Roots

Today is the third anniversary of my late wife Peggy's death. It must not go unnoted. However, I'll reserve my celebration of her life for her birthday. With the help of a genealogy book written by her great uncle in the 1880s she was able to trace her ancestry to the mid 1600's when her many times great grandfather landed in Narraganset County in what is now Rhode Island. 

I have no such records which only inflames my imagination as to my progenitors. 

45,000 years ago, give or take a week, Omar Levine left Africa walking upright, shed some fur, and made his way to the Eastern Mediterranean. He knew good real estate when he came to the Fertile Crescent. 10,000 years later Olof Levine was still looking for a good night’s sleep free of growls and snarls. Contrary to family lore his first words were likely, Your cave or mine? or maybe, How’d you light that fire, again? We’ve always been slow learners.

All this comes from the scrapings inside my cheek which my daughters arranged to be sent to Family Tree DNA. They traced my double-helix back from whence we came. The footprint of our beginnings is mapped by my haplogroup. It doesn’t reveal much of anything I didn’t know before but after staring at the genome for a while it begins to speak.

Given my propensity for staying out of fights I overheard my forefathers saying how they survived skirmishes as the ones hiding under rocks or high up in trees. They knew enough not to hang a left to Spain 20,000 years later though if they’d been there during the Inquisition I’d have been raised as a Roman Catholic altar boy. Faced with the multiple choice: conversion or expulsion or…boiling oil, I expect my forefathers would have said, What else have you got? I’ll be anything you want… except chopped liver.

As it is, they headed north by northeast. The Levites were the scribes and they scribbled like scriveners, writing blogs in Yiddish whether in Lithuania or Ukraine. One day during a particularly nasty pogrom, my father’s father huddled in the root cellar while the Cossacks were busy doing the only thing they were good at, pillaging and looting. He escaped on the shoots of potato wings and their ferment.

Without enough points for an upgrade, he took the passage in steerage. Grandfather Lior slept in the hold with potatoes; they became his skin and his misshapen dreams. Did he scramble above deck to wave at the famous torch lifting its lamp, seeing himself as the wretched refuse…, tempest-tost? It’s a good bet he did. By a twist of fate, he also ended up in Rhode Island; Providence yet. A taste for drink combined with gout had its way with him. He named his first two sons Shmuel; Sammy meet Sammy.

Had we arrived in Los Angeles earlier we would have been the ones racing down Wilshire Blvd toward the ocean hoping the mastodon got caught at La Brea in the tar pits. We knew enough not to do combat with saber-tooth tigers or any other creatures in need of orthodontic work. The DNA inside my cheek has gotten me and my daughters this far. Embedded in there is a winning combination of cowardice and luck and a fair share of Peggy's irrepressible pluck and spunk.