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Why we fight, why we lie awake
My poem "About Building" is now online at Through the Gate. It was inspired in very sideways fashion by William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with influence from Joe Johnston's Captain America: The First Avenger (2012); it may be one of the most unsupernatural things I have ever written. Read it first and then come back for the notes.
Unlike the long, braiding family story of immigrations and migrations that my mother would tell me on nights when I couldn't sleep (always on the old cat-clawed green couch in the living room of our Arlington apartment, when I began to fall asleep it was back to my own bed; some nights I stayed awake as late as Philadelphia, some nights I was asleep before my grandparents got out of Brooklyn), I learned the story of my grandparents and World War II in pieces, as an adult; I don't know all of it even now. My grandfather really did try more than once to enlist in the armed forces and was refused each time because he was that guy who, if he lost his glasses, would get not just himself but his entire platoon killed—without them, he could barely see that trees had branches, never mind such nitpicky details as leaves. Instead, while still in grad school at UC Berkeley, he worked in the mill room of the California Ink Company, where I know very little of what he did except that he met my mother's future godfather, a foreman from a well-to-do Mexican family and no relation to my mother's future godmother, the Hungarian psychologist who had been one of the witnesses at my grandparents' wedding. My grandmother worked in a daycare under the supervision of Erik Erikson, the legendary developmental psychologist; my mother believes it was part of her dissertation, studying how early associations form between colors and moods. I might find out if I unearth her boxes of ABD research someday. I've never had any information about her family who never came over—they would have been in Russia, we think, or Bessarabia, which went through a couple of changes of hands during the war, none of them peaceful, pogroms and camps included. My grandfather's family we know about: they had already gotten out of Poland or they never did. Maybe one branch of cousins who made it to then-Palestine after the war, joining the branch who had emigrated earlier. Otherwise Auschwitz and Chełmno. It was chilling to me when I realized that those lost cousins were the same degree of relation to me as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior, who lives ten minutes' walk away from me at most. Anyway, that is not unusual; I think it is stranger for me to be an Ashkenazi Jew in America with no Holocaust survivors in my immediate tree. But my grandparents' war story is different than most of the ones I know.
Even Wyler's film, which makes a point of refuting civilian assumptions of a one-size-fits-all wartime experience, still constructs its narrative around three men who went off to war and three women who kept the home fires burning; even 4-F Steve Rogers got his chance at the front and left, albeit on the battlefield, a girl behind him. So my brain detoured from classic Hollywood through Marvel superheroes and ended up with this poem: just because a story does not fit the great sweep of dominant narrative does not mean it isn't true. I tell my grandparents' story because I don't know many like it. My mother liked the poem, which in this case matters. I feel like the last lines may have become more important between the writing and now.
Unlike the long, braiding family story of immigrations and migrations that my mother would tell me on nights when I couldn't sleep (always on the old cat-clawed green couch in the living room of our Arlington apartment, when I began to fall asleep it was back to my own bed; some nights I stayed awake as late as Philadelphia, some nights I was asleep before my grandparents got out of Brooklyn), I learned the story of my grandparents and World War II in pieces, as an adult; I don't know all of it even now. My grandfather really did try more than once to enlist in the armed forces and was refused each time because he was that guy who, if he lost his glasses, would get not just himself but his entire platoon killed—without them, he could barely see that trees had branches, never mind such nitpicky details as leaves. Instead, while still in grad school at UC Berkeley, he worked in the mill room of the California Ink Company, where I know very little of what he did except that he met my mother's future godfather, a foreman from a well-to-do Mexican family and no relation to my mother's future godmother, the Hungarian psychologist who had been one of the witnesses at my grandparents' wedding. My grandmother worked in a daycare under the supervision of Erik Erikson, the legendary developmental psychologist; my mother believes it was part of her dissertation, studying how early associations form between colors and moods. I might find out if I unearth her boxes of ABD research someday. I've never had any information about her family who never came over—they would have been in Russia, we think, or Bessarabia, which went through a couple of changes of hands during the war, none of them peaceful, pogroms and camps included. My grandfather's family we know about: they had already gotten out of Poland or they never did. Maybe one branch of cousins who made it to then-Palestine after the war, joining the branch who had emigrated earlier. Otherwise Auschwitz and Chełmno. It was chilling to me when I realized that those lost cousins were the same degree of relation to me as
gaudior, who lives ten minutes' walk away from me at most. Anyway, that is not unusual; I think it is stranger for me to be an Ashkenazi Jew in America with no Holocaust survivors in my immediate tree. But my grandparents' war story is different than most of the ones I know.Even Wyler's film, which makes a point of refuting civilian assumptions of a one-size-fits-all wartime experience, still constructs its narrative around three men who went off to war and three women who kept the home fires burning; even 4-F Steve Rogers got his chance at the front and left, albeit on the battlefield, a girl behind him. So my brain detoured from classic Hollywood through Marvel superheroes and ended up with this poem: just because a story does not fit the great sweep of dominant narrative does not mean it isn't true. I tell my grandparents' story because I don't know many like it. My mother liked the poem, which in this case matters. I feel like the last lines may have become more important between the writing and now.
no subject
One of my great-aunts was a nutritionist for the RCAF, and at least one other one was in the censorship office, reading letters from German POWs to make sure they weren't revealing any strategic information. I occasionally wonder if that was just her cover story, and she was really doing spy stuff, but I have no real reason to think that; it's just that I've never, ever seen any situation faze her.
no subject
That's almost certainly true, so thank you for the reminder.
In any case, they told him, clergy were needed on the home front for morale.
Interesting. I wonder how being an army chaplain worked, then.
One of my great-aunts was a nutritionist for the RCAF, and at least one other one was in the censorship office, reading letters from German POWs to make sure they weren't revealing any strategic information. I occasionally wonder if that was just her cover story, and she was really doing spy stuff, but I have no real reason to think that; it's just that I've never, ever seen any situation faze her.
Even if she wasn't, that's an amazing job.
no subject
I found a photo the other day which shows a bunch of navy chaps and others who may be civilians gathered round a large hole with pipes coming out of it. The countryside is very flat (so its probably Romney Marsh) and the pipes are presumably for pumping water out of the boggy ground. I think- though I can't be sure- that my father is the guy in a naval cap mooching about in the middle distance.
no subject
That's wonderful. Thank you for telling me.
The countryside is very flat (so its probably Romney Marsh) and the pipes are presumably for pumping water out of the boggy ground. I think- though I can't be sure- that my father is the guy in a naval cap mooching about in the middle distance.
I hope it is. That would be a lousy afterlife, but it's a great piece of memory. Would you be able to show it to your mother and ask, or is her recognition not up to it anymore?
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I'm glad you can trace them.
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I know more about the recent immigrants in my family (my mother's mother and aunts, who came from Poland) than the ones who came over earlier (from Russia, Germany, and I think Lithuania). So while I do know that my mother's grandmother and uncles didn't make it out of Poland, I'm not sure if there were other more distant branches of the family that didn't make it out.
no subject
Thank you.
I know more about the recent immigrants in my family (my mother's mother and aunts, who came from Poland) than the ones who came over earlier (from Russia, Germany, and I think Lithuania). So while I do know that my mother's grandmother and uncles didn't make it out of Poland, I'm not sure if there were other more distant branches of the family that didn't make it out.
With my family, we have wildly differing levels of information about the different branches involved, and not just in trying to track the Holocaust. I know way more about my grandfather's father and associated family than I do about his mother, ditto my grandmother's mother and her family versus my grandmother's father. I assume this is normal, but it is literally the difference between having a three-ring binder and having a letter from a cousin, and sometimes I find it very strange. Anything salvaged from the past is valuable knowledge. Most of it goes so quickly.