Tell Me About Your Heritage

[ellipsis]

my parents never talk about my great-grandparents, so i have to start with what i know about my grandparents.

ok:

i didn't know my mother's father, since he died when i was about two years old, but i've been told that until he died, my blood-curdling yell irritated everyone's favorite family member. i got off to a bad start, it seems. my mother's mother and i had a wonderful relationship, though i've heard snippets about her verbal and physical abuse to my mother. i loved this grandmother more than i've ever loved any family member. when she was diagnosed with alzheimer's disease when i was 11, i had to help my mother take care of her for the next year and a half (we had to live with her--she was bedridden, plagued with the complete absence of long-term or short-term memory, had to be fed, clothed, and bathed). then she was admitted to a nursing home, where she died about 3 years later. i haven't been the same since watching her wither into a mass of what seemed to be an unprogrammed robot that cried constantly until she finally died of an obscenely high fever. during this emotionally taxing time, my mother and her brothers cut off all contact with one another, and later, one of those brothers and his wife died from an alzheimer's-influenced accident and a heart attack, respectively. none of that family can find us now, which is fine, because they threatened our lives. my mother's entire family consisted of farmers and housewives, and my mother received the hghest level of education--her high school diploma. one of her brothers dropped out during the eighth grade, and his son dropped out during his tenth grade year. i don't know about the rest of them, and i can't really find out, since my cousins from that side have tried to seriously harm me with broken glass and crowbars. yikes, indeed.

my father's father worked at the county health department, and my grandmother taught middle-school english and science. my grandmother had to raise children alone (my grandfather would often disappear to drink heavily), and during WW2, she had to manage to satisfy her children and herself, what with the shortage of sugar and metal, for example. even today i see evidence of her ingrained practice of saving every piece of metal and using every drop of food. and she still uses the sugar substitute she invented: a spread made from peanut butter, jelly, and bananas. i've heard that this spread is very popular as a snack in prison.

she and her daughter (my father's sister) are left-handed, like i am, and both are highly artistic, like i am. my aunt, "Sis" (real name Eve), now works in graphic design. my father and his brother, uncle michael, both chose "the service" instead of education; my father joined the air force, and michael joined the navy. my grandmother's family are now spread all over the US, from california to florida, but south of the mason-dixon line. my mother's family wouldn't dream of living the little plot of land next to their childhood home, and my mother moved 12 miles away from it, but she's trapped in the tiny town where i was born. my grandmother lives there, too. they are all afraid of change. my father is as well, but the only reason he lives--and has ever lived--away from his hometown is that the air force has moved him around a bit. we now live in montgomery because we're near the air force base.

in summary: my mother's part of the family consists of violent, redneck-ish farmers and housewives; my father's consists of artists and people turned US patriot to avoid higher education. i used to have a loooong summary of my family's heritage, from the countries where we originated to the journeys to the US to now, but i don't know where it is. the people, from both parents' families, are collectively german, french, welsh, canadian, scottish, and irish, but i don't think those nationalities matter to me now. the bloodlines thinned a bit through the breeding that led to the production of me.

[stilltrucking]

First Draft
I am a first generation American on my father's side. He came to the United states when he was sixteen. A Lithuanian Jew, he got his citizenship during world war one by enlisting the merchant marine, he was admitted to medical school after the war but prohibition offered more lucrative prospects, so he operated a speak easy in Baltimore somewhere near the shot tower. Made a lot of money but he was a compulsive gambler lost everything. Later he gave up poker for chess and things got a little better. It took him longer to lose gambling on chess. In fact I think he eventually got a masters rating. One of my earliest memories of him is playing chess with me. He would sit with his back to the board and call out his moves. He had the whole board in his mind. I have not been able to play chess since he died. But I now have a chess board and pieces for the first time in years, so maybe that joy is coming back into my mind. I was scared shitless of him.
My aunts and uncles called him Crazy Mike. His favorite saying to me was, "You are stabbing me in the back." I guess he caught that look in my eye. I do not know his side of the family at all. I think they wanted to nothing to do with him. I am just finding some love in my heart for him and I am able to begin mourning forty two years after his death. My baby sister is finally putting his memory to rest. She can say rest in peace Dad. She had the worst experience of all with him. I remember when my brother graduated medical school one of my uncles asked him what kind of doctor do you want to be. My brother said, "what ever my family needs the most." My brother is a psychiatrist.

My mother was born in this country in a commune for Jewish refugees in Woodbine New Jersey.
http://www.boroughofwoodbine.net/

She spoke only Yiddish until she was twelve and the family moved to Baltimore. My maternal grandparents are the most beautiful part of my childhood. They lived in a three story brick house with an outhouse in the yard. When we finally got an indoor toilet she planted a fig tree where the outhouse was. The house was a gift from my father kind of a reverse dowry, he was thirty two my mother sixteen and he promised her parents a house if they would let her marry him. I have a picture of my grandmother from the Baltimore Sun Circa 1970, she is wearing her normal outfit of four dresses one over the other, about three sweaters and two overcoats, she is pushing a supermarket cart full of odds and ends. I think it was captioned "Street Characters". It is amazing how my grandparents survived. My grandfather sold shopping bags at Lexington Market, and letter he worked as a tailor at Harry Klotzman's pawn shop at Baltimore and Caroline streets, he was a wonderful tailor except he was color blind. He would patch a pair of paints with whatever material he had handy. Did not matter red on blue or plaid on stripes, it was stitched beautifully My grandmother would scavenge the neighborhood for anything she could sell, one of her big money makers was wood. It was a poor neighborhood mostly black and everyone had wood or kerosene stoves. She would chop the wood into kindling and cut inner tubes to make a big rubber band to hold them together and sell the bundles. We lived next door to a junk yard and there were many junkmen coming and going with horse and wagons. She would go out into the street and collect the manure for her plants, she would put a plant in anything , dolls heads were her specialty, all those upside down dolls heads in the window. but people would buy them. The house had a store front and for a while they had a little grocery business that my father set up for them but it did not last. My grandfather had a strange business model. If someone came in carrying a loaf of bread and wanted to but a quart of milk he would throw them out, and tell them go buy the milk where you bought the bread.