Susan Cain starts a post with a C.S. Lewis quotation today that is just the feeling that lingered with me after your essay. Not that you are saying these words exactly, but I thought about all the varieties of yearning - in the ones who left their village, the ones who stayed, the ones who lost their property, the strangers who bought it to fulfill their vision of home, your return. There are just so many layers of what C.S. Lewis calls a “longing” here:
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born.”
--C.S. Lewis
Notably, it is the longing itself, not the achievement, that he finds sweet. That wisdom is in your essay, too.
Yes -- and part of what made that longing sweet was the recognition that people in Czechia shared it. The people who welcomed me into my old family home felt something like that, too. And don't we all feel that longing when we sit down to write? I haven't thought of it in quite this way, but the discovery we experience while writing something new might be a homecoming. Now you have me thinking of all the forms this longing takes. 😊
Compelling experience, but hardly universal. Requires an implantation of social/familial history, an interest in genealogy and an inquiring mind, a combination that can crumble on several levels. First of all, an estimated 3% of Americans are "adopted" and even if they are aware of the adoption the social/biological history comes through a fog of varying density. Add in an additional 3% who are unaware (although Mom may have an inkling) their "biological" father is someone other than their "social" father and the fog is totally opaque and may result in chasing down an irrelevant heritage which could still have personal value but no basis in fact (see: 23 & Me and similar ilk). Further, names get shuffled across borders and over time (Shreck was originally Schrock). And multiply these uncertainties by the number of intervening generations and we begin to talk about some real numbers. Finally, my anecdotal experience is that these heritage explorations lean heavily toward the paternal side which is less than half (see above) of the full picture but I would love to be proven wrong.
Still, interesting and obviously rewarding. Please keep recovering and sharing!
Quite right, Bob. I've written at length about both paternal sides and not as much about my maternal roots -- it's a shame how surnames play into those identity priorities. Thanks for your insights. None of this is very clear!
So interesting, Josh, and similar to my own efforts. Though all of my grandparents came from Ukraine, I only knew of my paternal grandmother's and father's hometown. No Jews remain there, so the two largely destroyed and effaced stones with Yiddish inscriptions in the Jewish cemetery were unreadable by me. The remainder had been used by the Ukrainian mayor after the Nazi massacre to build his new home. So, like you, I felt confident that my great grandfather and great grandmother, of whom my father spoke, and generations before them, were buried in the ground beneath my feet, but there would never be an acceptable way to locate, identify and honor them.
There is a series of novels by the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg called The Emigrants, which I haven't read but which Jan Troell 50 years ago made two films from, The Emigrants and The New Land. If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend them, with Liv Ulmann and Max Von Sydow. They're as good a depiction as you'll find, in epic fashion, of poor Europeans -- Swedish here -- barely surviving in the old country, barely surviving the arduous journey to the U.S. (lured by the kind of advertising I talk about in my current Route 66 essays), barely surviving their first years in the U.S. When I lived in Minnesota for a few years in the early 90s, I had a basis to understand the histories of the people who surrounded me there. The second film ends with the second American-born generation knowing no Swedish and little of their origins.
I think you're on to something when you write, "My ancestor Karel may have wanted to forget much of his life in Moravia. He was eight years old when his mother died, eleven when he lost his father, and twelve when his sister Maria died. The American Dream came true for Karel in Nebraska, and that was the story he wanted to pass on." I think that was true of all my grandparents. I know it was true of my father.
Thank you, Jay. And so I imagine that you, too, understood that feeling sorrow, in that Ukrainian graveyard, was perhaps the best way to understand those origins?
Appreciate the film recommendation, too. How interesting that you spent time in Minnesota. I always thought that Minnesota was the best part of living in Iowa 😊
Susan Cain starts a post with a C.S. Lewis quotation today that is just the feeling that lingered with me after your essay. Not that you are saying these words exactly, but I thought about all the varieties of yearning - in the ones who left their village, the ones who stayed, the ones who lost their property, the strangers who bought it to fulfill their vision of home, your return. There are just so many layers of what C.S. Lewis calls a “longing” here:
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born.”
--C.S. Lewis
Notably, it is the longing itself, not the achievement, that he finds sweet. That wisdom is in your essay, too.
Yes -- and part of what made that longing sweet was the recognition that people in Czechia shared it. The people who welcomed me into my old family home felt something like that, too. And don't we all feel that longing when we sit down to write? I haven't thought of it in quite this way, but the discovery we experience while writing something new might be a homecoming. Now you have me thinking of all the forms this longing takes. 😊
Yes, you’re right that this applies to writing, too. Nice that you felt it coming from your hosts also. That sounds just a tad sublime. ✨
Compelling experience, but hardly universal. Requires an implantation of social/familial history, an interest in genealogy and an inquiring mind, a combination that can crumble on several levels. First of all, an estimated 3% of Americans are "adopted" and even if they are aware of the adoption the social/biological history comes through a fog of varying density. Add in an additional 3% who are unaware (although Mom may have an inkling) their "biological" father is someone other than their "social" father and the fog is totally opaque and may result in chasing down an irrelevant heritage which could still have personal value but no basis in fact (see: 23 & Me and similar ilk). Further, names get shuffled across borders and over time (Shreck was originally Schrock). And multiply these uncertainties by the number of intervening generations and we begin to talk about some real numbers. Finally, my anecdotal experience is that these heritage explorations lean heavily toward the paternal side which is less than half (see above) of the full picture but I would love to be proven wrong.
Still, interesting and obviously rewarding. Please keep recovering and sharing!
Quite right, Bob. I've written at length about both paternal sides and not as much about my maternal roots -- it's a shame how surnames play into those identity priorities. Thanks for your insights. None of this is very clear!
So interesting, Josh, and similar to my own efforts. Though all of my grandparents came from Ukraine, I only knew of my paternal grandmother's and father's hometown. No Jews remain there, so the two largely destroyed and effaced stones with Yiddish inscriptions in the Jewish cemetery were unreadable by me. The remainder had been used by the Ukrainian mayor after the Nazi massacre to build his new home. So, like you, I felt confident that my great grandfather and great grandmother, of whom my father spoke, and generations before them, were buried in the ground beneath my feet, but there would never be an acceptable way to locate, identify and honor them.
There is a series of novels by the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg called The Emigrants, which I haven't read but which Jan Troell 50 years ago made two films from, The Emigrants and The New Land. If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend them, with Liv Ulmann and Max Von Sydow. They're as good a depiction as you'll find, in epic fashion, of poor Europeans -- Swedish here -- barely surviving in the old country, barely surviving the arduous journey to the U.S. (lured by the kind of advertising I talk about in my current Route 66 essays), barely surviving their first years in the U.S. When I lived in Minnesota for a few years in the early 90s, I had a basis to understand the histories of the people who surrounded me there. The second film ends with the second American-born generation knowing no Swedish and little of their origins.
I think you're on to something when you write, "My ancestor Karel may have wanted to forget much of his life in Moravia. He was eight years old when his mother died, eleven when he lost his father, and twelve when his sister Maria died. The American Dream came true for Karel in Nebraska, and that was the story he wanted to pass on." I think that was true of all my grandparents. I know it was true of my father.
Thank you, Jay. And so I imagine that you, too, understood that feeling sorrow, in that Ukrainian graveyard, was perhaps the best way to understand those origins?
Appreciate the film recommendation, too. How interesting that you spent time in Minnesota. I always thought that Minnesota was the best part of living in Iowa 😊