I’ve been doing some ancestral research of late, trying to cobble together whatever factoids that I can gather about my relatives. I was able to put a basic picture together on my mother’s side, going back to my great-grandparents. After that the trail goes cold, given that they were all in Poland and I have no practical access to any trace they may have left behind over there. Even if I were rich and could go to Poland for a few months on a fact-finding mission, there might not be many facts left to find, given the mess that was made of eastern Europe during WW1, WW2 and Soviet Communist rule. But still, I know a good bit more now about my grandparents, and I can better appreciate what they went through. They seem like real people to me, much more so than when they were alive. The language, age and cultural barriers between them and us (i.e., my grandparents versus my brother and my cousins) kept us apart; but now I can almost enter their bubble and see that our lives weren’t all that different, on the most important levels anyway. My little genealogy project has been quite satisfying in that regard.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do much with my father’s side. At least I had a small cache of family papers and pictures that my mother’s brother had saved, which we inherited when he died eight years ago. But I have almost nothing to go on regarding my father’s family. He died almost 35 years ago, and his surviving brother died back in 2001. We hardly saw my uncle at all after my father died, but I had a chance to speak with him briefly in 1999 at his late wife’s wake. He wanted me to stop by his house for a longer visit. But of course I didn’t. Back then I had “bigger fish to fry”. Only now do I realize the golden opportunity that I passed up there.

If my maternal grandparents were “on another planet” back when I was a kid, my paternal grandparents were off in another galaxy. I never even knew my father’s father, as he died shortly before WW2. I somewhat remember my paternal grandmother, as she lived upstairs from us. But she only spoke Polish and didn’t always get along with my mother, so my brother and I mostly stayed away from her. She died when we were around 10 or 11. So there ain’t much that I remember about her, other than the little musical “glockenspiel” she had with the mechanical boy and girl coming out of the doorways during the song, along with the smell of mothballs up in her apartment. And the fights that she used to have with my mother in Polish. I remember my father saying that they ran a “dry goods” store in Wallington, NJ, and that he had good memories of occasionally taking the train to New York City with his dad to order stuff. And that they were all good Roman Catholics of Polish origin. But really, that’s about all I know.

Up to now I haven’t mentioned my last name on this blog; that gives me more leeway to talk candidly about my employer, a county law enforcement agency. But if you knew my last name and did a Google on it, you’d think that my grandparents (or grandfather, anyway) were Russian Jews. It’s one of those “strongly” Jewish names. In fact, many people in the past have assumed that I’m a Jew (and that actually may have helped me to land a job or two). Also, I’ve heard that being a dry goods merchant was a rather Jewish thing to do back in the early 20th Century. So what was the story with my grandfather? My father was a more-or-less devout Catholic, and never expressed any interest in Judaism; he was perfectly at ease eating pork sausage (kelbasa) and other non-Kosher stuff. Also, I don’t remember any signs of Judaism in my grandmother’s apartment; no Stars of David or even a candle set. My grandfather is buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery, so I assume that he had an official Catholic burial. And yet, I also remember that my father had a certain Jewish sensitivity, somewhat rare for a Catholic son of Poland (although he was born in the USA). If he even thought that my brother and I were making fun of Jews (easy to do in the all-white, all-Christian neighborhood where I grew up; all the kids were little bigots), he would yell at us. By contrast, he left us alone when we got down on blacks.

I recently came across a little tidbit of info on my paternal grandfather on ancestry.com. I paid the $20 for a month’s access and then managed to drag up my grandfather’s WW1 draft registration card (from 1917), along with an entry in the 1930 Census for my father’s family. The registration card did confirm one thing: my grandfather was a “Rusky”, born in Minsk (actually that’s in Belarus, so I guess that he was a Belarusky). But he was also living in a very Polish Catholic section of Passaic at the time, and worked in the Botany woolen mill as an elevator man. He was already married by then, and would have his first son (the uncle who died a few years back) in another year. So he was living the same life as my authentic Polish-Catholic maternal grandparents, who at the time were only two blocks away and working at the same mills.

And yet, in 1930, something of a Jewish trend could be seen. In the Census, he is listed as the proprietor of a dry goods store and has three kids. Also, they own a house in suburban Wallington. My maternal grandparents were still renting, and never did leave their tenement in Passaic. But my paternal grandparents had obviously stepped up an economic notch or two during the 1920s. My father’s family might have been relatively well-off had my grandfather lived into the 1960’s.

Well, no need for me to ponder what might have been, in that regard. But it is interesting to consider what a unique individual my granddad must have been. He was a bit of a “black swan”, in the sense of that interesting book by Nassim Taleb. He went against the averages, deviated from the trends, and was an unpredictable phenomenon. Most Russians families with his last name (and mine) came over from Russia in the 1880s, and clustered in one of two urban regions: one in southern New Jersey, and one on the other side of the Hudson River. (The New York clan actually had a rubbish carting business; I remember once being in a car with some friends next to a garbage truck with my name on it – obviously I took a ribbing for that!). Yet there was my grandfather in Passaic, where there was no one else with his last name. There certainly was a Jewish section of Passaic, but my grandfather was firmly entrenched in the Polish Catholic zone, living and working (and arguably praying) just as any other Pole would. And yet he pulled off some kind of Jewish connections to become a successful local merchant, something that very few of the typical Polish immigrants would do (other than a candy store here and a meat market there).

Back when I was in law school, one of the profs asked me if I were related to the southern NJ clan, as they had produced a number of attorneys who had gained local fame. All I could tell Professor Cohen was “no”. But now I’d tell him, quite proudly, that I’m with the black-swan branch of the family!