PartI

The irony of it all is that wujek Zbyszek married a woman with the same story. Ciocia Basia’s mother – Marianna – was Italian and her father Armenian. A story I always found a little bit too quaint for my liking. I was 14 when I figured out that Armenian names tended to end in -ian or -yan, courtesy of the bad guy in one of my favorite stories (Alexander Key’s Escape to Witch Mountain), a book my neighbor from across the hall had given me that I really shouldn’t have been reading when I was fourteen ( Paula Trachtmann’s Disturb Not the Dream) and William Saroyan (who to this day has remained one of my favorite writers after discovering him in a second hand bookstore in Budapest at the age of 16). I’ve been blanking on wujek Annik’s family name for years now but I do remember recognizing it as deeply Ashkenazi, even when I first heard it. My great-grandmother’s (conversion to) Catholicism had once again saved the day – alongside long distance phone calls being a pretty complicated matter in those days, not to mention the fact that burdensome letters could easily be made to disappear, especially when you knew the right people (who’d take care of these matters). 

Their daughter, ciocia* Basia, produced one son who was the antithesis of his father: tall due to hormone treatment (this info courtesy of my mother), into the same things his father was and an absolute condescending jerk when it came to any interaction with him. To be fair, wujek Zbyszek was a snob, too, but he at least had a sense of humor and a good portion of charm, which my mom claimed both he and her had gotten from their father. That part I could see, because as my mom also told me, my grandfather had the uncanny ability to talk to anyone on their level without being condescending or submissive. He just liked people and got a kick out of being with them, regardless of their status, and 

I hated his guts, he probably / most very likely hated mine in return. We were ten and five when we first met, then sixteen and eleven, and finally twenty-two and twenty-seven. By then he was already engaged to a blonde, blue-eyed girl he’d knocked up, but in the official version they glossed over that. I did ask my mother if the condom broke when she read me wujek Zbyszek’s letter, to which she replied that that could well have been the case and she’d ask him first chance she got, meaning when we’d get there. Other than staying with us for two years when I was eleven, we didn’t really see much of him, though I did get $50 once for my birthday from him when he stayed with their youngest sister in the US. We were in Germany then, and I’m pretty sure it arrived stuffed into an envelope accompanied by some letter divulging little to no information but containing some kind of request. Most likely bribery about the apartments we were all set to inherit, since my grandmother owned an apartment building with enough apartments to will one to each of her four children and three to her grandchildren, including myself. More on that later, because it was an epic fight fest that merits its own set of entries entirely. But wujek Zbyszek had always had a good sense of humor, so when my mom asked him if the condom had indeed broken, he gave a slight nod with his head, at least that’s what my mother said. He did burst out laughing when his son leaned in for the obligatory kiss on the cheek and I extended my hand to keep him at bay. 

Assholes and jerks don’t always all come in black and white, most of the time they’re pretty gray. Wujek Zbyszek’s son was one of those rare exceptions. But after that day in my grandparents’ hallway, when I extended my hand for him to shake, we never spoke again. I didn’t think too much of it, but many decades later I realized that he was more typical of the average, well educated Polish male than atypical: acutely aware of his status and how it affected others in full knowledge of the fact that the woman they’d chosen to bear their children would count her blessings of having landed such a fine specimen of a man, keep her mouth firmly shut and do the best to raise and maintain a family unit lest the neighbors, church and assorted acquaintances, relatives and friends get a chance to list all her shortcomings (and by extension also those of her family), a feat that would happen anyway, regardless of how perfect she aimed to be. The one thing a Polish male was pretty much always guaranteed was the fact that due to the very conservative nature of the society they lived in – which placed more importance on checking attendance at the first mass of the morning every day but Sunday during Advent – most women were not very likely to leave their men. A fact which was basically drummed into them from the pulpit every morning around 7am at those same masses and again – just to be safe and so as to ensure that they really got the message – on Sunday. 

*aunt