Much in the same way that family tree included  in the opening pages of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great assist in telling the story of the Buendia’s many Aurelianos, if I had my own family tree to share with you, I could explain my mother’s vast side of the family much better. But that’s an undertaking that more than one family member will have to help me with.

My mom’s aunt Raisa, now approaching her 90′s, wound up in the hospital last week after a bad fall, which  facilitated my first visit to her in years. I did spend five years away in New York, but I’ve been back for seven months now with no excuse for not visiting except my own shame. It took this.

When I ask my mom questions about her family (“If you’re from Moldova, how did some of you end up being raised in Ukraine?”) she often has the answers, but sometimes she only wishes she did and defers instead to either the deceased who would have known had they made it this far, or to her aunt Raisa. Raisa’s memory is long and petrified, details hovering in her gray matter like amber-encased ancient bugs. I can’t remember the last joke  I  heard, but she remembers the whole story of why her husband’s Mark’s last name is Kipervaser but two of his brothers wound up with Kipervas.

My cousin Anna and I were visiting her together tonight, asking questions and swimming in answers. Then the two of us moved the operation to the IHOP around the corner and continued the conversation with Anna’s dad, Yasha. I so wish I had a tape recorder with me. I warned him I’d have to ask him all these questions all over again. For almost three hours we sat and talked about the real reason the “er” was dropped from “Kipervaser” that Raisa (Yasha’s mother) can’t talk about; how she escaped a concentration camp as a pre-teen; how Mark’s brother Mozya survived being a WWII P.O.W.; how some of us indeed ended up in Ukraine; that our family lived on the same street in Chisinau, Moldova for decades.

This part of the world still keeps secrets from me. I’m going to find them all out.

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