Let me tell you a story:
My father's mother was born in Latvia, and brought to the United States through Ellis Island when she was 5 years old. I have sat in the Registration Hall and tried to imagine what it was like for a 5 year old, all of the noise, the disconcerting poking and prodding, the anxious adults costumed from all over the world, and I imagine her dizziness, and see her snuggle into her mother's lap.
My father's father was born in this country, but his parents were also Jews from Latvia, and they met, in modest prosperity, in the Philadelphia sunurbs, in a community of people from roughly the same area around Riga. He struck out for Washington, D.C., and settled in Northeast, near Gaullaudet University. He tried his hand at various things: running a store, an Amoco franchise, insurance salesmen, he was always looking to become his own boss, and never quite succeeding. I remember him sitting in one of the gas stations that he owned (he had a couple), proud to have the power to indulge his eldest grandchild in the treats then common: cheese crackers with a peanut butter middle, peanuts, Slim Jims. He looked out of place in coveralls, and I doubt that he knew anything about car engines, but he was a businessman! He was young when he died, in his mid- 50s, and he died an office of the Baltimore Life Insurance Company.
My maternal grandfather was of Italian descent, his mother a mail order bride. Oddly, when she was widowed, she ended up marrying a Jewish man, so that talking about her, she sounded like a relative on my father's side. My maternal grandfather also did many things: worked construction, became a shop teacher, ran a small grocery until crime drove him out, went in with several partners on a restaurant, but he also never could quite make it, until his second wife inherited a farm in Michigan, and they got well above water, not rich, but comfortable. Eventually, he moved to a little cottage in Florida, and died of a heart attack in his 70s, while driving a desert highway to Vegas.
My maternal grandmother was of English descent. Her grandparents had been in a later wave of immigration, after the Civil War, and were sharecroppers on a little farm where Bolling Air Force Base is now located, beside the Anacostia River. She quit school after 8th grade, and yet retired a lower middle grade civil servant, in procurement for the Air Force. Her father was of English Catholic descent, and she was raised Catholic. Nevertheless, she was married a couple of times, ran a bit wild, and mostly raised my mother alone. She is still alive, slowly dying of congestive heart failure.
My parents were born and raised in Washington. They were attractive and bright, and they ran off to get married when they were 17 (dad) and 15 (mom) respectively. I, the eldest, was born 3 years later, after my mother had had a couple of miscarriages. My father has worked in printing all of his life, going from running presses to sales fairly rapidly. He even had his own business for awhile, but suffered an upset, and sold most of it off. He has spent a great deal of time as a vice- president with several different printing firms. He and my mother were divorced when I was 10, and we felt the effect of post- divorce poverty, exacerbated by the fact that one of my brothers had cerebral palsy, making it difficult for my mother to work. I spent a good deal of my childhood putting on his braces, carrying him around, pushing his wheelchair, and generally trying to be helpful, looking out for my other two younger brothers.
Both of my parents got their high school diplomas, but neither went to college. I was the first one in direct line who graduated from college.
I went to synagogue until I was ten. We used to do the horah in Hebrew school, and wear costumes during Purim, and build a booth for Succoth, and when Passover came around, I would ask the 4 questions. For a couple of years, nothing, and then my mother decided to go back to the Roman Catholic Church. I was not very happy about it, but I went along with it, and when I was 12 I was baptized. At Holy Family Parish, I sang in the choir, ran the group for the folk mass for awhile, helped put on plays, and went to Catholic Youth Organization parties.
This will give some idea of where I came from, and who I am. Think of all of the selection, compression, and omission necessary. Few historical events get more paragraphs than this in a textbook.... |
