5. blood line
it’s a wild story, me and my mom in a living room in a main line suburb I’d never been to, surrounded by an extended family I’d never met, a map of our family tree wrapping the dining room to show the gaping hole where the descendants of my zeida’s immediate family would have been if they had survived
and before the pizza was served, we were politely encouraged to leave
my zeida was born in a Polish town called Pidvolochys’k, he completed eighth grade before starting work in the fields, his father was known as a ‘doctor for trees’, was called on by neighboring farmers to care for their sick trees,
boim is yiddish for tree, their last name, Bomze, means of the trees
my zeida’s zeida was avrahm, like our patriarch, he had 12 children by 2 different women, like our patriarch
my zeida’s mother was the oldest, the one who stayed behind to care for aging parents when all 11 siblings left for the U.S. in the 1910s, according to the tree in this suburban dining room and the dozens of eyes tracing its branches, she was the lost one of 12
my zeida had a twin who walked with a limp and a brother imprisoned for his political beliefs, the brother he left home with had a wife and a young son but only the two of them walked through the woods from Poland to Russia, eating turtle meat when there was no town to steal from, swallowing extra fake papers when they were almost caught with them, hiding from Russian officers who were rounding up Jews to force them on the front lines against hitler
after, in the displaced persons camp in Zelsheim, they made contact with aunts and uncles who’d left home before they were born, got themselves and their new wives on a boat towards their only remaining blood
the alte kakers with their accents and their hair salons welcomed the young families but their children wanted nothing to do with another generation of bad English and gaunt faces, their children, all lettered
in MDs and ESqs and PHDs, gave my bubi and zeida a loan to buy a store, but there were no invitations to dinner or play dates in their big lush green back yards
my zeida worked 7, 12 hour days a week, except on Sundays he closed up for 2 hours and took his kids to the movies, always asleep by the opening credits, always trying to sneak his teenage daughter in at a kids price,
he used to tell his children ‘like water off a ducks back” as his wife fumed about the humiliation of marrying beneath her class,
he told then “everyone is a thief in the right circumstances” as he showed them where to hide cash so it would escape the next robbery,
he slid a broom in his daughter’s hand, told her ‘hard work is for everyone’ as he swatted the air like he could clear the fog of his wife’s racism, and her determination to saddle their children with her desperate clinging for upward mobility
there was a story he told over and over about a man in a village who sat crying on a roadside, he’d spent his whole days earnings at the market on a bag of spicy peppers when he’d meant to buy his favorite sweet ones, his tongue burning and eyes watering as he ate them, ‘you don’t have to eat the hot peppers’ my zeida told his children, it was the closest he came to ‘I love you’, instructing them not to punish themselves for an honest mistake, teaching them they were allowed to show themselves forgiveness.
in his 60’s he married for love, in his 90’s when his care become too much for his wife and he was moved to a home, the two of them talked on the phone every night like teenagers
years after my zeida transitioned distant cousins contacted my mom to invite her to a family gathering. They said ‘please bring your children’
that morning my mother came with me to her first anti-Zionist workshop, though she had never swallowed her mother’s attachment to Israel, her fear of “ruffling feathers” had kept her too frozen to even listen to talk of the occupation, the nakba, apartheid conditions in Gaza, settler violence in the West Bank…
that morning she had listened, to all of it, in the car on the way to the main line, she thanked me for getting her there, for being patient with how long it took
at the door we were greeted by someone who remembered riding in the back seat from Philly to Ellis island to pick up my Bubi and Zeida from the boat, they remembered being told not to stare at the numbers on my bubi’s arm, my mom politely corrected that her mother was never in a camp, but later my uncle disclosed a young memory he could never make sense of…. of numbers on their mom’s arm that later were gone, 50 years after her death we still wonder if she found a way to remove a tattoo and the parts of her story she couldn’t stomach, if the story we all have etched on repeat is just a cover
we were invited to gather in the living room, and invited to feel the blank spaces on the tree where my mom’s cousins and their children and their children’s children should have been
then we were told, in their memory we have an obligation to help rid Jerusalem of Arabs
my mom stood, timidly, and walked out, cutting a wake of ruffled feathers
I stood too, the only words escaping the sieve of my disappointment, my retracted reaching for this almost family were “I don’t agree” followed by a muffled “and if there’s anyone else who doesn’t agree I want you to know you’re not alone’
the room bubbled in discomforted chatter, questions were lobed at my age, my education, a hand on my shoulder pushed me back into my chair when I tried to retreat, another swatted it away, and patted me for my courage, my mom had turned around at the sound of my voice and made her way back to me, she took my hand and said ‘let’s go’
and we did, to no protest and no goodbyes
I wanted to sob. and scream. I wanted to stay. I wanted them to know, this isn’t who my Zeida taught me to be.
