It wasn’t until Barbara was in her early twenties that she discovered the truth about what happened to her mother – that she died while giving birth to Eddie. He simply told Barbara that she should call his new wife “mom”, and to tell anyone who asked that she was her “real” mother. While everyone else thought she’d forgotten her mother’s existence, Barbara spent years wondering where her mother had gone, all while secretly harboring hopes that she would come back.įive years later, when Barbara was eight years old, her father remarried.

There were no photographs of Veronica in the house, and nobody ever spoke of her. She remembers her Nana saying that any mention of Veronica would “open a can of worms”, something most people didn’t want to do in the 1940s. Though very much aware her mother was gone, Barbara learned quickly that she was never to speak of her. In Barbaras’ mind, her mother had simply vanished. One day she had a new baby brother (also named Eddie), moved with him and her father into her grandmother’s house, and no one ever spoke of Veronica again.

Not her father Eddie, nor her beloved Nana, nor any of the aunts and uncles that were a part of her life. Unbelievably, nobody told Barbara that it had happened. In Barbara’s compelling new memoir Veronica’s Grave, she tells the story of how her mother simply disappeared when she was three years old. People throughout the world endured tragic losses as a result of the war, and yet there were also people living other kinds of pain, pain that was often hidden from those they loved most. Though indeed there was a romantic innocence back then, what I didn’t realize as a child was how much suffering people went through, sometimes in unimaginable ways. Maybe I watched too many Frank Sinatra/Gene Kelly movies with my mom, or read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn more times than I should have. I always had a wish, mysterious in origin, that I would have grown up in working class Brooklyn in the 1940s.

Veronica's Grave by Barbara Donsky