yes the berlin wall!

I’m from Buffalo, which is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Not only are we divided by color, but we’re so hardcore about segregation that we go beyond that and segregate into sub-sub categories. I grew up in a Polish suburb, my father is from the Irish ward. When my mother married my father, it was like she was committing a mortal sin, because he was a dirty Irishman and my mother’s Polish family hated him. And my grandmother blames all my bad qualities on him and the Irish blood in me (for real).

It’s frustrating, because I find the sub-sub sections can be really interesting. Like I kind of like that we have a Polish neighborhood, an Irish one, an Italian one, a Vietnamese one, a West African one (those two are newer than the European-descended ones, which were all founded in the early 1900s). It’s frustrating how much “difference” leads directly to “inequality.” I live in one of the more diverse neighborhoods in terms of race, but around the corner from one of the most diverse neighborhoods I’ve ever seen in terms of race, culture, and even socio-economic status. That one has everything from recent immigrants from Tibet to lots of Puerto Rican families to college students with ancestors who were in the Revolutionary war, and it’s really awesome. There are groups of kids running around all summer, and all their parents standing on corners watching, talking, grilling out, and all the parents are in totally different kinds of clothes, depending on where they’re from. And all the little kids are, like, wearing Pokemon or Hannah Montana teeshirts. But as the groups of immigrants make more money, they move out to the richer suburbs or away from western new york and become more American and less xxx-American. Leaving behind empty houses, of course.

I’m so sorry Becky, the look on Kudrows face brought back the horror that so many perhaps have forgotten but sounds like you cannot. Frankly I cried that entire show, even at the joy when they found ‘Yuri’ in Poland. My son visited one of the camps on his trip to Germany and brought back what he claims to be part of the wall – sounds like a religious artifact though (and therfore maybe not real).

Some Jews left no trace. They were murdered with their entire families, so there was no one left to submit Pages of Testimony for them; or they left no documentary traces; or the traces they left were destroyed, either during the war, or afterwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, archivists sometimes burned entire collections of what were perceived, unfortunately, as documents with no lasting value.

In fact, one of the things that was most striking to me about moving away from the South was how much more people (especially white people) knew about their ethnic/national origins. There were several times when I was living in the American Northeast that someone would ask me “where’s your family from” and mean something other than “Louisiana.” When I got the follow-up, “No, I mean, where are you REALLY from,” it was always pretty bewildering. Maybe this experience was unique to me, but my youth in the South was dominated by the sense that one’s racial classification (i.e., black or white, since most people pretended that no other classification was possible) was all that mattered, and most people didn’t know much beyond this. Oh, except for the white kids who liked to make vague claims about being “part native American” to seem more interesting.

A lot of this stuff seems to cost a lot more than my fairly meager budget will allow, so I think I might have to wait a while before I can indulge my curiosity.