I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.
She showed me her room, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?

—The Beatles

When my mother was three years old she ran through a muddy field and came home with polio. I like to imagine her this way, 1945, rural Norway, north of the artic circle, a three-year-old child with ridiculously dark brown hair running fast, as fast as her baby legs can carry her—alone—through a field of heather and cloudberries. Coming closer I can almost see the polio like fairy dust jump up out of the ground and sting her bare feet. She winces in pain. Her right leg goes limp. At the same time I see that she is no longer a child. Turning fast into an adult, her leg has stopped growing with the rest of her. She pauses in the field for a moment while a large metal brace wraps and buckles around the short leg. But she doesn’t stop for long. She moves forward again, walking now on crutches. Too slow! She pushes forward in a manual wheelchair. Still, too slow. Finally, she surges toward me in a battery-powered chair. I like thinking of my mother as a crippled Norwegian goddess descending from the far north, hitching herself to a star, and crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a winged chariot of metal to find herself in a foreign land.

I have pictured my mother this way often enough that the image—crossing from story to memory—seems more real than fiction. If I push further in I can see whole scenes, watercolors of the time before my mother became my mother. Wielding, casting, seizing hold of her life, my mother has always managed to defy the ordinary. Not so much a case of my mother fighting the odds and coming out on top—no, my mother held the odds in her hands and made with them what she wanted. Regal, enchanted, magical, she was more than her experiences—she was a goddess. So I’ve chosen to see her, for twenty years, in fragments of washed out pigment, lovelier that way, simpler too.

Example:

On the northern tundra, a land beyond the tree line, covered in moss and lichens, my mother, just ten years old, sits on the ground in front of a gingerbread church with a swooping roof. The pattern resembles Viking ships, each corner an elegantly arching bow and stern. The wood, walnut, comes from the south, carried slowly by pack mules. Every beam is precious, sanctified.

Inside the church, a man preaches. His words are like songs, Norwegian, a language of lilt. He says prayers to god, certain that the Christian god, his god, is the only god, the father of all earth’s creatures, mighty and good. At the pulpit he speaks softly, but his voice still creeps outside over the lawn and into my mother’s bones.

The sky turns gray. My mother wonders how late the sun will set tonight, how many flower necklaces she can tie before he comes to the door and tells her to “Go home. If you’re not going to come inside, go home and help your mother.”

Their house is small, yellow, and nestled between two other similar houses. A woman comes to the door and calls my mother inside. They sit by the fire and make dinner. Fish again. Carrots and potatoes. My mother looks at the woman, a stranger somehow, and wonders who this person is, whose house was she sitting in? Did she live here? Could it be? This drab and lonely place. Somewhere in the hair rising along the nape of my mother’s neck she sees that she is already a grown woman, a full and soaring spirit, trapped in this little girl body. She touches her right leg. The metal brace is cold. It sends a shock through her arm. It is her power. She leans her foot hard on the ground and feels a surge of responsibility and control. She must leave this place.

And why not? She runs back outside, flops on the ground, throws off her shoes and her brace, and digs her toes deep into the soft earth. She is bigger than this place. So much bigger than this place. See how she grows straight up from the ground? She sways in the breeze. Her thoughts wander, already miles away, casting about in a foreign land. She is both linked and free.

A chicken comes to attention.

“You see?” she says, “Mr. Chicken, you see? I am already gone.”

My mother did not depart that day, but she knew as a ten-year-old that someday she would leave her home, her family, her land—Norway. Norge. Waterfalls, snow drifts, 2am sunsets. Norge. Giant fjords, massive glaciers, hairpin turns. Norge. And still, it was too small for her. Her heart—I can see it even now—pounding with the thought that she had so much to see and do, other places still to go. Her eyes like chopped walnuts, flecked, reflecting blues and greens, could speak words her parents never expected. Where next? What next? A job. A family.

In his essay “Folklore and Advocacy” Elliot Oring argues that “What folklorists do is provide knowledge about people’s behaviors, beliefs, and values…That knowledge is only useful to the extent that it is knowledge—to the extent that it succeeds in making clear some of the operations of the real world.”  If Foucault was at all right that knowledge is power, however, the collectors and disseminators of knowledge also deal in power. As dangerous as “defining one's work in terms of benefits” may be, it is equally nearsighted to presume that folklorists embody an objective outlook. It is a sham for the discipline to feign disinterest. We are interested and invested and driven and stuck in the quagmire of subjectivity like all other intellectual selves.

The difficulty here is rooted in a view of knowledge as a static entity that could or should ideally exist external to or separate from humanity. This view seems inherently troublesome, as knowledge cannot exist without human apprehension. Also troublesome is the side effect of viewing the folklorist as a distant, uninvolved expert, one that is never emotionally implicated. I take this point seriously for two reasons: one, as a means to understand the dynamic nature of etic vs. emic inquiry; and two, because my informant is rather close to home.

In the next few paragraphs, I want to tell you a little about my mother. I want to peal back a few small layers of my own family lore, in part, by making use of the position I hold within my family.

Why begin with family? For all the squabbling over how to best define folklore, the material and the discipline, and my own tendency to use ‘folklore’ and ‘lore’ interchangeably, one thing has become fairly clear—the family is a cornerstone of folkloric activity. Folklore is the family’s “creative expression of a common past,” how “we learn about the idea of family and how to be a member of a family.”  In other words, family is undeniably folkloric. I began to realize this link last spring when writing my folklore midterm (note: it is perhaps a tad hubristic to quote myself here.  I aim mostly to illustrate the progression in my thinking, not the brilliance of the thought, which is actually fairly basic - at any rate...):

"In interpreting the symbols of ethnic groups, folklorists often benefit from considering the process of transmission inter-generationally. It seems almost too obvious to posit a reminder: begin with the family. But as an amateur folklorist interested in her own ethnic background, I still at times conflate the object, the material we call folklore with the dynamic process, and would be well served to heed my own advice. Mom, why have you not taught me the Norwegian table prayer you used to say every evening when you sat down to supper as a little girl living just below the artic circle?"

The inquiry I made into my mother’s life was at the time immediate and for me emotional. From a visceral reaction, however, I was able to draw some useful connections. If folklore frequently provides the central symbols for ethnic group identity, it is the family or kin group that tends to provide the central conduit for passing this ethnic identity from generation to generation. In groups that are displaced from their homeland or larger ethnic community, this process stands in high relief. Transplantation does not cause the generational passage of ethnic traditions; just as staying in your home town doesn’t guarantee that you’ll follow your father’s career path. However, while emigration - a disruptive event - is potentially traumatic and can lead to a loss of traditions, it is also possible that gaining outsider status can strengthen group lore. Displacement tends to heighten group members’ perceived need or desire to reinforce or rearticulate a known identity, recognition within an ethnic or national group. Often this happens on the level of the family first. In this way, family becomes the signpost, a clear indicator of the folkloric symbols of the larger ethnic group.

To be sure, growing up in Tennessee and Missouri, my childhood was set off from the majority experience. Pancakes were always flat like crepes, not thick like Bisquick. We ate other “different” foods with names like lefsa and geitost, a brown goat cheese. The king of Norway was a suggested topic for at least two history papers. I knew what the Norwegian ten Øre coin looked like as well as the U.S. dime. Grandmother and Grandfather were Bestemor and Bestefar. Calling the eight-pointed star that adorns many quilts in middle America the “Heartland Star” was greeted with a staunch, “Blasphemy! It’s the Norwegian star.” And of course the real Olympics are held in the winter. Why then at the age of twenty-four did I still not know my mother’s Norwegian table prayer?

On one hand, the answer is obvious: transmission of cultural information is an imprecise process.  So I got the Norwegian lullabies and a closet full of knit sweathers; the table prayer - by random selection - was simply lost. On the other hand, Marvin Harris, a cultural materialist, has argued that the physical transmission of folklore is the locus operandi of knowledge brokerage.  Here the outsider or etic approach becomes, “useful in making objective determinations of fact, and etic [Harris's] claims to knowledge are necessarily superior to competing emic claims [my own sense of loss].”  Indeed, the number of crocheted doilies and tea sets with the traditional Rosemaling pattern that my mother did or did not carry with her across the Atlantic is only a small part, a snapshot, of her migration narrative. What one can’t infer from an entirely etic vantage about the folk narrative of my mother’s crossing might begin in the material realm, but is incomplete, will always be incomplete, without some consideration of an insider perspective.

In the winter of 1970 my mother still wore a brace on her right leg. Growing up with polio in Norway, her parents assumed that she would never marry, never have children, and that she would devote her life to God. Her father was a minister in the church, her mother a school teacher. For twenty-eight years my mother lived as a Norwegian. Shortly before her twenty-eighth birthday, she crossed the Atlantic ocean and began a journey that would radically change her identity.

That January Karen Mahgnild Nygaard flew from Holmestrand, Norway to Yellow Springs, Ohio so that she could teach for one year in a U.S. public school. She came for a variety of reasons with a variety of expectations: “I figured that as a foreigner they wouldn’t want to give me too much responsibility. I was still trying to avoid too much responsibility.”  By the time I was born in 1980 my mother had begun to use crutches. Later, she used a manual wheelchair. Now she gets around mostly in her scooter. As she puts it, “I have lived in two countries—Norway and the United States of America—as a woman with a disability and a professional within the field of special education.”

Why did she come to America? I have asked myself that a number of times. Why? And how did she know it was right for her? My mother came to America to find a space in the world that was her own, not her parents:

"Over time I repeatedly heard the story about how my parents chose not to give me up for adoption because they loved me so much and because they believed that God had purposefully given me to them as their daughter and the fact that I had come down with polio was also God's will…I picked up a strong yet barely articulated message about how my parents saw my life on earth: as a female with a disability, the God-given role for me in the church was to inspire others to believe that God gives out disabilities as a 'blessing in disguise'…I accepted my mother’s valuation of me and my work for a long time. It was only a couple of years before I came to the U. S. that my childhood faith and world view started to crumble."

My grandparents expected my mother to become a good Christian schoolteacher. As my mother put it, “How could a woman with my level of disability ever expect to be attractive to a man? So in spite of almost missing out on an educational career altogether, getting an education and acquiring a career became my only option.”

Ultimately, my mother left Norway to get away from her parents’ constrictive sensibility. I know this in part because my mother told me so. I know it also because of the house I grew up in. When my mother got to the U.S. she met my father and fell in love. She also decided to marry him and stay in the U.S. She agreed to raise my sister and me in the Jewish faith, not as Lutherans. Later, when I was a teenager, my mother told me that she liked being part of a Jewish family living in Missouri because she wanted her children to understand and to have a minority experience. She wanted us to get a glimpse of her alienation, a taste of her distinctiveness. Making a life for herself in the U.S. was no doubt a struggle for my mother as well, and that struggle, trying to live somewhere between two cultures, put an indelible stamp on our family lore: “I felt in my gut a sense of respect for the humanness of human beings, trying to hold on to at least a sliver of my childhood faith while embracing an outlook that accepted new information from science and research.”

What have I learned from informing on my mother? Again and again I face the daunting challenge of trying to distinguish my subjectivity from my mother’s life history. For Kenneth Pike, who coined the categories of etic and emic knowledge, “the etic approach is useful for penetrating, discovering, and elucidating emic systems, but etic claims to knowledge have no necessary priority over competing emic claims.”  As a researcher and a daughter, I have learned that my mother’s narrative and my perception of it are constantly in dialogue and that this dynamic relationship bears all the science and art of our family lore.*

To lament that folklore is not advocacy misses the point. Sure, we do not call ourselves folklorists and mean advocates. We may, however, make folkloric inquiries that promote both a larger, perhaps broader outlook and an insider, perhaps more empathetic, point of view. Moreover, we should not assume a stance that disregards the living, striving souls of our investigations. My mother’s legacy is grounded limb by limb in her disability experience. For at least three generations our family has been marked by a growing need to acknowledge different bodies. Our family lore is a lore of advocacy. To study my mother in the scientific sense—to put her under an etic microscope in order to gain from her history some abstract knowledge (power)—is exactly the kind of experience she’s spent most of her adult life trying to avoid. My mother’s journey through life, across an ocean, as a disabled woman, is the journey of an active tradition bearer, whose voice wants and needs to be an equally active part of the academic fray. As both of my parents ask in their jointly-authored essay “Disability in the Family?: New Questions about the Southern Mill Village,” “It is time to try to imagine disability as having a history. Don't we all know deep down that disability and able-bodiedness exist in a dialectical relationship that all of us have experienced, and that if we can explore the history of that experience we will understand both the past and ourselves better?”

I didn't know my mother's table prayer, not because it simply got lost, but because my mother made active, intentional decisions about what lore to share with her children.  She rejected her parents religiosity and embraced a new faith, she rejected the protection of her family and allowed herself to be swallowed up by the idea of marriage, she sang the prayer to herself without teaching it to her daughters, waiting for a time when such a transmission wouldn't also be a transgression against her struggle for independence and value.  My mother is a product of her family, her country, her language, her adolescence.  She is also a product of the times in which she lived, of her disability experience, and her immigration to the United States.  The cultural artifacts that she has carried through her life are not largely accidental, nor are they entirely material, nor are they completely recognizable, even to herself.

*Note: Most cultural anthropologists agree that the goal of anthropological research must be the acquisition of both emic and etic knowledge. Emic knowledge is essential for an intuitive and empathetic understanding of a culture, and it is essential for conducting effective ethnographic fieldwork. Furthermore, emic knowledge is often a valuable source of inspiration for etic hypotheses. Etic knowledge, on the other hand, is essential for cross-cultural comparison, the sine qua non of ethnology, because such comparison necessarily demands standard units and categories.

P.S.

By now, my grandmother’s immigration story has become almost rote. Filming her a year ago she asked, “Do I have to go through all this again?” Apparently the story had served its purpose. We all basically understood that her family had come to America, had settled, and prospered. It was a lesson in progress and we had succeeded by applying the lesson in our own lives. Was there anything left to go over?

Sitting on her couch my grandmother admitted that she had once believed in the idea of progress—that we should always strive to make the world better. And now? Recently, she had come to the conclusion that, well, sometimes bad things happen in the world and there’s nothing you can do about it. My face grew red and I told her that people still had a responsibility to send a positive message into the world. Whether they are chronicling tragedy or not, we are still responsible for examining tragedy with a critical eye, one that sends what I consider the right message into the world. Why else do I write? She nodded.

I looked at my grandmother. She was trying to listen to me, but she looked tired. I suddenly appreciated her attention. At the same time, I realized that I was the one talking, that it was quickly becoming my turn to help guide my family and friends forward. It would be my turn to choose which stories to tell, when to tell them, how to tell them, and to whom. And so, I began by practicing on one of the people I learned from, someone I consider a master.

I think back about the person I was three years ago, living in my grandmother’s apartment. I grew up in a house with a father who knew how to yell, a mother who took it, and an endless string of run-over and given-away cats—a house that made me afraid to trust my own voice. Later, I lived for six years in a relationship that made me afraid to have friends or talk to strangers. Three years ago, in my grandmother’s living room, I woke up. Like Washington Irving’s Garp, the idea of women cutting their tongues out for a political statement is horrifying to me. Of course I need my tongue.  Maybe now more than ever.  I need to tell my family, the world, my friends, the new cats (they're not going anywhere)—myself, that life is for the living. And yes, my tongue will always be short—but I’m working my damnedest now to untie it.

Stories Told in Negative Space

My grandmother has never been the best story-teller. Some of the jokes she tells are missing entire plot points. Stories about her life are often rambling. She interrupts herself to laugh at parts before I understand what is funny. But her stories are familiar. Often when she asks, “I’ve told you this, haven’t I?” I’ve never heard this particular detail before, but the motif is so familiar I can almost guess what will happen next. She is considerate of my space. When I call her on the phone she asks, “Do you have time for this?” Whenever possible I am all ears. I know that I am learning from her. My grandmother also seems to find recounting certain times in her life useful. She likes to tell stories about people learning how to be better people. Sometimes they’re jokes, often they’re serious stories. One of her favorite sayings she learned from her mother, a Russian proverb: “To know something, to experience something, and to do what your heart tells you.” This is the way my grandmother operates, what has kept her functioning.

Growing up, I knew that there were stories not getting told or repeated. I’d heard my father mention bits of my grandmother’s history that I knew nothing about. The most prominent was the story of her mother going into an asylum. Those stories lived in a sort of negative space. For my grandmother, they weren’t readily useful. They were stories of pain and defeat and they were difficult stories to tell. No less stories in our family, they too helped shape who we are, how we know and define ourselves. However bleak the details, the process of transmission, learning these buried stories is still somehow essential to the continuity of our family.

My grandmother’s mother, Dora, lost her mother to a gas fire after trying to light a stove. She lost two brothers to scarlet fever. Dora also lost a son in Poland to scarlet fever. My great grandfather, Levi, was kicked out of his house at the age of twelve when his father remarried. In America, one of my grandmother’s surviving brothers, Abe, went insane and was sent away from their home. Not long after, Dora was also institutionalized. My grandmother visited her twice. The second time, Dora was catatonic and mumbled something about hiding the children from the Nazis. As my grandmother put it,

"the Depression came along, and Hitler and his invasion of Poland, and what went on there…it was always with her [Dora], it was always a nightmare that was with her…Because I think my mom when she was in Europe—and her life could make a full story and then some—she was involved with the social structure of the country and the different things that went on. She was part of it. Even though there were many things in her personal life that were extrememly difficult from what she has told me. And I think she worried about all these things."

Recounting this story was not like my grandmother’s other stories. She had to think hard to get across what she thought her mother’s life was like: “I don’t think she ever really got adjusted to American life…I think she was lonely. I have thought about it in many ways, but when you try to talk about it, then it suddenly becomes difficult.” My grandmother’s relationship with her mother must have been very painful in the end. It was painful for me to listen to. As with the story of my grandfather’s heart attack, I didn’t know how to place it, what to do with it. I acknowledged the new information and quickly tucked it away somewhere deep in my own heart.

Grasping for something to say, I asked my grandmother if she would ever go back to Skolke to visit. I wondered if she thought at all about exploring her past, trying to reconnect. For my grandmother the stories didn’t serve as a jumping off place. Her stories had become her closure. In answer to my question she said flatly, “There’s too much blood there.” I asked if that was because of her mother’s family tragedies. “No,” she said quickly. “Because of the Holocaust.” I was reminded of a much larger family whose stories I knew in another negative space, in the testimony of concentration camp survivors, in a history that I acknowledge, but have generally chosen not to dwell on.

Indeed, that is the Jewish custom. Even the mourner’s kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, never actually mentions death, but rather proclaims life. As Tamara Pearl writes, “Being Jewish means being an apprentice to a school of alchemy that knows how to transmute pain and horror into life-affirming substance.” The tragedies of my grandmother’s life, the tragedies of the Jews in Europe were all real, but it was dangerous to dwell too long in the world of the dead. My grandmother knew that she had to turn to the living, to her sons, and to her granddaughters. We—my father, my uncle, my sister and me—weren’t to forget what had happened, but neither could it interfere with our health, our happiness, or our accomplishments.

It's almost too perfect that the family business was a furniture store, furnishing the very living lives of my grandmother's newfound community.  The store, still thriving, is now run by her brother's family.  And then my grandmother and her husband, my father and my mother, my sister and now me, all took to teaching, careers bent on bringing up the next generation.  We focus on lives still needing help and I plow ahead sometimes still forgetting my family's legacy of pain transmuted into activity.  Luckily my grandmother is still around to tell me a story or too.  Like a protective sieve, she continues to help regulate our familial and cultural heritage by bearing much of the pain alone in stories left untold, stories told in negative space, a flash, a memory, a lesson in horror, and then—most importantly—stories told to celebrate and affirm.

She Came Twice

I can’t say exactly how many times I heard the story—it was enough to stop counting. I heard it from my father, my mother, and from my grandmother herself: how my grandmother, Edith Drzezwiescki, left her small town in Skolke, Poland, and immigrated to America at the age of seven.

To her mother, Dora, it must have been a relief, to pick up her children and make the long journey across Europe, a week-long passage by boat, then across the eastern states to arrive in Chicago, finally, and reunite with her husband, my great grandfather, Levi. A relief and an ordeal. Dora and Levi had been separated for seven years. For Dora, the trip might have seemed familiar—she’d made the voyage once before. Seven years before, Dora came to the U.S. the first time, with three-out-of-four surviving children and her husband. But she only made it as far as New York City. She was turned away by U.S. immigration because of the visible markers a contagious disease, trachoma, had left in her eyes. As my grandmother notes, it was a time before penicillin and given that it was a contagious disease, the U.S. government felt compelled not to admit her. It was decided, my grandmother told me, that her mother would go back and wait while her father stayed in the U.S. and earned money for the family. Dora and the kids, including my grandmother, set sail again, back to Poland.

My grandmother, a baby at the time, didn’t remember that first trip across the Atlantic. For her, the story of how she came twice meant a kind of hardship, it meant living in Skolke for the first seven years of her life, speaking Yiddish as a child, learning the stetl, seeing firsthand the oppressive atmosphere of interwar Polish society. My grandmother was a Jew in Poland. Later, she was a Jew in Chicago. While in Poland, she lived in close proximity to a plethora of family tragedies. When she came to America, she was forced to mourn family, other Jews she knew, her entire town, destroyed during the Holocaust and World War II. Bearing a history fraught with grief, a tradition shared by Jews of brutality and destruction, my grandmother found focus in a new world, a neighborhood in south side Chicago, and as such she moved forward. She was driven to move forward, to make life work, and she accomplished this in part through storytelling.

According to the story I heard growing up (many details of which have not changed) my grandmother’s biggest concerns coming to the U.S. were her new clothes and the ice cream she demanded when she finally arrived in Chicago. At some point, while she was still in Skolke, she was told that her uncle, her father’s brother, owned a Dodge car, which she mistook to mean that he owned a Dodge car company. When she’d settled in America, she decided that the other girls at school must be doing something wrong because they wore a style of underwear you could see peeking out from under their dresses. She refused to adopt the style, choosing instead to pull the long underwear up high, scrunched together under her skirt. Generally, the details of the story are innocuous, told from the point of view of my grandmother as a child who was at the time, as most children are, concerned primarily with her own immediate needs. As she is quick to let me know, “That’s where I was then.”

Her story suggests that immigrating was in many ways pretty normal. At the same time, the journey wasn’t exactly easy for her family. Leaving the first time to go back to Poland, my grandmother told me, my great uncle took off his cap and threw it into the water. He told his hat to stay behind and be with their father. My grandmother wouldn’t really know her father for another seven years until they made it back to the U.S.

In Chicago, my great grandfather worked for a time at the Pullman Factory. When my grandmother’s brother was old enough, he opened a fruit stand with his father. The business did well, but at some point they decided that they would be better off selling furniture. My grandmother gleans over the details of how Darvin furniture came into being. Rather, she jumps to the present to talk about how well the business is doing today, the second-largest family-owned furniture store in the U.S.

Growing up, I heard my family’s story of making it in America more often than the story of how they made it to America. The times I remember hearing the immigration story, my grandmother emphasized the pleasant memories, the successes, making it to America, making it back to her father: “I was so glad to see him.” She did not dwell on the setbacks. Being turned away the first time was in a way incidental, mostly an explanation for why she came separately from her father, for what the first seven years of her life was like. She traveled across the Atlantic twice, her, and her mother, and her family, but in the end, getting to America was what mattered. As she put it, “So that’s not my whole journey and that’s not all the events that happened in it, but for the importance or the significance of going on with my life there I stop.”