The ghosts that haunt our DNA
A faded old photo revives a forgotten family story
Saturday at sundown, Jews across the world begin the Hanukkah holiday. At our house, we’ll light our menorah and spin dreidels. But the potato latkes will be fried up by my Anglican husband. And the menorahs on our mantle share space with a display of Christmas teddy bears.
Ours is a multicultural, secular family. I feel no deep tie to the Jewish faith, much less to the nationalistic Hanukkah story about the military triumph of Judas Maccabee over the Seleucid Empire.
If I have a religion at all, it’s a far more primal form of ancestor worship. I come from a family of storytellers. Our tribe knits itself together through shared memories and old jokes. In marking Hanukkah, I like to think I’m connecting with our history, writing the next chapter.
But what about the stories we don’t tell? The ones we choose not to remember?
For much of the last year, I’ve been haunted by a damaged old photo.
This Hanukkah story starts last summer. We were hosting a houseful of guests at our family’s cabin in the woods, when three of the kids came dashing over, fresh from exploring my parents’ big storage shed.
“We found a picture of a ghost!” my friend’s 11-yearold daughter called out.
It was a large framed blackand-white portrait photo of a stern woman in old-fashioned dress. The glass had broken, and the picture had warped and faded, and was covered with water spots. The woman did indeed look ghostly, staring hard at the observer through a fog of time.
It wasn’t a photo I’d seen before. The woman certainly wasn’t pretty. She looked tough, intimidating, and quite a bit like my dad in drag.
I suddenly realized I must be looking at a picture of my paternal great-grandmother, my father’s father’s mother.
In a family that never stops talking, no one ever talked much about Sonia Simovitch.
She was my great-grandfather’s second wife.
According to the few stories I overheard when I was younger, about her only redeeming feature was that she treated her own children and her stepchildren with an equal lack of affection. Her husband was a gentle, pious man who spent much of his time at the synagogue. She was more the fairytale wicked stepmother, who locked up the food when her children were hungry, then punished the older stepson who broke into the stores to steal something for his little brothers to eat.
The siblings eventually emigrated from Russia to North America, spreading across the continent as part of the great Jewish diaspora.
Sonia, too, later landed at Ellis Island.
“The brothers all sent her money so she would stay in New York,” says my 81-yearold father. “She was never fondly spoken of.”
He doesn’t remember meeting his grandmother, though she did visit Alberta once. He knew her only from this photograph. He didn’t even know her name. For that, I had to call my Auntie Sarah, 89, who’s wintering in Phoenix.
“She wasn’t a very nice person,” she told me. “Dad never talked much about her.”
Sonia wasn’t so much the black sheep of the family as its unperson, so unpleasant she was written right out of the family narrative.
Yet when I stare at her formidable face, I can’t help wondering how Sonia would tell her story. Was she pushed into a marriage and a life as a mother she didn’t want and didn’t know how to handle? Was she hard because she’d been forced to run an impoverished household while her impractical husband prayed? Or was she just a genuinely unpleasant person, a natural-born bully? When the only people to remember us at all are those who remember us without love, do we die a second death?
I celebrate Hanukkah to honour the Jewish grandparents I remember with affection. But in adopting a secular ancestor worship as our faith, we must occasionally confront the reality that some of those ancestors were people we probably wouldn’t want to meet. We all construct our own imperfectly accurate family narratives, allowing time to blur and soften the failings of those we loved, allowing us to airbrush or Photoshop those we choose to forget out of our mental family albums.
I look again at poor unloved, unlovely Sonia Simovitch. Her hair is wavy — perhaps that’s where my father got his curly hair. He passed it on to me. I passed it on to my daughter. My dad definitely got Sonia’s nose. I fear I inherited her rather unfortunate chin.
But perhaps I got something else from Sonia — a certain core of steel that helps me face down angry politicians or fight for what I believe. Perhaps, when we honour our past, we must accept that not all of it is pretty, but that it all shapes who we are today.
“There are all kinds of people in a family,” says my dad. “Some are saints. And some are not.”
And some are ghosts — who haunt our DNA, and even our Hanukkah table.