Origin Stories

Where do we come from?

This plate has lived on three continents.

I once heard a story on the radio about some 6000-year-old skulls that were found in a cave in Germany. Scientists had called for local volunteers to have their DNA tested to compare to that of the skulls, and on the show, they interviewed a man who’d found out he was a direct descendant of them. Not only that: he’d played in the same cave as a child.

I envied that man. The story stirred my profound longing for roots and connection to a place. My sense of where I come from doesn’t reach far into the past, and though I’ll always feel a deep and abiding love for my hometown, Urbana, Illinois, I wasn’t from there. Nor was my family. I’ve visited Italy, where my father grew up, and I’ve visited Argentina, where my sister and I were born and my mother grew up. But as much as I love visiting, I’ve never learned that much about either country. 

Hearing the story about the German man also made me think, Wow, his family didn’t get around much. They must not have been very adventurous.

But it was a desire to escape the pogroms — not necessarily a sense of adventure — that prompted my mother’s Jewish family to immigrate to the U.S. and Argentina. Her father and his sisters left Russia as teenagers, never to see their parents again, had their last name changed at Ellis Island, and lived for a while in Chicago. It might have been adventurousness that subsequently took them from Chicago to Argentina, and led my grandfather’s sister Yvette, widowed and pregnant at 18, to become a successful Mary Kay cosmetics salesperson and, oddly, a Christian Scientist. It might have been adventurousness, along with an entrepreneurial spirit that I did not inherit, that led my Nonno to take his family from Italy to South America, where they opened several hotels in Argentina and Uruguay. Adventurousness may have played a role in taking my parents to the University of Illinois, where they met. A sense of adventure might have eased their move back there from Buenos Aires when my father got a tip that the company he was working for was going under. Whatever the motivations, there was a lot of moving around.

On my parents’ wall in their new assisted living apartment is a ceramic plate with a picture of a fox looking yearningly at a squirrel in a tree. This plate was in my father’s apartment in Milan when he was a small child and then traveled with his family to South America, back to my aunt’s house in Italy, and finally to San Rafael, California. In its 90 years or so, it’s gotten around more than the German man’s family did in 6000 years.

It’s gotten around with a family that’s been wandering for a few generations, including mine. That rootless wandering gives you a broader perspective, but it isn’t an easy place to inhabit.

So, where am I from?

According to 23andMe, I’m 49.8% Ashkenazi Jewish, from Ukraine and Russia; 35.3% Southern European, a large chunk of that being Italian; 9.8% Northern European, mainly French and German; 3.8% Eastern European; and 1.3% Broadly European. But do I come from those places? Do I come from Argentina? Do I come from Illinois?

Perpetually lacking a sense of belonging to a place, and growing up in Illinois with a name that people there couldn’t pronounce, I’ve always felt like an outsider. My parents didn’t help by constantly talking about how weird Americans were. At movies, they’d complain that Americans laughed in the wrong places; at concerts, they clapped in the wrong places. Americans had strange customs, like telling you what time a party would end. They ate dinner too early and ate the wrong foods — though I can hardly blame my Italian father for his distaste for what was available in Central Illinois in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

I sometimes wonder how different I might be had I grown up in Buenos Aires, where I spent my first three years. Maybe my personality wouldn’t be different, but I’d surely have been affected by my environment and experiences. How much is innate? Based on my genetics, 23andMe tells me, my chance of having a fear of heights is 38%, compared to the average person’s 29%. They’re on the nose with that one, and, speaking of noses, with my dislike of cilantro, which my sister shares. Do these things matter? Maybe not, but they hint that the things that do matter may also be governed by biology.

Where am I from? When people ask, I say I’m from Illinois. Though it may not be the Illinois they picture.

Where I come from is not just Illinois but also a university town that’s a cultural oasis in a vast patchwork of corn and soybean fields. It definitely gave me a specific liberal perspective, though not everyone who grew up there is liberal. Still, I know that growing up in a university town in the 1960s and ‘70s played a major role in shaping me and making me the Flower Child that I am.

Where I come from is not just that place but also my family. My parents, both more intellectually inclined than their business-oriented families, met as students at the University of Illinois and moved back there later to teach. When my father, an architecture professor, represented himself in small claims court, the judge complimented him on his excellent case presentation. English was his third language, after Italian and then Spanish, but when I got my editing mentor and Bay Area “editing god” to edit a chapter my father wrote for a book, he felt bad charging for it because there was so little he needed to edit. My mother’s Jewish family expected her, not her less-intellectual brother, to become a doctor. She’d taught herself to read at the age of four and got a PhD while raising two young children. She was sort of a groupie for famous Latin American writers and introduced us in person to stars like Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges.  

Despite my parents’ critiques of Americans, as liberals who prioritized intellectual pursuits they fit right into the university environment.

I sort of fit in, but I never felt that I measured up — to either the place or my family. Maybe I inherited some genes from my aunt and uncle, who were not as learning-oriented as their siblings. What mix of heredity and experiences makes us who we are?

I come from various places, and I come from my parents. I also come from a grandfather who forged papers for his Jewish family doctor so he could escape to safety during World War II, though I never heard about that while Nonno was still alive. I come from a grandmother who was one of the first women in Buenos Aires to drive a car — which she bought with money she’d earned — and braved men shouting insults at her as she drove through the streets. Do these grandparents live on in me? I’ve never done anything that bold.

What remains from all this? The decorative plate in my parents’ apartment, for one thing. It’s not at all my architect father’s style, which leans more modern minimalist with a sprinkling of classical. If it hadn’t been in his family all these years and he’d seen it in someone else’s house, he would have dismissed it. Yet it made the cut for their downsized living arrangement, along with a number of more elegant pieces and a few select childhood artworks by my sister and me. After all these years, now that he’s outlived his younger sister and is out of touch with the few relatives we know of in Italy, this plate still means something to him. It’s not the only sign of sentimentality I’ve seen in him lately, somehow taking precedence over his customary rationality. Maybe we all need some kind of anchor to a time and place where we belong.