Memories and Truth

I had a long talk with my sister this morning about all the memories we have of our childhood that we’re slowly finding out are not true. I don’t know about you, but when I have something in my head long enough, no matter how it got there, it seems to lodge in my brain matter and become an unquestioned part of my reality, complete with visual, auditory, and other sensory cues. When I’m faced with irrefutable evidence that the incident did not occur as I “remember” it, I first get indignant, then defensive, and then terrified that I’m losing my mind. A lot of these shaky memories swirl around my parents’ divorce in the early 1970s, the facts of which were so ugly and clouded in secrecy that I’m surprised my siblings and I are not all undergoing intensive treatment for repressed memory syndrome. This blog is still too new to me to figure out what, if any, rights I have to reveal further details of such personal family stories, so I’ll refrain from doing so for now, but I'll just add a defensive asterisk that my parents were very young and doing the best they could in a difficult situation. And they came around in the end, becoming extremely close during the last year of my mother’s life. My dad even spoke at her funeral in 1999. But for many of the major events of the 1970s, when my family was in the process of disemboweling itself, my brother, sister, and I now find that we have three completely distinct versions of what happened. And each of us will swear that ours is the right one. We do have a small paper trail to follow as we begin to sort through the Salvador Dali-like memories, including a letter from Karl Menninger himself, the revered Father of American Psychiatry who was asked by an influential family friend to evaluate my parents’ chances of making their marriage work. At this stage in his career, Menninger apparently only took calls from two people: this family friend and Richard Nixon. That should have clued us in that we might not fare too well. The Good Doctor pronounced that there was no chance of saving the marriage and that my parents should run in opposite directions (which they did). He had some choice words to say about my mother and her actions, even going so far as to call her a "non-virtuous woman." Bite me, Karl. I still have a lot to figure out about what went on during this time period. If only I could get Bruce and Sue to start their own blogs, we could submit our daily feeds to a shrink via the Internet and try to reconstruct our memories of that lost decade.

I also find big chunks missing from my pre-1970s memory bank. The few memories I do have (that aren’t about what TV shows I was watching) center on the ritualized events of my mother’s orthodox Jewish family. Here I am with my great-grandparents, Itshe Meyer and Alta Toba Korolnek at a family wedding in the late 1960s. They emigrated from Stashev, Poland, at the turn of the century and settled in Toronto. I can't believe I'm old enough to remember people who grew to adulthood in the shtetls of 19th century eastern Europe. I think they’d be about 130 now, and oh, how I wish I could talk to them as an adult and not just the kid who was wary of their Old World ways and my great-grandfather’s bemused and constantly repeated question to his legion of long-haired great-grandsons: “Are you a boy or are you a girl?” Family lore has it that Itshe Meyer used to groom the Cossacks’ horses when he was a lad. After one pogrom too many sent him packing to the New World, he used to collect old bottles in alleys, wash them out, and then resell them. Fast forward a few years and he is the owner of Consolidated Bottle Company, now one of the largest bottling manufacturers in Canada. I think of the direct line connecting the ultra orthodox, Yiddish-speaking Itshe Meyer and Alta Toba to my musical-hopping ten-year-old daughter Leah. I know that she has inherited the Korolnek red hair, but I wonder what else. I wish I had a memory bank I could trust to pass on to my daughter. Or better yet, a time machine. Not that being present at any event would necessarily lead to memories that are more “real.”

Comments

[danya rychly-bornstein / switzerland]

hello
I heard yesterday first time about your great-greatfather itshe meyer korolnek. he should be a half-brother of my great-greatfahter herschl korolnik, who moved from poland to switzerland end of the 19th century. do you have any further information about the korolnek/korolnik family ??
I am looking very much forward to your soon respond

danya rychly / switzerland

[Lori Swartz]

Do you know your great-grandmother's maiden name? My great-great-great-grandmother was Feiga Goldkind, from Staszow, Poland. She had a niece (her brother Moishe Goldkind's daughter), who married a man Meyer Korolnek. If these are your great-grandparents, it would add a new branch to my family tree.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Lori Swartz
Toronto, Canada