Montreal man discovers long-lost brother
Montreal man discovers long-lost brother
By Jean-Francois Cyr, QMI Agency
MONTREAL – Some stories, like this one, can warm the heart.
Last August, 79-year-old Jean Sorrentino was sitting at his kitchen table reading the newspaper when the phone rang.
“Someone asked me if I was born in France, in 1931 and if my name was Jean Sorrentino,” he said.
“‘That’s me,’ I answered. A few moments later I learned the stranger on the line was calling from Europe and was my biological brother. I was bowled over. I didn’t know what to think. Was it a joke? A scam? But it was true, I had a brother.”
Sorrentino was born in France during the Great Depression. His mother was raising him alone, and was desperate. She put him up for adoption hoping the system could care for him better than her. But he struggled through the system and at 26, he decided to chance his luck overseas.
In Quebec, he got married, had two kids, and found work as an industrial designer.
Noel Brepson, 64, had a happier childhood. His mother took care of him until her death in 1961.
“I was her gift after all she’d been through,” he recalled. “She often spoke of my brother, saying she didn’t know whether he was still alive. When she died she gave me his birth certificate, hoping I might find him one day.”
This summer, Brepson, who works as a doctor in Germany, was in Paris and stopped by the town hall. There he found the bureaucratic traces of his brother’s life and used them to track Sorrentino to Quebec.
“When I spoke with Jean for the first time I was so moved,” he said. “I was shaking.”
For Sorrentino of course, the news came as a surprise.
“It was a shock to learn that somewhere, at my age, there was someone who shared a living part of me,” he said. “This is like a whole new life.”
In the living room of Sorrentino’s home in a Montreal suburb, the two brothers have a lot of catching up to do. Brepson, who is visiting Quebec for a month with his wife, said they’ve promised to mend the broken family.
“Our mother would be thrilled,” he said. “What a lovely bookend to our lives. We’ll visit our mother, who’s buried in France, and let her know everything is fine.”