My day of extreme comfort and luxury

I’m thinking a lot about immigration. In particular, about the immigrants who were the beginning of my American family, our American life. I’ve been thinking about how little I know of how they arrived, why they left, where they left from, what their lives were like when they got here. Maybe I don’t know what happened to my ancestors because it was bad and they didn’t speak about it. Maybe I don’t know it because I was the third generation born here, on my father’s side, and the stories had softened and blurred.

These members of my family left Europe during the pogroms of the late 1800s, when thousands of Jewish people fled eastern Europe for places that seemed safer. They became refugees when a right-wing movement blamed them for various political, economic and social problems, and drove them out of their homes via terror, violence, and murder.

Doing a little bit of research, I recently learned from some documents that one of my great-grandmothers arrived in America as a child with her parents, but not her younger brother, because he died en route. That’s what it says on the papers recording their arrival: ‘En route’.

I also learned that six more siblings were born, once they settled in New York. And then two of them, sisters, died in childhood, within a few months of each other. This was in the first decade of the twentieth century. I haven’t found a record of what happened. How do you lose two young children within a few months? Maybe from a disease for which there is now a vaccine.

I was close with my grandpa, talked to him a lot about his family, about the past, but this detail, these three dead children, he never mentioned. I don’t know if he knew about them, if his mother ever told him. I have a photograph of her with her two sisters who lived to adulthood, in their teens or early twenties. They look relaxed, so happy to be together, which isn’t something you see a lot in photos of that era. They made it through.

I have a few photos of their parents, too, my great-great grandparents, the parents of those lost children, Tobias and Bertha. (Some of the later records call them Thurber and Bessie, English names they presumably chose to assimilate. Thurber!) They don’t look cheerful. I am struck in particular by a photo of Bertha, a woman who was born in Minsk, in 1866. The photo was taken towards the end of her life, and the hardness of it seems written on her body and her face. She endured so much.

The family name is distinctive, quite rare, perhaps because other people who carried it didn’t leave Europe and did not survive. I’ve been able to identify many descendants of Bertha. Some I know, of course. Many more, I don’t. There are a lot of us in the world, doing our thing, because of that woman’s endurance.

Yesterday, for example, I got up in the morning, went to the gym, attempted this exercise where you sort of walk up the wall upside down (unsuccessful), went home, felt irritated that we’d run out of the components of my preferred breakfast, ate a less-preferred breakfast, sent some emails, typed in some spreadsheets, taught my son how to cross-stitch, ate dinner, put my daughter to bed, read a novel. I went to sleep at 9:30 because I was tired from getting up too early to go to the gym. And all of that, my day of extreme comfort and luxury, was possible because a young family emigrated when they decided that it was not a good idea to stay in the place they called home, and some of them survived.

There are dozens of us, people who are alive in the world because of them. All kinds of folks. Artists and scientists, physicians and lawyers, nurses and musicians, teachers and writers, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, siblings and friends and neighbors. Extraordinary and ordinary people. Optimists, pessimists. Kind, unkind. Happy, unhappy. Whatever, everything. It’s kind of a miracle that any of us were born.

And yet some of us, these people who got the opportunity to be, are choosing to align themselves with fascists. Celebrating the terrorization of other people who came to America in the hopes that it would be safer for them, for their descendants. Some of these people whose existence is as miraculous as mine are now happy to see people driven out of their homes, right here in America, by terror, violence, and murder, by a right-wing movement that blames them for various political, economic, and social problems. Here we are.

JHE