Eleanor's Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret

Eleanor's Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret by David Siff

Eleanor's Rebellion is a touching tale of a mother reluctant to tell her oldest son the truth about his parentage. Her son, author David Siff, discovered when he was 40 that he was adopted; when he confronted her with this revelation, she claimed his real father was actor Van Heflin. Siff has linked the missing pieces of her life and his from the time of his birth and after her death, through her writings, interviews with family members, research into his adoption records, and his own recollections.

Single mothers, especially those from close-knit immigrant Jewish families, were uncommon during the early 20th century. Eleanor Segal was just one of the 87,250 women in 1935 to have a child out of wedlock, a scandalous situation. She wanted to keep her baby. He was placed in a foster home, then moved to an orphanage, the Hebrew Home for Infants. Eleanor's mother and her Aunt Lee hatched a plan: they told Eleanor's father that her Uncle Dockey, a doctor, had diagnosed her with tuberculosis and that she needed to to stay at sanitarium for treatment (she actually stayed with a friend). Another Aunt, Rose, who cared for foster children, convinced Eleanor's father to adopt a foster child--his own grandchild. Eleanor married a childhood friend, Benjamin Siff, a few years after she bore her son, and the couple adopted him after his stepbrother's birth.

Like his presumed papa, Siff also became an actor, before he knew he was adopted, bringing up the nature vs. nurture debate--it hasn't been proven whether genes have as much an influence on a person's upbringing compared to the parents and the home environment. While in Hollywood, he declined an offer to have lunch with Van Heflin ("It could never have dawned on me that I was out there looking for my father."). By the time he had learned about Heflin he had switched from acting to teaching.

Siff writes well, with honesty and feeling. He expresses his identity crisis and distrust of the mother he thought he knew. "I was someone who had lost any sense of who I was, where I had come from, and where I was going.". He feared confronting his mother about her cover-up. "I can say now that my inability to see came not from a deceptive play of light on a movie screen, or even a defect in my own character, but from the simple and primitive fear