I’ve done some genealogical research. I found out about my Jewish roots, as one rabbi called it, with the help of the museum of history of the Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw, Poland. I’d like to thank them here.
My roots which are in my father’s lineage are important to me.
Facebook has made it possible for me to find quite a few relatives on my my mother’s side of the family. She wasn’t Jewish.
Thank you Facebook.
One of my relatives on my father’s side whom I would have never suspected exists sought me out on Facebook after seeing a comment I’d made on the POLIN museum’s page.
She is related to me through a forgotten branch in my great-grandmother’s family.
On my father’s side, I’m related to the founder of UNICEF, Ludwik Rajchman.
Genealogy, however, gives me a persistent sense of personal dishevelment and chaos.
My brother then took a DNA test, I think Ancestry’s.
He found out about being 30% Jewish, for example.
Such percentages, I think, give me more feelings of disarray.
How can this be? Why am I not fulfilled?
An ex girlfriend of mine once drew me naked as a tree.
I’m reminded of the complicated explanation by Freud of one of his patient’s, a woman, dream of a tree stacked with wolves.
Now I don’t feel whole and I feel like my genes are coming apart.
Do people have a good reason not to believe in mixed marriages and relationships in general?
I mean the Quebecois for instance or the Poles who are so opposed to immigration as well as to taking in refugees.
Am I a freak?
I love my Jewish bloodline though.
I don’t know what kind of response you’re looking for. Most Americans (I believe you are Polish?) are more than one nationality. Consider it hybrid vigor. I got my Ancestry profile
Ethnicity Estimate
Europe West 46%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 33%
Europe East 10%
Scandinavia 3%
Europe South 3%
Great Britain 2%
Iberian Peninsula 1%
Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Africa North <1%
but none of this changes who I am. You realize that people have travelled, since before recorded time. Poland has been a gateway between Europe and Russia and the East. Being “Polish” is likely to bring you Tatar, Mongolian, Romany, Visigoth and so many others in your heritage. Be proud of that!
StG
Plenty of people have zero problem with “mixed marriages” (however you define them) and are products of the same.
Personally, I want a t-shirt that says something like I’M PROUD TO BE A MUTT.
Hybrid vigor is a good thing, both for the individual and the species.
I know that people are mixed as a rule.
Some people, however, will never attempt a mix in terms of certain other types of people.
I mean, marriage is not always about selfless pure love.
Don’t you think that the choices are often inspired by a basic understanding of how our species has worked over the ages?
Yet intermarriage is most often forbidden in cases.
One of my aunts married her relative.
Races, ethnicities, social status, health, religion all of these can be obstacles toward mixing.
I have a German great-great-grandmother. Jewish great-great-grandparents. A Polish mother AND it appears to me that I’m an acceptable light mix for the society which I was born and raised in. But my Polishness is still relegated to an ethnic subgroup. I live in a Jewish neighborhood which is reminiscent of how ghettos and shtetls looked like in the past.
When I was growing up, it was before the sexual revolution, equal rights for women and there was a weird group of white, rich, male Anglo-Saxons who had all the power. I mean right here in Montreal, Quebec. Of course, the Catholic Church was also all powerful in terms of what the Quebecois endured. I am Catholic.
The Quebecois are sometimes mixed with the natives, the Irish and so on.
But it is a minority I think.
I’m not a racist, by the way.
Is self-preservation in terms of race or nationality with regard to mixing a good call?
Can we go on being immune to others and to live behind nationalistic walls or in racial fortresses like European countries do?
Can the human RACE evolve under these conditions?
Just questioning.
OK.