In 1938, my grandparents sent their daughter to America, all by herself, with little more than her clothes. She traveled on the German ship Deutschland to Ellis Island and then by train to her new home in Chicago, where an aunt and uncle had sponsored and agreed to raise her. She was one of thousands of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied countries who became refugees, traveling to any country that would accept them – England, Sweden, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Canada, the United States. After 1938, most rode "Kindertransport" trains to Great Britain. Parliament had granted entry to ten thousand children between the ages of three and seventeen, once their families paid a fee of $250 each. All the children were sent without parents or families, on trains so crowded that smaller children squeezed into the luggage racks above the seats.

These young fugitives from war are called "escapees." An ironic notion, since no one escapes the grip of a homeland, the first ground etched in childhood and memory. No one evades the influence and stamp of a mother who, absent or present, imprints an identity onto her child. No one escapes the motherland. Not my mother. Not me.

Her story, and mine, is about the half-life of the Holocaust and the emotional legacy of an escapee. But there is much more. It is a complicated terrain of pain and love, expectation and disappointment, past and present. Ours is the story of the land all mothers and daughters inhabit.

Here, a daughter cannot see the whole landscape; none of us really knows our mother, or for that matter, our parents. My view was particularly narrow. My mother never wanted me to know anything of her former self, so she restricted what I knew of her present self.

What I could see is that immigration and loss had ripped a fault line in her life. Suddenly transported to a new land, my mother lost herself. Her past blurred; over time, it was buried, becoming a hidden layer of her self, a stratum of a land and a life that she tried to deny ever existed. In years of digging, I managed to excavate only bits of this; my private archeology unearthed too few pieces to construct a past. When pressed about her childhood, she offered small, detached sketches that seemed to tell someone else's story. My mother presented herself as nearly tribeless, without a history, a supporting cast, even a nickname.

This was so even though my mother's older sister had preceded her in leaving Germany. A Chicago family adopted my aunt a year before my mother arrived in Chicago; despite their geographic proximity and the profound loss that might have united them, they spoke infrequently. Reared in separate homes, by families who made no effort to bring them together, the sisters became distant. When they talked – almost always in English – they were mindful of staying in the present. I suspect they limited their contact because each reminded the other of all that was lost. Consequently, I rarely observed my mother in the role of sister, and never saw her as someone's daughter, cousin, or niece. She was always just my mother.

Hard as she tried to forget her former life, to shed the "before," it echoed in the present. My mother was like an amputee who still feels her toes. Though she made herself into someone else, small things betrayed her. I remember her hunching over her checkbook, softly muttering math in a strange tongue – German – "Sechs plus acht ist vierzehn." Sometimes, when I walked past the bathroom while she was taking a bath, I would hear her repeating, over and over, words that began with a "w": "witch, walk, work." She was trying to master its sound, to rub out the "v," the last vestige of her German accent. It was her stain.

Each time I overheard her this way, I was struck by the fact that she had another self, a full yet unimaginable life folded into her being. Strangely, it was the parts I couldn't see that had formed me. I became defined not by what I knew, but by what I didn't know.

Identity is derived from self, family, place, and past. For me, most of those elements have been unknowable and my mother has been, in many ways, unreachable. All my life, I've longed for her, for facts, a lineage, a narrative stream flowing before me, within me, and beyond me.