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I am reading the GODFATHER. I am slightly fascinated by gangsters. It helps me understand politics, and my family.
As a child I was told my blue eyes were like my step-sister's. This confused me because I knew we were from different families. My bio-dad was out of the picture but lived a few
towns away. I would run into him in Grand Central Station going
in the opposite direction on the escalator, or in the elevator of 342 Madison Ave where both my step-father's and bio-dad's offices were. Bio-dad had blue eyes and his
father had red hair, though when I knew him he had no hair. Grandpa Red was his
name. I had natural red highlights on my brown ringlets, fair skin, and freckles, all from him.
My mother used multiple last names "depending on who was asking."
That always struck me as strange. My bio-dad was writing children's
books at the same time that my mother was illustrating children's books.
They both had the same last name even though my mother had remarried when I was three years old. Yet her oil paintings were signed
with her 2nd husband's name.
I have
been cornered a few times by my niece and nephew asking, "What are
we?" "Why do you have a different last name than my mommy?" "My friends
ask me if I am Polish, they say I look Polish, am I Polish?"
My biological sister Arlen Lisker had the same Jewish
mother and Jewish father as me. She's my only full sibling. She took my step-father's last name, Gargagliano, after
college. Her husband's last name is Markusfeld. His father was Jewish, his
mother was Irish. Arlen did not take his name, though she has two children with him.
Arlen is going to speak in Italy next month about Mediterranean food at a conference
in Palermo, Sicily, through an Alabama college. Then she will visit our step-father's father's hometown Castellamare del Golfo. She
will bring her 30-year-old son Wes who looks exactly like our Jewish biological father Tom Lisker, tall Jewish Hungarian. Not that it matters I suppose but if she's presenting herself as Italian she
is lying.
Why does this matter to me? False identity is a huge part of my family history. Ethnic denial. All of this wouldn't
bother me so much except I find authenticity to be so much richer. What's wrong with the truth? That's my question. Wouldn't it be more interesting? What drives a person towards smoke and mirrors when the truth has has such power and weight? This is the question I ask myself every time I ponder my family.
5 comments:
Good piece!
Not everybody likes the truth. Some folks are ashamed of what or who they really are and do their best to conceal it. Who can say why?
I was estranged from my mother when I was a kid and she and my dad divorced, so I tended to identify more with his WASPy old New England clan than with her Italian/German/Irish family from New York. The Bensons could trace their ancestors back to a cavalcade of notable Colonial and Revolutionary War era ancestors in Rhode Island and Philly. My mom’s New York people, the Furgiueles, Redas, Gunermans and Murphys, probably came over around the turn of the last century and likely all went through Ellis Island. They were waterfront laborers, cops, firemen, teachers, woodworkers, municipal beaureacrats – maybe even a mobster or a bootlegger or two in there on the Calabese Italian or Irish sides, though I don’t really think so. Nobody very notable in any case, at last not that I know of.
I didn’t exactly lie about “what†I was when I was younger, but I didn’t tell the whole truth either. Nowadays though I embrace it all. Interestingly, my dad’s family, the Bensons, are just regular folks like my mom’s people, and not “swells†at all. They were coastal Yankees: seafarers, ship’s engineers and waterfront merchants. We’re even related to the pirate Thomas Tew. But our last name only goes back to the 1840s in New England, when our first Benson immigrant ancestor sailed down the coast to New London from Nova Scotia.The notables all come in through the Rhode Island and Pennsylvania Quaker families that guy’s son and grandson (the one who RISD’s Benson Hall was named for) married into.
I did one of those DNA tests recently. Turns out I’m mostly German. There’s a smidge of Italian and Spanish there, a little Irish and a bit more English. But the preponderance of my genetic code comes from the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, and the first fella in my line who emigrated to Canada in the 1700s was very likely Danish.
Who knew?
family lies. false names. self naming. i'm adopted, right? I knew nothing until 2017 when I did Ancestry and found out, to my surprise, that I'm 100% northern European. I grew up in a typical mixed Jewish family. My father was Jewish, but from Louisville, where the (mostly) German Jewish people attended Reform Temple. A hundred years ago, when he was a child, Services were on Sunday to assimilate better. But my father's sister married the son of an Ashkenazi, Polish Jew from the Lower East Side who came to get into the fur business.
I've been a Jew all my life! And as far as I'm concerned that DNA test is meaningless.
It did lead to my biological family. I got to meet my mother once before she died, and my sister, and nephews and nieces, at her memorial. My father died a few years earlier, so I never met him. There was another sister who died at the age of 44 of drugs, hard living, anorexia, alcoholism and hallucinations. Everyone said she was beautiful, exciting, charming, charismatic and intelligent. They said she could walk into a bar full of men, order a drink and in ten minutes laughing and telling jokes. She was obsessed with walking and would often walk four five hours a day.
My kids sort of feel Jewish, but I never did anything except act jewish and say i was jewish all the time. but they were disappointed by the dna test. funny, i've written 2000 pages of fiction about genetic experiments, cloning, dna etc. but being adopted means these things that people can trace in their families are a mystery. an absence. so absent i never gave it much thought. It was REALLY cool meeting people who look like me. My kids all look like me, but these are siblings, half-siblings, parents, cousins, nieces and nephews. and learning their story, what would have been my story, was also very cool. But it didn't change who I am. And yeah, being that as authentically as you are able is an imperative!
That was nice. I have a quick story for you. A few years back, I was at home and the U S census fella knocked on my door. I usually don’t entertain this, but I answered never the less. I answered a few of his questions, until he asked what race my kids and I were. For some reason, that question really bothered me. Not for any political or social reasons, it just bothered me. So I paused for a minute, looked him in the eye, and said “Humanâ€. He took a long pause with a confused look on his face and said,†No, I mean what race are you?†I repeated, “Human raceâ€. He literally got angry and said, “Sir I can’t write that, you have to give me a raceâ€. I told him “that’s all you get and if you can’t write that, then I supposed our conversation is overâ€. I closed the door. My mum is Italian/Irish and my dad is black and I’m proud of that, but I hate labels. God made us all in his image and ( I’m not na�ve ) but we all should embrace that. Labels keep us divided.
Sorry for the rant,
Always a pleasure reading your stories.
wow. beautiful reflections. A few thoughts - don't we look through a glass
darkly - when we peer into our near and far ancestry?
Do we draw conclusions from the information we have - or admit that there's
a lot we don't know?
LS
This is perhaps more typical of families than we acknowledge. Particularly amongst certain ethnic groups and, let's say poorer people who want to "fit in."
My family is a case in point. I never met or knew my grandfather on my Dad's side. Frank Hart abandoned his family when the boys were young, leaving my grandmother to work 3 jobs in order to keep a roof over their heads. This was long before the days of child support. Eventually, she married a wonderful man, Earl Toombs, who was every bit a grandfather to me and my sisters. He worked as a mechanic at Norton Abrasives, a huge employer in Worcester at the time.
On my mother's side, her grandfather, Isaac, my great grandfather, made front page news in the Worcester Telegram upon his passing -- "Oldest Man in Worcester County dies at 106.". The remarkable thing beyond his longevity was his incredible vigor up til the end. He was ice fishing and fell, broke his hip, and died of complications from that accident.
There was this "myth" that he had Native American roots; he was a trapper in Canada and became fluent in native dialects with the indigenous people. But no one has confirmed that he was actually an Indian.
Back then, it wasn't great to be from Native American stock. Now, there's a certain cache to carry this blood, but at the time everyone just wanted to fit in to the larger identity of being American. People often remarked about my mother's high cheekbones, wide nose, and tawny skin as proof that she likely had Indian ancestors.
Like you, I often wish that I had a better understanding of my roots -- it would be fun to know! But this is the conundrum of America. Everyone wanted to conform, to meld into society and shunned differences that made them unique. Now, everyone wants to be special, which I find tiresome.
One thing is for certain, neither of us descended from the original colonists who arrived on the Mayflower! I knew a woman who was such a descendant, and boy did she flaunt her genealogy. She attended national meet ups of that elite group. It's interesting, but uncommon for the rest of us.
I hope you don't mind anything I've written here. We desperately want to know "What Are We" but eventually, we construct our lives from cradle to grave.
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