Actress Learns of Family Ties to Holocaust for the First Time in New Episode of Genealogy Series

Shiryn Ghermezian

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Pamela Adlon on an episode of “Finding Your Roots.” Photo: Screenshot.

Actress, producer and writer Pamela Adlon first discovered she had family members who were murdered in the Holocaust in Tuesday’s episode of the PBS genealogy show “Finding Your Roots.”

The writer, director and star of the FX television series “Better Things” was born in New York to a Jewish father from Boston, writer-producer Don Segall, and a British mother who converted to Judaism. She knew little of the paternal side of her family, but during this week’s episode of the show, Adlon found out that her great-grandparents were born in areas of the former Soviet Union that are now Ukraine, and that their native language was Yiddish.

In 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine, then part of the USSR, and began efforts to exterminate its Jewish population, one of Adlon’s great-grand aunts, Clara Berman, was living there with her Ukrainian husband and two children.

After the Nazi invasion, Berman’s husband was called on for military duty, but before he left, he took his wife and two children to stay with his mother in a village outside of Kiev. No one but Berman’s mother-in-law knew she and her two young children were Jewish. Yet when German troops came to the town, Berman mother-in-law turned over her and her two kids to Nazi forces.

Adlon, who voiced characters on the animated series’ “King of the Hill” and “Big Mouth,” was shocked by the revelation and said, “Oh she told on them! She narced on their Jewishness. Wow! Why?”

According to a family friend, Berman, at the age of 27, and her two children — a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old — were among the roughly 33,000 people who were massacred by Nazis in large ravine in the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine.

Asked by “Finding Your Roots” host, Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., if she had any knowledge about her family’s ties to the Holocaust, Adlon said, “No, not at all. And I was hoping that they could still be alive, [Clara’s] babies.”

Adlon’s great-grandfather, Frank Segall, died in Ukraine around the time of the German invasion.

However, Berman’s mother, Meniha Segall, survived the war, returned to Ukraine and lived there until she died in Kiev at the age of 85 in1969, when Adlon was 3 years old. She passed away the same year that Adlon’s grandfather died in Boston.

During Tuesday’s episode, Aldon also discovered that her great-grandfather was a rabbi, and was presented with a photo of his tombstone inscribed in Hebrew, “Here is buried a pure and honest man. He was famous Rabbi Itsak, son of Tzvi Ha’Levi.”

“The amount of time I spent in temple — if somebody had just said to me, ‘your great-great-grandfather was a rabbi,’ I would’ve been like ‘Oh wait, let me catch up to this sermon right now,’” Aldon said. “It’s mind-blowing.”

Reflecting on all the new revelations about her family, Adlon said, “What’s so incredible to me is how little families know about their stories, how we just accept the crumbs, how we don’t preserve our histories, and how I think people need to know this. Seeing all of these people, that’s what makes you realize that everybody is important and how precious life is. All of us are against all odds.”

Aldon also made discoveries about her maternal side of the family, learning that the man who she thought was her grandfather was not in fact related to her. She learned details about her real biological grandfather, was told that her mother was the product of an affair and that the latter has a half-sister who currently lives in upstate New York.

The segment ended with Gates Jr. revealing that Adlon is distantly related to actress Meryl Streep.

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