It was me
Like a generation of women, my unwed birth mother kept a life-long secret:
In spring 1954, Judith Ann Hiller, a bright, promising 20-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was terrified.
She had grown up in a working-class, largely Jewish neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west side, where families valued academic achievement and wanted a better life for their children. On campus, she was an active and popular student.
But about two months shy of graduation, Judy learned she was pregnant.
A baby meant shame, disgrace, expulsion from the university. It would shatter the dreams Sarah and Abe Hiller had for the third of their four daughters. Marriage was out of the question; she barely knew the father.
Judy told no one other than her parents and a close friend. She pushed through to graduation, then moved to the farmlands of central Washington to stay with relatives.
During the summer, she lied to their neighbors in the tiny community of Ephrata, claiming to be the wife of a deployed soldier. She wore a fake gold wedding ring. It was arranged that she would deliver her baby in Seattle, 200 miles away. The infant would be placed with a Jewish couple through a private adoption service.
In late October, Judy gave birth to a girl. She never saw her baby. Never held her.
Like so many unwed mothers of her time, she was
Judy never saw her baby. Never held her. Like so many unwed mothers of her time, she was told it was better that way. ... Sixty-two years later, I would learn the truth.
told it was better that way.
Then she went back to Milwaukee to pick up her life.
Judy’s parents went on as if nothing had happened. Her sisters never learned why Judy left home that summer.
Judy would go on to marry a man she had corresponded with before her pregnancy. They had four children, none of whom knew there was a fifth. Judy took that secret to her grave.
Sixty-two years after that birth, I would learn the truth.
That baby was me.
I am Judy’s secret.
No one like me
As children grow, they may be told they have their mother’s nose or their father’s chin. It’s a natural step in knowing they belong in the family. Later, their identity may extend to behavior, learned and innate. Are they verbal like Mom’s side of the family? Did they pick up Dad’s skill with his hands?
As a child, I was told I was the image of my mother’s long-dead sister. My younger brother, Alan, heard that he took after an uncle who died in World War II. It was part of the fiction that my parents advanced to deflect questions they weren’t ready to answer.
Truth is, I’ve never resembled or behaved much like anyone in my adoptive family.
Brenners were practical, unpretentious blue-collar folks who worked diligently to achieve a comfortable middle-class life. My father, Charlie, opened Brenner Brothers Bakery and Delicatessen with his brothers, Joe and Itsey. A mainstay for decades, first in Seattle and then in suburban Bellevue, it’s where Jews from five states came for challah, kosher salami and Hanukkah candles.
All the kids in my generation either tied on a baker’s apron or wore a pink sales clerk uniform. When our hands were small, we rolled miniature bagels and stuffed dill pickles into jars for brining. As we grew, we were trusted to operate the mechanical bread slicer and carve corned beef. To this day, I can slice lox whisker-thin.
At the deli, we learned to be polite and diplomatic behind the counter. It was also there, side-by-side with uncles and aunts and cousins, that I was reminded every day that I was different. Physically, Brenners are short, chunky and solid. I’m 6 feet tall without heels, slender, and can palm a basketball with one of my preternaturally large hands.
The difference went beyond physical characteristics. I never saw my parents open a book, comfortably argue in a debate or aspire to dreams beyond their hometown. I did all those things.
When I was 9 years old, I learned I was adopted. My aunt was pregnant, and I asked my mother why she had never looked like that before bringing home my younger brother. She told me matter-of-factly that Alan was adopted. And so was I.
I knew what that word meant. I accepted her explanation — and asked no more questions.
Looking back, I was incredibly fortunate to be adopted, raised and loved by a huge and close clan. My parents gave me a solid foundation.
My mother, Lee Brenner, died when I was 14. My father had no idea what to do with two young children. He soon married an emotionally distant woman, a strict stepmother who was happy to see me leave for college four years later.
I had lost one mother. I never connected with the one who replaced her.
Years later, that’s what prompted me to find my first mother — the one who brought me into the world, and then let me go.
Driven by shame
Judy was one of hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers who surrendered their babies during a nearly three-decade bubble known as the Baby Scoop Era, from the end of World War II until Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal nationwide in 1973.
Most — like Judy — never learned what happened to those children.
“These women were made to carry the full emotional weight of circumstances that were the inevitable consequence of a society that denied teenage sexuality, failed to hold young men equally responsible, withheld sex education and birth control from unmarried women, allowed few options if pregnancy occurred, and considered unmarried women unfit to be mothers,” wrote Ann Fessler, author of The Girls Who Went Away, the definitive history of women who relinquished their babies during this period.
From 1945 to 1973, an estimated 4 million mothers in the USA placed children for adoption, according to the Adoption History Project, coordinated by the University of Oregon. About 1.5 million of those mothers were not married.
Unwed mothers at that time were likely to be white, middle-class women in their teens and 20s living at home. Driven by shame, their families pressured them to give up their babies and put the experience behind them.
“If you wanted a ‘decent’ life — if you were an unmarried mother with a child — the sense of it then was that no man would want to marry you,” Fessler said in an interview.
“You were used goods. You were not only unfit to raise your own child, but in the eyes of the community you were not a good person.”
Relinquishing babies effectively gave these girls a second chance at a good life.
“So, while (a pregnant girl) made a big mistake, she could be redeemed if she just kept this secret,” Fessler said. “She could go on and have other children. The message to these women was to move on, forget — you’ll have more babies. But keeping this secret was destructive to their psyches. Anyone will tell you that not being able to grieve a loss like this is devastating.”
That’s how birth records came to be sealed and the identities of birth parents hidden away. Everyone involved — the parents of the unwed mother, the social workers and clergy who coordinated the adoptions, and ultimately the girls themselves — went home after the birth to pretend it never happened.
The past hidden away
Judy grew up on Milwaukee’s west side, near the corner of North 46th and West Wright streets, in a neat bungalow in the uptown neighborhood.
She attended Washington High School, where she played clarinet in the marching band. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she studied medical technology, joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and participated in Habonim, a Jewish Socialist-Zionist youth group on campus. She graduated in 1954.
A year earlier, she had begun a correspondence with Al Goldberg on the recommendation of a mutual friend. She was in Madison; he was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. They kept in contact for a year before meeting in person for one day in May 1954 — when she was already four months pregnant. That one day ignited a romance.
It was only after that meeting that Judy wrote and told him she was pregnant. Al wrote back to say he wanted her, despite a baby fathered by another man. They discussed bringing Judy and her baby to Hawaii, where she and Al would raise the child as their own. But the idea didn’t last.
And so, I became one of millions of surrendered babies.
Judy married Al in the summer of 1955. They eventually settled in Denver, where Al taught at the University of Denver for 36 years. The family expanded in quick succession — four kids in five years. Judy completed a doctorate in speech communication and taught at a Denver-area community college. She also became a licensed family therapist, counseling clients while continuing to hide the biggest secret of her own life.
A shot in the dark
By 1994, I had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northwestern University and worked at newspapers in Chicago, New York, Miami and Denver. I was successful, married — and curious about my origins. I wanted to find my birth mother.
That year, I reached out to my mother for the first time, through a designated intermediary. I didn’t know my mother’s name or where she lived, and she didn’t know mine.
It was a Saturday afternoon. The intermediary called her home, where a child picked up the phone. A woman came on, and acknowledged she was Judy Hiller. She was asked whether she had given birth to a daughter in Seattle on Oct. 31, 1954.
Judy said she did.
That baby was now an adult and wanted to meet her. Would she agree? Judy said no.
The intermediary could hear more voices — adults and children — in the background. Perhaps this was a bad time. She asked if, given a chance to reflect, Judy’s answer might be different. “No.”
And then my mother asked the intermediary never to contact her again.
The intermediary called me back and walked me through the conversation.
I was heartbroken, deflated, as hope drained out of my body.
Just give me a chance, I thought. Give me a half-hour, that’s all I ask. Get to know me a little. Let me convince you that I’m worth knowing — then you can decide if you don’t want me. You already rejected me once. Now, give me a chance before you reject me again.
But instead, I thanked the intermediary for her efforts. Then I tried to forget.
A name, a place
I came to Wisconsin after a recruiter’s phone call. He proposed what I considered a dream job — publisher and president of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It was easy to move from a midsize paper in Washington state to the largest newspaper in Wisconsin, and one of the most respected in America.
I ultimately led the Journal Sentinel for nearly 12 years and stepped down in 2016. I still live in the city and stay active on civic and corporate boards.
Last year, I needed a copy of my birth certificate. While applying online, I learned that Washington state had recently opened sealed adoption records. I applied for my real birth record.
In late March, a government-issued envelope from Olympia, Wash., arrived. Inside it was a name I had wondered about for years but never knew: Judith Ann Hiller, 21, of Wisconsin.
I tried to absorb the name, and then her home state. Wisconsin? That’s where I live.
Thirty minutes of searching the Internet uncovered the name Judith Hiller Goldberg, born in Milwaukee in 1933. Her four children with Al were living now in Hawaii, San Francisco and Philadelphia. She had died in 2015.
Judy’s childhood home in Milwaukee is 11 minutes from my door. When my husband and I lived in Denver, the Goldberg home — my birth mother’s home — was less than 3 miles away. I could have walked by her house, bumped into her at the grocery store, sat next to her at synagogue on the high holidays.
When the intermediary phoned Judy that afternoon in 1994, she knew how near we were. She couldn’t tell me that at the time, though. Had Judy agreed to meet, we could have been face to face in minutes.
But we never made a connection. Judy wanted it that way.
She had told her friend Toby Lewin about the baby but was so embarrassed and disgraced she never even shared the identity of the father.
“She experienced incredible shame; she felt it was her fault,” said her friend, now Toby Gleitman. “That’s the way girls were taught in those days. They believed all that junk. The whole thing left a level of shame in her that she never worked out. It created a sadness — a heaviness — that she never lost.”
‘A bomb going off ’
Last April, I asked a former colleague with deep UW-Madison ties to dig into college yearbooks from 1954. There, in the UW Badger, I saw my birth mother’s face for the first time.
Later that month, my attorney wrote to the four children she had with Al: Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, and Ben, Elissa and Adam Goldberg. He introduced me and my request without using identifying information. Would I be rejected again, this time by my birth mother’s family?
When my letter reached the siblings, it felt “like a bomb going off,” Ben said.
Elissa was on the phone with her brother Adam as she idly opened the mail that day. She glanced at the text of the letter and gasped.
Elissa read the letter to Adam aloud, mentally refuting each paragraph. Then she saw the Washington state birth certificate and realized it was true.
She wrote back to me within days: “Dear Sister. One week ago, I had no idea you existed. Now, six days into having my world turned sideways and the contents shaken up and down, I am realizing that your story began way before I
ever existed.”
After direct correspondence with my four new half-siblings, we met together for the first time at Thanksgiving last year. When I found the right door, I took a deep breath and walked into a room full of strangers waiting for me.
We spent more time together through the weekend. As we talked, I had plenty of questions. So did they.
Elissa was very close to her mother and nursed her in the months after Judy refused treatment following her fourth cancer diagnosis.
“It would have been the perfect time for her to tell me about you,” she said. “She was preparing to die. I asked her if there was anything she wanted to share with me.
“She could have told me then. She never said a thing about her first baby.”
What if?
Judy’s children generously shared memories, stories and photos of their mother. Our mother.
Eldest son Jonathan recalled his mother’s vibrant energy: “She would frequently knit a sweater while reading a novel on her lap and watching television. She was a mean Scrabble player and loved to gamble, often coming out ahead on poker machines.”
“Judy loved to laugh,” Elissa added. “She taught us all to bake bread. She knitted sweaters. She sewed.”
She and Al crisscrossed the United States and Canada, packing the family into a Volkswagen Microbus and setting up camp wherever they stopped.
She also was politically active and passionately left-wing. A Democrat by pragmatism but a socialist at heart, Judy always supported the working person and never crossed a picket line.
Her mother, Sarah Hiller, worked within Milwaukee’s Socialist Party and served alongside Golda Meir, a dear friend.
The children all were expected to hold their own in political discussions around the dinner table. That table “was the most sacred space and time I recall from growing up,” Jonathan told me later in a letter. “Everything political or intellectual was fair game for discussion at these salons.”
These stories fed my imagination. I dreamed of a life — my life — at Judy’s dinner table.
Her children with Al modeled their parents’ careers and avocations.
Jonathan is now a professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where Al earned his master’s degree. Ben picked up Judy’s old clarinet as a child and went on to become an acclaimed jazz artist. Elissa is a social services program director at Drexel University’s medical school. Adam runs a transcription service in San Francisco.
Like many other adoptees and birth mothers, I’ve had to wonder “What if ?” What if our trajectories weren’t determined by the social policies and mores of the mid-1950s? What if we were born today — when society allows unwed mothers greater latitude to choose to raise their children, when the stigma of illegitimacy has subsided?
What if Judy had kept me?
I’ll never know why
I realize that Judy Hiller Goldberg remains a phantom to me. She is a series of photographs and warm memories shared by her children. In retrospect, she was much more complex than they realized.
Resemblances between us would make our connection more real to me. I searched the photographs from the Goldberg siblings for answers and clues. I’ve studied the bump in Judy’s nose, her chin, her smile, looking for similarities.
Judy did leave me one heavy hereditary legacy. She battled cancer her entire adult life. She persevered through multiple sclerosis, ovarian cancer and two mastectomies. When she died in
2015, it was after refusing treatment once cancer spread throughout her body. Her mother and two sisters also succumbed to breast cancer.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in
2003 and again in 2013. For years, I wondered where my disease came from. Now I know.
What happens now?
Through all the revelations of the past year, one question hasn’t been answered: the identity of my birth father.
Toby Gleitman, Judy’s best friend, offered a hint. At college, she introduced Judy to a friend of her cousin’s. He was a brilliant student who had recently re- turned from study in Israel to pursue his graduate degrees at UW-Madison.
He was tall, with prominent features and exceptionally large hands and feet, Toby remembered. If he and Judy shared a brief fling, it would not lead to anything lasting.
Last summer, I wrote to this man’s only son and shared this story. The son said his father never mentioned Judy by name or hinted at having fathered a child while in graduate school.
I won’t name him here, because his connection to me is just a strong suspicion. I know I match his physical description. The dates and proximity all check out. He went on to a distinguished career at an Ivy League university. He died of heart failure in 2003.
I have no proof — but as I stare at his photo from aged Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle newspaper clippings, I want him to be my birth father. To be certain of his kinship, though, I would need to ask his son for a DNA test. That’s an intrusion I’m not willing to make.
Still, I want to fill in more pieces of my heritage. I can do that by building relationships with Judy’s children and grandchildren. For now, meeting and spending time with her side of the family is enough.
Last week, I traveled to Mount Nebo Memorial Park in suburban Denver. Judy and Al are buried side by side there. Under Judy’s name on her marker is the quotation “A full life of family, books and friends. Loved by so many.”
After all the searching and discovering I’ve done about this woman, standing there was the closest I would get to her since my birth. I placed a rock on the tombstone, following the Jewish tradition for loved ones. And I fought back tears.
At Thanksgiving, I asked Jonathan, Elissa, Ben and Adam: “What happens now?”
None of us had a plan. But we agreed to spend time together. Get better acquainted. Discover more about each other.
Elissa and I have become phone pals. Jonathan recently traveled from Hawaii to Milwaukee, in part to spend more time with me. Our getting acquainted begins.
I hope Judy is watching. And, finally, making peace.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Brenner is the former publisher and president of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at efbrenner@gmail.com.