Don’t let this get in your reader’s way

When my great-grandfather emigrated from Ukraine to the United States in the mid-19th century, he did so on a set of papers with someone else’s name on them — a name my family still has today.

The Men in my family, alive and not.

Those same papers went right back to his little village in Ukraine and the following year his younger brother used the same papers to join my great-grandfather in Philadelphia, where he’d settled and was working in construction. Years later, when I was a child, I asked my grandfather about his father and why he came to the U.S.

“You know, Merry, I asked him what it was like in his village, and do you know what he told me?” my grandfather said, leaning toward me over the top of his mandolin that he’d been playing. His light blue eyes sparkled with humor and his lips curved up into a smile from under his thick, white mustache.

“What, Poppop?” I asked.

“He said, ‘If it was so great, would I have come here?’” My grandfather chuckled and then went back to picking out a tune on his instrument.

As I sit here today in my comfortable home almost a hundred years after my great-grandfather died, fifty since my grandfather passed, and barely six months since my own father — his son’s death, I love thinking about my family, their history, and how fascinating I found my grandfather.