A Re-story: Reimagining My Heritage

Healing comes from re-storying our self-narratives.

Slanted Frame (Unsplash)

Saturday mornings during the spring and summer months I visit my local farm stand. Aside from the produce, including the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten, animals are harvested–sheep, pigs, and chickens–euphemistically sold as lamb and pork, once they’ve been “processed.” I can’t think of another name for chicken. As a vegan, not for health reasons, I don’t understand how they do what they do, but I also get that their livestock probably have damn good lives compared to those that end up shrink-wrapped in the supermarkets.

A curious potpourri of people, the father, A., looks like he just came off the boat, and my understanding is that his family were survivors of the Holocaust. He’s the chef, preparing a range of soups, stocks and whatever else inspires him that are available for purchase; and, he’s also the calculator, adding up the costs of your items on a simple sales pad, where he lists the cost per pound, how many pounds and the total for each item. The crew, as I’ll call them, includes his son with a Hebraic name, giving weight to my hypothesis about their origins, and the senior’s wife, who only occasionally makes an appearance. From bits of information I’ve learned that she’s a lawyer and is often in the city. (She also cooks.) They arrived to my area, upstate New York, around six years ago from New Jersey. They may not realize it, but they’ve become family.

Then there’s R. Obviously Irish, and much younger. They’ve “adopted” him. I’ve no idea where R came from or how they met. From what I can gather, he seems to do much of the actual farming. Although I’m older than all of them, maybe old enough to be the hypothetical mother of A., I sometimes think that I too would like to be adopted, brought into this clan that puts their arms around me, at least that’s how it feels, when I arrive. Along with the human members, there are the dogs and cats, positioned along the driveway, always ready to greet me, and who always manage to escape the oncoming cars.

They’d been around for a few years before I made my way up their road one Saturday morning. A friend of mine had told me about them, that she used to go there routinely, but she stopped because the bread they baked was too much for her to resist, and she’d finish one before getting back to her house, under ten minutes away. They’re simple mini-baguettes, with a crust that has a perfect crunch. Part of my ritual is lopping off the end–just the end–of the baguette to eat on my drive home. That time capsule on a Saturday morning gives me the sense that at least for the moment all is well in the world.

What draws me to them? Perhaps there’s a wished-for, subterranean link to my father. After all he really did get off the boat, arriving at Ellis Island from Palestine in 1920. In the few pictures I have of him he never had a beard but he had the heritage, coming from a seriously orthodox Jewish family. His father, from what I was told, ran a kosher slaughter house. (Obviously he didn’t “process” pork.)

In snooping through my father’s dresser drawers one night when he and my mother were out, I found fragments of his past. A picture of a man I presume to be my father, standing with a woman, and they’re holding a child in their arms. I can take this in two directions, one that he had another life, or that the woman was his sister who was twenty-five years older than him, having been born to their father’s first wife who died young. Except the man and the woman in the photo look about the same age. What do I want to believe? There’s another photo of a man, dressed in a black suit with a vest, wearing what appears to be a military cap, with his hand resting on an ornately carved column. The back side is designed as a post card, the left side for the “information,” and the right side for the “address only.” My father’s signature, “Sol Jainchill,”, on the back side of the card, was elaborate, curving and spacious, like the handwriting that I knew years later. The last name looked more like Churchill than Jainchill, the upper loop dominating the signature. He looks to be in his twenties, maybe early thirties. Guessing his age, the picture was probably taken in the 1930s, post-Depression. I’ve been told that before he married and settled down he was always ready to have a good time. Maybe this was an image captured of one of those good times. Still, as a relatively recent immigrant not long after the Depression, I wonder how he managed.

As much as I was in love with him at the age when it was okay for a little girl to be in love with her father, our “break-up” was brutal and the healing wasn’t complete when he died. Is that why I remain unsettled? Or is it because he left me with so little, a story where most of the pages are described by the white space? I have different theories about his silence. Was he always that way? Living the life of a bon vivant I would think otherwise.

My farm stand neighbors, the dirt of their work encrusted in their being, are in some ways the antithesis of my father, whose pants were always perfectly creased, who always wore a collared shirt, who only on weekends would be seen without a tie, and his hands didn’t know from dirt. So what. I’ve adopted them. Of course, they don’t know and I doubt they have a clue about the connection I’ve conjured up. It’s curious how much meaning the “asides” of life can assume.

Dr. Lydia P. Ogden, a trauma therapist and a professor of social work at Salem State University in Massachusetts, talks about how our “identities are built on the stories told about us and that we tell about ourselves and experiences. And healing comes from re-storying our self-narratives.”

I’ve written about my father before and undoubtedly I’ll write about him again. There’s more re-storying for my father and for me– and my new “family”–to be done.