family history

These Here Are Crazy Times 2

farhana — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Every so often, I’ll be on the phone with my ninety-one-year-old grandma and she’ll reveal a tidbit I’ve never heard before. The most recent revelation—admittedly several years ago now—was about her only serious boyfriend before meeting my grandpa. He hadn’t been interested in religion, and my gram just couldn’t envision a future with such a man, much as she loved him.

My grandpa, a theology professor who fit the spiritual bill, has been gone for a decade, but while I’m always working to pry memories from Gram’s Alzheimer’s infected brain, I’ve got a nice little book full of grandpa’s handwritten notes about every major event of his life. The once-blank journal contains 365 questions about childhood, marriage, children, and aging; always an educator, he filled it out like a homework assignment and gave it to me before he died.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have such compendiums of information about our loved ones after they’re gone. Even fewer would know what to do with it. Sarah May’s zine, These Here Are Crazy Times 2, about her late grandmother, Martha Luzier Birdsall, is filled with stories about working in a coal mine, getting married in the Methodist church, and losing a brother in WWII, many of which bear resemblance to my own family history. Several years before her death, Sarah May’s grandma gave each of her grandchildren a folder full of poetry and family history, but it wasn’t until years after she’d been gone that Sarah May started poring over her grandma’s personal stories about losing everything but a yard full of turkeys and a big vegetable garden during the Great Depression and dating an enlisted guy who showed her his incomplete divorce paperwork as an afterthought.

Some people have a knack for storytelling, and it’s clear that Sarah May inherited hers from her grandmother. Pick up this small booklet for stories about how things have changed—and how, when it comes to some things like dismissive doctors and broken hearts, they haven’t changed at all.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 18th 2011

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives From The Other Side of Silence

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Kim Dana Kupperman

Graywolf Press

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a collection of memories and letters, speaking out from places of silence. Throughout the text, Kim Dana Kupperman conveys an enduring need to bring chosen tragedies to light and does so vigorously. She talks about her past in a cautious and gentle style, like cleaning a raw wound with salt water: painful yet cleansing.

The book unravels stories about difficult moments in life, describing the deaths of her mother and father, the after effects of radiation pollution in Chernobyl, and failed intimacy in her romantic relationships. She explores the many inner emotions that come along with these trying stages in life, and exposes her past bravely. One of her stories describes her trips to Russia and Ukraine, a private quest to learn more about her family's history. She constantly uses her imagination to investigate her ancestors, like fantasizing her grandmother walking the streets of Kiev. She is constantly searching for a connection between her identity and kin, but instead, she finds herself detached and is “reminded that the business of returning to a place that doesn't belong to me is impossible.”

This intimately detailed storytelling releases sweet sorrow that is rich and poetic. Each chapter is full of vivid imagery that fully traverses all the senses. She inspects small details in her memories: the smell of her lover's breath, or the texture of her mother's feet. The reader is brought daringly close to these personal realities. However, within the numerous events and settings, there is a pervading disconnectedness that distracts from the powerful writing. The loose themes of ancestry and “failed flight” ineffectively tie all these tales together.

Apart from the dispersed themes, Kupperman's “missives” are pungent; full of pain, resentment, and bitter love.

Written by: Cinthia Pacheco, June 8th 2010

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:09:00 +0000

By Helene Cooper

Simon & Schuster

Helene Cooper’s memoir about growing up in Liberia and moving to the United States paints a portrait of a girl trapped between two cultures and countries worlds apart from one another. Cooper is the descendant of freed African American slaves who returned to Africa to found Liberia in the early 1800s. Her upbringing was a privileged one, as a member of the small Liberian upper class composed almost entirely of the descendants of Black American settlers. Sheltered by her family’s wealth and privilege, Cooper grows up relatively oblivious to the growing tensions and inequities in Liberian society. She doesn’t seem to understand how unequal and unfair the distribution of wealth and power was in Liberia.

The contradictions of a small and wealthy elite living within a very poor country are glaringly apparent, especially when her parents decide to “get” a sister for her after she complains of being afraid to sleep alone at night. The “sister” they obtain, Eunice, comes from the poor class of Liberians. A relatively common practice in Liberian society was for poor children to come live as sons and daughters of the upper class. Eunice’s mother sent her to live with another family, as this would give Eunice a better opportunity to succeed in life. Eunice becomes a part of the family, but is never completely embraced as a true daughter. This is particularly the case when they end up leaving her behind when a bloody coup in 1980 forced Helene’s family to flee the country and immigrate to America. Once in the U.S., Cooper avoids talking about her homeland, embarrassed of being associated with a country that the rest of the world saw on the nightly news as being riddled by uncontrolled violence and grisly civil war.

The House at Sugar Beach alternates between tender childhood memories at an idyllic beach house in Liberia to Cooper's life after the coup as she struggles to find her own identity and "make it" in the United States.

Written by: Liz Simmons, November 5th 2009

Gold Dust on His Shirt: The True Story of an Immigrant Mining Family

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Irene Howard

Between The Lines

When you think about migrant memoirs of North America, stories of moving north from Latin America often come to mind more than those detailing moves east and west. Flipping around that common assumption, Gold Dust on His Shirt tells the story of Irene Howard’s Swedish-Norwegian immigrant family’s tumultuous life in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century.

After the death of her first husband in Norway, Howard’s mother Ingeborg immigrated to Canada. She left her young daughter Inga behind with the child’s grandparents, promising to send for Inga as soon as she was settled. Instead, once she arrived in Prince Rupert (in current day British Colombia), she met and married a Swede, Nils Alfred in 1913. Only seven years after Norway had gained its independence from Sweden, the couple felt—and was—thousands of miles from the political controversies of their homeland. Six months later, Ingeborg gave birth to their first son, Swedish-Norwegian-Canadian Arthur Ingemar. Over the years, Ingeborg and Alfred had several more children—Verner Erik, Nels Edwin, Irene—and were uprooted from their home several times. Alfred’s job working on the railroad demanded that the family relocate as work became available. As Alfred became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and began mobilizing other immigrant workers, his job prospects were often limited due to his radical organizing.

Reading about language barriers, death by tuberculosis or mine collapse, police raids, and workers’ struggles against mining companies is a sobering experience. Living a reverse tale of sorts—an American in Denmark, mostly unable to speak Danish—I have a lot of empathy for the characters in this story. I also suspect that my own Norwegian background and my adopted Danish family made this a more interesting tale for me. I didn’t mind reading about characters named Sigurd Ullstreng, Olav Trygvasson, and Elling Erikssen Aarvig. For me, it was a bit comforting and homey—or “hygge,” as we say in Danish.

Howard’s history is fascinating, though her presentation is a bit dry. At times, the book reads like a genealogy scrapbook instead of a memoir, listing people and events in a factual if uninspiring way. For history buffs, this is no doubt enjoyable. I will admit to struggling at times to wade through the details of a time and place with which I have no real familiarity. Yet Howard’s story is valuable and often untold, and her objective storytelling—in which she often removes herself entirely from the narrative, even though she lived through the same events—is a refreshing departure from the self-centered account most memoirs provide. I suspect I will revisit this book for years to come, perhaps as my roots deepen and spread among the Nordic states and North America.

Howard was born in 1922 amidst her father’s career change from mining to fishing. That she has survived the last eighty-seven years—three less than my own still-living Norwegian grandmother—with her story intact, now fully documented and published, is no small feat. In Norwegian, we say, “gratulerer”—congratulations.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, July 11th 2009