How My Ancestors’ Stories are Shaping My Own
This blog post is part of the lead up to the upcoming Ancestors’ Homecoming Huddle, a peer-led journey to reflect on our pasts, presents, and futures by connecting to our ancestors and elders. For more information about the Huddle, please visit the website here. To understand my relationship to the theme and why I’m hosting this Huddle, keep reading.
Witnessing my ancestors
My relationship with my elders and ancestors met a turning point several years ago when a series of letters addressed to my great-grandmother Genia were translated from Yiddish and Polish into English. In the letters, dated 1929–1941, Genia’s parents Chana and Nachman plead desperately for help amidst the suffering of anti-Jewish pogroms and the Holocaust in the city of Brest-Litowsk. Genia, who left Europe in 1929, received these letters from her home in Kensington Market in Toronto, the city where my family has now lived for four generations. The letters stopped by 1942, when Genia’s parents and three siblings were murdered, along with 30,000 Jewish residents of Brest-Litowsk.
Reading and processing the translated letters with my immediate family shocked us, moved us, and bonded us in the love and pain we felt for our family lineage. Genia’s family begged her time and time again to help them survive, help them escape. We read this knowing that they did not survive but were ultimately murdered in genocide, thinking about how Genia may have been experiencing this all as she received these letters in her Toronto apartment. As we took this in, my family was able to widen our window into understanding Genia’s bottled-up pain, suffering, and anger. This was an anger which had often been taken out on her own children and grandchildren, and which has impacted the lives of each successive generation in their own ways. Now, we finally had more insight into the roots of this suffering, into the people who have shaped us and brought us to the land we now call home. Perhaps this deeper relationship with our history and present could offer new paths for our family, and for each of us in turn.
Almost a full year after reading these letters, I was struck by an understanding that I had somehow never previously internalized: Chana, Nachman, and Genia’s siblings were not only Genia’s family but my family as well. They were my great-aunts, my great-uncles, my great-great-grandparents. Their lives, experiences, love, and suffering are all part of me and my family. In that moment, I felt the responsibility to honour each of them, and show love to the spiritual, emotional, and material presences that exist from them still. This is a responsibility that has not left me since.
Since then, I’ve pursued what is turning out to be a lifelong journey of understanding and connecting with my family history. This journey has taken me to Brest, where I witnessed the home place of Genia and her family, experiencing as much as possible what it feels like to bring Genia back home. It has brought me closer to my ancestors and elders here in North America / Turtle Island too: my journey to Eastern Europe was in many ways a journey for my entire family.
Deepening my learnings
Since emerging from that deeply personal experience, I’ve engaged in creative methods, archival work, and programs to continue this journey, nurture my family’s connection to our history, and learn more about what this work can mean to others. In June 2019, I participated in a cohort of the month-long intensive course Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Our Family Legacies and Changing the World, led by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. During that time, we drew on trauma science, depth psychology, and spiritual connection to nurture our capacity for self-regulation, self-awareness, and resilience. Our goals went beyond ourselves: Reb Tirzah suggested our objectives include identifying and witnessing “the trauma legacies at play in the world with compassion and self-awareness, so that we can engage it with maximal effectiveness” and “to add our energies to the ongoing healing of our tribal lineages and the larger world”. For me, the course was a foundational part of the next years of my life, holding space for me to connect with the wise and loving ancestors in my lineage, accepting them as spiritual allies as I move through life.
“Our personal life-riddles are founded on our ancestral legacies, and how we can transform their seemingly impenetrable lead into radiant meaning.”
— Rabbi Tirzah Firestone
Through the Diaspora and Transnational Studies program at the University of Toronto, I focussed on courses in family memory, including transnational & cultural memory. Memorably, this included two courses that allowed me to consider how memory is translated into visual mediums: a class on translation theory and a class on graphic novels, both led by Professor Naomi Seidman.
In 2021, myself and a group of nine other learners participated in the interdisciplinary class Memory, Home, and Family, led by Eriks Bredovskis. We engaged in personal family research, discussed historical texts and analyses, and presented our work along the way in both pairs and full-group settings. The course wildly expanded my conception of what it means to do family archival research, and what it means to do this work with peers who are doing the same. Consider this excerpt from the course description:
This course examines how scholars, artists, and ordinary people have investigated their family’s history. We will take a closer look at the sometimes-blurry line between scholarly research and personal historical self-reflection. This course’s discussion is centered on (but not limited to) questions such as: How do families remember (or forget) their (genealogical, ethnic, racial, religious, and political) histories? How do individuals grapple with competing and contradictory narratives? How have professional historians, community historians, and ordinary people come to terms with their family’s past? What do we gain from using different literary genres and forms of media to remember our past?
As part of my work in the course, I formed the website Family Archive Experiments, linked here. On the site, I showcase the archival and meta-archival processes I was experimenting with. As indicated by its name, rather than creating a conventional archive or choosing one medium in which to document the archive creation process, I played around with several formats: blog, mind map, free-write, visual harvest, graphic memoir, and digital map. Each format presented unique opportunities, challenges, and questions, and so in their respective web pages they are each paired with a reflection to contextualize their meaning in my broader family archive process.
Expanding and huddling up
When I think about where I am moved to go next on this journey, I want to create a walking tour of my family and community story in Toronto, bringing my extended family along it. I want to use magazines, newspapers, and images to make a collage of my ancestors, named or unnamed, whose presence I can feel. I want to draw about my experiences, creating a graphic memoir a la Belonging, Fun Home, or Between You & Me. I want to chart my journey using Open Masters’ self-directed learning tools and Art of Hosting story harvests. I want to splash in a river with community, celebrating ourselves as whole beings with expansive ancestry and potential descendants, whether from our communities, families, or otherwise.
I want to learn more about what life might have been like for my ancestors in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Lithuania, through meeting with historians, scholars, and elders. I want to understand better what my family’s arrival in North America / Turtle Island meant and means to the Indigenous peoples of this land. I want to stand beside my friends, family, and community as they pursue this journey of ancestry and family legacy in their own way. With them, I want to learn from each other about the journeys through life that our families have been on, and what role we each seek to play in shaping our ongoing family story.
I want to host an event for my family, where we show love for our family members who have passed on, and learn more about each other’s relationships to them, whether it’s been months, years, or decades. I want to interview my living family members, appreciating the whole lives they’ve lived and are living. I want to talk to the people who knew my late Uncle Benny’s queerness better than my family ever did, and connect with him through that understanding.
I am moved to do this work with peers, in community. To create space for us to reflect openly and meaningfully on our pasts, presents, and futures; where we can connect to our ancestors with compassion and curiosity. These experiences, alongside my experiences as a facilitator and event organizer, are why I’m hosting Ancestors’ Homecoming, a 4-month learning journey starting August 2023. Ancestors’ Homecoming is a space I’ve been excited about for a long time now, for us to explore the presence and legacy of our ancestors. If you’re interested to learn more, please allow me to share a bit of the what, why, and who with you now.
My learnings and experiences have taught me how bringing compassion to our family legacies can lead us on a process of healing, inner awareness, and self-transformation. Ancestors’ Homecoming emerges from that understanding, in combination with the power of the peer-led approach designed by Huddlecraft aptly called Huddles: purposeful, pop-up peer groups.
“When you learn, create or take action with others, you grow yourself, your connections and what you’re capable of” — Huddlecraft
In Ancestors’ Homecoming, as a group of twelve peers, we’ll open up new pathways for our lives and families through diving deep into our roots and ancestry. We’ll learn from our family members’ life journeys, past and present, regardless of whether this is a path we’re already on or if it’s entirely new to us. If you’re curious to learn about the ways of being that you’ve inherited from your ancestors, to hold space for family conversations that you’ve always wanted to have, or to have space to tackle a related purpose, project or challenge that matters to you, then this space is for you.
Drawing on the combined power of the peer group, we’ll pool ideas, questions, challenges, skills, perspective, momentum, and care. We’ll discover the stories of our families alongside a community of people doing the same, and draw on one another’s discoveries to multiply the inspiration. We’ll experiment with imaginative methods to create safer, braver spaces to dive into family legacy, to mourn lost ancestors, and to shape the future of our families. We’ll capture and harvest stories in whatever form resonates: scrapbooks, films, memoirs, art, family events, walking tours, digital archives, and more. From meet ups every two weeks to Power Up days, these 4 months are designed to maximize the collective potential of the peer group, diving deep into each of our families’ stories, together.
As you can tell, Ancestors’ Homecoming is an initiative that matters a lot to me and that, I think, will be pretty transformative. You’re invited to read more about it on the Ancestors’ Homecoming webpage, at the bottom of which you can request more information, register your interest, schedule a chat with me, or apply. Please also share this blog or the Huddle with anyone you know who might benefit, or if it feels relevant, share it on your socials.
I also welcome your reflections on the blog post itself — feel free to reach out via email, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Thank you for reading it. I’ll continue to contribute to this blog, writing next about other resources that can support people in their reflections on their ancestry.
