Smile pretty and watch your back

This project is not going to be a comprehensive family history. That is a worthwhile project, but it is not what I’m doing now. That project would entail putting into one place all the details of hundreds of lives, the basic and massive accounting of jobs and marriages and the occasional feud. That would be a reference book, and in its more detailed story-telling moments, a history. I would love to have that book already written for me now to use on this next project going forward.

I don’t know what this next project will be exactly. I know that I want to look at what it meant to be in those old places of home and what it meant to leave them. I want to know what those moments of travel were like. I want to know what my family took with them – physically, and in their minds. What was it to have that place? What was worth knowing of that old place? Why does it matter that I see it? Why put myself in a place that was worth leaving?

If life today has any echoes of those other places, why are those the elements that remain? I expect that I will find foods that are cousins of what I can find in family recipes. People eat what they like, and they often like what is familiar, and so old and familiar foods keep getting made. When my family gathers, we eat. Familiar foods would not be a shock. And yet, if much of the Jewish population was expelled or killed and our foods were more culturally Jewish and less Lithuanian, then perhaps I will find nothing familiar on my plate. I suppose either is possible. Old recipes are just as important as old official documents. What else is there? What else is present that is still true in our lives?

I worry that perhaps what may be recognizable will not be recognizable to me. Perhaps I am the wrong traveler. Ideally, I would have a great-grandparent with me to point out what can still be seen and point out what has gone. As a third-generation American on both sides, I am only on the level of hearsay, repeating stories that have been told to someone else. Perhaps that is why I have to go to Lithuania (and to wherever the current borders say the old towns are technically located now). While I can never hear the stories directly from those that can speak to this place, I can see the place myself, however much changed it is. I don’t think that I can balance hearsay and direct experience, but I can at least put them next to each other on the page. Much has been written about old, Jewish Eastern Europe and I don’t need to rewrite that with personal examples. What I can write something about is a relationship to place that comes through generations who have been elsewhere. Let’s talk about the ability to be in multiple places at once. Just because you’ve left somewhere, doesn’t mean that place isn’t yours anymore, doesn’t mean you aren’t still there. Multiple residences can be true at the same time.

You’ll have to excuse the fact that this approach is scattered and made up of vague questions. But if I go without them, I may just show up to some town on a map, some town with a name I’ve been given as the name of the old shtetl, standing there and turning my head left and right and waiting for something to pop out at me, and all I’ll end up with is some snapshots and a sunburn. All that might prevent that scene from occurring is some luck and charm.