Misremembering Stones

An organization staffed almost entirely by immigrants and first-generation Americans, we at GrubStreet are as keenly aware of the sheer breadth of "the immigrant experience" as we are the crucial contribution immigrants make to American arts, culture, and society. In defiance of an ethics of exclusion, we’re curating a series of immigrant stories that celebrate and illuminate the plurality of immigrant life. This installment comes from poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach.

 

We are always afraid. My mother and grandmother say. Afraid to lose everything. Their echoing refrain. They want me to live more cautiously. To live as though I’d lost more. Afraid because everything has been taken away before. Their fear didn’t start out this way. It has grown heavier and more urgent with each year—poppy seed to sunflower to stone, a bone lodged in the throat—because each year brings more that can be lost.

In Ukraine, we had little, but I remember it as always enough. Though tangerines and American candy bars were only for special occasions, and I had to keep secret that I was buying them with Hanukkah gelt, I’d never known my grandfather’s starvation or father’s bloodied Jewish nose or the stones they’d both placed on unmarked earth beneath which their missing ancestors might lie.

Once though, I was teased for being the zhid girl. The neighborhood boys threw stones. My parents don’t remember this. Maybe the memory isn’t mine or isn’t a memory even. Maybe it’s part of the mythology written for my short-lived Soviet childhood—floating amid hours waiting for bread and walking atop rusted fountains when the Dnepr flooded and watching women move through our tiny kitchen with its bathtub doubling as a table when covered by a wooden board and eating hot persimmons ripened on the radiators and knowing someone was always at the stove, the flame always lit. Maybe it’s something I’ve chosen to claim, so I too have the loss my family passes down. So my un-accented English is tinged with our refugee-immigrantness. So I remember that here, I am being passed as a white woman, while across the Atlantic, whiteness washes away and I’m that little girl I imagine, everything to fear and little to lose.  

 

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature and Literary Theory program where she focuses on the lyric rendering of trauma in contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, TENT, and the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine's 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award, and the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.

 

Click here to read more from the Immigrant Stories series.