Rootlessness
After a truly horrible Thanksgiving visit with J's family at the Jersey shore (mostly related to parenting, so maybe I'll post about it in my other LJ, once I'm not so emotionally charged...), I'm thinking a lot about my own family, in particular, my family's history. And what I most come back to is how profoundly sad it is that I know almost nothing about it. This is true for both sides, but especially true for my father's side. The short story is that my father & his parents immigrated - supposedly via New Orleans, but there's no records to verify this - to the US from Hungary (indirectly, via a whole host of other countries first) in the late 1940s, had two more sons, and became naturalized citizens. The family name, Czibesz, was changed (before or after arrival? unclear) to the Americanized phonetic Seabase; my brother changed his back to the original spelling about 15 years ago. So my only existing relatives in the US are my father, his two brothers, and all their children, most of whom I haven't seen in 20+ years. I know a few of my grandmother's relatives back in Hungary - have even met them - but no one can figure a single thing out about my grandfather, not about him, his family, where he was from. It's all just a big, murky blank. And that's not for lack of effort. Even anecdotal stories are blurry, conflicting. The original surname is so uncommon as to be almost non-existent, so that doesn't help. And during that time, all the countries in that region were in such flux, with changing borders and boundaries (there is some evidence that my Croatian maternal grandfather's family may have actually been from the village right next to that of my paternal grandmother - weird).
This isn't the first time I've thought about all this, but my brother got a message last week from an Austrian woman with the surname Czibesz - she knows of no one but her immediate family with it - and it's gotten me puzzling over this with renewed interest. Part of it has to do with the fact that my grandparents had led a troubled life back in Eastern Europe, wanted to assimilate completely, wanted to shed every last remnant of their former lives and selves (the language was completely abandoned in favor of English). In college, I had to write an essay on my "ethnic roots." I ended up writing about not having any, because there just isn't anything there. And I just keep wondering about how very much has been lost. How much we will never be able to learn, regain.
This isn't the first time I've thought about all this, but my brother got a message last week from an Austrian woman with the surname Czibesz - she knows of no one but her immediate family with it - and it's gotten me puzzling over this with renewed interest. Part of it has to do with the fact that my grandparents had led a troubled life back in Eastern Europe, wanted to assimilate completely, wanted to shed every last remnant of their former lives and selves (the language was completely abandoned in favor of English). In college, I had to write an essay on my "ethnic roots." I ended up writing about not having any, because there just isn't anything there. And I just keep wondering about how very much has been lost. How much we will never be able to learn, regain.