(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A Song Of Zion: I Did Not Forget Thee, Jerusalem [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-16 This week I want to tell you all a story. It’s not a happy story, all of it. It’s a story of grief and loss and tragedy. But it’s also a story of strength, and discovery, and joy. The year is 2002. My grandfather is dying. My mother asks him to share our family history, to provide the links she doesn’t have. He provides what he can: a photograph of his mother and his siblings. His grandparents’ names, Jacob and Anna. This, he says, will probably get her nowhere doing genealogy. Anna was a housewife and Jacob was a good-for-nothing drunk who claimed he worked for a Senator and lapsed into weird, mostly-unintelligible Polish when he was in his cups, which was often. My mother logs onto ancestry.com and adds these snippets to what she already knows: that we are Polish, and that our family name was Anglicized at the American border. She begins to search. The year is sometime in the late 1880s and a man named Yakov is listed in a Polish census. The census states he’s a Russian Jew and has a mother and brother not currently in residence. The year is 2011 and I’m working at a gas station. A woman who looks and sounds like every stereotype of a Russian woman you’ve ever encountered comes in. I greet her. When she comes to the counter she gasps and says “you are Russian!” No, I tell her; my family is Germano-Polish. Whether we were German or Polish in any given year depended on where the border was at the time. She touches my cheekbones. “These do not lie,” she says. “You are Russian.” The year is in the mid-1890s and the man named Yakov leaves Poland. He never arrives in America, so to speak, but a man named Jacob does. Within a year he’s married to a woman named Anna. Seven months later she gives birth. The year is 2002 and my mother cannot find a Jacob with our supposed Polish family name anywhere. Weirder, the name itself doesn’t seem to exist. But she does find someone with our “Anglicized” name, living in Poland. His name is Yakov. The year is 1921 and my grandfather is born. He’s christened in the Baptist church. The year is 2002. My mother finds a man named Jacob living in Washington DC, having just been fired from his job as a Senator’s aide for public drunkenness. His point of origin is given as my grandfather’s hometown. The year is 2003. My sister feels a call, an urge. She talks to a rabbi and begins her conversion to Judaism. She tells the rabbi she’s Polish and Apache. The year is sometime in the late 1920s. My grandfather meets his grandfather for the first time. The man is often drunk, and speaks a form of Polish even the other Poles in the area don’t understand. He never speaks of home. The year is 2003. My mother shares her research with my grandfather. He grows irritated and insists she’s wrong. The dates don’t lie, she tells him; neither do the birth certificates. He tells her to forget the whole thing. She agrees not to discuss it…but she doesn’t forget. The year is sometime in the 1930s. Jacob dies. Perhaps it’s better this way; how much more grief could a single heart take? Still, he dies alone, having been divorced by Anna for his drunken ways. He dies as a Polish gentile with an Anglicized name. For eighty years, nobody will question this. The year is 2006. My sister marries under the chuppah. There are no words to describe her beauty as a bride—to say she looked radiant is to damn her with faint praise. At the reception I meet her new grandmother-in-law. Tzipporah has a number on one arm and the stamina of someone twice her age. When my new brother-in-law’s family call to dance the hora, it’s Tzipporah who pulls me into the circle. The year is 1949. My grandparents marry in the same Baptist church my grandfather was christened in. The year is 2002. No records of Yakov’s life in Russia ever surface. My mother is forced to conclude that he fled the Pale of Settlement, and that any record of his village has been destroyed. The year is 2012. My older nibling tells me that she learned in Hebrew school that you should never call G-d by name because it takes His attention away from more important things, and announces that henceforth she will be saying OMH, or “oh my HaShem,” instead of OMG. She sticks with this for two or three weeks before both the G and H form fall out of her vocabulary. The year is 2015. Like my sister before me I felt a call, an urge. I tell my mother I want to talk to a rabbi. She says: “well, we are Jewish, you know.” I give her an eloquent, erudite answer: “huh?” The year is 2016. I stand in front of the open ark. A Torah is placed in my arms. If G-d is anywhere, in those moments, He is with me. I swear I can feel the eyes of every person who stood at the foot of Sinai as I accept the blessings and responsibilities of Torah. The air feels more than real; I feel like I understand how the Patriarchs must have felt, speaking directly to G-d. As the minyan with me sings a Shehecheyanu, I think: blessed are you, Jacob, son of parents whose names we do not know, whose sacrifices have enabled me to reach this moment. The year is 2023, and I am telling you this story. After three generations lost, the fourth finally came home. We did find a single picture of Jacob, by the way. And yes—I have his cheekbones. Return us to You, Adonai, and we will return; renew our days as of old. Welcome to A Song of Zion, the weekly check-in for Jews on DailyKOS. How are you doing? Share your joys and sorrows here, that the joy may be magnified and the sorrow lessened. Goyim are not unwelcome in the Song of Zion posts; however, we request that you take this opportunity to listen, rather than speak. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/16/2205944/-A-Song-Of-Zion-I-Did-Not-Forget-Thee-Jerusalem?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/