i found this picture today. it’s of my grandmother on her wedding day. this morning i was at my aunt’s house in massachusetts. i was helping her move boxes out of her attic because she’s selling the house and moving into an apartment. my sister was there, so was my grandmother, who recently turned 93. many of the boxes were filled with slides, old 8mm and super 8 film, photo albums, and letters. there was too much stuff to go through, but we did sift through some of it. in one of the big boxes was large roll of paper, yellowed with age. it was the family tree mapped out by my great uncle joe, my grandfather’s younger brother. the photo below is just a section of it.
joe lives in maine and is the person on my father’s side of the family who holds the most knowledge about our history. i interviewed him a few years ago and have a couple hours of footage of him telling stories about our family’s history. i have a fragmented digital version of the family tree, but, i had no idea of the amount of work he’d put into unearthing our family’s lineage until i unrolled the tree he’d painstakingly written out (in carbon copy duplicate) by hand.
looking at the tree, it’s immediately clear that joe put a lot of time and love into this project. the story of his research alone is something i’d like to hear more about. the tree is wide, spanning far beyond our immediate family. given it’s width, though, the tree is not quite as deep as it should be. it extends all the way back to the 1500’s, but scanning across the paper, most of the lines are truncated a few generations before the current one. looking more closely, you can see that a lot of them end in the 1940’s with: “killed by nazis.”
(click to view detail)
all my grandparents were born in this country, so the holocaust has always been somewhat of an abstraction to me: films, books, music, what i learned in school, and the occasional conversation with elderly jews usually opened with a disapproving comment about my tattoos. today i had this moment in my aunt’s living room, standing there by myself with ice running through my veins. it was the first time that i felt my own history moving inside of me and it felt uncomfortable and disorienting and like getting kicked in the stomach. more later.
