Kindertransport train left Germany and the minute it reached London, on Hitler’s 50th birthday. She had just turned 15. He can tell you his father’s parents were deported from Munich and murdered.

On Tuesday night Lisa and I went to see him at the JCC in San Francisco, one stop on his book tour. He spotted us across the room, came straight over, and threw his arms around us both. Then he went on stage and told the room what he would ask his mother if she were alive today. What she wore the morning she left. The color of her suitcase. Whether both her parents came to the station. The documents kept the minutes and lost the girl.

At 12, he told the room, he drew a family tree and put a small red swastika under the name of every relative the Nazis killed. He said it felt like collecting stamps. At 13, for my bar mitzvah, I sat my mother’s parents in front of a camera and asked them to start at the beginning.

My grandmother was 13 on Kristallnacht, the same age I was holding the camera. She was from Düsseldorf, the city where Mike’s mother would board her train to London a few months later. Her father was beaten so badly he spent six months in a hospital. The family got a visa to Ecuador and left with the clothes they had on. There was no suitcase to remember. Two weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then Japan, then a ship across the Pacific to Balboa, and finally the climb to Quito, more than 9,000 feet up. She spoke German and a little English. Nobody around her spoke either.

Two girls from the same city went in opposite directions. Sixty-seven years later, the son of one and the grandson of the other sat down over a mug of twigs.

My grandfather’s story starts at a fair. In 1939 he came from Yugoslavia to New York for the World’s Fair, a city of white pavilions under the slogan “The World of Tomorrow.” General Motors handed out buttons that said “I Have Seen the Future.”

Then the war started, and he could not go home. The family story is that the shoes in his stores were loaded onto trucks and sent to Germany. A man went to see the future while the past was being carted off behind him. He learned English and went to work in a textile factory. By the 1950s he had a chain of shoe stores again, on Long Island.

Last week I finished the book and wrote Mike a note. I told him I was proud he had written it, and I attached the video. He wrote back that our two families’ stories were “just two of many millions of similar tales.”

On Tuesday, after the talk, dozens of people lined up for his signature. When Lisa and I reached the front, he wrote For Lisa and Brian, Who Understand.

I finally got my Shana Tova back.

I understand the tea now. Mike’s parents never called themselves survivors. They were refugees, and refugees drink what they are handed. In 2006 I took his questions for diligence. Twenty years later, I hear something different in them. My grandfather lost one chain of shoe stores to German trucks and built another on Long Island. My father heard that story and told me to work for myself. We built a company that told millions of women what to wear. Mike heard all of it and wrote the check.

Two of many millions. Every one of them has a morning nobody asked about. My grandparents answered every question a 13-year-old put to them, and I never thought to ask what anyone was wearing. Now neither of us has anyone left to ask.

My mother has never been to Europe. Her mother left it as a girl with the clothes on her back. Her father left it for a fair, and the war kept him here.

Katie, who was three months old the day Mike drank the twigs, is spending a semester in Florence because she wanted to. She needed a visa too. Hers is for school.

For Thanksgiving my mother will cross the ocean her father crossed, in the other direction, to see her granddaughter. Both sets of our parents are coming. So are our other two girls. Nobody is fleeing. Nobody needs a ship that sails before the war does. The girls will overpack.

This time I’m writing down the color of every suitcase.