My grandfather was a deeply religious man, who had one final semester left at the seminary before he met my grandmother and decided that what God really wanted for him was to create a family and a life with the beautiful blonde peasant girl he saw. This is according to my mother and I will never understand what exactly drove him because she was not exactly a person who exuded even the smallest semblance of love. Or affection. Actually that applies to my mother as well, but she masked it better. A mixture of times and being her father’s (self-proclaimed) favorite. Narcissists might make for great storytellers – especially if their stories don’t have the potential to directly hurt you  or impact you negatively – but their narrative is very unreliable when it comes to staying factual. 

Maybe he did fall in love with her. Maybe he felt or intuited that this was a soul in dire need of help, and so he decided to help her. Which, indeed, would make him the propeller of God’s words on Earth. But maybe there was also another element to it. Maybe this very blonde, blue-eyed ultra Polish girl would be able to pass on her genes, ensuring that the children they had together would invariably become more Polish in terms of optics, making them more Polish in the eyes of various citizens of the nation. 

It wasn’t a calculating move, but having read what I did about how we try to assimilate and seeing how I have always been drawn to blonde, blue-eyed people in my life through a mixture of fascination, awe and fear, who’s to say there isn’t some generational trauma at play here. My grandmother was poor, of peasant stock, but she had the look of a Good Polish Girl. Today she would be venerated for being Of This Land. My grandfather (again, if we take my mother’s words into consideration) was from a very high-standing family, “the third lady in the town,” my mother would say of his grandmother. And though she didn’t grow up there (and apparently only went there to visit as a child after they moved up North), she still spoke of her grandmother’s house as though she knew it intimately. A seamstress, a cook and a maid (at the very least) to accommodate the man of the house, his wife and their seven sons. And the home chapel that had been built just for her, with a photo of her praying to whip out as proof against accusations of Judaism (or the other unspeakable crime, Roma heritage). Wanting to marry a blonde, blue-eyed Slavic girl wouldn’t even be self-serving, merely trying to keep oneself and the future generation safe. 

In actual fact it was probably – and most likely – a combination of all of the above. Maybe he wasn’t entirely aware of his own family history either. It’s a very uncommon name, my mom told me, one that spoke of being noble. Apparently all people with that name are related, in which case, may God have mercy on my soul. Because whatever goodness and kindness and understanding my grandfather possessed, it completely bypassed all of his four children. Maybe it was my grandmother’s influence. Or her genes got passed down in a different way than my grandfather had hoped for, because none of the four children had her looks, though my mom’s two sisters colored their hair blonde and swore blindly that indeed that was their color. As I stated earlier, I never managed to warm up to her or even like her. If anything, I wanted to avoid her, including any and all items that were in any way, shape or form related to her. Like food she made, or the sweater she made me, in my favorite colors, which I ended up hating. As a child, I wasn’t able to articulate that, so it only dawned on me in my adult years that I didn’t even like my grandmother, never mind love her. There was something about her that made me want to stay very far away from her, no matter how much I forced myself to try and love her. 

My grandfather, on the other hand, was someone I always sought out and with whom I got along. He had a tattoo of an Indian on the inside of his left arm. I never asked him about it, maybe because I somehow intuited that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I always thought it was cool and that it was a testament to how much he understood me, because even though I never told him about it, I was convinced that I had Native American blood in my veins. I don’t in this life, but the life before this one is a whole other story. 

He was deeply religious but didn’t care that two of his children married Jews. And he lived by what he preached. Always ready to lend a hand, never judging, no questions asked. Apparently a member of the French embassy my mom and I met remembered her father and told her that it was due to her parents that he was in the position he occupied today. Because they paid his father’s school fees, which resulted in his father later being able to escape Poland and settling in France. It was an interesting conversation to say the least. 

He also loved fortune telling, and he was good at it. And I think that always cracked me up, that this deeply religious man would so readily engage in something I got lectured on by religious strangers, because of course I wanted to learn.