Paul Genega
Paul Genega's work has appeared most recently in Stillwater Review, Gay & Lesbian Review and Days of Clear Light: A Festschrift in Honour of Jessie Lendennie & in Celebration of Salmon Poetry at 40. A new and selected collection of his poetry is due out from Salmon in 2022. Visit Paul at paulgenega.com.
The Man Repairing the Rafters
When my grandmother Rose was a little girl, a man repairing the rafters in her little village church lost his balance on the scaffolding and plunged to his death on the white tile floor. She watched as they lifted him onto a straw-filled cart and wheeled him away, his cracked skull soaking the straw with his blood. A moment, an image, an event so horrific it stayed with her all her days—on the family farm, stayed with her; across the ocean to America, stayed with her; through marriage and motherhood and old age, stayed with her—like a bad dream that just wouldn’t go away.
Barely five-feet tall, soft and round and wrinkled, she was my “Little Grandma” and to my four-year-old self she was magic. Magic when she scrambled eggs in a black iron skillet. Sprinkled salt on buttered bread. Plucked apples off monster-warted trees. Magic when she took out her teeth and put them to sleep in a glass jar by the bed. And most of all magic when she told stories, long ago and far away.
In Queens, New York, in a long, low garret bedroom, we lay next to each other in twin beds, me in flannel pajamas, she in a floral flannel nightgown. “A story,” I would plead. “Please, Grandma, a story. Tell me a story when you were little.”
Some nights it might be the story of how she stole cherries from her neighbor’s orchard and was whipped with a switch when she got caught. Or how three handsome soldier-boys had once marched into the village and she’d hid in a thistle patch to watch. Or how, grown older, she begged and begged her mother to mortgage the family farm so she could come to America, and how her poor, dear mother finally gave in, and they never again saw one another. But more often than not, it was the story of the man repairing the rafters in her little village church, head cracked open like an egg.
I pictured him way up high, like a tightrope walker or trapeze artist. Some nights he was blond like me, some nights brown-haired like my father. Sometimes clothespin-shaped like father, sometimes squat and barrel-chested like grandfather. He wore a rumpled white shirt, baggy pants, scuffed black boots. Keys and carpentry tools jangled from a belt at his waist. One hand held a hammer, the other, spikes and nails, as he leaned over… leaned further… further yet… and further…
Then fell head-first to his heaven.
All this long ago, of course. Nearly seventy years have passed since I was that spellbound little boy in a faux half-timber Tudor, soaking up grandmother’s tales. Roughly one-hundred-twenty years since that accident, though the exact date and place, like most of the specifics, have been lost. Probably for good. Grandma Rose is long gone. So too are her daughters (my mother and aunt), my grandfather, father, sister, and anyone else who might have heard her tell the tale. In truth, as far as I know, I am the last one who knows of the man repairing the rafters, the last one who can keep the story alive, and through the magic of storytelling, keep him alive.
Then again, for all I know, there are people back in that village who know the story of the man who fell to the white tile floor. Maybe his children’s children or his children’s children’s children keep the memory alive. Or the descendants of friends, witnesses, neighbors. Maybe the tragedy has been woven into the fabric of the community - a defining event, a touchstone - like a catastrophic fire or flood. Maybe there is a metal plaque with fading Gothic script nailed to a whitewashed church wall:
On This Spot XXXX XXXXXXX
Plunged to His Death in 190X
Working for the Glory of God
If that church still exists. If that village still exists.
Grandma Rose originally came from eastern Galicia, a multi-ethnic province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just north of the Carpathians. The Galicia of her childhood was one of the poorest, most overcrowded, least developed regions in all of Europe, and in 1913 alone, the year Rose boarded a German steamer and left for New York, an estimated 400,000 of its desperate inhabitants emigrated to the United States, Prussia, or more prosperous parts of the Hapsburg empire. They were mainly Jews or Slavs—Polish and Ukrainian—but Germans, Hungarians, Armenians and, Roma were also significant parts of the mix. If Rose had stayed in her birthplace, if she had not pressed her mother to mortgage the farm to pay for her passage to America, she would have seen the territory change hands many times, briefly becoming part of an independent Ukrainian state, then, for the next thirty years, a newly created Poland, before descending into the chaos of the Second World War, a battleground for Polish-German Russian troops, as well as Ukrainian militias of various political stripes.
In his study of Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, Yale historian Timothy Snyder dubbed the vast region between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR, “the Bloodlands.” Galicia was just one small patch at the western edge of those Bloodlands, where, in the 1930s and ‘40s—before, during, and just after the Second World War—the carnage almost defies comprehension, some fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war exterminated by organized starvation, shooting or gassing—fourteen million beyond the enormous casualties among conscripts.
It is a story of dizzying complexity and soul-piercing depravity.
If the man repairing the rafters had somehow managed to survive the fall, the likely fate awaiting him would have been harrowing. If he were Jewish, he almost certainly would have been murdered in the Holocaust, shipped to the Belzec or Janowska concentration camps, or—more likely—taken into the forest and shot by an SS death squad, body dumped in a mass grave. If he were an ethnic Ukrainian, he might have gone on to fight for and against the Germans, for and against the Russians, for and against rival Ukrainian factions, while simultaneously battling Polish neighbors. Given the unrelenting violence, survival itself would have been a small miracle. On the other hand, if he were ethnically Polish and an uneducated laborer—thus spared the Soviet attempt to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia—he probably would have been expelled west in a great sweep of ethnic cleansing at the end of the war as the borders of Poland were pushed into Germany and Stalin gobbled its eastern parts for himself.
The few official records which exist list Rose’s nationality as “Austrian” and her place of origin as “Ivano-Frankivska,” which is not the name of her village (which is unknown) but of its oblast and largest city. Actually, Rose would not have recognized that name. In her day, the city was known as Stanislawow (Polish) or Stanislau (German), or Stanyslaviv (Ukrainian), the name changed by Soviet authorities in 1962 to honor Ukrainian poet—yes, poet!—Ivan Franko and to further eradicate any vestige of a Polish past.
Today the part of Galicia where Rose spent her childhood belongs to an independent Ukraine. Its Jewish citizens, once 12% of the population, have been almost completely annihilated. In its largest city, Lviv, Poles have been reduced from 55% of the population to less than 1%. Multi-ethnic diversity no longer exists.
Political upheaval, poverty, famine, disease, war, mass murder, fratricide, anarchy, and genocide: This is the history of Grandma Rose’s Galicia in the years after she left. It is a history written in smoke and blood, a history that forms a gulf, a chasm, a black hole, a void, between me and Rose’s stories, between me and the man in the rafters.
Perhaps someday I’ll join the genealogy craze and track down Rose’s ancestors, who are, of course, my ancestors as well. It would be much easier with my other grandparents. They had brothers, sisters, cousins that joined them in America or they kept contact as best they could with those who stayed behind. Rose, on the other hand, arrived alone on these shores at the age of fifteen (technically, she was underage, an “illegal”). She only had one sibling, an older sister, with whom she had minimal contact and who disappeared in the conflagrations of the war. Aside from stories from her childhood, she seemed never to look back. In that way, she was quintessentially American—self-invented, cut off from the past, sprung like Gatsby from a Platonic ideal of herself.
Nonetheless, it would be nice to know something about my great-grandmother and great-grandfather and the great-greats who preceded them. Any of the ancestry companies which hawk their services on TV could probably reconstruct Rose’s branch of my family tree. But truth is, this is not the kind of connection I am seeking. It isn’t blood lineage, really, but a cultural and historical connection I am looking for, a connection of stories, of the imagination.
Americans like to romanticize the European immigration of an earlier era: the forging of a new, hyphenated identity, eventual assimilation into something called “American.” It’s part of the national myth; it’s what makes Ellis Island a place of pilgrimage, a holy shrine. Or they celebrate the remnants of the old culture that have been transplanted on American soil, the miraculous ability of people to preserve and pass on, and surely there is much to celebrate in the courage, perseverance, and persistence of those who emigrated. But their story is also a story of loss, a severing of ties. Dislocation. Isolation. Fragmentation. Alienation. It costs a lot to become American. For some, too much.
Perhaps Rose’s suicide speaks to that.
When I try to write a capsule bio of my grandmother, I wind up with something like this: She was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a region that became part of Poland after the First World War, then was part of the Soviet Union, and now is an oblast of Ukraine. Her maiden name was Polish, and her original language was Polish, but she was fluent in Ukrainian and married a Ukrainian. Her first job in America was cooking for a large Jewish family so her home fare tended towards blintzes and kugel. She was Roman Catholic, but nominally so. Her marriage was a misery. All her life, she felt terribly alone.
Or something like this. She came from a place where the straw was soaked with blood. She came from the Bloodlands.
Or this: She was my Little Grandma. Magic. Story. Poem.
What, I often ask myself, has been passed on from her to me? Well, foremost, I suppose, is a love of story, a love I can trace back to that hapless fellow repairing the church rafters so long, long, long ago. Over the years, his story—that is, her story of his story which became my story—that story—has kept evolving as details were created, revised, and reimagined, and when the storyteller—namely me—had different visions, different versions, different needs. Early on it was simply a way of conjuring my childhood and my grandmother. Later I endowed it with heavy symbolism. A fall from innocence. Or grace. Or faith. A young man’s pretensions. A different sort of gravity.
Today it all seems so much simpler.
Older now than Grandma Rose when we lay together in that long, low garret bedroom, I find myself focusing first and foremost on the basic notion of connection. So many things—grudges and phobias, fears and hatreds large and small—so many things—pull us apart, separate us from each other and ourselves. Storytelling, hard-wired into the human psyche, seems the most fundamental way we counter those dangerous centrifugal forces. First come family stories that help us to understand who we are and where we came from, and those are miraculous enough, but even more miraculous are the connections we make to people we have never met in places and times we have never experienced. It is in this way, we first learn empathy and compassion, what Thoreau calls our primal ability “to look through each other’s eyes,”
That man repairing the rafters on a little village church, that man who was likely born in the mid-nineteenth century, before the dawn of the modern era, in a land, a way of life, fundamentally unchanged for a millennium, has been with me my whole life.
And that indeed is magic.
But even more magical: Thanks to Grandma Rose, he lives on now.
In you.