I Never Truly Appreciated

While I’m a few months late, this year marks the 100th anniversary of my grandmother’s arrival in the United States and I got to thinking about her life. Not the woman I thought I knew, however, but the person she was throughout her life.

My grandmother came from a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia in the mountains near Poland. As a 17 year old girl, she traveled by boat – apparently by herself – to a country whose language she barely spoke and made a life for herself. She only had a 6th grade education and her profession was listed as “maid servant” on the ship’s manifest. She arrived in New York in June 1921 and eventually made her way to Philadelphia where a brother had arrived sometime earlier.

We don’t know a lot of the details about the years right after she came to the US but we know she eventually met and married my grandfather, another immigrant who moved to Philadelphia after first going to the Dakotas with his family. Several years later, they had their only child, my father, and the family ran a small corner store in Philly.

My grandmother was widowed in her 50s and never dated or got involved with another man the rest of her life. She also never learned to drive, instead walking or taking the bus everywhere she needed to go (including her annual trip to the Midwest on Greyhound to visit family). She was loving, fiercely independent and still spoke with an accent until her death in her 90s.

While this all-too-brief summary of her life lacks a lot of details, it has a far deeper appreciation for the life she led and the challenges she faced. For most of my life, I knew her only as “Gram,” a loving woman who baked incredible cakes and cookies and who doted on me and my brother. But as I learned some of her story, I was able to appreciate who she was and what she lived through.

I have to wonder if I would have had the courage to get on a boat, travel across the Atlantic ocean and make my way from New York to Philadelphia – by myself?!? While we aren’t really German, that’s the language my grandparents spoke and they were trying to run a small store during WWII when Germans were the enemies. What biases and hostilities did my grandparents face during those years? My dad hinted at some trouble but they were of a generation that didn’t talk about those kinds of things.

Then there was the loss of my grandfather at a relatively young age, leaving my grandmother on her own for the next 40 years. Still, she was comfortable – she had a modest home on a quiet street in the suburbs of Philadelphia and she took good care of it. She never had a vacation except to visit our family each December. She knew and was friendly to her neighbors but, to the best of my knowledge, mostly kept to herself. She certainly seemed at peace with her life but I cannot help but wonder if she’d wanted more or if she was truly content with the life she’d made in this new country.

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate your indulging in my telling the tale of my grandmother. Now, however, we come to the point of why I wanted to share this story. You see, when I was growing up, I never knew any of these things about her and it was only in her final years, as my dad was getting into genealogy as a hobby, that I even heard some of what I’ve shared her. And even then, it was more of an “oh, that’s cool” kind of reaction without any real appreciation of what the reality had meant to her.

It’s only as I have gotten older and – maybe – a bit wiser that I’ve started to think about what her life was like. Where I had simply fit my grandmother into a well-defined box in my world, the truth is that she led a vibrant, challenging life and made bold choices that ultimately led to my being here to write these words today.

As I look around to friends, family and even strangers, the reality is that we all have a story and that our interactions with one another tend to be somewhat superficial. As I wrote recently, people are icebergs with the majority of who we are never being fully revealed to one another; this post reinforced that fact but on an even more personal level.

So as we close this year – which happens to mark a century since a young, Czechoslovakian girl boarded the Mount Carroll and came to the US – let me wish everyone a safe and prosperous new year, and encourage each of us to appreciate that there’s a depth and breadth to the stories of those who surround us each day.

Know that I’m pulling for you!