My mother died ten years ago this week, and I am brought to think of the vanishing point, that not-so-distant past beyond which none of us can know the fathers and mothers who brought us here.
My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and tragedy to imagine. Continue reading “The Vanishing Point”
So here’s how the story goes, as told to me by my Uncle Max (long-deceased).
Somewhere in the late 1890s (I could be off by ten years), a man by the name of Tudrus Zlutchin (another branch of the family claims that the surname was Dudek) landed at Ellis Island from Russia with his wife and three (maybe two, maybe four) children. He came from a shtetl just outside of Nizhni Novgorod (now Russia’s third-largest city). Continue reading “Ellis Island Vignette”