AS I WRITE MY NOVEL Far to Go, Dad embarks on his own research into our family history. We exchange a steady flow of emails each morning, me asking questions and him answering them. Soon he begins his own attempts at documenting what he learns, including the first chapter of a book recounted from the point of view of Granny and Gumper’s shared passport.
The passport left out on a desk, its pages riffled by the wind.
Later, Dad sends me drafts of his chapters. Accompanying the thorough research are small boxes of text, containing the fates of various relatives.
Ella was gassed, meaning suffocated, to death on March 8, 1944, at Auschwitz. May Ella’s soul be bound in the bond of eternal life.
May he rest in peace and not be forgotten. Alfred was murdered, at Svatobořice in 1942 at the age of 78 … those bastard Nazis.
For my part, as I work on the novel, I am also taking a second set of notes, more personal, about my depression as it relates to our family. As I write, however, I am assailed by doubts about my own qualifications to tell this story, as though my father and my older cousins have a lease on “truth” because of their increased years. As though my dead relatives have taken the truth to the earth and my opinion is entirely irrelevant.
A photographer from New York comes to interview me as part of a project on hidden Jews. I confess my uncertainty to her. She assures me that my version is not inferior, only different. It is mine. I counter that it is inferior precisely because it is mine—which is to say, I have learned my position in the family. I feel an oppressive, relentless psychic weight, a nagging voice that I have to somehow override each time I set pen to paper.
Every family has its own mythology; adding a writer to the mix means that the mythology becomes externalized, that a trace of it exists physically, in the larger world. The material version—the book—accrues the sheen of truth, despite the fact that it is just one of many possible stories. Who am I to claim the official version?
In reading William Styron’s depression memoir, Darkness Visible, and his daughter Alexandra’s Reading My Father (there is an essay by Styron’s wife, Rose, as well), you notice the divergence between the stories but also the overlap. The books act as a documented inheritance; a reader can follow the lineage directly, tracing a line from origin to output, a crude furrow in the dirt from cause to effect. Of course, William Styron is not the bona fide origin, only a juncture in the river, and his daughter recognizes as much, going back a generation further to expose what she comes to see as her grandfather’s undiagnosed depression. The decision where to begin a family story is arbitrary. There is always a previous generation to excavate, like a never-ending series of lost civilizations buried deeper and deeper in the sand.
But a shovel only digs so deep. And a story, any story, has to start somewhere.