Memoir Excerpt #1
by way of introduction...
Part 1: How I got there, and how I got got
1:
Many of us grow up with a wonder, a lust you might say, for places we’ve never been. Not right away, more like in our teens. We may or may not be content in our childhood, but we are at least absorbed into where we are, for better or for worse, in pleasure or in pain, in love and security or harrowing dysfunction and trauma; or what’s more likely, somewhere along that spectrum, perhaps sliding back and forth, even. It’s a wide world out there, and for many of us, the means to explore it are as within reach, easeful and accessible as they’ve ever been, especially within one’s own country. The European Union, and the Schengen Zone in particular, I hear, make movement remarkably seamless, an apology or a retribution, perhaps, for the thousand years of conflict and petty tribalism that plagued that continent. For the large countries of North America, spanning several Gaian spines of impressively bioregional-defining mountain ranges and flanked by a world ocean on each side, the variety of landscape, place, region, macro and micro climate in a single country - such as the US, Canada, or Mexico - is vast. These are swathes of land that just happen to be single countries, what with the way the cookie of history has crumbled; elsewhere in the world, such land masses have been, through time and war and the proud preservation of cultural nuance and identity so firmly fought over, thoroughly subdivided. I’m talking about you, Europe.
That’s where both sides of my family were, a mere three generations ago. Eastern Europe, to be exact. I, a third generation American, am the, as far as I know, thoroughbred descendent of Ashkenazis, which is to say, Eastern European Jews. My paternal side came from Poland and Russia, and my maternal side came from Poland and Hungary, though, my mom’s dad once told me that his father (who had adopted the simple-enough name ‘Jack’ when he came over stateside) was born in a border town on Hungary’s edge that either was pre-WWII or is now post-war, part of Serbia or Slovakia.
Wherever they came from, they were funneled through Ellis island and into the Jewish neighborhood(s) of New York City, a common-enough story I went on to hear about in my history classes throughout my primary school years. I even remember seeing a black and white photo of an Eastern European immigrant in line processing through Ellis island that everyone in my highschool history class agreed (myself included) bore an uncanny resemblance to me. My father, just two generations after that familial-looking punam was captured by camera, was born in New York City, in the Bronx, but went on to mostly grow up in Queens. My mother’s parents, from the Bronx, moved out to suburbs of northern New Jersey to start their family, and that was where they had and raised my mother, in Emerson, New Jersey. My two parents met at a Jewish sleep-away camp in Putnam, NY, which is to say, upstate, not the city. They were sixteen years old at the time, and their generation I would say, had fully melted into America’s melting pot. Their Judaism and overall connection to where their grandparents came from was but nominal. At times in their youth they were made fun of for being Jewish, my mother in particular pelted with pennies by the neighboring Greek-American boy, but by and large they did not wear their ethnicity on their sleeves, and thus assimilated well into secular, liberal New York metropolitan-area identities, like so many of their ethnic kin.
