Why I Love My Inexistent Heritage
By: Octavia Drexler
Tags: Holocaust, Family, Jewish, Stoicism, Memories

And What That Has to Do with Stoicism and My Millennial Self

Post-edit: I started writing this sometime around Easter and have been creeping in to look at it every week since. Somehow, this is the one piece I am genuinely afraid of publishing — mostly because I don’t have the data, I don’t have the full story, and I am more than likely juxtaposing my own perception of the man behind the main “character” in this piece with a series of things I have learned in the past few months. Therefore, as a disclaimer, I want you to carefully navigate these lines and these paragraphs. They are highly sensitive in nature and they might not make sense. But since this entire blog is meant to be a (humorous) exercise in honesty, I decided to hit the Ready to publish? button any way.

Post-post-edit: I also wanted to add pictures of my grandpa, just to show off how handsome he was, but then I decided not to. It would have been, I’m afraid, too personal — even for something as touchy-feely as this entire piece. So, as a proper European abiding to GDPR, I maintain my right to privacy. You’ll have to take my word for granted: he was just as handsome as any Hollywood actor playing a Roaring Twenties role, with the exception that my grandpa was real.

The pictures above aren’t mine. Credit goes to Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I remember Easter at my father’s parents.

The lunch usually happened on Easter Monday (because Sunday was dedicated to visiting my mother’s side of the family). My grandma would make chicken soup, pork schnitzels, mashed potatoes, and spring salad, all drizzled in Pepsi, cake, and some amazing wonders we called “walnut rolls” (they were more like cookies, though).

Traditional?

Hardly — chicken soup is chicken soup, pork schnitzels aren’t necessarily Romanian (and they are definitely not Easter-esque, since the traditional Easter meat here is lamb), nor are mashed potatoes (or Pepsi for that matter).

But to us, that entire day was a tradition.

After lunch, my grandpa and my father usually played backgammon. Sometimes, we all gathered around the wooden cherry table in the living room to play Rummy.

When the time came to leave, my grandpa helped me put on my jacket. And every single time he zipped it, he did this little trick, mimicking that he was taking the zipper past the point where the jacket ended and up to my nose.

I giggled every time.

He did that until my grandmother died when I was 14. When that happened, I saw my grandfather in pain for the first time. The only thing he said when he opened the door after her death was It should have been me.

He was 14 years her senior.

I was told my grandfather was Jewish ever since I was little. And that always made me feel proud. It made me feel special — not in any kind of religious or even cultural sense, but because I associated “Jewish” with this amazing human being my grandfather was: an artist who drew and played the piano and was touched by classical music every time he listened to it, and yet, a full-time engineer by profession, a man who carefully chopped spinach leaves for my grandma’s cooking, using no less than 4 knives of different sizes and cuts.

Even in his quirks, my grandpa was this personal superhero of mine. Last month, he would have turned 100. He didn’t live to that — he died at 88, 28 years after he quit smoking his four-pack-a-day serving of cigarettes, and 17 years after I came into the world.

Heavy smoking was his only excess, actually.

This man would wake up at 7 sharp every single day, go for a walk, buy bread and the necessities for the day, and then followed a very strict routine of crossword puzzles, playing Solitaire, listening to the radio, and reading.

Never have I ever seen him eat more than he needed, or indulge in anything in excess. I don’t ever remember him drinking alcohol of any kind. I guess his only soft spot were crepes — the man could gulp on 20 of them without breathing. So, whenever crepes happened in that house, they happened in massive quantities — my grandma dedicated an entire day just for that.

All his life, he worked as a textile engineer — but his dream had been to be a chemist.

Same as my dream of being an actress faded one evening in the bathroom of a dubious bar, his dream of being a chemist faded when he blew up the little practice laboratory his parents had set up for him in the house.

I guess drama runs in the family in this respect.

By the time the Nazis came to power, my grandfather was well out of his teens, heading into life, only to hit the wall of hatred and turmoil that was building on the West.

Somehow, my grandfather was not deported, like many in other parts of the country. I have tried to find sources on how this happened — but somehow, I cannot pull them together. It might have been luck, or it might have been something entirely different. What is clear is that Jews in most of the other parts of Romania were deported and/or killed. My grandfather and his father survived, and my great-grandmother survived, only to be killed in the years following the war.

Unfortunately, Romania is the second-largest participant in the Holocaust, following right after Germany itself.

All his life, my grandfather never spoke about anything that had come before he got married (including the war). When my father came into the world, my grandpa was already 40 and he had been sent to forced labor, his house had been taken away from his family twice (once by the Legionnaires, and then the second time by the Communists), and he had been imprisoned at one of the highest-security penitentiaries in Romania for actions against the Communist Party.

The paperwork showing his incarceration says that “as a chief engineer, he did not take care of the machinery received from the USSR”.

The same paperwork made a physical description of him: half-white/half-brown skin color and black eyes (in Romanian, “față smeadă” describes a type of brown-colored skin — which is what they used to describe his physical appearance).

He was very white and his eyes were sky-blue.

All my life, I never heard one story from him — about the Holocaust, losing the houses, or being imprisoned. Not once did he mention anything.

Whenever talks popped about topics that were even remotely adjacent to any of the above, he waved them away with a typical hand gesture, irritated, as if to wave away a mosquito.

It took me more than a decade from his death to realize my grandfather was a Stoic in the fullest and most meaningful sense of the word. A lot of people from his generation were (and some still are) — because as I have learned in the more recent months, Stoicism proves its efficiency not in times of peace and pleasantries, but in the harshest days of one’s life. And those people, well, let’s just say they are kind of entitled to call us snowflakes. Because by comparison, we are, and there’s no nicer way to put it.

I loved my grandpa, although I am pretty sure I never said it out loud. I am also pretty sure most of the people he came across during his lifetime came to love him too. The man was adorable, it couldn’t have been otherwise. I didn’t know how much others appreciated him until, at his funeral, I saw two 80-year-old ladies who remembered him from their working days together.

The lack of excessive anything, the way he talked, the way he treated people around him with kindness, the verticality of everything he ever said and done, and even the fact that he jotted down every single small purchase they made in a hand-sized notebook — they all point out to a Stoic way of living.

My grandfather is the reason I wrote my college dissertation paper on Isaac Bashevis Singer and why I intended to write my MA dissertation paper on Jewish Humor.

He is the reason I take pride in a heritage I did not inherit — mostly because it wasn’t shared. I never heard my grandpa say anything about his Judaism or his Jewishness — in fact, I am pretty sure that he was not religious at all, and perfectly well assimilated into the Western Romanian culture. After his death, I discovered a little Jewish prayer book and an illustrated Haggadah that had been gifted to him as a child. I never knew they were there, at the back of the old bookshelf — one I had rambled through all my childhood, looking for books of adventures and stories of emotion.

My grandpa did not pertain to the Jewish culture in any other way than by birth.

It’s hard to explain, then, why I take so much pride in this inexistent heritage. I am not culturally appropriating anything — but somehow, the fact that I always admired my grandfather makes me feel emotionally close to everything Jewish.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved my grandmother and I loved my mother’s parents as well (kind, humble, sweet, and beautiful people).

Yet, there’s some sort of inner fascination that turns me to my grandfather as a role model.

Let her do what her heart pleases, she’s a smart girl, he said when my mom told him I wanted to become an actress.

My heart stopped pleasing that fantasy, but his words encouraged me back then and continue to encourage me now.

My grandfather and my fascination with him taught me one of the most important lessons: you choose how you let life roll you around. It’s not that he was this mad success, it’s just that he lived a beautiful life — one that eventually gave me a point of moral and sentimental balance when things fell apart.

Yes, I am proud of an inexistent heritage — because I am proud of this blue-eyed Stoic who will always guide my moral compass.

And if there’s one thing I regret, it is that I didn’t spend enough time with him, to learn patience and strength and what tennis is all about and if that Haggadah book had ever been read at Pessach when he was a boy.