Genealogy

Mending Estrangement: Rebuilding the Missing Branch of My Family Tree

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Of all the inheritances one might lose, family histories are the most valuable. Money, jewelry, and furniture take second place to the stories our ancestors hoped would get passed down from one generation to the next.

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My mom’s Lewy Body Dementia was in full blossom when we moved her to memory care in 2019, right before COVID cast us all into isolation. The facility was only blocks away from the home Mom and her second husband bought in 1982. Every inch of that house and garden was designed and decorated by her. Only a few of her precious items moved with her to the room where she died. Everything else was up for grabs.

Like many mothers, mine had a highly refined sixth sense. She could read your mind. She saw through her children’s deceptions so easily. At an early age, I decided my best strategy was to always tell the truth. It wasn’t surprising, then, that Mom knew the day her house sold, though no one told her. She was inconsolable on the day its contents were “secretly” liquidated. Each of her five children collected what we could pack into our cars before all the rest was taken away in a truck to parts unknown. Mom’s beloved octagon table, her selection of paintings and mirrors, her quilting fabrics, her piano, her organ, and her porch swing became anonymous finds in some second-hand store. That’s how family histories are lost, by the way. The keeper of the history dies or the last survivor of a generation gets sick during plague. Or there’s a fire. Or a war. Often, the next generation chooses to disengage from their immediate family. Memorabilia gets cast aside, its stories forgotten.

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The current popularity of Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots signals a collective nostalgia for boxes left behind in some attic, somewhere, sometime during the 1990’s. Many of my fellow family historians have become pretty adept at fleshing out complex family histories. Some of us can trace American identity to the first wave of Western Europeans who broached this nation’s shores. I can do that on my maternal grandmother’s side, where I qualify to be a Daughter of the American Revolution six times over . . . and counting. On my father’s side, I trace my American identity to a migrant worker and his wife. Members of the Polish Peasant Diaspora, they were not welcome in America. We know the derogatory terms they encountered. Sometime during the 1970’s, mainstream America agreed not to use them anymore. DNA tells me my father was 100% Polish. His parents wouldn’t admit this while they were alive. I don’t blame them. They wanted to rise above the embarrassing stereotype attached to being Polish and pave the way for my generation to enjoy the American Dream. So our grandparents assimilated. Changed names. Changed locations. Some changed locations so many times, it’s as if they never stopped migrating. I’ve found death certificates for my relatives in cities all over the United States. Addresses confirm they never left the working class. They lived in company towns, industrial workers’ quarters, and densely populated ethnic urban neighborhoods. Many of them died young. Renal failure, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, and diabetes are among the most common causes of death.

Rebuilding a family tree becomes very difficult when ancestors relocated often, and were prone to changing their name. But not impossible. In my case, DNA results only confirmed suspicions. DNA doesn’t get you very far if you don’t have the proper surname. I have countless DNA matches on my father’s side that are only that: DNA matches. Their names are like Hill: Smith, Martin, Jessica, Rose. A generation or two back, an ancestor assumed an alias and began creating legal documents to support their revision of the family’s past. Little did they know that their grandchildren would have access to FamilySearch and Ancestry.com. There’s always a crack in the wall of documents created by ambitious migrants trying to rewrite their family’s history. For me, it was a pair of wedding documents.

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My mother told me when I was eleven that my name wasn’t really Hill. She had written down a name she found in an obituary, but it was wrong. In my thirties, I became very tired of the blandness of “Hill.” I decided to find my true surname. I knew my father’s parents changed it. So, I wrote a letter to the pastor at the church where my grandmother told me she and grandpa wed, requesting a copy of his marriage registry on October 10, 1917. The pastor wrote back. He sent me this:

When they married, my grandparents were using variations on their Polish names. Twenty years later, I discovered on Family Search that”Doski” was first used by my grandmother’s family on the 1900 census. “Gozinski” is a misspelling. The proper spelling of my grandparents childhood surnames appeared on another wedding registry. The two witnesses to my grandparents’ nuptials were Grandpa’s sister Helen and Grandma’s brother, Clarence (aka Clemens) A few years later, Helen and Clem married.

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On the day I walked into my mother’s vacant house to collect the things I wanted, I felt a bit like a stranger. She raised Mary Louise Hill (aka Mary Lou aka Louie aka Babe) in a void. I took after my father. Not knowing my father’s family, she didn’t recognize their traits in me. She didn’t know how to guide me.

I took mom’s sewing machine and a few pretty ribbons from collection. I took an antique mirror and some ceramic bowls from my maternal grandfather’s ancestral farm in Pennsylvania. And I took all of the old photo albums and memorabilia. Boxes of them, from all sides of the family. On visits home, I spent time sorting them out. I knew what was in those boxes, but I left them in Mom’s basement so other family members could have access to them. In the end, no one wanted them. I took them.

My mother took meticulous care of her own family’s photos, and they’re all marked well. (The display in the first photo above are hers.) Not so with my father’s family. It’s not that they didn’t take photos. Photography was one of Grandma Hill’s hobbies. She had multiple cameras, and she carried one of them almost everywhere she went. She took great care to organize her photos into albums. The problem is, she didn’t label anything. These were albums created for her own enjoyment.

Over time, I’ve learned to identify many faces in my father’s family. The anchor photo is always my grandmother. Hattie. She had very distinctive facial features, so it wasn’t difficult to identify younger versions of her.

This is one of the rare instances where she put her name on a photo.

That nose and those eyes helped me identify photos from every stage in her life.

According to censuses and other public records for Berea, Ohio at the turn of the twentieth century, the woman I knew as Hattie Hill was called Jadwiga Dziedziekowski as a girl. A photo of her church’s choir in the centennial anniversary book confirmed that name and its spelling. This photo also informed me that my Aunt Charlotte was originally named Leokadia.

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Migration – whether it’s from city to suburb, state to state, or country to country – is a sure fire way to become estranged from one’s past. Many families in Poland know they had relatives who left during their nineteenth century Partition. They have no idea where they ended up. I wrote a blog entry about the Dziedziekowskis several months ago which caught the attention of a Polish family historian with a mother who wanted to know what happened to her disappeared ancestors. The researcher recognized my tale as that of a long-lost relative. After exchanging photos, we decided we were distant cousins. When she finally admitted her father came from Poland, my grandmother told me I was the great-grandchild of Polish aristocrats. My new cousin informed me that was a lie: great-grandpa was from a hard working Christian peasant family called Dziedziach. His story had been passed down in her mother’s family: he and his brother Stanislaus had disappeared after their father died. When their mother remarried, they took off, never to be heard from again.

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Though I lived in Buffalo and Mom lived in Cleveland, I visited her as often as I could. We were close. She often confided in me. One day, while she was still living at home, she asked me to get a particular sweater from one of the drawers. She was in the early stages of her dementia already, and nothing was where she thought it was. While looking for her sweater, I found this:

My mother was upset when I handed her both the sweater and this photo. She demanded I return the photo to where I found it. She knew it was the branch of the family I was most obsessed with. She’d written the name “Hill” on the back. And I could easily recognize my young grandfather. You see, even though I never met the man, I knew from photos that my grandfather had pretty distinctive features, too. Here’s a page from Grandma’s album that features she and Joe when they were courting. Grandma’s sweetheart is none other than the little boy leaning against his mother’s knee in the family photo.

The Górzyński family photo tickles me. Grandpa Joe and his family laugh with me across time. My great-grandfather Marian – Oh my! I can imagine him winking. I estimate his photo was taken between 1895 and 1901, when no one smiled for photos. Anyone who did was considered a little inappropriate. On showing this to my seven-year-old nephew, he labeled it”the silly family.”

The silly family. The ancestors no one wanted to talk about. Were they silly? Were they embarrassing? Were they in the mafia? Or did they simply refuse to assimilate? My grandfather’s parents were migrants for a long time. They moved several times before they owned their own home. They always lived in the Polish enclave. Creating America’s Polonia was a process: villages reunited in working class areas near America’s mines, factories, and stockyards. At the turn of the twentieth century in Cleveland, Warszawa, the Polish neighborhood my family settled in, “was, in essence, a Polish town situated in the corporate limits of Cleveland” (Polish Americans and Their Communities in Cleveland, by John J. Grabowski, Judith Zielinski-Zak, Alice Boberg, and Ralph Wroblewski.) That community flourished as long as it could remain isolated. President McKinley’s assassination was the first of several events that forced the assimilation of Polonia into the urban Cleveland landscape.

Great-Grandpa Marian (often called Frank) died in 1914. Franciszka stayed in the Warszawa house her husband built for her until she died. That house – a double with a livable attic – is still standing. In 1920, the house was functioning as my great-grandparents had intended: Great-Grandma lived there with Walter and his family, and Joe and his family, plus Helen and John, both still single. After Walter died and his wife and daughters moved out, Helen married Clem, and their family moved in. My grandparents moved out when my father was born. Helen and Clem stayed on with great-grandma for a few more years before finding their own suburban home. During the 1930’s Grandchildren moved into the family home, but they didn’t last long. By 1939, when Franciszka died, she had tenants. The final census she appears on – 1930 – lists her as illiterate, her language, Polish. At the time of her death, her eldest living son – and possibly the child who was in line to inherit the house – was my grandfather. By then, Joe and Hattie lived in the suburbs. It appears Joe washed his hands of the family situation completely. Franciszka’s death certificate and the documents marking the sale of the house were signed by Grandpa’s youngest brother Eddie, who still lived nearby. It’s amazing this photo remained in our possession. Although mom kept us hidden from us, I credit her with keeping it. She valued family history, even when it was a little embarrassing.

Embarrassing by whose standards, though? My research suggests otherwise. To their family back in Poland, they were a success story. Until they lost touch. This photo was taken to send to someone. Chances are, copies of it went to Poland, where everyone knew the beginning of this family’s story.

Marian Gorzynski was orphaned at age three when his mother died and his father moved away and remarried. When Marian married, he lived in Czarny Bryńsk, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivoideship, Poland and had a respected trade: he was a wheelwright. Franciszka Golembiewska was the eldest daughter of an esteemed family in nearby Bryńsk-Ostrowy (shown on maps as Ostrowy), Warmian-Mazurian Voivoideship, Poland. These villages were among several satellite settlements of the nearby settlement called Bryńsk. (Marian’s father was born there.) Franciszka’s father Thomas bequeathed a slice of his land to his community, where he erected a wooden cross for travelers to pray before leaving town. When that cross was destroyed, the village erected another. I’m very grateful to a contact I made through the Facebook page Orędowdnik Wielkiego Lasu who has shared this story as well as photos of the current cross marking the former Gołembiewski land.

The Gorzynskis’ first stop in America was Glen Lyon, Pennsylvania where, in 1881, the wheelwright became a laborer for the Susquehanna Coal Company. The family photo suggests that Marian was tall. It’s an attribute he passed on. The men (and some of the women) in immediate family range in height from 6’0 to 6’7″. If Marian was anything over six foot tall, he probably found it challenging to work under ground.

from: Growing Up In Coal Country by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Given his experience in carpentry, I imagine him as one of the men tasked with timbering tunnels.

From Growing Up In Coal Country by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Meanwhile, above ground, Great-Grandma Franciszka had babies. The miners were paid in scrip that could only be spent at company stores. There was never enough to feed a family, and it was the women’s job to figure out how to make it last.

From Images of America: The Anthracite Coal Region’s Slavic Community by Brian Arden

Franciszka was the first of Thomas Gołembiewski’s daughters to leave home. She arrived in Castle Garden September 25, 1883, accompanied by an eleven month old daughter (Honorata). In July 1884, the couple’s eldest son Ladislas was born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. Later called Walter, he’s the boy standing between his parents in the family photo. My grandfather, Jozef, was born across the river from Nanticoke, in Plymouth, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1888. A daughter named Tekla was born in Pennsylvania in 1887. In 1890, their son John was born in Buffalo, followed by Helena, born in Buffalo in 1892. Their next son, Alfons, was born in Cleveland in 1894, and their final child, Ildefons (Edward), was also born in Cleveland in 1897. Looking at the photo, I calculate my grandfather is between six and eight. If that is so, then the baby is Alfons, the little girl in front, Helena.

Somewhere along the line, these folks earned a reputation that my father and his mother didn’t want to pass on. My siblings and I heard rumors about rum-running and organized crime. And one of grandpa’s migrant kin supposedly knew Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin. I have researched that particular rumor in depth and come up with circumstantial evidence. The Górzyńskis lived five blocks away from the Czolgosz family. Leon worked at the same rolling mill each of the Górzyński men worked at one point or another. Leon’s father ran a bar not far from the rolling mills. Given my family’s love of drink, I’m sure my great-grandfather, my grandfather and his brothers visited it once or twice. Any association may have been passing. Does that deserve estrangement? If so, then every man who enjoyed a good drink and worked in the rolling mills was implicated.

I’m a member of Polish Genealogical Societies in both Cleveland and Buffalo, and I’ve met several Poles with ancestors who knew Leon Czolgosz or his family. Most retained their Polish name and identity. Not even Leon Czolgosz’s father took an alias. Marian and Franciszka didn’t change their names, either. But their children did. Shortly before World War I, America’s cities developed Americanization programs that targeted these immigrants’ children of immigrants. Recognizing their potential as soldiers and workers, these programs taught American culture. Cities with large immigrant communities continued those programs into the 1920’s. My grandfather may have resisted participating for a while, but my grandmother was ambitious. She went to business school, and she’d already changed her name once. She was the force behind their assimilation. After they changed their name, they left Warsawa behind. In 1932 they bought a home in Fairview Park, a semi-rural village on the west side of Cleveland. Then four years old, my father grew up there. If his Polish grandmother wanted to see her newest grandson, she needed to find someone who owned a car. Fairview Park probably seemed like another country to her.

My family history research has focused on restoring my migrant ancestors’ dignity, and their past. This blog does that. My novel The Double-Souled Son strives to do that, too, while also acknowledging these folks were probably far from perfect. The first part of the book recreates the Poland they left behind: a traditional village in its third generation of Prussian occupation where it’s getting harder to keep their Polish language and culture alive. Essentially, they were traumatized before they ever left home, and the conditions they encountered in America only made it worse. In the second part of the book, the characters remedy their alienation by recreating their village life in urban Polish enclaves. There, ancestors’ traditions were passed on to their children. How they came to America was integral to their identity.

The novel is fiction. The “real” story is slightly different. This photo represents a high point in my family’s journey towards building an American home. The “true” story I’ve cobbled together about it deserves to be told:

Based on my timeline, the Gorzynskis were living in Cleveland when they visited Pannebecker Photography, a well known shop in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. Why did the family return to Pennsylvania?

In 1939, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of St. Adalbert’s Roman Catholic Church in Glen Lyon, the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader published an article listing the names of the miners who founded that church, in 1889. On the fifth line from the bottom I found the name Marian Gorzynski.

found in Newspapers.com 5 February 2021.

Marian arrived in 1881. St. Adalbert’s cornerstone was laid 20 November 1889. Between 1881 and 1889, Glen Lyon’s Polish mine workers had to travel to Nanticoke’s St. Stanislaus if they wanted to attend a Catholic mass delivered in their own language. St. Adalbert Parish’s first service was held in a basement in 1889. The original church building was dedicated in 1891. My Gorzysnki family photo wasn’t taken then, though. Given my grandfather’s age in the photo, I’m imagining Marian and his family returned for a service inside the new church when they could finally afford to travel with all those children.

found at the Nanticoke Historical Society.

The family in my photo is far from silly. They’re happy. Perhaps for the first time since arriving in America, they’re proud. They’ve moved on to jobs that pay in United States currency, and they’ve saved enough of it to return to their first American home, and the church they helped build. This photo was a big expense for them. I’ll bet Franciszka made a new dress for it, and they surely had several copies made, one for each of their children, one for their own home, and one for Franciszka’s parents, who were still alive, living, in their home near the cross in Ostrowy.

The current St. Adalbert’s in Glen Lyon, now known as Holy Spirit Church, and slated to close soon. My photo, taken May 2024.

Baba Yaga’s Professional and Writing Biography

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            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

/ mlouisehill / 2 Comments

  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.”