My father was born near the end of the 19th century (1897); I arrived near the middle of the 20th (1945); my four grandchildren, early in the 21st (between 2005 and 2016). My maternal great-grandmother, Belle, born in 1871, lived with us for a while and died in 1965, as did my father.
My mother’s people endured the hardships of farming life in the hills of Pennsylvania. Belle was a country woman who taught me how to skin a squirrel in seconds flat. As yet another girl in a too-large family she had been “farmed out” to a more prosperous household to do chores; there, in her teens, she was impregnated by one of the family members and gave birth to an illegitimate child (my grandfather). He grew up to be a ne’er-do-well drunkard who worked when he could for the railroad, as many men in that part of the country did in those years.
My father’s people escaped the horrors and prejudice of the Old World, in Lithuania. They arrived in this country decades before that prejudice was organized by the Nazis into genocide, but many known to them did not escape it. I have no detailed knowledge of their hardships because they were never discussed, but they existed like shadows in our family.
I grew up in a Jewish community in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II and in the midst of the Cold War. There was an expectation of nuclear annihilation: as children we scrambled under our desks during drills. One fine fall day in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, we were sent home from school to be with our families, as our dumbass principal told us it could be our last day on Earth. There had also been the terrifying menace of the polio epidemic, when public gathering places were closed and images of children in iron lungs proliferated.
I managed to develop into an unexceptional teenager, idolizing Elvis, interested in sports cars and social pursuits (i.e., girls), and finally became a Bob Dylan-wannabe with a vague notion of being a writer. Then I came to Provincetown. The rest, as they say, is history.
Thoreau, in Walden, wrote, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” Same here, but I am trying to know others well.
I am in a historical frame of mind because I have lately been involved in the preparation of the Seamen’s Bank annual report, and the theme this year is the history of the working waterfront. My partner in this project is Lisa King, a native, self-taught, and passionate historian, who has amassed and curated a priceless trove of materials on the places and people of the Outer Cape. (Some of these can be seen on “My Grandfather’s Provincetown” on Facebook.) We have been reviewing photographs for inclusion in the report, and it has been transporting. There are images of men tending weirs, offloading fish, mending nets, and much more.
My favorite photograph, dated 1900, is of a group of people assembled in front of a building on Small’s Wharf (where Cannery Wharf Park is being developed). I count 28 people — men, women, and children; the adults are wearing aprons; I think the structure is either a smokehouse or a cannery. The people are posing, so I assume it is some sort of event — Christmas or a birthday celebration.
I want to reach into that photograph and interview those people. Who are you? What is your work like? How do you live? What are your hopes and dreams? Have you any inkling that headed your way is the Spanish flu, the Depression, a world war or two? How are you? We will never know. We have been unable to identify any of them, although doubtless some of them are ancestors of people walking down the street today. Their individual stories, like those of my mother’s and father’s predecessors, will remain unknown, merged into the common narrative of the age.
The future, though, is more bewildering than the past. And more terrifying. We know, at least, that we survived to be here. I look at my grandchildren and cannot even imagine the world they will be living in as adults; even more incomprehensible is the thought of their children’s lives. I do not envy them.
Will they look back to us, in 2024, and wonder? What have we created? A world in such peril, the planet that nurtured our species seemingly ready to give up on us; a country bitterly divided, awash in conspiracy theories. Hatred abounds; guns proliferate; decency in public discourse is at a low ebb; 28 percent of polled voters of one party say that violence might be an acceptable means of achieving political goals.
This is where we are today. Will future generations be able to hear our voices?
