My grandmother escaped from Russia hiding under a pile of hay in a horse-drawn wagon. At the border, men with pitchforks stabbed into the hay, attempting to thwart any stowaways. They didn’t succeed. She and her family found their way to Minnesota, where her daring story seemed utterly incongruent with the 84-year-old woman in the nursing home bed doing the telling.
When the family arrived, my great-grandfather had a horse-drawn wagon and sold fruit. Later, my grandfather had a small store and worked with farmers. After World War II, my father went to college on the GI Bill.
Not long ago, my father told me that he was embarrassed when his grandmother would speak Yiddish on the street. He knew what it was to be the son of an Eastern European Jew, but he didn’t know what it was to be an American. Like so many who came to this country, he wanted to become a typical white American. So he tried to distance himself from his family history.
My father and mother raised me in Minnesota, in a house with railroad tracks in the backyard. When the trains would go past, the house would shake. On summer nights, when the window was open, I would be serenaded to sleep by a chorus of crickets.
Until recently I didn’t tell these stories. I was embarrassed by them. As, I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of origin stories. Now, I need to tell them and want to make sure my kids know them.
Ironically, across the street from our Seattle home, there too were once railroad tracks. They’ve long since been converted into a bike trail. Well past bed-time the other night, I carried my seven year-old outside so he could hear the frogs echoing from the park by the lake several blocks away. In the morning at sunrise when my children look out the window, they don’t see trains. They see the sun rising over lake and mountains.
My kids are far away from the world of my childhood and further still from that of my parents and grandparents. I wonder how I can help them feel the connection to our past and appreciate the present they have been fortunate to inherit.
For all its liturgical and literary emphasis on the past, our Jewish tradition doesn’t have a word for “history.” It only has a word for “memory.” Why? I think it is so that we will be compelled to connect our present circumstance to our collective experience – our collective memory.
Our memories and our stories tie us to both our past and our future. Embedded in them are the values that we have inherited. And, depending on our choices, they are the values we will pass along to future generations.
By Will Berkovitz
Will Berkovitz is CEO of JFS. He and his wife Dr. Lelach Rave, live with their three children in North Seattle. Will is a long-distance runner, avid hiker and backpacker. He particularly enjoys volunteering in the Food Bank and helping with refugee resettlement.
