I probably still have some of my mother’s kin living where she last left them. I wouldn’t know because to me they are not family. In fact they are the furthest thing from family a person would wish to have / would / could wish on their arch enemy / enemies to have. This is not country specific. I’ve spoken with so many people, from all kinds of countries and walks of life, and they all had similar stories to tell. What united us in our individual adventures was the knowledge that we all went through pretty much the same. We’re really way more alike than we would care to admit at times, so regardless of where you are or where you feel you (don’t) belong to, hopefully something will resonate. And with that I am hopping off my little soap box and letting the writing speak for itself. 

As a child you remember it differently. Things are taller, they take longer and destinations are far wider apart. But once you’ve developed it, your instinct about people will pretty much stay the same. It’s funny because in my life the people I’ve known sine childhood changed, at least on the surface, but really it only meant that their masks were beginning to slip off. 

Wujek* Zbyszek was my mother’s younger brother, the second in line to whatever inheritance their parents (and grandparents) may have deemed appropriate. Or how their families saw it. According to family legend (so really mom mom’s interpretation of events), my grandfather’s family had been so wealthy that not only were they able to help seven brothers establish themselves, they also had a live-in maid, cook and seamstress. There was even a photo of my great-grandmother praying in the family chapel, which lay staid to her devout Catholicism. That last bit was super important. The family name was too different, and that’s even before taking her name into account, I can’t state it here, because I have gone strictly no-contact with the relatives after the same wujek Zbyszek sold an apartment I’d inherited from my grandmother for twice the price he quoted me, and still demanded a one-thousand Euro commission. Writing about them is therapeutic and also serves to help others in a similar position, to show them that they are not alone. But I don’t want them sniffing me out like nefariously trained bloodhounds. I’ve felt much more at peace since they’ve been out of my life, and the last time I had any contact with them was when wujek Zbyszek wired me money he claimed to be somehow left over from the sale back in 2006. 

Although distinctly Ashkenazi  (so easy to hide within the countless others of her name), her name, coupled with the names of my relatives and the information I have to divulge in order to write about them, would be more than enough to disclose her identity and set whoever is still alive from that bunch on my trail. Apparently she hailed from Lithuania, which was extremely convenient about 120+ years ago if you wanted to keep unwanted names hidden, of which hers was most definitely one. 

Whether or not that had much of anything to do with wujek Zbyszek’s love for the outdoors and his choice of sports was not something I would hazard a wager on. Tennis, skiing and sailing are classed as expensive sports everywhere, there is no question about that. Perhaps, rather than pursuing these sports as some kind of status symbol his interest went beyond a love for the water, the mountains and a good session of “pounding it out of your system.” He liked being tan, he liked being seen and from what I picked up when observing the relatives interact with each other, he liked being looked at as a go-getter and someone who had it made. If his older sister was the beauty in the family, he was more than happy to be seen as the brains. Physically he looked a lot like my grandfather, and my grandfather was the one reason I still gave them a chance. My grandfather was good people, and I couldn’t for the life of me process or even understand how someone so kind and so empathetic could have produced not one but four children who – much as it’s not something you’re allowed to say in Polish society as you cannot say anything negative about your elders – were narcissistic and rotten to the core. If you swindle someone out of their inheritance, that makes you rotten. If you tell a small child that the cousin she had bonded with over the summer had hit her and abused her, that’s beyond redemption in my book. 

My mother told me that wujek Zbyszek once had to jump out of a window in his underwear when the woman’s husband made a surprise appearance. Perhaps that, too, was yet another story to add to the legend that was Zbigniew G. Anything to distract from the fact that if his father’s true history came out, he would have been known not as Zbigniew G. whom everyone called Zbyszek, but as “The Jew,” a descriptive no Pole (I knew) wanted to be subjected to, and fought hand and foot to the point of utter denial. A dark-eyed, dark-haired youth with dubious heritage could be a danger to himself and to others and at the very least wouldn’t get ahead in life. Much better to be thought of as somewhat of a rake, hustler and even a grifter, but that too evoked respect, because though I’m sure not everyone was like that, what I was seeing around me was Poles pretending to be pious but backstabbing the very hands that would feed them every chance they got. 

I really do wish I could have discussed this with my grandfather. But those stories (except for the one about wujek Zbyszek’s adventures with underwear) only came to my knowledge when my grandfather was long gone. I must have been well into my twenties when I really started digging around with the knowledge of what it all meant i.e. being fully aware of what a Jewish name was and what it could mean, especially in Poland where I noticed people labeled someone “a Jew” as though that took away the identity of the country where they lived, ate and breathed on a daily basis.

*uncle