In an Age of Lessening Privacy, Some Family Secrets Persist

Yeah, well. Life's a bitch sometimes.

At the New York Times, "Secret Histories":

After Itzhak Goldberg’s father died in 1995, at age 86, his mother gave him a watch in a red case. The 18-karat gold Patek Philippe was a rare indulgence for his father, a Polish Holocaust survivor who married, moved to Israel and ran a produce business.

As Mr. Goldberg wrote in the online magazine Tablet, when he opened the box, he was stunned to find, tucked in the folds of the guarantee booklet, a tiny, yellowing photograph of two beautiful young women he didn’t recognize. His mother was startled but made no comment. For 17 years, out of deference to her, Mr. Goldberg, now a clinical professor of radiation oncology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, did nothing. But after his mother died, he went looking for the truth.

“I knew my father wanted me to find that photograph,” he told me recently. “He was saying, ‘This is a part of my life, and I want you to know about it after I pass away.’ ”

One truism about contemporary life is that there are no more secrets. In the age of selfies, sexting, Twitter and Facebook, people are constantly spilling every intimate detail of their lives. Video cameras trace our every move; our cellphones know where we are at all times; Google tracks our innermost thoughts; the N.S.A. listens in when we dream. Everything is knowable, if you just know where to look.

But that idea is flawed. Secrets endure. Especially in families...

It's the "age of knowing." (I think that's from an AndroGel commercial, but it rings true in the contemporary culture, as I pointed out last night.)

But continue reading.