When in my reading I come across sentences like this one—“Her great-great grandfather was the principal advisor to the Dutch royal family in the 18th century; a great-grandfather made a killing in the Gold Rush; and her mother was descended from George Sand”—I feel a trifle bereft. I don’t crave the descendants’ social position or wealth, simply their connection to a history, going back centuries, that for me is blank, as if my family sprang from nowhere. Of course, my forebears must have existed in those centuries, but who were they, and what and where? Nobody tells.
There is no shortage of information about my 12 pairs of aunts and uncles, transplanted from Ukraine (which makes me wonder about any distant relatives who might be suffering in the current war), and my 26 first cousins, born here and mostly gone now. Rumor, usually in the voice of my mother, had it that one uncle killed a pedestrian while driving; two other uncles supposedly lost their wives very young and were left with infants to raise. A cousin left her husband of one day for another man; a second was shot to death by his Cuban refugee wife. One headed west to escape his humble origins, another because he was secretly gay. And so on. Some of the stories are tragic, some the ordinary sprinkling of drama in any large family, from anywhere. They have the piquancy of gossip, yet they do not intrigue me. What I wonder about is the unknown earlier world, the past in which suffering was a daily event on a mass scale. So awesome that it mustn’t be spoken of. Like the name of God, which religious Jews never write in its entirety, only in abbreviated form.
Grace Paley once warned a group of students not to simply “write what you know.” No, she said, you should write what you don’t know about what you know. For me that is a wide barren stretch, blank pages.
What I know for sure is that my ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower. My grasp of family history goes back only to my grandparents on either side, with the name of an occasional great-aunt or great-uncle thrown in. For instance, I was told of an uncle on my father’s side named Peter, who went from his native Ukraine to Jerusalem—how? when?—where he worked as an architect. So, on a trip to Israel, I looked him up in histories of local architecture but with no luck. I thought he might have been part of the Bauhaus group that flourished in Tel Aviv in the 1930s, and I visited a neighborhood known for its many examples of that style. I strolled down the boulevard lined with handsome Bauhaus buildings, but nothing suggested my great-uncle or brought me closer to him. Maybe it was all a story.