BACKGROUND

My greatest trauma was the death of my father, Ionel Rapaport, from cancer in the 1970's, when I was only sixteen. He is the vortex of this story, even though he is now a missing character.

A medical doctor and a psychiatrist, he was approaching fifty when I was born. He was an only child who had been born in Romania in 1909 and emigrated to France at seventeen to go to medical school. During the war my father lived in Paris, no doubt a painful experience for a Jew living undercover. In the early 1950's, he emigrated from France to the United States to follow my mother, an American, back from Paris, where they had met in 1949.

More than ten years after his death, I was rifling through desk, which had lain undisturbed since his fatal illness. I found, hidden away with two black-and-white photographs of his octogenarian parents, a pocket-sized portrait-photo of a young boy. Immediately I was struck by the boy resemblance to my father. The child gazed into the camera with the same bright, intelligent dark-brown eyes that my father had. It was like Daddy at ten.

I turned over the picture. In a child's writing it was signed with a tender greeting in French: "Je vous embrasse bien fort - Pierre", and dated 1956. My mother said she had no idea who the boy was. But from the moment I laid eyes on that photograph, I felt convinced that I had a brother somewhere.

Years went by. I had no idea of how to pursue the mysterious Pierre. I thought at trying to find him in Paris, or trying to pursue whatever relatives of my father's side I had heard of. But we had neither addresses nor last names to research. I never would have thought of trying Romania.

Then a few months ago, my mother called to tell me of an odd letter she had received postmarked Bucharest. It began: "I am looking for the trace of Doctor Ionel Rapaport's family..." and was signed "Pierre Radulescu-Banu". I gasped. Couldn't be the Pierre whose photo I had found in Daddy's drawer ten years before?

That was the beginning of the story that will be told in this film, and re-creations of these scenes will serve as the set-up for the rest of the documentary. As the film unfolds, it will include scenes of my first meeting with Pierre in Romania, our discovery of our grandparents' graves, his arrival in America, disorientation, and then search for work in New York. It will explore the development of the relationships with my mother and sister. In Paris we will re-visit the places where our parents lived, and search for any surviving friends who knew the main characters in our family's story.