What’s Past, Not Passed

The Story Spark for this piece was Family History. I took the prompt: “Choose an event from your family’s history and write an alternative ending to it.” 

What’s past not passed

Other than my parents and their siblings, I never knew any of my ancestors personally. They had all passed away before I was born. My parents, my uncles, and aunts all came from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. 

DNA testing has identified that my heritage is 100% German/Jewish, based on what Ancestry.com can determine from a piece of spit. 

My parents must have endured a lot of hardship before emigrating to the United States, having lived in Germany just prior to WWII. They shared very little of that life with me. 

I would occasionally hear stories from my father about soccer feats he had accomplished, none of which, in my later years, I could verify. 

My mother shared some stories about being a tomboy when she was very young. 

When I was teaching in the 1980s and learning more about how to interview and ask good questions, I did manage to record an interview with my parents, but by that time, my father had had a stroke, and he had trouble sharing verbally. My mother helped at times, correcting his mistakes, but it didn’t give me much information. 

My father, being a German Jew, also made it difficult for my half-brother, Franz, from France. I only found and met Franz in 2013. He was 75 years old. My father had already sailed to the U.S. before he was born in 1938. His mother, who was not a Jew, when Franz was born in France, could not admit that she was an unwed mother of a German Jew’s child, for fear of what the Nazis would do to her or her child. 

So these stories about my parents’ lives became hidden away in their memories, not to be shared, unless asked. It never occurred to me, at least to ask, until all of those aunts and uncles were no longer around to answer the questions. 

All I have are pictures of people that my mother and father kept. Some I can identify, and others are just faces in unknown places. 

I have many letters written to my parents in America by people who were still living in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Some of them I was able to get translated by my wife’s father, who was not only fluent in German but could also read Old German Script, a style of writing that no longer exists. I know people who were born and raised in Germany who live here now, and they can’t translate the letters. 

I even have one letter from someone in Argentina written to my dad, in German.

I’m sure that most of these letters are friendly, ‘’How are you doing?’’ letters; however, there must be some tidbits of history that are buried in their wording. Someday, when I have time, I will endeavor to unlock the mystery hidden in this correspondence.

For this writing piece, I was asked to choose an event from my family’s history and write an alternative ending to it. 

My alteration would be to my personal history. I would like to go back in time and ask my parents, uncles, and aunts the unanswered questions. You know, if you read any of my other writing, I love the idea of time travel, so I would even wish to go back before I was born and ask my grandparents and even older ancestors what life was like, what stories they have, and share with them which parts of their stories I have inherited. 

Of course, I would have to learn to speak German first. And trust me, that is not an easy task. Take it from one who has been trying to learn French since 2013.