The Ashkenazim of Arkansas
sometimes this is actually funny
like funny ha ha!
A lot more about religion and immigration later, but this, for now.
My dad’s mom died when I was two, and his widower father married a German Holocaust survivor. I’ll call her Ruth. Both my dad’s parents were Jewish, as was my mom’s mom. It is through my mom’s mom (and her mom, and so on) that my children and I are Jewish, as it’s a matrilineal religion/culture. (Again, more about this later—the effects of the particular way these two are connected.)
But Ruth was the only fully practicing Jew among us, and it was with her that we celebrated Passover and occasionally Hanukkah. A lot of it annoyed me (being with family in general annoyed me, mostly) but I did like a lot of the songs and the charoset. Still do.
She told stories of Kristallnacht and was twice widowed because of the Holocaust, both men ultimately dying of the brutalities inflicted upon them.
I studied for a year in Europe while in college and at Ruth’s suggestion—a request, really—my boyfriend and I went to the small town in Germany where she had stayed safely in hiding. She wanted us to meet her protectors. I know these details aren’t all correct, but this is how I remember it. She arranged for us to stay in a fine, odd hotel (there was an exercise bicycle in the room, which perplexed us) and we met her friends at their tidy apartment. They were a lesbian couple--one of them a retired barber who gave my boyfriend a (much-needed, as evidenced in the photo above) trim. They lived above a bakery and greeted us downstairs, straight away directing us each to select several pastries. Once upstairs, they insisted we eat them all, one after the other, no matter that we were all about to go out to dinner. They spoke little English, and I almost no German, but my boyfriend was a dual citizen, and fluent.
The next day took us to a memorial plaque for the city’s Jews killed in the Holocaust, among them Ruth’s father, a Nazi resistor, murdered, presumed to have been assassinated early on.
In any case—I tell you all this because I remember stories, and always want to know more. I wanted to learn more about Ruth after she died. I was too self-centered to ask the questions I should have while she was alive. She never had children and if she wrote anything down, it’s nowhere to be found. I have found very little about her online.
So, in signing up for Ancestry and 23 and Me, my main goal was to find out where my family was from. My mom’s side is pretty straightforward, and the information I found I already knew. She was born of immigrants 2-3 generations back, her mom’s side Ashkenazi, her dad’s Scandinavian. My maternal grandfather’s family is big on the genealogy, and I know the name of the town in Sweden where they are from. I never found much about my dad’s side. I knew his dad was born in Brooklyn, and before that his family was from England, and his mom from (Poland? Hungary?)
What I wanted to know was mostly about my paternal great-grandparents and my great aunts and uncles, any cousins I might have, and where everyone was from and where they ended up. My dad’s dad was an only child and my dad isn’t very close to his family, so he didn’t know much more than I did.
So, back to the thing that’s funny, that actually made me laugh the other day. 23 and Me or Ancestry shows me migration patterns of my ancestors. Most of these were familiar to me, but then there is a migration to/through Arkansas from my dad’s side.
I spent quite a while researching synagogues in those states (as my husband said wryly when I told him this story the other day—” I bet there weren’t many”) hoping to find birth/death records for people with my last name but I never did.
Still, I thought I might have something interesting to research. I have accepted that what people pejoratively call rabbit holes are my way of exploring the world, like looking at core biopsies. A deep dive into a particular life or lives is of more interest to me than a broad understanding of history (as my grades in school have always reflected.)
I even had a working title for my never-to-be-published dissertation—let’s downscale to thesis—or, let’s face it, a little essay I could share with friend.
The Ashkenazim of Arkansas
I could find nothing about this particular path taken by my people. It was a robust enough migration that actual people who’d opted into these DNA sites were still living there. I figured for every person taking a test there were many more, so this improbable outpost of Jews was a big deal and I was going to get to the bottom of it, by gum.
It remained something that nagged at me but in the months since my DNA surprise I forgot about my quest to find my southern Jewish roots.
Only last week I thought of them again and realized that the people in the south were, of course, the donor’s ancestors.
Instead of making me sad, it is one of the things that has made me laugh. I guess because of the absurdity of it. The combination of me being the way I am and the facts being what they are. Part of my DNA discovery means I have to dismantle and ultimately let go of a working theory on late 18th century Jewish migratory patterns. I was quite fond of those Ashkenazim, phantoms that they are.