In my teens, I asked my Great Aunt Rose where in Romania our family had come from. She claimed that she didn’t remember. I said, “Aunt Rose, you lived there until you were nineteen. What do you mean, you don’t remember?” She said, “It was a horrible place and we were lucky to get out of there. There’s no reason for anyone to go back.” I begged her to tell me at least the name of the place. She gave me an uncharacteristically steely glare and said again, “I don’t remember.” That was the end of the conversation.

My paternal grandfather—Aunt Rose’s brother, a farm laborer—preceded her to the United States when he was sixteen, fleeing pogroms and generational poverty. He was processed at Ellis Island and then settled in New York City, where he made neckties out of dress remnants. He insured that my father got a good education, and my family has lived in prosperity ever since. I’ve often wondered about the life my grandfather left behind. Presumably my forebears had inquiring and capacious minds much like mine and my father’s, and I have often pondered what it would be like to be us and to live like that.

Fifteen years ago, my friend Leslie Hawke moved to Romania and founded an N.G.O., OvidiuRo, to teach Gypsy children. I joined her board in part because I saw a parallel between the oppression of my Jewish ancestors and the oppression of the Roma. We had bettered our lives through education outside Romania; they might better theirs with access to schooling in Romania.

When a Romanian publisher bought the rights to my book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” last year, it reignited my curiosity about this ancestral place, and I signed on for a promotional tour. I saw an elegant circularity in the contrast between my grandfather’s departure in destitution and my return as a published author. A second cousin I had dredged up on Facebook said that she thought we hailed from Dorohoi, a small city about two hundred and fifty miles north of Bucharest, near the Ukrainian border. An amateur genealogist friend offered to do further research, and she unearthed papers confirming that the family had indeed come from Dorohoi; my grandfather and two brothers had sailed steerage from Hamburg in 1900, sending for their parents and siblings four years later.

My publisher worried that Romanians might not be ready to talk openly about depression, but the zeitgeist had shifted more than they had guessed. Romania’s greatest living writer, Mircea Cărtărescu, agreed to write an introduction and to participate in the book launch. Even before I arrived in Bucharest, the book was a best-seller, and in my first two days there I was interviewed on all three major television networks, on Romanian National Radio, and in many leading newspapers. A large crowd squeezed into a bookstore for the inaugural event, and “The Noonday Demon” went into a second printing the next day.

But all was not to go as smoothly as planned. Before I arrived, Leslie had been in touch with Florin Buhuceanu, who leads ACCEPT, a Romanian gay-rights organization. Leslie’s friend Genevieve had a connection to the Central University Library, a spectacular building in central Bucharest with an impressive lecture theatre that was opened, in 1914, by King Carol I. They agreed that this would be an ideal place for me to speak to Bucharest’s L.G.B.T. community. Genevieve arranged a meeting with the library director, who, after what Leslie and Florin said was a very cordial hour-long discussion, confirmed that the hall was available and that she would be delighted for the lecture to be held there. Florin thanked her for her courage in supporting an L.G.B.T. organization, signed and returned the contract, and posted details about the event on Facebook.

Putin’s homophobic shadow falls long in Eastern Europe, and in early June the Romanian Chamber of Deputies defeated a bill that would have granted legal recognition to gay couples, with two hundred and ninety-eight votes against, three abstentions, and only four in favor. The same week, Genevieve said, the library director phoned her, angrily accused her of lying about the nature of the lecture, and said that the library would never host an event in which gay identity was to be discussed. Thereafter, she did not return either Florin’s or Leslie’s multiple messages.

ACCEPT scrambled and found a smaller, less central place for the lecture. After I spoke, the Q. & A. lasted nearly an hour. Many of the questions pertained to my family life—what it was like to have a husband and children, how it felt to find acceptance from my father and in a wider social context—which was as unimaginable to them as my life of relative affluence would have been to my great-grandparents. Several attendees said that they dreamed of immigrating to a place where they could find such acceptance. Too many described severe depression as a result of social oppression, and several alluded to the change of venue for my lecture as an example of that problem. While it was hardly comparable to a pogrom, the incident helped me to imagine what it might have been like for my family to belong to a group that most Romanians found repugnant.

The next day, Leslie and I drove seven hours to a horse farm in the north Moldavian highlands, where we stayed overnight, eating rustic food and drinking homemade blackberry brandy. In the morning, we picked up one of the last Jews in the county, who runs a sideline in genealogy, and proceeded to Dorohoi. It was haunting to look at the gently rolling landscape on our approach and think of my grandfather and his grandfather seeing those same hills. Life seemed to have changed little in the elapsed century; farmers in oxcarts were going about their labor, women in head scarves were hoeing the fields by hand, faces had the cracked skin that comes from brutal summers and brutal winters too close in succession. We went to Dorohoi’s Jewish cemetery, up a long dirt road; it was locked behind a tall metal fence, but a man who lived nearby had the key and for about five dollars each he let us in, explaining enthusiastically, “I am not Jewish, but I like Jews.”

The cemetery was in a state of profound neglect—but so is everything else near Dorohoi. A lowing cow wandered among the tombstones, many of which were swathed in nettles. Leslie spotted the first Solomon grave. Soon we found more, many from people born after my grandfather had emigrated. It’s impossible to know for sure whether these are my relatives, but the Jewish community was never enormous (there are about forty-five hundred Jewish graves in the county), and it seems likely that my namesakes are my relatives. I placed stones on some of the graves (Jewish tradition is to place a stone rather than to bring flowers), and thought about these people who could have left and didn’t. We went into the funeral chapel, which was just a barn with a Star of David on it, and saw the old horse-drawn hearse.

One of the graves had an inscription memorializing the Solomons who had died “at the hands of Hitler”; many of those dead had names that occur elsewhere in our family. A memorial at the center of the burial ground commemorates the five thousand Jews who were taken from the area, never to return. I heard Aunt Rose’s voice saying, “We were lucky to get out of there.” I had hoped she might not be entirely right, that this European source of the family would be at least picturesque, that I’d have a surprising sense of identification with the place. I didn’t know how despondent it would make me to imagine being trapped in that life. I’ve reported from war zones and deprived societies for decades, but they have always been profoundly other, and this felt shockingly accessible—I could have been born here, and lived and died like this.