These true tales from the lives of immigrants and their children has helped me understand something about myself that I wasn’t able to articulate before. I am a child of immigrants.
I love my heritage. My mother’s family immigrated from Ukraine in 1876. My great grandparents were both Ukrainian Mennonites. My Grandmother spoke Plattdeusch until she was 11 and the family left the church (or was kicked out?) and they all had to learn English. Grandma always called it low-German. Our family cookbook (yes, we published a family cookbook) includes recipes for vareniki, borsch, and plumamousse.
I have always been drawn to people who seem different and a little bit foreign, to the various unfamiliar folk music and traditional dances, to the accents, to the different arrangement of speech sounds in my mouth, almost as if I’m looking for something that fits.
As the author of “The Foreign Girl”, Siri Hustvedt says, I have learned double-consciousness. I call it seeing two worlds at once: I see the world as is with one eye, and with the other I see magic, I see my ancestral memory, things the way they could be.
“But I the child of the foreign girl, learned what every offspring of immigration learns — double consciousness. The way things are here is not the way things are everywhere. There are words in my mother’s tongue that have no equivalents in English. I can dance to a different tune. I am a creature of between here and there.”
— Siri Hustvedt, “The Foreign Girl”, Alien Nation:36 True Tales of Immigration, edited my Sofija Stefanovic
“Muzherii,” my Mennonite Grandma used to say, “scrambled, hodgepodge, mushed together.”
What if we had never left Ukraine? I would be Ukrainian, not American. Would I still be “a creature of between here and there”? Have I ever truly been American? After all,
“If your relatives weren’t Native Americans or brought here on slave ships, are you not of immigrant stock?”
— Siri Hustvedt, “The Foreign Girl”. Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration
Calling pale-skinned people Caucasian is a misnomer. Caucasian means “from the Caucasus”. If you are white, you’re probably European American or something, but not Caucasian. And you’re a child of an immigrant at some point in your family history.
I want to encourage people to learn about their family heritage and ancestry. You might be surprised at what you find, and you might gain a deeper understanding of your relatives and the world around you. I know the journey for me has been very worthwhile.
Thank you for reading my thoughts.
Be curious —
— Shalanosa
Shalanosa's Sanctuary 