My Grandmother’s Passport
My grandmother lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn for over fifty years. She had moved there just before the bar mitzvah of my father, her eldest child, and remained there until her death, raising three children in, and burying my grandfather from, the same two-bedroom apartment. When I was growing up, my feelings about my grandmother were the same, I imagine, as many other children. We were always going to visit when there was something else I wanted to do, and when we arrived, I was never allowed to do anything fun like play the piano, which was in the living room. Instead, I spent a lot of time running up and down the stairs between Grandma’s apartment and her sister’s apartment two floors below.As I became an adult, however, Grandma and I became close, and I would call weekly and visit whenever possible. I had always been interested in our family history; I was the kid who knew my grandmothers’ maiden names and where they had lived before they came to the United States. When I began doing genealogy in 1987, I started asking Grandma questions about her life in Poland. She always answered in the same annoyed way: “Why are you bothering me with these questions? If we hadn’t left they would have killed us.” Now, given that she and her family left Warsaw in the early 1920s, this wasn’t strictly true at the time, but since she lost many relatives in the Holocaust, it was certainly true in hindsight.One time I persuaded Grandma to show me her naturalization certificate. When I asked if I could borrow it to make a copy, she refused, as if letting it out of her possession would cause something terrible to happen. She wouldn’t even let me borrow my grandfather’s naturalization certificate, and he had been dead over fifteen years. When I would ask her about other papers or documents, either from Poland or her new life after arrival here, she denied having anything else.
After her death, it was left to my aunt, my cousin, and me to clean out Grandma’s apartment. You’d think that a person living in the same place for fifty years would have accumulated a tremendous number of things, but my grandmother had saved only certain items of value to her: beautiful dresses from the 1940s along with matching purses and gloves, a Persian lamb coat with her name embroidered inside, and, for some reason (maybe because he had been a butcher), my grandfather’s big cleaver.
It was when I was cleaning out a dresser drawer that had been carefully lined with paper so many years before, that I found it. It started as a bump under the lining. When I lifted the paper, it was there—a little book with Polish writing. After about ten seconds I realized it was her Polish passport.
I must have screamed because my aunt and cousin came running in and had to calm me down since I was hyperventilating. I sat there, looking at this little book that had allowed Grandma to leave Poland and come here in 1923. The passport had several pictures of her as a teenager, as well as her signature of her Polish name, something that had been left behind forever along with the people and life she had known.
It is said that people don’t really die as long as someone remembers them. So when I became pregnant four years after my grandmother’s death, I promised Grandma’s sisters that I would follow the Ashkenazic Jewish tradition—if my baby were a girl, I would name her for Grandma, both honoring Grandma and keeping her memory alive.
My now six-year old daughter knows that her special Hebrew name is the same as her Poppy’s mother, my grandmother, whose picture hangs on our wall. I don’t know for certain for whom Grandma was named, but I know that in continuing the tradition, the memory of my grandmother is assured.
Debra Braverman is a New York–based genealogist and an award-winning writer, most recently winning a 2005 ISFHWE award for this essay, My Grandmother’s Passport.
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