This is a story of obsession and rabbit holes, of mystery and artistry, and a flagrant extramarital affair. Above all, however, it is a story of tragedy and love, as the politician and diplomat Meryl Frank doggedly tracks down the ultimate fate of a member of her extended family in wartime Vilnius (previously known as Vilna), the capital of Lithuania.
Frank, the former mayor of Highland Park, New Jersey, has worked for American presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Joe Biden appointed her to the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in January 2022.
And she has worked tirelessly to improve the status of women, both in the United Nations and on the ground, in war zones such as Afghanistan.
Franya in the ocean
Franya Winter in the ocean (Photo: Handout)
So Frank is no lightweight, no dabbler. And yet she admits that what she thought was going to be “a two-year sabbatical” turned into seven years of research.
“I kept finding more and more evidence, so I had to keep going, to return to Vilnius and to go to the archives and speak to more people. One of the problems was that as time went on, the survivors were no longer around, so I spent time with the surviving survivors. It just took over my life”.
Unearthed, Frank’s book, is subtitled A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust. The actress was her maternal cousin’s wife, Franya Winter, a star of the Vilna Jewish Theatre.
The “forbidden book”? That is something that might prompt some readers to shout at Frank’s narrative, “Open the book!”
For Frank embarked on finding out more about what had happened to her family during the Holocaust with, metaphorically, one hand tied behind her back.
Franya beaded headdress
Lost actress: Franya Winter (Photo: Handout)
The book in question was called Twenty One and One, and each of its first 21 chapters was an account of the fate of the actors and artistes of the State Yiddish Theatre, written by their fellow actor Shabtai Blecher.
Blecher himself perished — murdered in a camp —in 1943 and there the stories might have ended, but for a bizarre coincidence.
A Christian Lithuanian, Boleslaw Boratynski, who was already hiding a family of Jews, the Etingin family, found Blecher’s biographies being blown around in the street. He scooped up the pages and handed them over to the Etingins.
The family eventually survived and made their way to the States. In 1962, a Yiddish version of Blecher’s book was published, with the editors adding a biography of Shabtai Blecher to the other chapters.
And it was this book, in Yiddish, that Meryl Frank was given by her Aunt Mollie a few years before she died. There was only one proviso, said her aunt, giving Frank Twenty One and
One for safekeeping: she must promise not to read the book.
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Meryl Frank's book (Photo: Handout)
Part of that promise was easy to keep, as Frank did not read Yiddish. She knew that one of the chapters was a full account of the life and death of her Polish Jewish actress relation Franya Winter, and over the years wondered just why her Aunt Mollie, her mother’s older sister, had banned her from reading it.
“I wondered if perhaps Franya had been a collaborator,” she said.
In any event, for a very long time, she kept her promise, not even revealing the existence of the book to her mother or her own three sisters.
Frank’s acknowledged obsession with the Holocaust — much of it fed by stories from her Aunt Mollie — was well understood by her husband and children. She has a fine line in deprecating humour, and says: “My family were actually very supportive. You know, with all the other things I did in my life, when I was mayor, or ambassador — meh, they couldn’t have cared less.
"My children were not impressed at all. But with this book — they were very interested in it. I think they understood that it was something I had to do.”
Franya posed as boy
Franya posing as a boy (Photo: Handout)
She describes herself as “a memorial candle” in relation to the Holocaust, a phenomenon that she says is common to many families. When the survivors are all gone, it will be Frank and the candle cohort who will continue to preserve the stories of the Shoah for future generations.
Thus, with the truth of what had become of Franya Winter sitting hidden on Meryl Frank’s bookshelves, she embarked on discovering what had happened to the actress by herself.
Right at the beginning of her research Frank successfully persuaded her 85-year-old mother to accompany her and her family on a first visit to Vilnius.
Somewhat to Frank’s amazement, her (American-born) mother was able to hold conversations in fluent Yiddish. “I knew that she had studied Yiddish when she was young.
All her friends were studying Hebrew but her mother said, it’s a dead language, you don’t need to learn Hebrew, you need to learn Yiddish!
So she knew how to read and write in Yiddish, but she didn’t really have the opportunity to use it. We went to a Shabbes ‘tisch’ one night [in Vilnius] and my mother was singing all the songs in Yiddish, it was beautiful, and really magical to see my mother like that.”
Franya Winter was married — not terribly happily — to a man called Isaak Punski, who was cousin to Meryl Frank’s grandmother.
At some point during the actress’s theatre career Franya encountered a leading man, Rudolf Zaslavsky — and it seems that the pair began a torrid affair. “Zaslavsky was a larger-than-life character,” says Frank — which could easily be translated as “a man with monstrous ego”. “He faked his own death, you know”, Frank says with some glee, “and it made the papers all over the world.”
An actor-manager easily comparable to the hammy equivalents in London, Zaslavsky, writes Frank, “believed fervently in theatre as high art, but more fervently still in the cult of Rudolf Zaslavasky”.
The affair is documented in Blecher’s Twenty-One and One, so it’s not merely speculation on Frank’s part.
Franya full body pose
Lost actress Franya Winter (Photo: Handout)
And in some respects, she says, she benefited from not reading the book before she embarked on her own research. “I would have written a very different book, had I read it. As it was, I had to dig, and I read every piece of paper over and over to get hints about Franya.”
Working in the archives at YIVO, the New York-based Institute for Jewish Research, brought Frank “a treasure trove” of documents.
YIVO was founded in Vilnius and during the war, a group of men and women who had been working there before the Nazi invasion, managed to save thousands of pages and material relating to the Jewish life of eastern Europe.
This group became known as the Paper Brigade.
“The information that they found and buried beneath the ghetto in Vilnius was the information that I used. One of the members of the Paper Brigade was a theatre historian, and I believe that she understood that this was important material.”
For the Jews of Vilnius, Frank says in her book, the arts represented “almost a second religion”.
So it was not surprising that so much of what was saved related to the creative arts, the work of the actors, writers, musicians and painters who once flourished in Lithuania, before being murdered on an industrial scale by the Nazis.
So what did happen to Franya Winter? Her lover had died before the war, and she had gone back to her husband Isaak. Theatre opportunities grew smaller and smaller as the war engulfed Europe.
“She was in a play, a Sholem Aleichem play, sometimes called The Lottery.
They had a great opening night, all the leading people of the Vilna arts scene were there — including Abraham Sutzkever, one of the founders of the Paper Brigade, who became a famous poet.” The play, in fact, was called Dos Groyse Gevins, or The Big Prize.
It opened on June 21, 1941. But, writes Frank, “this would be the last performance of the famed Yiddish theatre of Vilna.
“There was no second night.”
Just 16 hours later, Nazi bombing put paid to Jewish life in the city.
Franya survived until October of that year, though exactly what became of her requires an almost forensic reading of Frank’s book.
Now on the board of YIVO, and with her book finally published, Meryl Frank is turning her attention as to how the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto might be commemorated — and what she herself will do next.
Her plans include the possibility of the placing of the now popular Stolpersteine — brass covered cobblestones in the pavement in front of the homes of Nazi victims. And she would also like to re-stage Sholem Aleichem’s final play — in Yiddish, but with English and Lithuanian surtitles.
And for herself, Frank is turning her laser-like attention to the issue of climate change. Dealing with the tragedy of the Holocaust, she says, has made her think deeply about the legacy she might leave to the next generation.
‘Unearthed, A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust’, by Meryl Frank (Hachette Books) is out now.
