The email came from my father's eighty-two-year-old half sister. "Please send me 'Saying Kaddish for Peter,'" read the subject line, followed by just her address and "Thanks. Chaninah." By this point, in 2014, I'd had no contact with Chaninah for seven years; we had only ever met three times. What unsettled me even more than her curtness was her request for an essay I'd published two decades earlier, in my twenties. The titular Peter was her brother, who'd died in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, but my piece had disregarded her and her real loss, focusing on my fantasies of Peter. I had long since stopped fretting that she might find the essay, but now she'd finally gotten wind of it. Peter was, or would have been, my half uncle, but I had learned of his existence only at fourteen, when my father's father died and I read his obituary: "Rabbi Lowenthal and his wife, Suzanne (Moos), fled to New York in July 1939, escaping the Nazi purge of the Jews.

However, a son, Peter, from an earlier marriage, was a victim of the Holocaust." I was staggered. Who was this uncle who'd turned up out of nowhere? A forebear who, just as he appeared, also perished. I ached to learn about him, but also--self-involved teenager that I was--to learn what he might show me about myself. I had often felt like an alien in my own family, unconvinced that I deserved our name. I latched on to Peter as a possible connection, dreaming of the links we might share. (I'd seen twins on TV shows, separated as infants and, years later, reunited.) Like me, he would be moony, into folk songs and hiking alone.

Like me, he would wonder how he fit in. I was dying to ask someone about him, but who? I'd met Chaninah a few years earlier, when she came to Passover at my grandparents' place, in Brookline, Massachusetts. She'd struck me as a sanded-down version of Papa Eric--that was what we called my grandfather--her old-world accent a touch less gruff, her stare as hard but with a little give. I'd thought it odd that although we both lived in Maryland (her home, in Annapolis, less than an hour from mine), we were meeting hundreds of miles away. Was she, too, a misfit, undeserving? I didn't see her again until Papa Eric's funeral. I know she attended--she was his daughter, after all--but I can't summon an image of her there. In truth, I have few memories from that day, so jarred was I by the loss compounded by an awful adolescent embarrassment. My face, as it did often then, had swollen with hives; my eyes bulged like oozing goiters.

Mortified, I tried to hide behind mirrored sunglasses. Through my fog of shame, I couldn't see that the flashy lenses only drew attention to my face, or that in the synagogue they would seem profane. (Did my dad try to talk me out of wearing them? Did anyone?) By the time I read the obituary, days later, and learned about my grandfather's first son, Chaninah was gone again, her place in the family largely notional--which was why, I suppose, I didn't register that she had probably grown up with Peter. And why, even as my curiosity surged, I didn't think to ask her about him.