Rhymes of History
In ways my grandparents and parents could never have envisioned, I have become my great-grandfather. I now know what the wisest among us mean when they say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Whether iambic pentameter or free verse, there is a cadence and a rhythm to it so familiar and intimate that I can feel the creaks and squeals deep in my great -grandfather’s lungs as the flu pandemic took his life in 1953, when he was in his early seventies, as I am now. I understand and feel deep in my chest the sadness he lived with as a result of the decisions he made, griefs until now I could only imagine. We are bound together now not only by blood, but by experiences that reverberate through time at identical frequencies.
Most of my life has been colored by the family stories I heard as a boy and investigated as an older man. Stories many of us share, about hardships of immigration and new worlds, searing departures and arrivals in foreign places, stories about ventures that failed but lives that were a success because they gave children and grandchildren better futures.
This is the short version of my great-grandfather’s story and what binds me so closely to the single photograph I have of him. Why I now see parts of myself in his bewildered grey eyes, why I understand at a cellular level the resignation and sadness in his slouched posture.
Almost 115 years ago, around 1905, my great-grandparents left Latvia for South Africa, hoping to find a better life for their two young sons. In South Africa he became a baker, and they had several more children. Then my great-grandmother died in childbirth. Bereft and unable to cope, my great-grandfather left his two teenage sons behind, and returned to Latvia with the younger children to find a new wife he could bring back to South Africa to help him raise his family.
He went back to Latvia just before the start of World War I. As he and his young children steamed from England to the port at Riga, German submarines were already patrolling Baltic.
Yes, he found a new wife. But by the time he was ready bring her home and introduce his sons to their step-mother, the portal between eastern Europe and the west had slammed shut. He and his children were trapped, with her and hers, behind what would ultimately become the Iron Curtain. World War I was followed by the Russian Revolution, the era of Stalin, and then WWII. The portal remained closed for the remainder of his life. He never saw his sons in South Africa again. My grandfather never spoke of his vanished father, and offered no evidence that they had ever been able to correspond with one another.
When they were old women, the children my great-grandfather took back with him told us that he had been a depressed and unhappy man. They confided that returning to Latvia had been a most terrible decision, consigning three generations to the purgatory of Stalinism.
What similarity could I possibly see between this terrible story of loss and separation, and my own rich, fulfilled existence, lived in freedom and plenty? There is little similarity, but there is plenty of rhyme.
Rather than a six-week trip across oceans in a steamer, travelling steering from west to east, I flew from east to west in five hours, from Boston to California. I took no children with me, as he did, and I had no need of a wife, being quite satisfied with the one I have. But just as he did, I left two children behind, along with their spouses and my three young grandchildren. We would miss them, but we had children and grandchildren in California, and besides, we would be back in a couple of months, as soon as the snow melted. Just as my great-grandfather thought he would be back across the ocean as soon as he found and married a new wife.
There is little similarity between World War I and the Coronavirus, other than death, but they were equally effective at closing the portal between east and west. Unlike my great-grandfather, we communicate daily with children on the east coast, not only in writing, but thanks to technology, we get to see what we are missing. But we are separated just as surely as they were, by a decision to make a round trip. My great-grandfather was able to make only one leg of his trip, the second leg being cut out from under him. We’ve postponed our second leg several times, but we have no doubt that, unlike him, we will soon return home.
Our situations are in no way parallel. The rhyme, I think, is in the unanticipated consequences of the decisions we make, and in the universality of separation from those we love. Watching grandchildren grow, learn to walk and vocalize on a screen, is a privilege that previous generations could never have imagined. But it also emphasizes the rapidity of change. It underlines the importance of months in the life of a one year old. It forces the recognition of bonds not established, or at best, delayed.
But there is another level at which these experiences rhyme with others—at which family and the human family become indistinguishable.
We left my parents in Boston, in a retirement community that is now locked down. Were we there, we could not visit. They have a caregiver living with them, who makes their lives possible. He is locked down with them. But his lockdown extends beyond the impact of the Coronavirus. Like my great-grandparents, he left the country of his birth—Ghana, on the west coast of Africa—traveling east to the Unites States in order to secure a better life for his family. He left his wife and grown children, planning to return periodically to visit and to arrange for them to visit him.
Immigration in the United States being what it is, he hasn’t seen them for five years. Like us, he watches the growth of his grandchildren, who only know him from his image on a cellphone, and from the gifts he sends. Unlike my great-grandfather, he is able at any time to make the return trip home, giving up the opportunity to contribute to the security and wellbeing of his family, and with limited possibility of coming back to the United States. He is unlikely to make that decision. It is, he says, what we do to make a better life for our children.
The rhymes are perpetual, a part of the human experience, as unlikely to change as the manmade boundaries that separate us.