San Rafael resident Francine Falk-Allen may never know if she ever would have found out the deeper, hidden parts of her family history if it weren’t for an offhand comment made by her Aunt Dorothy during a relative’s memorial service in Southern California in the early 2000s.
“When we were in the orphanage,” she said as an aside during a story on another topic.
The orphanage? Falk-Allen and her nearby cousins looked at each other stunned.
San Rafael author Francine Falk-Allen wrote “A Wolff in the Family.” (Courtesy of Francine Falk-Allen)
“I said, ‘Aunt Dorothy, what are you talking about? She’s like, ‘When Daddy put the five of us youngest kids in the orphanage,’” she says. “And she also said, ‘They wouldn’t take Frank Jr. because he was 14. He was just out on the street.’ Everything about it was just totally shocking. It was really stunning.”
These stories — and her research she did about them — of what she uncovered about her family would become the inspiration for “A Wolff in the Family,” her historical fiction book that launches Tuesday. In it, she tells of her grandmother, Naomi — some names have been changed — who lives a lonely, stressful life carrying for her many children while her husband, Frank, a railroad engineer, is gone often for his job — and who also has affairs with women along his stops.
But, after finding out that Naomi was in love with her parent’s foreman, Charley, Frank kicks her out off the house and gets the courts to declare her unfit as a mother, giving him full custody of the kids, and not allowing her a divorce, which eventually leads him to put his five youngest kids in an orphanage in Kansas so he could move into his mistress’ boardinghouse and live with her and her kids.
And that’s not even where the story ends.
While this book is a piece of historical fiction, “the skeleton of this story is real,” she writes in the epilogue.
“The narrative I pieced together from these fragments from my aunt, the vaguely related stories I was told by my mother, Frances, and various facts or opinions supplied by several family members has only served to make me wonder what other secrets my mother took to her grave. All of this was kept from my sister and me so successfully, even though I used to see my grandfather several times weekly, that I have since thought my mother missed her calling; she should have worked for the CIA.
“I knew that my grandfather had eventually married my German step-grandmother, the only woman I ever personally knew as Grandma. I had, as a child, wanted to know why Mother had no trace of a German accent, unlike her youngest brother — her half brother, actually. Subsequent to my asking if ‘Grandma’ was really Mother’s mother, I learned that my maternal grandmother (the real ‘Naomi’ in this story) had died before I was old enough to remember her. My mother always met these questions from her curious child with succinct, and often vague and dismissive, answers.”
She will discuss her book at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Admission is free. For more information, go to bookpassage.com.
Digging deeper
When she first heard the rumblings of some of her relatives being left in an orphanage, she knew it was a good story — but she didn’t know what she’d do with it just quite yet. At the time, Falk-Allen hadn’t published her first book yet, something that wouldn’t happen until years later when she neared the end of her longtime career in accounting.
But she started asking questions and gathering information from genealogy and census records as well as talked to different relatives when they were alive and wrote down some details of her grandmother she’d gotten from her mother before she died.
“The other day, I was thinking I know why she didn’t tell me. First of all, she was ashamed of the things that happened, all the events. And secondly, she was afraid I’d tell somebody. And here I am. I used my imagination based on the facts I had combined with what I know about being a woman,” says Falk-Allen about the writing process. The polio survivor’s previous books include her memoir, 2018’s “Not a Poster Child,” and 2021’s “No Spring Chicken: Stories and Advice from a Wild Handicapper on Aging and Disability.”
As she started writing this book, it became hard for her to create a personality for her grandfather, who she was “posthumously rather angry with.”
“I knew my grandfather and he was very hard to have an affectionate and close relationship with,” she says. “I did try to be more kind than I felt because I thought it was unfair for me to just come from he was a jerk. That’s a huge judgment to make about anyone because you don’t know what their feelings are and how they thought about things. I do know he was a product of a different time. I don’t think he has as much of an excuse though. But that was the time when men did what they wanted to and women stayed home, unless you had a very unusual background where your parents believed in education and that women should have a profession, and that was really unusual in America in the early 1900s. I still don’t approve of him.”
But, on the other hand, she was able to create her grandmother as “the grandmother I would have liked to have known because I didn’t know her at all.”
“I knew things about her and there’s pictures of her in the book and she looked so happy and I just thought she went through all this stuff and she decided to be happy. She made a choice to be happy,” says Falk-Allen of Naomi, who ends up having a life and child, Connie, with Charley. “I’m glad I created her the way I did. I created her to be a sensitive, fun-loving person who had faults.”
While the story is rooted in her family’s experiences, she feels it can relate to others.
“I did put a reader’s guide in the back and I think there’re a lot of good issues about what women’s roles were then and what they are now, about how the railroad affected America. I hope that people will enjoy it and use it as something to talk about, especially if they love historical fiction,” she says.