I wrote a meditation for the 9/25/2024 “Writer’s Journal” column in The Boston Globe about looking for a grandfather I never knew…

I GO LOOKING FOR MY GRANDFATHER, Louis Graver, who died in 1944, twenty years before I was born. He went by Lou, which is also my parents’ nickname for me, though it’s only now, a few weeks after my sixtieth birthday and long after my father’s death, that I notice the twinning of the name.

The story goes that Lou Graver came home from work one day complaining of a headache, lay down on the bed and died. A cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, though my father had a memory of blood (maybe Lou fell during the event?) and of his mother calling save him, Larry, save him!, but my dad was only twelve, a skinny, smart boy with curly black hair and ears that stuck out and a communist shoe salesman father he adored but who couldn’t keep a job, and there was no saving to be had.

I’m looking for my grandfather in order to write about my father, in order to also write (if I dare) about myself. I won’t really know what I have to say until I say it, and if my prior experience is any indication, the road will have many twists and turns. Doing research as a writer isn’t new to me. Before the Internet, it mostly happened in the library. For my first novel, “Unravelling,” set partly in rural New Hampshire, I remember going to the stacks to research how to slaughter a pig, but the temptations were many, and I stumbled upon a book that described how to insulate a house by surrounding it with a bank of dead leaves. I was early in the process but knew that this — the nest of leaves rising up, damp and fecund, insect-filled, rotting, protecting — would set the scene for the end of my novel. It took me years to get there, but I did.

Early on, I researched worlds, not real people, but over time I began to investigate my own family history, which feels ever more fleeting as I age. My last book, “Kantika,” imagines the migration journey of my maternal grandmother, a Sephardic Jewish woman born in Turkey. Though I wrote it as a novel, it relies heavily on fact, beginning with recorded interviews I did with my grandmother when I was 21 and she was close to the end of her life. I include family photographs and some real names, along with invented characters and scenes. It’s a “true novel,” or “roman vrai,” to borrow a term from French writer Anne Berest, whose powerful novel “The Postcard” straddles genres in similar ways.

This time, I might try nonfiction, or maybe not. I’m only just beginning; much can change. It being 2024, I look for Louis on the Internet. Ancestry.com, with its jaunty green leaf clues, turns up censuses with addresses in the South Bronx, as well as in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Lou died. I go on a pilgrimage with my nephew Jacob (middle name Louis) to several addresses. On Faile Street in the Bronx, where my dad lived with his parents and maternal grandparents as a little boy, we find only a modern basketball court at the address, but down the street, we come upon a Fellowship Baptist church with a Star of David peeking faintly out from behind a pane of glass above its faded blue sign. The census told me that my father’s grandfather, Benjamin Pearlstein, was a Hebrew teacher. Maybe he climbed these five stairs to teach in this shul, coming home (one of just a handful of things my father told me about his childhood) to argue bitterly with his son-in-law Lou, the communist.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtain my grandfather’s FBI file, where an informant, whose name is redacted, describes tracking Louis Graver in the months before his death. I learn that Lou joined a communist book group, and that he figured out the location of the undercover communist party headquarters in Bridgeport because he saw a white man talking to a Black man in an upper story window — an unusual sight at the time that led him to investigate. I learn that Lou, who never graduated high school, wrote for leftwing and Jewish publications, though when I search for his name in The Daily Worker and The Forward, I find only “graver danger” and “grave risk.” I write to an historian, who tells me that Louis probably wrote under an alias to protect himself. Just when I’m about to give up, I find one brief mention of him in the Daily Worker in a 1936 article about a Boot and Shoe Workers union protest, where he was arrested for “loud talking” by Patrolman Green.

For every hole, I find a nugget, and another hole. I talk to two second cousins I meet online through Ancestry, who share some things about the family that feel private and painful enough that I must wrestle with whether to put them in or leave them out. Slowly, a person starts to form in my mind, though the line between fact and imagination remains blurred. Louis Graver, I learn from his draft card, was a slight man. 5′ 6′’, 120 pounds. He had brown eyes, brown hair, light brown skin. He was rejected from the draft; I haven’t yet figured out why. The “G” in his signature looks like my dad’s.

I’ve been missing my beloved father for fourteen long years, but now, weirdly, I also miss his father Lou, whose name, in a certain way, I bear. Did my father notice the echo? I will never know, and so I wonder, ponder, research. Write.

Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, “Kantika,” was awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Award. She teaches at Boston College.