findingphilblog

I owe my great-grandmother an apology.

For more than a decade, I’ve shaken my fist at her. What kind of mother makes the choices she did? How could she not know? Didn’t she see?

It took a global pandemic for me to realize that, for Severina Brescia, there were no choices. Choice implies agency and options. For Severina, there were only reactions to unfolding horrors, which, she hoped, would be the least bad thing.

Marry a neighbor? At least her children had a “father” with an income. Realize the new husband is an abusive jerk? Send the children to their uncle. At least they are with family.

She hoped all would be well, and it wasn’t. I wonder, in the agonizing month it took for her to die from “childbed fever” contracted during her fourth and final birth if she was cognizant enough to spend time on recrimination. I hope she didn’t; I’m sorry that more than 100 years later, I did.

I’ve always said that interpretations of this life-long research project would be re-evaluated in the face of new evidence. While no new facts have come to light, a broader emotional understanding has.

As COVID-19 spreads on a wave of governmental failure and fear, our family faced its own crossroads: Do my daughter and I shelter with my parents while my husband, a newspaper photojournalist, continues to serve his community?

There was no good answer.

What if we weren’t infected? Why part when we could be together, safe at home? Still, each day he returns from assignments, the 14-day exposure clock clicks over afresh.

Even worse, what if I was already infected? In leaving my house, would I infect my parents? How could I live with myself if I did that?

Finally, if I wasn’t sick and he wasn’t sick, and the wave of infections hadn’t crested, now could be the last chance for safety. At least, for Jillian and I. Maybe.

In the end, Jason’s grandfather helped us decide.

In 1911, as pogroms savaged Ukraine and Jews like Nathan Malmut were hunted down, Jason’s paternal grandfather slipped the borders and found passage on a New York-bound ship. Nathan had no way of knowing that he had just 18 months to get out of the country and bring his wife, Sarah, and their year-old son, Ben, to freedom. By 1912, they were reunited in America.

A tiny fragment of family, saved by a split-second decision in a sliver of time. The Malmuts, also had no choices — only reactions — chanced an ocean and the world that lay beyond. We like to romanticize immigration tales as if our ancestors made these leaps the same way we pick travel itineraries or pursue career moves to big cities. It’s a fallacy. As someone so succinctly put it during a more recent immigration wave: “No one puts their children in boats unless the water is safer than land.”

Invariably, the decision that saved Nathan, Sarah and Ben — and made the lives of Esther, Anna, Saul, and Jason’s dad, Bruce (born Seymour) possible — came with bitter knowledge. Between the first and second World Wars, the Jews of Kakhovka, Ukraine, bore witness to mass executions. Wikipedia offers information about blood-libel cases and expulsions before World War I here. Yad Vashem has a history of its existence during World War II here. Though we have not discovered their names, it is almost certain some of Jason’s blood relatives perished in these atrocities.

That said, a viral epidemic is not a holocaust. What we, as a nation, are being asked to do pales in comparison to what was imposed upon impoverished, hunted people in the face of war and extreme human rights violations.

Still, by drawing strength from the stories of our ancestors, our family was able to do the one thing Severina Brescia and Nathan Malmut couldn’t: Make a choice. So, for now, we live apart, hoping every day for a speedy reunion.

Severina faced widowhood with a deceased mother, a father a continent away and three brothers, each as hapless as the next. It was her, 2,000 bucks and a lifetime of decisions for which she was not equipped emotionally, legally or economically.

So, Severina, across the ages, I am sorry. Sorry I judged you so bitterly. Sorry I couldn’t see through my own privilege. I am staring into history myself. My husband and I are making choices we hope are the right ones. We pray they can save our family. I hope, wherever you are, you can forgive me.