Knowing From Whence You Came

the cemetery plot gate - where the three brothers are buried

Three brothers, Abraham, Louis, and Benjamin (my maternal grandfather,) came to America from a shtetl near Minsk called Horviler-Davidevka. Abraham, the eldest, was known to be a hard worker who labored to bring his large family to America. Louis, who we knew as Labeh, the middle brother, partnered with his younger brother Benjamin in a kosher butcher shop. When Ben died at 42,  Labeh refused to give his widowed sister-in-law Ben's share of the business, leaving her and her 3 children to starve. They're even buried near to each other. Just a regular kinda American family. 

We who gathered this weekend are the descendants of Abraham and Benjamin. Louis's family has been unreachable for a long time. Meanwhile, the known descendants of those three brothers number 210 people, the youngest of which is 6 weeks old...and was in attendance.

I'm not about to bore you with the follies and foibles of this clan but I am going to take advantage of the my blog, my rules precept to write about this weekend in Lakeville, Connecticut. 

Blame it on Covid. Because no one could get together, the descendants of Abraham, who have always been a tight knit group, started up a regular zoom call. Whatever the genesis, they began cousin zoom calls. Someone reached out to me and my cousin Ellis, two of Benjamin's grandchildren, and invited us into the group. This cackling cadre meets on zoom every other week to talk and laugh a lot...and somewhere, someone had the brilliant idea of having a reunion. Since two of Abraham's sons had egg/chicken farms in Moodus, Connecticut where the family used to gather when I was a kid, we decided the reunion had to be in Connecticut. It took over a year of planning, but this past weekend, 45 adults and 9 kids convened for the first Simon family reunion since the impromptu ones on the farm.. 

Oh, ye skeptics of little faith! Be gone! This was a totally fabulous weekend. We got to tell stories, share memories, look at a whole lot of really old pictures and even some home movies. We saw each other as we once were...and found we rather liked each other as we are now. As we grew more comfortable with each other, we talked about the sad stuff, too. Two of our cousins were lost on 9/11.  I suspect I always knew the chicken farms were the heart of the extended family, and I was relieved to know I wasn't the only one with those memories of getting pecked. And if you've not experienced blow-up chicken races, you just haven't lived.

I did not know what to expect from this past weekend. I knew the older generation of cousins, all of whom are now gone, through my mom who kept in touch with everyone. I met most of my cohort cousins when we were kids, had kid memories of them, but besides my first cousins, no real contact in recent years. The zoom calls changed all that. Suddenly, there were all these people who knew other parts of my family's story....stories I'd heard, but never put together. Talking to them every other week was one thing, but getting together? 

The warmth, love, acceptance, and laughter was embracing and amazing. Not overwhelming at all. There was so much cross talk it was hard to get everyone to shut up for the presentations, and even then, we were yelling out additions and corrections! A veritable cacophony of information. We were all hungry for that information. We wanted to know who we were and who we are. 

One upon a time, people stayed in their villages and towns, and even ghettos. You knew who was related to whom, who was beloved, who was feared, and who shared that weird forehead wrinkle with you. There is definitely a "Simon Face;" lots of the guys have it...complete with dimples and chin clefts. We discovered blue eyes, left-handedness, breast cancer, and depression seem to run in the family. I favor my paternal side, but one of my kids is blue-eyed ....just like my mom who is also lefty....just like my grandfather....and just like my granddaughter. That makes me smile because in looking at my cousins, I got to see that same grey-blue eye color across several generations; distant or not, we are part of a shared gene pool. 

I made sure to have lunch on Saturday with my friend Wendy who actually lives near the resort and took me over there for the site-inspection last summer. On the way back from lunch, we stopped at one of the most idyllic places I'd ever seen, Twin Oaks Preserve. Apparently this is a popular site for painting, because two guys were doing just that. I asked one of them if I could shoot a picture over his shoulder. He grinned and nodded. "I've been many places," he told me as he pointed the end of his brush toward the view, "but this is why I live here."  I didn't know a thing about this guy other than he loved to paint; you could see it in his face. Whatever brought him to this spot, I wanted to believe, was out of love for something or perhaps someone. The reason didn't matter; his acceptance of his own presence did.

The next day, as I  headed back to Long Island with my cousins Ellis and Tracey, we passed the same spot, and the two guys were still painting. For a moment, I envied them, then realized I had just experienced my own sense of continuity. And perhaps more importantly, I needed to figure out how not to let that go. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Simon Zoom calls recommence next Tuesday.

We're already planning Reunion 2025.

Be there or be square.