Epigenetic Trauma

Baba Yaga’s Professional and Writing Biography

/ mlouisehill / 2 Comments

            I’m always a little surprised when I look at this blog’s statistics and see the number of hits. I don’t get thousands, but I have more than I expect. To those of you who are reading this, I thank you. I feel I owe it to you to tell a little bit about who I really am.

Me and Augustus (Gus)

 I’m a retired academic who always wanted to write fiction. Though the artistic part of my brain was badly fried by thirty-five years of teaching college composition, I managed to draft three novels and several short stories while fulfilling the requirements of a career that grew more demanding as the small liberal arts college I worked in drifted towards financial ruin. In the middle of COVID 2020, six months before my mother died, I retired. Revising my third novel pulled me through my grief. During my first couple drafts, I was worried I’d lost my ear. I credited that to having done very little reading for pleasure during my quest towards tenure at a small college in Buffalo. My workload at the Turkish university I worked at before that gave me enough personal time to savor reading fiction that wasn’t on one of my course syllabi. Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Yasar Kemal became my companions. Since retiring, I’ve added Richard Powers, Olga Tokarczuk, Susannah Clark, Elif Shafak, Anthony Doerr, George Saunders, China Mieville, Louise Erdrich, Joy Williams, and Karen Thompson Walker to my list. Their books have helped me resuscitate the writerly soul I’d repressed beneath the armor I had to build to function in my job.

 My adult life and my academic career began in the summer of 1985, when I was awarded a teaching assistantship and admission to Syracuse University’s Masters in Fiction Writing program.  At the end of my second year, my story “Tonto, In The Trees” won the department’s Stephen Crane Award for short fiction. That same story appeared in the Nebraska Review and was named their Best Short Story of 1987. Syracuse was a turning point for me. My teaching assistantship gave me a career I enjoyed more than the medical secretarial work I was doing back in my hometown of Cleveland. So after finishing my M.A., I set off to become an academic who wrote fiction on the side. While some of my Syracuse colleagues went on to write their first best-selling novel, I completed a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and became a university professor.  My dissertation, When The Voice Must Be The Body: Feminism and Radio Drama won the Tisch School of the Arts’ Cynthia Jean Bull Cohen Award for Academic Excellence in 1997. Chapters were published in Women in Performance and an issue of TDR that later became a book. An academic press offered to publish my dissertation if I was willing to edit.  Go figure. I didn’t do it.  I didn’t really want to write scholarly stuff. I wanted to write fiction. And I wanted to teach. You see, my family and friends were amazed when I finished a Masters degree. Many couldn’t believe I actually earned a Ph.D.. Especially me. I’d begun graduate school driven by the need to show myself what I was capable of. By the time I finished, I felt that if someone like me could accomplish what I had, others could, too.  And I wanted to help them.

My father and three-year-old me, during our first year in the suburban home I grew up in.

PAST REMEDIES

            So, who is someone like me? 

I was the second daughter in a family with three girls and two boys. We were your garden-variety dysfunctional family growing up in a brand new suburban development on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. One step away from working class, my parents (and probably all of our neighbors, too) worked hard to pretend they’d attained the American dream. And yet, they maintained a working class attitude. Josh Robert Thompson describes the milieu of my childhood well during his appearance on the Honey Dew Podcast #117, “Cleveland has an interesting philosophy . . . don’t try too hard and don’t be proud of your work.” Furthermore, “growing up in a Catholic alcoholic family, you keep everything to yourself.” Listening to that podcast reminds me of my father’s alcohol cupboard. By the end of each month, the family would be eating bologna for dinner, but dad always had good gin. He taught me how to appreciate a good martini. Alcoholism was probably what attracted the different branches of my family tree – the Gorzynskis, the Dziedzikowskis, the Malloys, and the Thompsons – to each other. Yes, Thompsons. I’m related to Josh Robert Thompson. Second cousin, by adoption. I’ve never met him, though. But I knew his grandfather. Josh’s grandpa was my mom’s youngest uncle. On her mother’s side. My mother and grandmother boasted of him being an opera singer. On this podcast, Josh describes him as a gruff old World War II fighter pilot. Which he was, but my mom preferred to emphasize his more genteel side when he dropped by for a drink or two. What would Josh have to say about that? I don’t know. Estrangement from rough and tumble city relatives was integral to being a successful first generation suburbanite during the 1960’s and ’70’s.

Even if we had met, Josh wouldn’t remember me. I was the quietest kid in a family that kept to themselves. I was that Catholic school girl who showed up freshman year at the local public high school and never succeeded in fitting in. That girl who sat in the back of English class and didn’t talk.  When teachers discovered I was a good writer and an astute reader, I was placed in Honor’s English and History, but I was never inducted into the National Honor Society.  My mother called the school to complain, but they didn’t budge. I was socially clumsy.  In retrospect, I suspect people thought there was something wrong with me.  But there are degrees of “something wrong,” right? The biggest thing wrong about me was that socializing and talking didn’t come easily. But writing did.

 I experienced my undergraduate English degree at Cleveland State University as a first-generation college student. I had no role models.  Sure, my father had earned a college degree on the GI Bill, but he was rarely home.  Luckily, I had compassionate teachers who made it a point to tell me I was a very good writer. One recommended me to work in the tutorial center, so in 1978 (the same year my father died) I began learning how to talk to strangers about something I knew a lot about: English composition. I discovered that I enjoyed the reciprocality of teaching language to someone from another country. We both grew from knowing each other. During my Master’s, I took TESOL methodology courses alongside my writing and literature courses but never gained a certification. I continued tutoring and teaching international students at N. Y. U. and the Cooper Union. By the end of my Ph.D., I’d begun developing ideas about how to use performance theory in the ESL classroom. However, I felt that, to be an effective language teacher, I needed to learn what it felt like to be a foreigner in a land whose language I didn’t speak. My first full-time teaching position (1999-2003) was in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey. There, I taught expository and creative writing, performance theory and world fiction and drama.  I helped build a composition curriculum and a Master’s program.  In my spare time, I wrote a novel – an updated Othello set on modern Turkish Cyprus called Past Remedies.  That unpublished novel received an Honorable Mention in the 2004 Peacewriting Contest.

My Turkish colleagues and neighbors were kind to me before, during and after 9/11, but when the United States invaded Iraq, anti-American sentiment grew.  I encountered it in grocery stores and on busses. My stepfather died in March 2003, leaving my mother alone in a big house outside Cleveland, and I decided it was time to go home.  A former colleague helped me secure a one-year position at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, where I was able to do an in-country search for a tenure track job as close to Cleveland as possible.

Medaille College during its final year, when it became a University.

YOU LOOK GREAT TOGETHER

 Medaille College in Buffalo, New York was full of first-generation college students who reminded me a lot of myself. Among the Medaille faculty, I found many other overachievers from working class families. We all did our best to give our largely urban student population a leg up.  I took it upon myself to teach my American students global literacy. During my first six years at Medaille, former Turkish colleagues and I worked on building cross-cultural writing wikis where students from America and Turkey collaborated on assignments. At conferences I attended in America and abroad, I was one of few discussing digitally enhanced collaborative writing assignments.  My pedagogical innovations waned as my administrative duties increased.  During my years at Medaille, I held the following titles: Humanities Chair, English Chair, and Humanities Division Head.  I helped build Medaille’s International Program. When I retired, I managed the Write Thing Reading Program as part of my duties as English Program Director. I was also building remedial reading and writing programs.  I spent hours every night grading student papers.  

 Rust belt cities like Buffalo and Cleveland are full of small colleges like Medaille. Today, many of these colleges are facing closure, if they haven’t closed already. Many have stories similar to Medaille’s case. “The Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille opened the Institute of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1875” on the land that later became Medaille’s campus. The school became known as Mount Saint Joseph Teachers’ College, and it started offering degrees 1937 (“Medaille University” Wikipedia). In the 1960’s and 1970’s, families looking for a small college where their Baby Boom and Gen X children could get personal attention were happy to send them to places like Medaille. As student numbers dwindled at the turn of the twenty-first century, those schools became more specialized in order to survive. Some didn’t. Medaille closed in 2022. When I joined its faculty in 2004, the signature program was Veterinary Technology. Medaille’s Vet Tech students inspired me to draft a mystery novel, You Look Great Together. The sleuths are triplet sisters: one a vet, another a vet tech, the third, a doggy day care owner.  The mystery begins when a prize-winning German Shepard is abandoned at day care and the sisters find themselves solving a mysterious disappearance when they go looking for his owner.  It was a fun book to write, but as with Past Remedies, it was set aside because of the increasing demands of my job.  Reading Richard Osman’s Thursday Night Murder Club has me itching to revise You Look Great Together and begin a sequel, where the pet that initiates the mystery is a Maine Coon. 

Me and my kitty Frankie (Francesca) in 2017, one of the years the Medaille’s Write Thing Reading Series collaborated with the Freshman Read program. That Fall, students read The Art of Racing in the Rain and participated in two days of special activities before Garth Stein visited us. In this activity, faculty showed off their pets.

My annual performance review at Medaille required that I account for scholarship, service, mentorship and teaching, with the last three being the most important. This emphasis on student teaching and community building was why I stayed at Medaille. Our evolving student population demanded creativity and risk taking. One day one of my non-traditional female students approached me after a lecture on The Fool in King Lear that featured my tarot cards. She wanted to begin a new club – a paranormal society – and she needed a faculty sponsor. I seemed like someone who would do it. She was right. I was the Medaille College Paranormal Society’s faculty advisor for several years before handing it off to a more psychic colleague. By the time Medaille closed its doors for good, it was the most popular club on campus.

A cottage in Czarny Bryńsk, Poland

THE DOUBLE-SOULED SON

Two years before my 2020 retirement, I took my first and only year-long sabbatical. That was when I drafted The Double-Souled Son, the novel I’m marketing now.  Based on research into my father’s mysterious family, it’s a paranormal-psychological literary family saga of a late nineteenth century misfit couple’s migration from Poland to America. Taking its cue from Mohsin Hamid’s line “we’re all migrants in time,” The Double-Souled Son imagines the psychological traumas these ancestors suffered before, during, and after their migration.  The characters were conceived to embody the multiple personalities Poles had to negotiate during the nineteenth century. One was religious: “Scholars who investigated Slavic folk beliefs in the nineteenth century were astounded by the extent to which the peasants, while practising [sic] Orthodox Christianity, were still connected to their pagan inheritance. The phenomenon became known as dvoeverie, or ‘dual faith.'” (Myth and Mankind: Forests of the Vampire: Slavic Myth). This was especially true in rural Poland, where the peasants proudly maintained their Polish language and traditions while also dealing with Prussian, Russian, or Hungarian occupiers. When they arrived to in America in 1881, they were already psychologically damaged. Life in a mining company town in Pennsylvania, Buffalo’s stockyards, and Cleveland’s industrial Polonia only compounded it.

Medaille’s second largest program was Psychology. Student research papers about trauma sparked my own interest, as a family historian, in epigenetic trauma. I theorized that unresolved trauma that gets passed on from one generation to the next produces dissociated personalities. Around the time I retired, I began untangling my own dissociations, tracing them to the stages in my life that induced them, and I found some predate my memory.  They may have been sparked by an initial trauma that occurred generations ago. Back then, no one talked about “dissociative identity disorder” or “multiple personality disorder.” Pre-modern cultures made sense of these conditions with superstition and myth.  In rural Poland, people believed that someone with contradictory personalities had two souls. One of those souls was an average soul, the other supernatural: a strzyga. Graves of the suspected double-souled provide evidence that this belief continued into the twentieth century. My 2019 visit to Krakow’s Rynek Underground Museum included a display of corpses decapitated, secured, and buried face down.

Seem extreme? Well, the strzyga is a cousin to the vampire, capable of inhabiting cast-off bodies and returning to life. My interpretation of being double-souled emphasizes the human over the demon.  CulturePL’s video “The Strzygon Soul And How To Deal With Him” offers a humorous depiction of this affliction. In this video, the body, possessed by its supernatural soul, climbs out of his grave, returns to his wife and has more children.  He’s only half-bad, after all. And even when he’s bad, he has a good sense of humor. In the book, I’ve imagined a family known to produce double-souled children. The entire village is on high alert when the protagonist is born. The signs are clear from the infant’s first holler: he’s born with teeth and has a strange birth marks. And here’s the hitch: his curse won’t go away, even when he and his family migrates.  In a place like America, the double-souled son may still be half demon on the inside, but to his immediate community, he’s crazy.

Therein lies the inspiration for The Double-Souled Son.  This novel begins in Prussian-occupied Poland in 1861 and ends in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, where every Polish immigrant’s reputation was further tarnished by a young man named Leon Czolgosz who he assassinated President McKinley.  This is the first of two books on how “starting in the late 19th century, traditional sources of identity such as class, religion, and community slowly began to be replaced with an emphasis on personal growth and happiness,” (“A Family Therapist Looks to Historians for Insight on the Changing Forms of Family Estrangement“). There’s a sequel in progress called American Limbo, in which the strzygon soul reincarnates during the 1920’s in Cleveland’s Polonia.  Ten years after his mother’s early death, his father remarries a younger woman who insists they assimilate when she has her own child. The newly minted American family moves to the suburbs, and the outcast strzygon becomes a carnival worker, and his migrations continue.

 Though it occasionally goes off theme, Baba Yaga’s Journal is primarily a collection of sources from my research.  It recaptures stories about the Poland my ancestors left behind, including what happened in my ancestors’ home villages during World Wars I and II, and beyond.  These were the stories my father’s family opted not to tell me.  My grandmother said she did it to protect me. And, dare I say, to make me pure American. And therein lies the heart of my proposal: that researching family history and studying the socio-political conditions that caused a family to migrate can increase anyone’s awareness of how we are all historically constructed global citizens.  Indeed, we are all migrants in a complex web of time, and our children will continue to be so, into the future.

What We Don’t Know

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  This was my favorite family photo when I was a girl. It was taken June 10, 1950, the day my parents, Katie and Myron, began the story of the family that produced me.

  I’m not a child anymore. I still like the photo, but for different reasons.  At sixty-six, I’m retired from two careers: one in higher education, the other as my mother’s confidante.  Second eldest of Katie and Myron’s five children, I was the child who didn’t talk much. The one who hid in her bedroom most of the time.  The one who sat in the back of classrooms; the one who was the last to be picked on softball teams. In grade school, high school, and college I had trouble putting thoughts into speech. So, I spent a lot of time listening. And smiling.  Talking to me was probably a bit like talking to yourself. That, I believe, is why Mom told me the things she otherwise kept to herself. She needed to say them out loud, and I provided a sounding board. Even after my language aptitude began manifesting, she continued confiding in me.  My reading and writing skills matured quickly.  I liked writing stories; everything around me was fair game. Yet she kept telling me things she didn’t tell anyone else.  Did she want me to keep these as secrets? Yes, I concluded.  So, for forty years or so I didn’t write much, and when I wrote a story, it wasn’t one of those burning inside of me. I published a few, was short listed for a few awards. The stories were good, even though I wasn’t sure what they were about, and a reader could tell that.

Katie died Christmas Morning, 2020. I retired six months later. My mourning lasted four years, give or take a month or two. Writing a novel helped me through it. I revised and edited in rooms decorated with family photos, both my husband’s and mine. 

As I streamlined my narrative and solidified characters, I began seeing stories everywhere. When I meditated on my own family photos, I felt Katie standing behind me. She spoke to me from the beyond. Remember what I told you about that day? Remember what happens next? Oh, yes, I remember. What happened next was happy for a little while, before it turned tragic – imagine a 1970’s Cleveland suburban Othello meets Death of a Salesman – it left my siblings and I scarred. Even today, emotional roadblocks limit our ability to reach out to each other. Why? The answer might lie in this wedding photo.

So, look again.  Katie’s wearing a rented dress.  She always regretted not buying it.  And the flower girl’s dress was stolen from her father’s car later that day.  The wedding party spent plenty of time in cars, driving back and forth between two receptions.  Myron’s mother refused to celebrate with my mother’s kin.  You see, Katie was working class Irish. Her dad was a Cleveland cop who’d served for years on the streets before being promoted to City Court bailiff. 

Is that wedding party smiling?  Or simply posing?

From the look on her face, I can tell Katie already knew how to maintain her composure while screaming inside.  That was a skill she passed on to me. My family rarely shared what we were really feeling.   Anyone who did was deemed hysterical, or out of line.  

The bridesmaids are Katie’s sisters, my aunts Rosie and Mary Lou.  Their smiles are sincere; they’re happy for their big sister. They hope they, too, will snag a handsome, wealthy man. Though they’d never seen it (and they never would), they’d heard about Myron’s parent’s sweet little house in Fairview. Its big garden with an apple and a pear tree.  Roses everywhere! And two automobiles, which made Katie’s brother Jim jealous. Jim’s the man on the left. He’s not overjoyed.  He’s been suspicious of Myron all along.  But Jim loves his big sister and wants to support her, so he’s rising to the ceremony.  

I never met the best man.  The day I overheard my mother talking about his death I learned the word suicide.

These details may suggest a misalliance, but actually, Katie and Myron were meant for each other. They shared the same nebulous American Dream, inspired by movies, radio, and early television. They each endured a Depression era childhood. Both lost friends in the second world war.  Myron served as an Army military policeman in postwar Italy and France. Everywhere he went, he was greeted as an ambassador from the United States, the defender of democracy.  When this photo was taken, he was in college, thanks to the GI Bill.  Katie had a secretarial job. They both were good Catholics who agreed they were ready to embark on crafting a new American family identity, here in this land of the brave and the home of the free.  

 As with most new identities, theirs required a change of location.  The apartment they moved into after the honeymoon was chosen for being equidistant between parents. For Katie, her family was a bus ride away.  When they finally bought their Dream House in the suburbs, the Myron Hills were within walking distance of his mother.  Katie, on the other hand, had to learn to drive. Her parents still lived in a working-class neighborhood on Cleveland’s West Side.  She was the first in her family to move to the suburbs.

Myron was only three when his family migrated from the city, so he didn’t remember living anywhere else.  I grew up believing the Hills were one of Fairview’s founding families. Grandma Hill worked hard to perpetuate that myth. Grandpa Hill might have told us otherwise, but he died the year I was born. The hints he left behind were tantalizing.  That old punching bag in Grandma’s basement?  His.  He used to be a boxer.  That funny shed-like extension on the garage? It once housed Grandpa’s chickens and roosters.  He was a cock fighter.  Those heavy scissors were his: he used them to cut wallpaper.  That hammer – he got it from his father.  The men in his family were carpenters.  During the depression, Joe and Harriett signed a lease for the house Myron grew up in. What Grandma called her Dream House was unfinished when they bought it. Though it was the depression, they paid it off in six months, while Joe completed the interior work.  It provided the setting for Myron’s growing up.

“We never know what we don’t know” became my mother’s motto as she grew older. In June 1950, she hadn’t realized its irony.  In the photo, her eyes betray her anxiety.   She was determined to be a good wife, to keep a good home, to bear healthy children and raise them in a loving home.  When it came to being an obedient daughter-in-law, she was already at a disadvantage.  Harriet Hill never hid her disappointment about her son’s choice.  When she first realized their relationship was growing serious, Harriet told Katie to break up with Myron. Katie obeyed. She stayed away until her best friend Jeannie (who was going steady with Myron’s bestie Richard) told Myron, who begged Katie to return to him.  Katie obeyed.  She was a good girl.  That’s what everyone said about her. What few understood was how smart she was.  Family and friends realized that after Myron died. But at twenty-two, Katie kept her “smarts” under wraps, lest it spoil her complexion or extinguish that glint in her eye.  

            Oh, what we don’t know.

Now recognized as the Greatest Generation, my parents and their contemporaries were heralded for the accomplishments they gained despite poverty, hunger, epidemic, and war.  As children or grandchildren of immigrants, many members of that generation still knew the stories of their ancestors’ journey from the Old Country. That only hardened their resolve to build a better America for their children. Sadly, many of those stories didn’t get passed down. Those that featured a lot of suffering were most likely to remain untold.   “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”  That’s what my father and his mother used to say when I asked about family history.  “Let’s just say it was awful. Be grateful you’ll never have troubles like that.”   And thus, they kept my siblings and I locked in a suburban bubble where we were led to believe everything had its place and every ending was happy. Thanks to them, I’ve lived a lucky life. My successes, which surpassed my childhood dreams, were fueled by the naivety that comes with not knowing what my immigrant ancestors forfeited for me. Like much of my generation, I lived flamboyantly, performing my parents’ American Dreams admirably. With only a dim idea where my ancestors came from, I had no idea when and how they migrated. When I’d ask my father, he’d laugh and say “my parents found me under a rock.”

 Nations that keep their identity intact can survive history’s violent cycles.  The same can be said for families.  I learned that lesson from my mother’s Irish kin.  Some of my warmest childhood memories occurred on our two-week summer vacations to Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains.  Today a mecca for hunters and nature lovers, I knew this Appalachian subregion as the location of the dairy farm where my Grandpa Malloy grew up.  The cows were sold when I was four years old, but Grandpa’s brother Rod and sister Marge maintained the remaining three hundred acres by renting them out for other farmers to harvest. The fields were neatly plowed; the barn and the outbuildings were all functional, and everything still smelled like cow manure. The farm’s hilltop position gave us a picture-perfect view of the nearby Roman Catholic Church, St. Anthony’s of Padua, erected in 1860 by the Irish potato famine migrants buried in the cemetery around it.  “You’re related to all of them,” Marge would say, when we accompanied her on our requisite annual walk through the graveyard.   My siblings and I were otherwise free to spend our daylight hours exploring the fields, rowing in the pond, jumping out of the hayloft, or shooting at targets. At night we’d sit on the front porch with Rod and Marge, drinking root beer floats and listening to stories.  Marge knew all the family gossip, and she told it. Who came from Ireland first, and who went back home. Who married who, who was an orphan. Which uncle went to prison; which cousin became a famous meteorologist. While Marge talked about people, Rod told us about the land. He loved every inch of their century farm, both tillable and forested. He had no desire to leave it. Only once, in his twenties, did he leave the farm, hopping a train to go to a Brooklyn Dodger’s game. After his team lost, he hopped another train back home. He realized he had to stay on the land that nurtured him. Its landscapes reminded him who he was.  He knew its legends.  Jimmy Hoffa was probably buried on the abandoned Murray farm.  Mountain lions lived in the forest. Bear, too.  Rod himself spotted a UFO over Tyler Mountain.  My mom egged him on, talking about the time she got attacked by a pig. In this reminiscing, family history and local legend merged. My siblings and I felt like we were part of it.

And yet we weren’t.  Our father was awkward at The Farm. Only once did he admit his father’s parents had lived nearby, in Nanticoke.  Otherwise, he didn’t speak much.

 What did he hold inside? Was he trying hard not to blurt out the thing Katie didn’t know back in June 1950? The thing she must never know? That Myron John Hill was a pseudonym, an Americanization of his paternal and maternal grandfather’s names, combined. “Myron,” when spoken a certain way, sounds like the Polish male name Marian.  As in Marian Gorzynski, the grandfather whose first American job was in Nanticoke’s mines.  “John” salutes Jan Dziedziach, aka Dziedziekowski, aka Doski, aka Doskey.  Hill is a translation of the góra in Górzyński.  This type of translation happened a lot, I’ve been told, when the children of Polish peasants who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century decided to assimilate.  After the son of a Polish immigrant killed President McKinley in 1901, the pressure to melt into mainstream white America increased.  Especially in Cleveland, where the assassin Leon Czolgosz’s family lived.  Even after the assassination, Pavel Czolgosz and his other sons didn’t change their names. Didn’t move away.  The Czolgosz family’s migration story ended in Cleveland’s Polonia.  They intended to die there, and they did.  

 Myron died after a series of heart attacks late in 1978; a stroke killed his mother in 1984.  Katie died in 2020, of Lewy Body Dementia.  By 2017, I knew the truth about my father’s name, thanks to Ancestry.com, Family Search, and the Polish Genealogical Society of America.  In her final years, Katie grew brutally honest. She understood things about herself and Myron that she didn’t know when she married him, and she was angry.  (“I don’t know who I married! Whose children did I carry?” she said to me once, three years before she died.) When I presented her with the story of our real surname, I asked if she would have married Myron Hill had he been named Marian Gorzynski.  

 “I wouldn’t have looked twice at him,” she replied.  “My folks didn’t have anything to do with Polacks.”

Here Lies Frank .

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  1. The Biggest Mystery in the Hill Family Tree

I was probably eight before I heard one of my parents mention him. 

Frank. My father’s only sibling, his half brother Frank.

What? Dad had a brother? My brothers and sisters and I thought he was an only child!

 “Yep,” my father told us. “He ran away to join the circus. He was a circus barker.”

He laughed that ironic laugh of his. I always read it as both sarcasm and discomfort.

Why?  To a kid, Circus Barker seemed both a viable and interesting profession.

“Don’t ask your grandmother about him, though,” he added.  “She’ll get upset.”

(Me, age four or five, in my grandmother’s backyard.)

My parents already owned a bungalow on the west side of Cleveland when my grandfather died. I was six months old, their second child. When I was three, we moved to a new house near Grandma. She lived in the house Grandpa built for her in Fairview Park.  For their family.  In her mind, that meant her son, Myron.  Not Frank. 

Myron – my father – grew up in that house.  He spent a lot of time alone. In fact, he was probably one of the first “latch-key” kids.  Grandma was proud to say she was a working woman. 

(Myron Hill, Grandma’s desk photos, on Grandma’s desk.)

Grandma was eighty-five when Myron died, at fifty-one. Many of her friends and family were already gone.  My mother, my siblings and I all took turns visiting her.   I enjoyed my Tuesday visits.  We’d sit alone in her living room, drinking tea and talking.  She asked about my schooling, my job, my boyfriend.  (She liked my boyfriend and ventured to give me advice about how to manage him. I had a bachelor’s degree by then, too. She was awed by that.) But I was managing a medical office. Or working in a hospital. I was a secretary, just as she once was. What did I do to relax? Baking, I told her.  “I get up and bake if I can’t sleep.”  “Me too,” she said, her voice quivering. We talked a little more about things I liked to do – reading, music, being quiet.  “You are more like me than I thought” she said one night. 

Until those evening teas, I sensed that she favored my two sisters.  They both inherited her dark skin tone and hair.  Her rebellious spirit. She didn’t see much similarity between my father and me. I had my mother’s Irish complexion and nervous giggle.   My mother told me later Grandma Hill made it clear very early in their relationship that she did not want her son to marry a working class Irish girl. When her attempts to block their marriage failed, she refused to celebrate with my mother’s family.  On their wedding day, my parents had to attend two receptions, one in Cleveland, and one in Fairview.

In the 1980’s, my grandmother and I became friends on those Tuesday nights. So much so that on one night, I felt I could venture into forbidden territory.    

“So, what can you tell me about our Polish background?”  I said.

She stalked away from me, into the dining room. Before she disappeared into the kitchen, she turned and said: “Why do you insist on asking this again?” 

“It’s because it’s who I am,” I answered, thinking it a weak reply.

It hit a nerve.  Her face fell.  She disappeared into her kitchen, returned with some cookies, sat down next to me and told me about her father, who came from a place called Suwałki.  Yes, that’s in Poland now, but it was in Russia for a long time.  I knew her dad’s grave said “John Doskey,” what she didn’t tell me was the name was changed. After she died, I discovered his name was Jan Dziedzikowski.  (Another fake name, but that’s another story.)

I asked about my grandfather’s folks.  She grew frustrated, tried to explain the Polish Partition to me, then said “his people came from all over.  Germany, Austria, some Russia.  Mostly Germany.”    

When I asked about Frank, her voice rose and grew agitated: “He was a bad man! Don’t ever speak of him again! “

(My paternal grandparents, Joe and Hattie Gorzynski, 1917/8, right after they married.)

Impossible.

Frank haunted me.  Came to me in dark clouds at night. Made appearances at Ouija board sessions. As a spirit, he was unpredictably nasty.

After hearing me inquire about Frank several times, my mother told me what she could: dad’s brother was “a little” older.  He ran away to become a “circus barker.” Mom thought he was married for a while, maybe even had kids.  Somewhere around Boston.  He died in Florida, “where the circus workers winter.”

“So now you know,” she concluded. “Don’t tell your grandmother I told you.”

Frank died March 26, 1958; I was born that September; my grandfather died March 22, 1959.  When Dad found Frank’s death certificate under some papers on his mother’s desk, he didn’t know his brother had died. Reportedly, it was one of the few instances he lost his temper with his mother.  When he demanded they exhume the body so Frank could be buried in a Catholic cemetery, Mom said he encountered roadblocks. Read: his mother. Grandma won, like she won most of the time.

Frank haunted him, too, though. 

Around ten years later, my parents were on their second vacation in Siesta Key when my father announced he wanted to look for Frank. He went alone. After some time, he returned, more silent than usual.  Finally, he told my mother he found nothing.

I know all this because Mom told me. When I realized I had someone who was willing to talk, I asked for more details.

“Did you ever meet him?” I asked. 

Yes. Once, after they became engaged, she went to the Fairview house to meet him. He was home. He’d totaled his car and he needed money. “He was really tall!”  (My dad was 6’4.”) According to mom, Frank was taller, very handsome, very charismatic.  He “checked her out” and made some comment on how my father nabbed a sexy babe. Or something like that.

“I didn’t think he was that bad, but your grandmother sure didn’t like him. Your father loved him.”

My father didn’t show much emotion towards anything.  So, if Dad loved him, then Frank was worth knowing about. 

2. How to do genealogical research on a Carny.

The death certificate was not in my grandmother’s final papers. She probably burned it. Around twelve years ago, I found our true family name – Gorzynski – and wondered if he used the name Frank Gorzynski, and that’s why my father couldn’t find him. No. With the correct surname in play, Ancestry.com kept yielding new insights. New family members. My grandfather was one of eight kids.  At nineteen, when he was still Jozef Gorzynski, he married his first wife Sophia Rucinski , age seventeen.  A year later, in July 1909, Sophia bore a son. Frank Joseph Gorzynski.  In 1912, when Joe was 23 and Sophia 21, she died.  Frank and Joe moved back to his parents’ house.  There, three months after losing his wife, Joe’s seventeen year old brother Alfons died. Tuberculosis, same as Sophia.  In 1914, six months after his sister Tekla succumbed to post-delivery sepsis, Joe’s father Marian died. From Diabetes. (Insulin hadn’t been discovered yet.) In 1917, Joe married Hatti Doski, formerly Jadwiga Dziedzikowska, my grandmother.  Jadwiga and Jozef Gorzynski lived with their “son” Frank in the Gorzynski family home in Cleveland’s Warszawa neighborhood for ten years. During that time, Joe lost two more of his brothers. Frank didn’t finish high school. He worked as a “driver.”  In 1927, the year my father was born, Joe and Hattie became “Hills” and moved to their own apartment, and Frank Hills moved with them.  They shared the same address until 1930 when Frank was counted twice on the national census: in his father’s household and in the household of his Sophia’s sister in Elwood, Indiana, about an hour away from Peru, Indiana, which is where the circuses wintered at that time.  By then, Frank Hill was 21. My father was 3.

International Circus Hall of Fame, Peru, Indiana

When I found this museum, I wrote to them about possible records.  The man who replied was very polite when he informed me no one kept records on the carnies.  There were too many of them.  I detected my father’s short ironic laugh in between his lines. 

Six months ago, I found Frank’s World War II draft registration, dated 1940.

Though he was in New Orleans at the time, his employer – Amusement Corporation of America (AMA) – was in Chicago, and he was still using my grandparents’ home address as his own. I wrote back to the man at the International Circus Hall of Fame. All he could do was confirm AMA ran carnivals. He referred me to the International Independent Showmen’s Museum. They didn’t have records on individual carnies, either, but the link accesses a trade magazine article about the Amusement Corporation of America.

A year ago, a death document for a Frank J. Hill of Hillsborough County Florida appeared on Ancestry.  I was hesitant to request it. I had found another Frank J. Hill who lived in Tampa and died around the same time. I didn’t want to receive some stranger’s death certificate.  So I ignored that recurring suggestion, for a while.  It wouldn’t go away.  Finally, I requested it.  Here it is:

3. Contemplations on a Death Certificate.

What was Frank’s life like before his corpse appeared in the ER that night?  Who delivered him?  There’s a street address: 1320 ½ Franklin Street.  Today, it’s a parking lot.  There’s a profession: Concessionaire Blue Grass Shows. No place of employment.  My guess is he lost his job with the Amusement Corporation of America and had to freelance. (I can’t help but think about Nightmare Alley’s Stanton Carlisle. )

The details about Frank’s birth and parentage are correct, suggesting the information came from someone in the know.  However, Edgar B. Walters, the informant, turned out to be no one significant: he worked part-time worker at the Walters-Howard-Farley funeral home, which handled the burial.  The father of one of the partners, Edgar was a retired barber who had the people skills required to get information out of difficult relatives  Lucky him. He got to call my grandmother.

The cemetery.  Oh, the cemetery. Oakland Cemetery, aka Home Cemetery or Old Home Cemetery, was once grounds of an Old Folks Home, now gone.  There are some marked graves in the lot, not Frank’s.  There’s a large open field, with plenty of space to bury abandoned corpses.

images from flgenweb

My siblings and I wager that when my father saw the death certificate, he noticed the five days his brother’s remains spent in the hospital morgue. I’m guessing he copied the information. Several years later, on that hot summer day during his vacation, he came here. He beheld its emptiness. And for a moment, perhaps this parched open downtown grassy area had a rare glimpse of my father’s heart. He may have even cried. (My father rarely cried.)  I’m sure he went to a bar and had a drink or two for Frank.

The click of my grandmother’s phone resonated across the years.  Everything on the death certificate confirmed the story my mother told me.  So strange. It was so long ago, and I’ve heard this story so many times.  Why was my heart breaking so . . . ?

For one thing, I really had hoped to discover Frank died happily somewhere in Gibsonton, where all good carnies retire.  I wanted to find him buried in a circus cemetery, alongside other one-time circus “talkers.”  (No self-respecting carny would use the word “barker.”) As long as he was with other circus people, I didn’t care if his grave was unmarked.

Strangely, I felt responsible. As if I were the sole witness.  A tardy mourner.  Born six months after his death, coming to awareness sixty some years later, I arrived far too late to mark his grave.

I’m not pretending my Uncle Frank was a nice man, but I am suggesting he was a victim of circumstances beyond his control. Born into a Polish speaking first-generation immigrant family, eight years after a Pole assassinated President McKinley, he was orphaned at two, and likely raised by his immigrant grandmother during a time when “Polacks” in America were shunned. To my grandmother, who wanted to shed that label, Frank represented everything she disliked about Joe’s earlier life: his first wife and his family’s Old Country ways. With Joe, she wanted to create a new American family. She felt she was doing the right thing, for her son and for his children, to erase her story and start again. Her treatment of Frank, indeed her treatment of all of my grandfather’s immediate family, may have actually given me a “leg up.” As a Hill, I was born without that tell-tale “ski” name into a world where Polacks were still the butt of many jokes. I could pass.

4. Contemplating heredity and inheritence:

I’m grateful for the opportunities born on my grandmother’s compromises. Still, I now see her gallant decisions as acts of violence. She hated Frank. She hated the Gorzynskis.

The thing is: I’m a Gorzynski.

Researching my forgotten Gorzynski ancestors has revealed a pattern to me: Frank’s not the only member of this family to suffer an unmarked, unrecognized burial.  It happened to Joe’s brother John. He died in a city hospital and was buried in their grounds when he was 35.  Cause of death: Cirrhosis of the Liver.  It took quite a bit of research to find John – I’d never heard his name before. He was the first in the family to use the name Hill. Nor had I heard about Uncle Eddy Gore, who died alone in Sandusky.  Sudden heart attack.  He had a wife in Cleveland who cared enough to bury him with a headstone, in a Lorain cemetery halfway between Sandusky and Cleveland.

Joe’s sister Helen’s burial raises suspicions, too.  Though she married and had a child with Grandma’s brother, Clem, and they lived together until she died, wife and husband are buried in separate cemeteries.  Helen was buried in the Gorzynski grave at Calvary Cemetery.  Clem was buried on the other side of town in Holy Cross Cemetery, with my grandmother’s clan, now officially the Doskeys.

My father’s family has a pattern of division and self-imposed alienation. He suffered from it, too. He was an enigma, a man who said little and drank a lot to numb his pain.  As he aged and produced more children, he grew bitter. In his 40’s, he took a job based in California.  Mom and us five kids stayed in the Fairview house. Every year, he stayed away from us a little longer than the year before.  One hot August day, his heart exploded, in the middle of our living room floor.  For forty years he lay in a grave marked by the government issued military stone we got for free.  No one visited.

I still love and identify with my father. When I was a girl, his friends joked that I was “Myron in a skirt.”

(Me and Dad in the backyard of our new Fairview house.)

One of my life’s goals has been to earn a stone for my grave, and to help make sure a decent one appeared on his. Last summer, after mom was laid to rest, dad finally received his proper treatment.   

Could this be my family’s inheritance? And our curse?  Perhaps the accumulation of all our ancestors’ traumas, all balled up and covered with COVID-like spikes, lodged inside a gene, mutated, and manifested as what we are today: functioning, “passing” as normal, yet emotionally crippled.

DNA tells me I’m 100% European. In other words, Pure White. In 1950, when my parents wed, Poles were still treated as an inferior ethnic group. The Irish, too, but not to the same extent. They had a language advantage. In Cleveland, they also had a good hold on the police department. (My maternal grandfather was an Irish cop.). Still, something attracted my parents, as it attracted all the other cross-pairings in second generation European American families. Some “similarities” enticed them to venture into groups their parents prohibited. First, they shared a desire to discard their past and live the “American Dream.” Second, they shared troubled family histories. I have long felt that the most common feature of “White America” is that we are all products of people who, at one point or another in our ancestry, left a beloved homeland either by choice or by force to join the American work force. Once in America, they faced extreme disappointment. Some found themselves living in conditions far worse than what they left behind. The luckiest overcame. It took grit to do that, sometimes in less than one generation. It took pride. It took resilience. It also took a lot of compromise.

I believe that all Americans suffer from some degree of epigenetic family trauma. In fact, this is the conceptual core of the two-part magical realist family saga I’m writing right now.  Since I didn’t know these people, I mythologized them, with the outrageous goal of adding the 19th century Polish migrant into the canon of Polish myths. Almost two years ago, after beginning the second novel – the one about Frank – did I realize I was writing a fabulist allegory about migration for white Americans. Frank’s death certificate told me how it would end, which meant I needed to revise the beginning, which as of April 2025, I’ve completed. Now it’s time to tell Frank’s story.

Oh, and you wonder what Frank looked like. My grandmother left behind several books of unmarked photos of herself and her relatives. After analyzing them in terms of era and context, I’ve identified four that I believe represent Frank. Here is one of them. I calculate his age to be eight or ten. This was taken at the Gorzynski home in the first years of my grandparents’ marriage. I suspect she dressed him up and put him on this donkey.  She did something similar to my father, a dozen years later. (second photo). Dad got a pony.