Summer is on the wane; I need socks. It's still beautiful, there are still roses and tomatoes and beans and two new flowers on the gardenia. But the change has begun. September is on its way.
This morning I received an email from a relative I've only met once. She lives in Illinois but some years ago was in Florida visiting her parents at the same time I was visiting my mother, so we met. Our grandfathers were brothers, hers Harry and mine Mike. She sent this family picture taken in New York in about 1915, of our great-grandparents Yetta and Jacob with their seven children - at the back, Ann, Mike, Sol, Belle, Bill, and in front Harry and little Leo, both seated - and Harry's wife behind him and daughter on his lap. My grandfather Mike is between Harry and their mother. In his face, I see my brother, named for him, but also my own children and of course my dad. The incredible power of genetics. I correspond with Belle's daughter Lola, now 92 in NYC, and granddaughter Patti, with Bill's sons Peter and David, with Leo's Ted and Debbie, and now with Harry's daughter Dottie. But they are all far away in the U.S. We are and have always been the only branch of the family in Canada - thanks to Joseph McCarthy, who forced my dad out of the country. Many thanks to him.
Yetta and Jacob emigrated in the 1880's from a shtetl near Minsk. He was a tailor and she was a battle axe. A few years after this picture, Mike would meet Nettie Gordin in the Pokonos, and 7 1/2 months after their wedding in 1922, my father would appear. Premature! my grandmother always said of the big healthy baby boy. Oh family. What would we have to write about if it weren't for family?
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