by Alex Wagner
Immediately, I wanted to know what he knew about the man who first brought the Wagner bloodline to America, our great-grandfather Henry Wagner. All biographical information had been left out of my father’s wistful recollection of Iowa life. What kind of man was Henry? What kind of woman was his wife, our great-grandmother Anna? What was hidden in the treasure trove of family anecdotes that might betray a lost religion, membership in a forgotten society? I wanted information—as much of it as Karl could spill out over dinner. We met at a restaurant downtown. I paid (it was only right!), the first and possibly the smallest of the many expenses I’d have to cover for the pleasure of being told my own family story.
I tried to control my brimming mania as I peppered him with questions. I’d brought a pad and pen with me and wrote down everything he said, all the while trying to act nonchalant, as if by nature I always transcribed dinner with friends. I felt like I had to obscure the sudden ardor of my quest to expose a family, lest my father and his sisters stage some sort of Catholic uprising and issue a Certificate of Deniability Regarding the Jewish Theory. I felt like a private eye, hot on the trail, desperate not to give away any of my leads. I was greedy for details, biographical sketches, whatever Karl could produce. At some point in the interrogation, in the middle of all the familiar stories of aunts and uncles and Iowa, Karl let slip another tantalizing clue.
Apparently, Great-Grandfather Henry was an avid fisherman, content to drop lines on the banks of the Mississippi River. Some years into his life, on one of his countless trips out on the water, Henry got himself into some kind of trouble. There was an accident of some sort, Karl recounted, and suddenly Henry was heard screaming for help. In Yiddish. As in the High German language of the Ashkenazi Jews.
This knowledge of Yiddish—a language I now discovered was spoken “informally” by my great-grandfather—was obviously unbeknownst to me, but it was apparently accepted if largely undiscussed among later generations. My father certainly never made mention of it. But for me, this was all the evidence I needed. We were Jewish. Or at least it was a pretty good bet that we were Jewish. And yet my father, distressingly, clung to the idea that this was instead some sort of kooky ethnic happenstance, simply evidence of Henry’s skill at foreign languages. Such delusional logic was akin to saying you lit a menorah in December because the candles lent a lovely, midwinter glow and not at all because you were, say, celebrating Hanukkah.
And so: I decided to contact my aunt Susan, my father’s sister. As the youngest of six Wagner children, Susan had spent a lot of time alone with adults growing up, since many of her brothers and sisters had already left the house or were too old to play with baby Susan, making hers an unusual solo act in a family as big as theirs. Like me, she grew up as a silent presence, surrounded by adults who didn’t always take notice of her. This gave her lots of opportunities to overhear things.
While she had only the dimmest recollections of my great-grandfather Henry and his wife, Anna, this was understandable, given the fact that they both passed away several decades before she was born. But Susan had spent time with my great-uncles and -aunts in a way that the other children hadn’t. I asked her what she might recall about any possible Jewish clues—she was, after all, the one my dad had said “believed we were Jewish” because of the kosher wine—and she emailed me a few weeks later:
When I was in high school I often visited my uncle Leo. He was the youngest and last living of [Henry Wagner’s] children. Our conversations were centered on news of my siblings, what I was learning in school, and politics, and were accompanied with doughnuts and a small jelly glass of Mogen David wine. Uncle Leo, like Dad, was deeply religious, but did not hold the parish priests in high esteem. During one of our less-than-positive conversations about the local clergy, Leo said, “Well, I’m just an old Jew.” Unfortunately, the conversation went no further, and I didn’t press for details. Certainly one of those I-wish-I-could-go-back-in-time moments.
It was staggering that Susan could remember—explicitly!—an admission by someone in the family that we were Jewish. Here was seemingly irrefutable proof that there was some specific Judaism that coursed through our veins. But, unbelievably, no one had followed up! I didn’t understand how you could hear something like this and remain unfazed. Here was a family that said Christian prayers every evening after dinner. A family that went to mass each Sunday without fail. A clan of children for whom Catholic parochial school was the only existence they’d ever known in a town with a single Jewish family—a group of teary semi-strangers—and yet a tableside revelation regarding their own Judaic roots was met unblinkingly, as if it had been an observation about the weather. As Aunt Susan sat at the table with her uncle Leo, he announced his Judaism, and that was…the end of the conversation. Pass the doughnuts and the Mogen David wine.
I tried to imagine myself in a similar position: If, say, over cocktails one evening with my grandmother, she had announced, “Well, I’m just an old lesbian.” I imagine that there’d be some follow-up on that—say, a Wait, what? Or, You were a lesbian when, again?—though one never does truly know what one would do in a moment like that. Maybe the allusion to Judaism registered confusion…or embarrassment? Maybe it was just too absurd to follow up on. Maybe both my father and aunt had heard this before, but in their minds it was too outlandish to be considered seriously.
Or was there a more sinister reason my father had resisted following up about his allegedly Jewish heritage? He might have gone on at length about the Erlich family to me and what wonderful people they were…but they were clearly outsiders. And perhaps my father’s fond recollections about how “well” the lone Jewish family was integrated into Christian Lansing society masked the fact that everyone in town, including my father, was acutely aware that they were different. I wondered if the suggestion that he was different, too, didn’t strike him as a revelation (as I understood it) but, rather, as a threat. It would challenge what my father thought of as his heritage, the true north to which he could point as the origin for his political leanings and his value system. In fact, it would make his legacy as flimsy and poorly understood as mine.
For me—someone who had no particular link to the institutional church, who could barely name the twelve apostles, who went to Reform Jewish nursery school (by mistake, mostly—my mother had missed the application deadlines for all the other schools in town, or so she says) and believed herself to actually be a practicing Jew for the entirety of age four, Jewish roots were not a disruptive, panic-inducing proposition, by a long shot.
What did it mean for the Wagners not to be Catholic? Not recent-covert-convert Catholic, not Catholic by way of Judaism, but Catholic going all the way back to Saint Patrick’s conversion of the Celts. That kind of Catholic. It was hard to fathom, given the magnificently large shadow the church had cast over my father’s home life and his cultural orientation. It was therefore cause for quiet, private panic. And the most efficient way to deal with the possibility of panic was to do everything in your power to avoid it. So my father brushed the theory aside, willed it away, and clung to a series of questionable hypotheses instead.
But I was ready to get at the truth. Not simply because I had a natural inclination toward detective work in general (thank you, Cam Jansen), but because it had awakened something in me. I was newly woke to the possibility that after all this time adrift I might now connect to something deeper and solve that longstanding and existentially unnerving question: Where the hell did I belong and who the hell did I belong to?
Ari my agent had even opened the door to his clan—the tribe!—and wasn’t this what I had been looking for all along? To be Jewish was to possess an identity rooted in the earliest stories recorded by the human hand! To be part of its traditions and practices, partner in an unseen bond that united people across the globe. To understand the mysteries of gefilte fish, to commune in seder dinners, to be part of a heritage that had always seemed ind
elible, especially compared to my hazy, dotted line of lineage. How could I not care about this? I was consumed by a need to know.
* * *
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This need to know is what fuels other people, too, in the global search for identity. Even for those of us who believe we’ve escaped the confines of heritage, we Homo sapiens still very much desire to know where we came from—a truth that would seem to be wholly at odds with both red-state American exceptionalism and blue-state ethnic transcendence. Thus the explosion in genealogy services and genetic testing to determine ancestry, which is now a billion-dollar industry.2 Maybe it’s symptomatic of our sense of entitlement—that we are all due an Ancestor Quest of our very own. I sensed this keenly when interviewing my cousin Karl and peppering my father with questions about his boyhood: I needed to know the answers, but I also deserved to know them. That entitlement is itself a symptom of everybody’s basic desire to find themselves again in a world that seems so utterly, inescapably lonely—gauzed in story but not fact, muddled by hypothesis without conclusion.
As I plotted the next stages of my investigation, the need to know started to blossom inside of me. I started to wonder: Why did I care so much about my paternal relatives’ history—and seem so dispassionate about the no-less-stark unknowns of my Burmese roots? On my father’s side, the mystery was intriguing and necessitated an epic wander through the mists of time, where I could interrogate the dead (or at least look for clues about their lives). But on my mother’s side, it was my own damn fault that I was in the dark. I had withheld these stories from myself! Everyone who could and would tell them was still living; they just needed to be asked.
My family and its mysteries represented two approaches to the existential mystery of identity and belonging. Both were fundamentally American tales, concerned with the future, not the past. (My mother and father, in their recollections, had equally emphasized the ways in which their respective clans proved that America was a place of inexorable momentum forward—after all, look what they had made for themselves in cosmopolitan Washington, coming all the way from where they had.)
But there were clear differences, too. My father’s history was the story of American assimilation: a family that crossed the Atlantic and landed right in the heart of America, white and Christian and ready to belly up to the counter for their scoop of that patriotic peppermint ice cream. But in this transaction—in the trading up of some specific, thorny European story for a broader American version—who knows what was lost?
My mother’s story was also an immigrant tale, but not so clearly one of assimilation. She didn’t look like the “average American,” and she possessed traditions and language and reflexive mannerisms that placed her, clearly, as someone who had departed someplace else to come here. She and her mother had fled their Eden when it met its ruin, but they remained, even in their welcome American exile, nationalists of a sort. If you had asked her what was really wrong with life in Burma, there was not much of a list. Growing up in Rangoon had been a series of endless halcyon days. There were no poisonous seeds of discord I could find in her wistful recollections, except for the emergencies that had pushed our family out at the very end.
As I started reflecting on my Burmese heritage through the lens of my newly-embarked-upon Ancestor Quest, it occurred to me that in my mother there was a Burmeseness rooted in blood and land that might equally be thought of as an identity, a tribe, like the one I sought. I had been intrigued by the Jewish Theory (which I was now greedy to categorize as the Jewish Reveal). It suggested, most profoundly, that in the Wagner family’s American assimilation, something—very important, I now realized—might have been lost. And I wanted badly to recover it. The Jewish Theory forced a revelation that the very thing I had first treated with indifference and rejection—the actual components of my identity—was something I now needed (and aimed to grasp firmly). I would find the things that had been lost in our dive into the American Salad Bowl!
In other words, the formerly blasé futureface hapa—generally happy to be mistaken as a Sioux Indian or Egyptian Coptic—was suddenly fixated firmly on specific identity and genealogy. How easily the landscape had shifted! From pan-multiculturalism to a tribe where I belonged, whether Hebrew in origin or Bamah Burmese. I wanted definitive proof that I was not alone, that I belonged. But where and with whom? It was a mystery to be solved—several mysteries, to be honest—and, oh, did I love mysteries. I was on the case: telephone, magnifying glass, library card, passport in hand.
I began this adventure where most everyone begins any adventure: at home. My parents divorced long enough ago that they could once again share holiday dinners and gossip about their only child, but I decided to approach them separately, so as to keep things simple, or at least simple-ish. On my father’s side, there were numerous family sources I could speak with, but not many who would remember very much about times past. In November 1967, my father’s father, Carl N. Wagner, Sr., died in Lansing, Iowa. His wife, Mary, joined him in the Great Beyond twenty-six years later. Their daughter Dorothy died of cancer several years before that. And the family archivist, their son Jim, left this world after a heart attack a few months before Dorothy. In other words, it was a large family, and all of the surviving relatives were (relatively) young, so getting to the root of who we were was going to require work beyond Facebook missives and clarifying emoticons.
Complicating this was the fact that my father was decidedly crappy at staying in touch with his family. It seemed ironic, or just plain sad, that America’s boom in Ancestor Quest-ing was happening at precisely the same time when our estrangement—from one another, from our families—was skyrocketing. Here I was, looking to better know the ghosts in our family, while my father and I were out of touch with the flesh-and-blood relatives who could offer camaraderie in real time.
How had we let things atrophy to this point? I had no siblings and as such was never tasked with the upkeep of familial relations. I was probably (definitely) a bad friend because of this. Calling aunts and uncles and cousins—with whom I hadn’t spoken in years—with pesky questions about what they remembered about our family made me uncomfortable. I suppose that reconnecting to community (that is, family) lay at the root of this entire project, but when faced (literally) with the prospect of corresponding with my father’s people, I felt queasy. I was not yet ready to call Aunt Kathy and (possibly) hear the displeasure in her voice if she brought up the fact that it had been a decade since we’d last eaten bratwurst together.
So I began with my mother’s family on the Burmese side: Relations here were not as distant as those on my father’s side—due in large part to the fact that my grandmother had mostly raised me, and we were therefore in regular communication. The branches on this side of the family tree were still very much tangled up together. Time and circumstance had not (yet?) alienated us from one another, perhaps a matter of recent immigration versus long-ago immigration, perhaps a function of Asian tradition (my mother’s mother lived with us for several years, something that did not happen with my father’s mother, who eventually moved into a retirement home), perhaps a result, simply, of geography. My mother’s immediate family moved to America and settled on the East Coast (we were only in sporadic communication with the family that had gone west), and so we saw one another frequently. Thus there was not the same self-directed shame in play when it came to my ancestral detective work.
I went first to the oldest person in our family, the one whose memory could stretch the farthest back in time: my grandmother. She was not like other grandmothers, insofar as most grandmothers did not play poker through the night. Nor did they evade the disposal of their precious (but stinking) durian fruits by hiding them under the kitchen sink…and then deny to the owners of the sink that they had hidden (stinking) durian fruits near the kitchen plumbing. Most grandmothers did not covet diamonds and forget birthdays. Most grandmothers did not try to get arrested while protesti
ng in front of the Burmese embassy.
Before the Internet and Twitter, before hashtags and streaming video, she was the member of our family most fully briefed on all the developments out of Burma. When the military junta shot and killed thousands of peaceful protesters following a massive protest on August 8, 1988—a turning point in contemporary Burmese politics—the person to phone our house with the news was my grandmother. “There’s been a coup!” she declared, ordering me to relay this message to my mother. “There’s been a coup!” I shouted. (I wasn’t entirely sure what a coup was, but it sounded dramatic.) It was she who met with and supported exiled Burmese pro-democracy activists, well into her eighties.
When a group of increasingly aged but nonetheless highly focused Burmese men—uncles, as they were known—gathered to form an exile government known as the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, my grandmother was their treasurer. She was a righteous matriarch of the fledgling pro-democracy movement—a position she’d adopted from her American perch—once shit back home really began to hit the fan in the 1980s.
I imagine that she was able to reconcile this Burmese activism with her status as an American citizen because while my grandmother considered herself a fully integrated member of American society—buying sweaters at Lord and Taylor, opining on members of Congress as if she knew them—she didn’t really consider herself “an American.” She would often begin sentences with “We Burmese…” (and, occasionally, “We Orientals…”) as if to demarcate the line between where she lived—and was indeed fully invested—and who she actually was.
Since embarking on my Ancestor Quest, I now viewed this connection to Burma in a new way—she, no less than my father and his idyllic stories of Iowa Catholicism, had that thing I wanted so much: a stake in a single, clear identity, one that clarified and strengthened her beliefs and stirred her to action through nearly a full century of life. Jewish or not, her certainty in her beliefs, her effortless navigation between worlds, appeared to me a possible route to finding that same committed sense of myself.
