I’ve been listening to a Jim Hollis lecture from the Jung Center archives here in Houston. The subject for this course was the power of untold stories. We all are the sum of the stories of our lives. As writers we know that—whether writing fiction or memoir, we write ourselves. The most imagined fiction has our stamp, our voice, our “trademark” if you will, and that special voice is marked by the stories our lives tell. Or, as Hollis often remarks, the stories that tell us. We are the story told.
But what about the stories we don’t know, but that, as he puts it, we live “in service to.” Like the stories of gender we live by as women, or as men, that may have limited our options. Or, the stories of religion that inform our choices before we are old enough to know other religions offer different choices. The stories that inform our lives may be helpful—give us ballast when we flounder—we “know” what’s right because. . . Well, because we know what’s right: we’ve been taught, told, trained, often without even realizing it. Sometimes, however, the received “key” stories may sabotage our choices, limit our goals and dreams, even define us into a context we “know” is not our true self.
Hollis points out that in his work as a Jungian analyst, he has tried to trace his clients’ stories back through generations and has discovered we usually know only back three generations, that is back to our grandparents, and often even those stories are vague, or have been silenced by parents. We may know who our great-grandparents are, that is four generations back, but usually their stories dissolve in a mist, silenced perhaps or never brought forward for a multiplicity of reasons.
Consciously, that is, we as progeny may know little about grandparents and even less about great grand-parents, but their stories may not be any less informative of our present lives. Furthermore, it is often that third generation—forward—that has the need and skills to uncover the untold story behind the family norms or practices or beliefs and trace them to the ways they are unconsciously influencing their own lives.
I have a “story of my life” that begins just before I turned 10. I’ve written it in many versions and for many years it was always the same. Then, once, in the middle of my life, suddenly, something my mother added to my story changed it completely: suddenly I knew, I understood the missing link. The blank page filled with text and though there was nothing I could do about the ending of the story (at the time) there was information that allowed me to deepen my understanding of the middle chapters.
So allow me here to tell, or perhaps retell, my story. It begins with my grandmother—three generations back. I know little of my great-grandparents on either side, but the tragedy surrounding my maternal grandmother’s story still haunts me and informs much of my own story.
My grandmother Ella and I shared a room in our house when I was a child. Her husband Joe Levy, my grandfather, died when I was around 6; I remember his death, the whole family converging on our house—a duplex on Truxillo, in the heart of the then Jewish neighborhood in Houston. I remember white sheets over the mirrors and lots of food arriving and aunts telling me my mother was upset and to be aware of all the sadness. I was sad too—I loved Grandpa Levy; he was a kind old man who lived at the end of our block in another duplex; my mental picture of him remains: his thin frame bent over a huge radio he loved to listen to. I don’t remember much interaction between him and my grandmother, but then they were of a generation that would have been rather formal, in front of people.
Grandma Levy came to live with us after his death, and we moved to a bigger house, a three bedroom bungalow at 3007 Wichita not far from Truxillo. I shared my room with Grandma and we became “best friends.” I remember that period well—shortly before my father died of complications from his Type 1 Diabetes, a disease he developed before my brother Herby and I were conceived. I remember that period as happy, in spite of the dark cloud that hung over our home as a result of his condition—the insulin bottles at ready in the refrigerator. The kitchen scale weighing his food. His doctors visits, my mother’s concern. Yet I remember him smiling, happy, loving, dancing in the living room with Mama, calling her “his girl.”
Grandma Levy was my ally when my mother was mad at me. She protected me from her fury: “Frances, it’s okay, leave her alone.” Or “Frances, she ate her vegetables, can she get up from the table now?” as she scooped them off my plate and threw them in the garbage. She was the one person in the world who could tame my tangled curls: she would get out her large-toothed ivory comb and dip it in a glass of water, and curl my hair around her fingers so that damp, they would dry in chunky ringlets. I have a picture of me standing in a white cotton dress, my bright red curls a display of her patience and care.
And I knew her story, part of it at least, for as long as I can remember. Ella Jerwick Levy (1876-1965) came from a shetl in Poland or Russ Poland, (near Bialystok), on a ship by herself at age 17, in 1893. Her older brothers—whose last name was Jerwick but whose first names I cannot ever remember hearing spoken in the house, and for good reason, had traveled ahead of the rest of the family to America to work and earn enough money for passage for Ella and their parents.
But by the time they had saved enough for passage for three, Ella’s father, my great-grandfather, was too ill to travel and his wife, my great-grandmother Malka, for whom I am named, had to stay back to care for him. So Ella made the trip by herself and never saw her parents again. But she had purpose, for Ella had a true love, her fiancé Calman who had come to America some time before her, and the reunion with that true love sustained her during the arduous journey to America. She would leave her parents, but she would find Calman and they would be married.
She took ill on the voyage here, so the story goes, and lost all her hair. My mother called her illness diphtheria, but my husband tells me there is no hair loss associated with that disease. Suffice to say Ella suffered from a serious illness that kept her quarantined when she landed at Ellis Island. When she was released, her brothers met her in New York, and she was astonished to find herself in a real city, a huge place to her even then, in the 1890s. She’d never imagined getting off the ship and finding herself in the midst of so many people: how would she ever find Calman?
Her brothers were unconcerned. They had settled in Owensboro, Kentucky, 100 miles West of Louisville, and they took Ella there. where they had pledged her to marry Joe Levy. I never imagined how they got her to Louisville until recently when I was telling my daughter the story of her great-grandmother—she will have the story four generations back—and she said: “by covered wagon no doubt.” I think I’d pictured them all on a train, but indeed, I don’t know if there were passenger trains from New York to Louisville at that time, and if there were the fares would have been expensive.
Ella was betrothed to Joe Levy, a man much older than she; with him she conceived 13 babies and 7 of them lived. My mother was their 7th child. Grandpa Levy had the wanderlust and took Ella and his growing family from one city and one opportunity to another until they settled in Kansas City, Missouri, where my mother was born; and later to East Texas, Lufkin, during the depression, where my mother graduated high school, and finally to Houston after my mother moved here and married Philip Kalman, an engineer from a “very good, religious family.”
The point is, however, this is as much of the story that I knew from childhood until sometime in my forties, mid-life, a time of unsettling changes for many of us, a time of intense searching and self-discoveries and crises and solutions.
And now I must back up: first, the name Calman carries irony in and of itself. My maiden name is Kalman—as you see—the surname of my father Philip Kalman, a civil engineer with a college degree from University of Texas at Austin, a man with Diabetes who died at age 39 when I was nearly 10 years old. I always found it interesting that Grandma Levy had a Calman and my mother had a Kalman and both of them lost their C/Kalmans during their younger years (my mother was widowed at 34). (I write this while sitting beneath a huge contemporary tapestry by the Israeli artist Calman Shemi. Such Jungian synchronicity solidifies the connections in my mind.)
The story, haunting as it may be, grew horrific when I learned the full truth of it. For though I grew up thinking that Ella never saw her Calman again, I learned in my forties that indeed she had. And that is the hidden story, the “untold” story that informed my life without my ever knowing it.
For Calman did find Ella, in Kentucky, though I never knew how he found her, what path he’d taken, what kind of detective work it required for him to find his fiancée in this vast “new” country. He found her, and he lost her, and no one knows where he went from there, or what his last name was, or how we, Grandma Ella Levy’s descendants might locate his descendants, and how the story of lost love has affected their lives as well.
Ella’s brothers, the Jerwicks, refused to let Ella and Calman marry because they would not break their promise to Joe Levy. Ella had nothing to say about it. They refused; she obeyed their demands. And she lived her life with a man she didn’t love.
I never knew just how unhappy she was until recently—just a few years ago when my cousin Mimi Levy Ryan made a DVD with a collage of old family movies and one of the earliest captured my mother’s family way back before I was born. They must have been living in Lufkin; several of my mother’s siblings were married to people I easily recognized, in their youth; my mother was of high school age. One of her cousins, now in her 80s, was there with her fiancé, who picked her up and swung her around to the delight of everyone else. Everyone but Ella, whose frown remained stoically planted throughout the clip. Arms folded firmly in front of her body, she ran away from Joe when he tried to embrace her: Joe–caught up in the spirit of the moment; Ella—angry, miserable, hurting. She ran from one end of the crowd to the other, away from him.
I played the scene over and over, mourning her sadness, her tragic life, her loss. And by the time I saw that DVD, I knew the story behind the story of her life. That she had lost her love, and found him, or him her, and lost him again.
We can call it patriarchal, we can call it abuse, we can call it ordinary for its time. We can call it by many names, and proffer many explanations; but it doesn’t change the unhappiness of her life, the ways it spilled into the unhappiness of my mother’s life and the ways it created tragedy in my own life—one I have struggled to make sense of; one I have pondered and analyzed since I myself was 17. One part of the mystery was revealed to me when I was in my mid-forties during the bleakest time of my married life; another part crystallized in that home movie reproduced on a DVD I discovered during the happiest period of my adult life: now.
End of Part One
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