My unwed birth mother kept a life-long secret: Me

Elizabeth "Betsy" Brenner | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Show Caption Hide Caption I am Judy's secret Betsy Brenner shares her story of finding the family she never knew she had.

MILWAUKEE – In spring 1954, Judith Ann Hiller, a bright, promising 20-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was terrified.

She had grown up in a working-class, largely Jewish neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west side where families valued academic achievement and wanted a better life for their children. On campus, she was an active and popular student.

But some two months shy of graduation, she learned she was pregnant.

A baby meant shame, disgrace, expulsion from the university. It would shatter her dreams, and the dreams that Sarah and Abe Hiller had for the third of their four daughters.

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Marriage was out of the question. She barely knew the father.

Judy Hiller said nothing to anyone but her parents and a close friend. She pushed through to graduation, then quickly moved to the farmlands of central Washington to stay with relatives.

During the summer, she lied to their neighbors in the tiny community of Ephrata, Wash., claiming to be the wife of a deployed soldier. She wore a fake gold wedding ring.

It was arranged that she would deliver her baby in Seattle, nearly 200 miles away. The infant would be placed immediately with a Jewish couple through a private adoption service.

In late October, Judy Hiller gave birth to a girl. She never saw her baby, never held her.

Like so many unwed mothers of her time, she was told it was better that way.

Then she went back to Milwaukee to pick up her life.

Judy Hiller’s parents went on as if nothing had happened. Her sisters never learned why she left home that summer.

The relatives in Washington tucked the memory away.

Judy Hiller would go on to marry a man she had corresponded with before her pregnancy. They had four children, none of whom knew about a fifth. Their mother took that secret to her grave.

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Sixty-two years after that birth, I would learn the truth.

That baby was me.

I am her secret.

No one like me

As children grow, they may be told they have their mother’s nose or their father’s chin. It’s a natural step in knowing they belong in the family.

Later, their identity may extend to behavior, learned and innate.

Do they share Grandma’s curiosity, or Uncle Joe’s humor? Are they verbal like Mom’s side of the family; did they pick up Dad’s skill with his hands?

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As a small child, I was told I was the image of my mother's long-dead sister. My younger brother, Alan, heard that he took after an uncle who died in World War II.

It was part of the fiction that my parents advanced to deflect questions they weren’t ready to answer.

Truth is I’ve never resembled or behaved much like anyone in my adoptive family.

Brenners were practical, unpretentious blue collar folks who worked diligently to achieve a comfortable middle-class life.

My father, Charlie, opened Brenner Brothers Bakery and Delicatessen with his brothers, Joe and Itsey. A mainstay for decades, first in Seattle and then in suburban Bellevue, it's where Jews from five states came for challah, kosher salami and Chanukah candles.

All the kids in my generation either tied on a baker’s apron or wore a pink sales clerk uniform. When our hands were small, we rolled miniature bagels and stuffed dill pickles into jars for brining.



As we grew, we were trusted to operate the mechanical bread slicer and carve corned beef. To this day, I can make a mean cabbage roll, and slice lox whisker thin.



At the deli, we learned to be polite and diplomatic behind the counter.

“The customer is always right — even when they’re wrong” was drummed into each of us.

It was also there, side by side with uncles and aunts and cousins, that I was reminded every day that I was different. Physically, Brenners are short, chunky and solid.

I’m 6 feet tall without heels, slender, and can palm a basketball with one of my preternaturally large hands. The difference went beyond physical characteristics.

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I never saw my parents open a book, comfortably argue in a debate, or aspire to dreams beyond their hometown. I did all those things.

When I was 9 years old, I learned I was adopted. My aunt was pregnant and I asked my mother why she had never looked like that before bringing home my younger brother.

She told me matter-of-factly that Alan was adopted. And so was I.

I knew what that word meant. I accepted her explanation — and asked no more questions.

Looking back, I was incredibly fortunate to have been adopted, raised and loved by a huge and close clan. My parents gave me a solid foundation.

I had ambitions they didn’t understand, but they always supported my goals.

My mother, Lee Brenner, died when I was 14. My father had no idea what to do with two young children.

He soon married an emotionally distant woman, a strict stepmother who was happy to see me leave for college four years later.

I had lost one mother. I never connected with the one who replaced her.

Years later, that’s what prompted me to find my first mother — the one who brought me into the world and then let me go.

Driven by shame

Judy Hiller was one of hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers who surrendered their newborns during a nearly three-decade bubble known as the Baby Scoop Era, from the end of World War II until Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationwide in 1973.

Most — like her — never learned what happened to those children.

“These women were made to carry the full emotional weight of circumstances that were the inevitable consequence of a society that denied teenage sexuality, failed to hold young men equally responsible, withheld sex education and birth control from unmarried women, allowed few options if pregnancy occurred, and considered unmarried women unfit to be mothers,” wrote author Ann Fessler of The Girls Who Went Away, the definitive history of women who relinquished their babies during this period.

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From 1945 to 1973, an estimated 4 million U.S. mothers placed children for adoption, according to the Adoption History Project, coordinated by the University of Oregon. About 1.5 million of those mothers were not married.

Unwed mothers during the period were likely to be white, middle-class women in their teens and 20s living at home. Driven by shame, their families pressured them to give up their babies and put the experience behind them.

“For a young woman at the time, having a baby was the very worst thing she could do. A shame was brought not only on her but on her whole family,” Fessler said in a recent interview.

“If you wanted a ‘decent' life — if you were an unmarried mother with a child — the sense of it then was that no man would want to marry you. You were used goods," she said. "You were not only unfit to raise your own child, but in the eyes of the community you were not a good person."

Relinquishing babies effectively gave these girls a second chance.

“So, while (a pregnant girl) made a big mistake, she could be redeemed if she just kept this secret. She could go on and have other children," Fessler said.

"The message to these women was to move on. Forget. You’ll have more babies," she said. "But keeping this secret was destructive to their psyches. Anyone will tell you that not being able to grieve a loss like this is devastating.”

Adoption professionals from 1940s to the 1970s truly believed that placing children with married, infertile couples would save them from “doomed lives with unmarried, emotionally unstable mothers who could not offer them real love or security,” according to the Adoption History Project.

That’s how birth records came to be sealed and the identities of birth parents hidden away. Everyone involved — the parents of the unwed mother, the social workers and clergy who coordinated the adoptions, and ultimately the girls themselves — went home after the birth to pretend it never happened.

“In truth, none of the mothers I interviewed were able to forget,” Fessler said in her book. “Rather, they describe the surrender of their child as the most significant and defining event of their lives.”

A surrendered baby

Judy Hiller grew up on Milwaukee’s west side, near the corner of North 46th and West Wright streets, in a neat bungalow in the uptown neighborhood. It had white trim, flower boxes outside the upstairs windows and apple trees dotting the backyard.

She attended Washington High School, where she played clarinet in the marching band. She had skipped two lower grades, so she entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison at age 16.

She studied medical technology and joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority; the International Club; and Habonim, a Jewish Socialist-Zionist youth group on campus. She graduated in 1954.

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A year earlier, she had begun a correspondence with Al Goldberg on the recommendation of a mutual friend. She was in Madison; he was pursuing a masters’ degree at the University of Hawaii.

They kept in contact for a year before meeting in person for one day in May 1954 — when she was already nearly four months pregnant. That one day ignited a romance.

Only after that meeting did Judy Hiller write and confess her pregnancy. Goldberg wrote back to say he wanted her despite a baby fathered by another man.

They discussed having her and her baby come to Hawaii, where she and Goldberg would raise the child as their own. But the idea didn’t last.

“She couldn’t do it,” my half-sister Elissa Goldberg surmised when we talked years later. “She didn’t want to look at you every day and see him. She couldn’t bear to see your father.”

And so, I became one of millions of surrendered babies.

Judy Hiller married Al Goldberg in summer 1955. They eloped in Hawaii.

Grainy home movies of their reception, held that summer in her parents' backyard in Milwaukee, show a happy young couple being feted by scores of family and friends.

They eventually settled in Denver, where Goldberg taught at the University of Denver for 36 years. The family expanded in quick succession — four kids in five years.

She went back to school, completed a doctorate in speech communication and taught for the remainder of her life at a Denver-area community college. She also became a licensed family therapist, counseling clients while continuing to hide the biggest secret of her own life.

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By 1994, I had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northwestern University and worked at newspapers in Chicago, New York, Miami and Denver. I was successful, married — and curious about my origins.

I wanted to find my birth mother.

That year, I reached out to my mother for the first time, through a designated intermediary. I didn’t know my mother’s name or where she lived, and she didn’t know mine.

It was a Saturday afternoon. The intermediary called her home, and a child picked up the phone.

A woman came on and acknowledged she was Judy Hiller. She was asked whether she had given birth to a daughter in Seattle on Oct. 31, 1954.

She said she did.

That baby was now an adult and wanted to meet her. Would she agree?

She said no.

The intermediary could hear more voices — adults and children — in the background. Perhaps this was a bad time.

The intermediary asked if, given a chance to reflect, would her answer perhaps be different.

“No.”

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And then my birth mother asked the intermediary never to contact her again. She hung up the telephone.

The intermediary called me back and walked me through the conversation.

I was heartbroken, deflated, as hope drained out of my body.

Just give me a chance, I thought. Give me a half hour, that’s all I ask. Get to know me a little.

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Let me convince you that I’m worth knowing, then you can decide if you don’t want me.

You already rejected me once. Now give me a chance before you reject me again.

But instead, I thanked the intermediary for her efforts. Then I tried to forget.

A name, a place

I came to Wisconsin following a recruiter’s phone call. He proposed what I considered a dream job — publisher and president of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It was easy to move from a mid-sized paper in Washington state to the largest newspaper in Wisconsin and one of the most respected in America.

I ultimately led the Journal Sentinel for nearly 12 years, stepping down in 2016. I’m so proud that our newsroom won three Pulitzer Prizes during that time and brought national recognition to Milwaukee and our work.

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I still live in the city and stay active on civic and corporate boards.

Last year, I needed a copy of my birth certificate, so my husband could receive a long-forgotten pension payout. While applying online, I learned that Washington state had recently opened sealed adoption records.

For the first time, adoptees could learn the names of birth parents. I applied for my real birth record.

In late March, a nondescript government-issued envelope from Olympia, Wash., arrived. Inside it was a name I had wondered about for years but never knew: Judith Ann Hiller, 21, of Wisconsin.

I tried to absorb the name and then her home state. Wisconsin? That’s where I live.

Some 30 minutes of searching the Internet uncovered the name Judith Hiller Goldberg, born in Milwaukee in 1933. Her four children with Al Goldberg were living now in Hawaii, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

She had died in 2015.

Her childhood home in Milwaukee is 11 minutes from my door. When my husband and I lived in Denver, the Goldberg home — my birth mother’s home — was less than 3 miles away.

I could have walked by her house, bumped into her at the grocery store, sat next to her at synagogue on High Holidays.

How could the mother I’ve wondered about, and searched for, have grown up across town? How could we have been living so close to each other in Colorado and never connected?

When intermediary phoned Judy Goldberg that afternoon in 1994, the woman knew how near we were. She couldn’t tell me though.

Had my birth mother agreed to meet, we could have been face to face in minutes.

But we never made a connection. Judy Hiller Goldberg wanted it that way.

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Back in 1954, Judy Hiller told her best friend, Toby Lewin, about the baby but was so embarrassed and disgraced that she never shared the identity of the father.

“She experienced incredible shame; she felt it was her fault,” said the friend, now Toby Gleitman. "That’s the way girls were taught in those days. They believed all that junk.

"The whole thing left a level of shame in her that she never worked out, it created a sadness — a heaviness — that she never lost,” Gleitman said.

'A bomb going off'

In April, I asked a former colleague with deep University of Wisconsin-Madison ties to dig into college yearbooks from 1954. There, in the UW Badger, I saw my birth mother’s face for the first time: dark eyes, dark hair, serious gaze, no smile.

I didn’t see a resemblance. But others would.

Later that month, my lawyer wrote to her four children with Al Goldberg — Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller; and Ben, Elissa and Adam Goldberg. He introduced me and my request without using identifying information.

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I wanted to leave my name out. I had no idea what the response would be.

Would I be rejected again, this time by my birth mother’s family?

When my letter reached the siblings, it felt “like a bomb going off,” Ben Goldberg said.

Elissa Goldberg, a program director at Drexel University in Philadelphia, was on the phone with her brother Adam as she idly opened the mail that day. She glanced at the text of the letter — and gasped.

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Elissa Goldberg read the letter to her brother aloud, mentally refuting each paragraph. Then she saw the Washington state birth certificate — and realized it was true.

She wrote back to me within days:

Dear Sister. One week ago, I had no idea you existed. Now, six days into having my world turned sideways and the contents shaken up and down, I am realizing that your story began way before I ever existed.

After direct correspondence with my four new half-siblings, we met together for the first time at Thanksgiving this past year.

They were gathered with their families. I was so anxious that my husband, Steve, and I initially drove to the wrong address down the block.

When I found the right door, I took a deep breath and walked into a room full of strangers.

They were just as anxious to meet me as I was to face them. We spent more time together that weekend.

As we talked, I had plenty of questions. So did they.

Elissa Goldberg was very close to her mother, and nursed her during the months after she refused treatment following her fourth cancer diagnosis.

"It would have been the perfect time for her to tell me about you,” she said. “She was preparing to die. I asked her if there was anything she wanted to share with me. She could have told me then. She never said a thing about her first baby.”

However, she did leave evidence.

Judy Hiller Goldberg kept her many love letters to her husband, including those that discussed her baby. She sealed them in a box and left instructions to destroy the contents after she died.

Instead, her kids moved the box to Adam Goldberg’s basement. When they got my letter, they opened the forbidden box, and read their mother’s confession about her first baby.

What if?

Her children generously shared memories, stories and photos of their mother. Our mother.

Eldest son Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller recalled his mother’s vibrant energy: “She would frequently knit a sweater while reading a novel on her lap and watching television. She was a mean Scrabble player and loved to gamble, often coming out ahead on poker machines.”

“Judy loved to laugh,” Elissa Goldberg added. “She taught us all to bake bread. She knitted sweaters. She sewed. When she was in her 50s, she took up weaving, creating towels, baby blankets, place mats and prayer shawls.”

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She loved to travel. She and her husband crisscrossed the United States and Canada, packing the family into a Volkswagen Microbus and setting up camp wherever they stopped.

She also was politically active and passionately left wing. A Democrat by pragmatism but a socialist at heart, She always supported the working person and never crossed a picket line.

Her mother, Sarah Hiller, worked within Milwaukee’s Socialist Party and served alongside Golda Meir, a dear friend. Judy Hiller Goldberg revered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., admired Fidel Castro and disparaged Henry Kissinger for being, as Goldberg-Hiller put it, “a Jew who had gone over to the darkest of the dark side.”

"Trump’s election would have killed her had the cancer not,” he joked.

The children all were expected to hold their own in political discussions around the dinner table.

That table, “was the most sacred space and time I recall from growing up,” her oldest son told me later in a letter. “Everything political or intellectual was fair game for discussion at these salons.

"Judy was always comfortable with an open door, and we often ate with friends who were fully expected to join in the serious discussions at the dinner table,” he wrote.

Her children with Al Goldberg modeled their parents’ careers and avocations.

• Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller is now a political science professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where his father received his master's degree.

• Ben Goldberg picked up his mother’s old clarinet as a child and went on to become an acclaimed jazz artist, credited in part with restoring eastern European klezmer music to modern performance.

• Elissa Goldberg is a social services program director at Drexel University’s medical school in Philadelphia.

• Adam Goldberg learned to love words working summers at Denver’s famous Tattered Cover Book Store. He runs a transcription service in San Francisco.

In the last years of Judy Hiller Goldberg’s life, as she walked through the halls of Denver’s Jewish Community Center on her way to aqua-aerobics class, people would line up to kiss her: her pool mates, the receptionists, the Spanish-speaking janitors and the Russian immigrants who knew no English.

“She had good friends, people who loved her, people who formed many different circles around her,” Elissa Goldberg said.

These stories fed my imagination. I dreamed of a life — my life — at her dinner table.

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Like many other adoptees and birth mothers, I’ve had to wonder “What if?”

What if our trajectories weren’t determined by the social policies and mores of the mid-1950s?

What if we were born today — when society allows unwed mothers greater latitude to choose to raise their children when the stigma of illegitimacy has subsided?

What if she had kept me?

I’ll never know.

I realize that Judy Hiller Goldberg remains a phantom to me. She is a series of photographs and warm memories her children have shared.

In retrospect, she was even more complex than they realized. They’ve said my identity has helped them understand more about the mother they thought they knew.

When we talked at Thanksgiving, Ben Goldberg recalled a wistfulness in his mother. He said the discovery of my birth helped explain more of her behavior and reactions.

When she told her children she loved them — “I love you, Ben” — it was always with some sadness, almost mournful.

Ben Goldberg took it for granted at the time. Only now does he suspect a longing.

Judy Hiller Goldberg couldn’t reveal my birth to her children. I'll never know why.

Her husband knew about her first child. He vowed to always love her anyway, and he did.

But she — who embraced debate and contentious discussions — wouldn’t share her early reality with her own family.

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Resemblances between us would make our connection more real to me. I searched the photographs from the Goldberg siblings for answers and clues.

I’ve studied her chin, her smile, the bump in her nose for similarities. Since I never resembled anyone in my adopted family, I was eager for genetic confirmation of a connection.

I don’t see the likeness though her other children tell me I look more like their mother than they do.

Judy Hiller Goldberg did leave me one heavy hereditary legacy: She battled cancer her entire adult life. She persevered through multiple sclerosis, ovarian cancer and two mastectomies.

When she died in 2015, it was after refusing treatment once cancer spread throughout her body. Her mother and two sisters also succumbed to breast cancer.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, and again in 2013. Testing revealed that mine is not technically genetic — but most likely what doctors identify as a “familial” cancer that clusters among relatives.

For years, I wondered where my disease came from. Now I know.

Cancer certainly clustered in Judy’s family and continued through me.

What happens now?

Through all the revelations of the past year, one question hasn’t been answered: the identity of my birth father.

Toby Gleitman, Judy’s best friend, offered a hint. At college, she introduced Judy to a friend of her cousin.

He was a Milwaukee boy, a standout basketball star at North Division High School. He also was a brilliant student who recently had returned from study in Israel to pursue his graduate degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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He was tall with prominent features and exceptionally large hands and feet, Gleitman remembered. (“Elephantine,” as she described him. My birth mother was short and petite. I am tall and big boned with exceptionally large hands and feet.)

But he was promised to another girl. If he and Judy Hiller shared a brief fling, it would not lead to anything lasting.

This past summer, I wrote to this man’s only son and shared this story. The son said his father never mentioned Judy Hiller by name or hinted at having fathered a child while in graduate school.

I won’t identify him here because his connection to me is just a strong suspicion.

I know I match his physical description. The dates and proximity all check out.

He went on to a distinguished career as a leading social scientist and professor at an Ivy League university. He died of heart failure in 2003.

He wrote an autobiography. In it, he recounts a strong Jewish faith, study abroad, academic success — and multiple romances.

He never mentions Judy Hiller. I’ve concluded it’s unlikely she ever told the father she was pregnant.

I have no proof. But as I stare at his photo from aged Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle newspaper clippings, I want him to be my birth father.

To be certain of his kinship, though, I would need to ask his son for a DNA test. That’s an intrusion I’m not willing to make.

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Still, I want to fill in more pieces of my heritage. I can do that by building relationships with Judy Hiller Goldberg’s children and grandchildren. For now, meeting and spending time with her side of the family is enough.

In early March on a crystal-clear Colorado morning, I traveled to Mount Nebo Memorial Park in suburban Denver. Judy and Al Goldberg are buried side by side there.

Under Judy Hiller Goldberg's name on her marker is this quotation: “A full life of family, books and friends. Loved by so many.”

After all the searching and discovering I’ve done about this woman, standing there was the closest I would get to her since my birth.

I placed a rock on the tombstone, following the Jewish tradition for loved ones. And I fought back tears.

At Thanksgiving, I asked the Goldbergs' children: “What happens now?"

None of us had a plan. But we agreed to spend time together, get better acquainted and discover more about each other.

Elissa Goldberg and I have become phone pals. Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller recently traveled from Hawaii to Milwaukee, in part to spend more time with me.

Our getting acquainted begins.

I hope Judy Hiller Goldberg is watching — and, finally, making peace.

Follow Betsy Brenner on Twitter: @EFBrenner