I come from a large family. Strong we stand, mainly because of our numbers. My parents had 5 children, and my grandparents from my mother’s side raised 10. My grandfather’s parents had 13 so much as children, of which 11 died because of the Spanish flu. (That same flu wiped out a large part of my Polish grandmother’s family, including her mother. A woman, who, the story goes, could speak to the dead. But that is for another time). On the 50th anniversary of my grandparent’s wedding, the whole family was there. And so we found ourselves with more than 100 people celebrating this union in their large garden, on a beautiful summer’s day, long ago.
Within this particular family, as within all large families, every story ever told can be found. People and their lives in are often highly fascinating, and a never-ending source of interest. But when a story involves a member of my own family, it becomes personal. That casual little fact makes it all the more tangible, and ‘What would I have done’ starts creeping up on me. And leaves room for an active imagination to fill in the blanks.
As a young girl, I used to ask my mother about the people in her family. I still do, and she tells me about the good, the bad, and, now that I’m older, the ugly too. While looking at photos in family albums, flipping through the pages, my mother points out uncles, aunts and cousins, and hands me little shreds of stories from their lives. The lovers who were unable to get together, great fortunes easily won and lost, the treacheries, the depressions leading to suicide, the secret affairs, resulting in illicit children. Both the simplest and the greater stories, every thinkable drama has at one time or another, been lived out to the bitter end. She never forgets to add some little fact that makes them all the more real.
‘There’s your great-grandfather. See him, that little pot-bellied man with the big smile? I remember how he used to love to frighten me when I was a little girl. He’d hide behind a door and scare me to tears. Anyway, he was a smart man, did very well on the stock market, and got very rich. He lost it all later, but after his wife died, he bought himself a car, a novelty at that time, and hired a chauffeur. Then he took his 3 beautiful daughters on long trips through Europe’. She points ‘Look, here’s your grandmother.’ I look at an old black and white photograph of 3 young women, posing along a stretched black automobile. The girls in light elegant summer dresses. Their father is standing proudly behind them, while the chauffeur is seated behind the wheel, wearing an impressive moustache. My grandmother is the only one wearing a summer hat. She seems to cast a confident, slightly seductive glance at the camera.
On the picture my grandmother is a strong and beautiful girl on the threshold of life, radiating a promising future, eager to start. How does the story continue? Well, there’s too much to tell, but in short: she grew up, married my grandfather, had 10 children, and they all lived colourful lives in that impressive house. A tiny fact: being a woman living at that time, my grandmother never got the chance to go to university. No matter how educated or well to do her father was, this was simply not possible for her. She was a bright young girl, with razor-sharp wit and a great hunger to learn. Always reading books, she had a love for languages, and later in life she became a translator. She always – always – stressed the importance of a good education to both her children and grandchildren. As a child I used to watch her in awe, this impressive, flamboyant woman of the world.
‘She really wanted to be writer, you know’ my mother remarks while turning the page. ‘In a way, you are now leading the life she would have loved to live’.
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