Mondays with Margie

A wet, gloomy, cold day, but I had a marvelous Monday with Margie, as I was bursting with news to tell her, and she heard me, felt me, understood my elation before I did. 

This morning I received, through a DNA testing service, an email from a cousin named Gatis Smagars in Latvia, telling me about my paternal grandfather’s family. My grandfather (who died three years before I was born, and who has always been a mystery to the family because he never told stories about his people) came from a family of socialists, antifascists, and academics. He was not Jewish, as we had thought, but Lutheran; and one of his sisters was a pioneer in paleobotany, one of the first women to carve out an academic career in Latvia in the 1920s.

I was bouncing in my chair over coffee with Margie, a little embarrassed. I said, "I know it shouldn't matter who I'm related to..." and she reached for my hand, held it steady, and said to me, “Now you have a stream you can cast in. You've never had that before.”

Tears rose to my eyes. Yes, I'm actually part of a family line. Not marginal, not an outcast, not a weirdo loner, some kind of misfit. I'm part of a lineage of people who lived by conscience, with moral vision. My great-aunt and her husband were placed under house arrest by the Nazis for their Social Democrat activism. My great-aunt’s husband was in the Latvian Parliament, later sent to a Nazi labor camp for his beliefs. Their son fought in the resistance to the Nazis. That aunt, the paleobotanist, was close to her brother, my grandfather. She loved him, wrote to him after he moved to the USA. The war caused disruptions in mail service and they lost each other.

I take that in. I want to know more. I wonder if he never talked about his family because the loss of them was too painful to think about.

Because I was “illegitimate” by birth and a leftist maverick in a right-wing family, I have felt in some ways isolated, disconnected, without a "people." Now I have, as Margie says, a stream I can cast in.