There are two ghosts on my mother's side of the family about whom I will never know more than the stories I am about to tell; the people who could have told me the rest died in other countries long ago.
One is the eldest child of my great-great-grandfather, who changed his name from Kaufman to Goldberg when he came to this country with his wife and four daughters in 1900. I am named for the youngest of them, my grandmother's mother Sofy. My cousin's great-grandmother was Anna, the oldest of the four. No one can tell me anything about the fifth child, the half-sibling, who may not even have lived. That sounds like a riddle, but it isn't meant to: at the age of sixteen, my great-great-grandfather was married in a hurry to a girl whose mother was so legendarily terrifying, an entire shtetl called her "the Cossack." The reason? He had gotten a local—Christian—girl pregnant. His new mother-in-law would keep him in line. And she may well have done, since I never heard that he was unfaithful to my great-great-grandmother, but neither did I hear what happened to the other girl. If she kept the child, if she bore it as a bastard, if she was married off just as hastily as her erstwhile boyfriend, if no one ever knew, if everyone knew, if she aborted or miscarried, if there are still descendants today: I don't know. All this is supposed to have taken place in Bessarabia, whose history has not exactly been untroubled since then. I am left to imagine, but almost nothing I can imagine ends happily. I would like history to prove me wrong. I know it's not often so obliging.
The second ghost is an alternate history. My other great-grandmother, my grandfather's mother, came to America with a friend in 1912. Her name was Ida Friedman; depending on the story, he is her lover, her boyfriend, her fiancé. They came from Vishnevets, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. He was of military age. They walked all night through the mountains to cross the border, I was always told: at dawn their guide pointed down into Austria-Hungary, out of reach of the Tsar's army. Together they took the trains to Holland and a ship to America and at Ellis Island he was sent back, because of his health. She never saw him again. She met my grandfather's father in New York City, they ran a general store on the corner of Broadway and Hooper in Brooklyn near the elevated station and the trolley stop, their two children were born in the building and their son fell in love with the movies. For their descendants, her lover's story ends in a maze of railings and benches. He is faceless to me; he looks like a photograph, with chalkmarks on his coat and a suitcase in his hand and even that is imagination. When they say sent back, I don't know where he went to. I have always wanted to know his name.
I am thinking about these stories, obviously, because I am thinking about people caught between definitions and borders and I feel some things should have changed in a hundred years.
One is the eldest child of my great-great-grandfather, who changed his name from Kaufman to Goldberg when he came to this country with his wife and four daughters in 1900. I am named for the youngest of them, my grandmother's mother Sofy. My cousin's great-grandmother was Anna, the oldest of the four. No one can tell me anything about the fifth child, the half-sibling, who may not even have lived. That sounds like a riddle, but it isn't meant to: at the age of sixteen, my great-great-grandfather was married in a hurry to a girl whose mother was so legendarily terrifying, an entire shtetl called her "the Cossack." The reason? He had gotten a local—Christian—girl pregnant. His new mother-in-law would keep him in line. And she may well have done, since I never heard that he was unfaithful to my great-great-grandmother, but neither did I hear what happened to the other girl. If she kept the child, if she bore it as a bastard, if she was married off just as hastily as her erstwhile boyfriend, if no one ever knew, if everyone knew, if she aborted or miscarried, if there are still descendants today: I don't know. All this is supposed to have taken place in Bessarabia, whose history has not exactly been untroubled since then. I am left to imagine, but almost nothing I can imagine ends happily. I would like history to prove me wrong. I know it's not often so obliging.
The second ghost is an alternate history. My other great-grandmother, my grandfather's mother, came to America with a friend in 1912. Her name was Ida Friedman; depending on the story, he is her lover, her boyfriend, her fiancé. They came from Vishnevets, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. He was of military age. They walked all night through the mountains to cross the border, I was always told: at dawn their guide pointed down into Austria-Hungary, out of reach of the Tsar's army. Together they took the trains to Holland and a ship to America and at Ellis Island he was sent back, because of his health. She never saw him again. She met my grandfather's father in New York City, they ran a general store on the corner of Broadway and Hooper in Brooklyn near the elevated station and the trolley stop, their two children were born in the building and their son fell in love with the movies. For their descendants, her lover's story ends in a maze of railings and benches. He is faceless to me; he looks like a photograph, with chalkmarks on his coat and a suitcase in his hand and even that is imagination. When they say sent back, I don't know where he went to. I have always wanted to know his name.
I am thinking about these stories, obviously, because I am thinking about people caught between definitions and borders and I feel some things should have changed in a hundred years.
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