Living in the COVID-19 World ... and Beyond #24: Who Are My People?

People often ask each other questions about their heritage or their background or their family history.  Who are your people?   Where do you come from?   I’m sure you have gotten these questions and you have developed how best to answer them.   So have I.  

My stock answer has been about my dad’s family, which is the family that I grew up around.   My grandfather’s older brother came to the United States, then my grandfather, then the next brother, and then my great grandmother and the youngest brother.   They came from Hungary, through Ellis Island, to the Lower East Side of New York City.   When my grandfather was a young married man, he and my grandmother moved to Middletown New York for health reasons.   My great grandmother and the other three brothers all settled in the Middletown area also.    They were a family – they did not spend a lot of time with each other, but they all got along, shared important events together, and even were business partners at some times.

Last month, I was back in Middletown to attend the funeral of the mom of one of my childhood best friends.   The service was at the cemetery (customary in Jewish tradition).    And there in the cemetery were all of my relatives – my great grandmother, her 4 sons and their spouses, and many of their children who had lived and died in Middletown.   I knew them all.  And as I looked at the gravestones and remembered them, I felt more connected than ever to the notion: “This is my family.  These are my people.   This is who I come from.”   I actually teared up thinking of all of them.

After the funeral service concluded, I stayed and visited with my family there at their gravestones and then walked around the rest of the cemetery.  I should let you know that it is a Jewish cemetery associated with the synagogue that I grew up attending.   It's a relatively small cemetery, maybe 300 people are buried there.   As I walked around and read the gravestones, I was surprised by how many of the people I knew.  They were my grandparents’ and my parents’ friends.  They were people that I heard about all through my childhood.  They were people that I met – at synagogue, on the golf course, at parties.   They were the Jewish community of Middletown.   And I grew up in the middle of that community.   More than I have ever realized, I really grew up as part of a Jewish community.  It was not talked about.  There was no intentional effort that I was aware of to build a Jewish community.   There was no visible external oppression that pushed the Jewish people of Middletown together with each other.   And the Jewish people gravitated to each other, were friends with each other, socialized together, recreated together, did business together, patronized each other’s business and practices, and vacationed together.   All of my doctors as a child were Jewish, my dad’s business partners and associates were Jewish, and my mom’s best friends were Jewish.   Our dinner table conversations were about these people – what they were doing, their children, and their plans.   I was enmeshed in this Jewish community.   And most of these people did not keep Kosher, most went to services only on the High Holidays, and most did not talk about being Jewish.  And yet they were all Jewish and I was part of them.    Just as I was part of my Jewish family.

Over these last few weeks, as I have reflected on my visit to the cemetery (and I even went back there a 2ndtime last week to experience it all again without a funeral service occurring), I have come to recognize something that I had no awareness of as I was growing up.   I grew up within an extended family and within a Jewish community that was interconnected with each other in significant but unspoken ways.   And I was fully part of it.   And, from my point of view now, I was smack in the middle of it.

Who are your people?    Where do you come from?