Travis Fife: Family history helps us appreciate present experiences
The cemetery in Bribir, Croatia is where Fife’s great-great grandmother is buried. Fife visited the cemetery this summer with his grandmother and other family members to connect to their family’s roots and learn about their past.
(Courtesy of Travis Fife)
By Travis Fife
Aug. 4, 2014 1:19 a.m.
A deaf and drunken priest who couldn’t speak English and was a little too handsy with my mom and aunt wasn’t the preferred tour guide when trying to understand the history of a 13th century church.
But in a town with a population of somewhere between that of your average Starbucks and a public school GE class, we’d take what we could get. This church was a part of the heritage tour in Bribir and my grandma was determined to see it, even if she was the only one who could understand the priest’s slurred Croatian.
My family came to Croatia to better understand our roots. Learning about our roots meant seeing where my grandma’s parents came from, which is why my grandma has been talking about us visiting Croatia for as long as I can remember. She didn’t want us to have to rely on her retelling of our family story; she wanted us to see and appreciate the country her parents came from and meet relatives who still lived there.
We were in the hills of Croatia, in Bribir, the city my great-grandma was forced to leave at the age of 17 following her mother’s death. She had no living relatives left in Croatia. She came to America without knowing any English and without any money. We came to Bribir to see the world she left and appreciate how hard transitioning to the States must have been.
After our church tour ended, we had a barbecue at my great-grandfather’s house. Distant relatives still live there and use the well he constructed in the early 1900s as a source of water. That home has burned down and been rebuilt three times since he came to America, but our family still calls it home.
My relatives greeted us with hugs, kisses and tears. We didn’t speak Croatian and most of them barely spoke English, but that didn’t matter. We were family. Or as they said, we all had the same blood in our veins.
When I was younger, my parents and I visited Ellis Island in New York and found my great-grandparents’ names etched on the stones with all the other people who immigrated through the island in the early 1900s. But hearing the first-hand accounts from my family in Croatia was different from seeing those names and hearing the stories from my mom.
I met family members who lived in my great-grandfather’s house during World War II, when German soldiers starved the people who lived in these parts of the country. My family lived through times after the war when Croatia struggled against Yugoslavia and then the Serbs for independence. In short, they knew the sacrifices and struggles that created the potential for my life in America better than I did.
My great-grandfather worked as a smelter, earning next to nothing, trying to support a family. Now, my mom has a Ph.D and all of her kids will attend college. I can no longer imagine someone in my family living a life like my great-grandfather’s.
Appreciating how my family made this leap in two generations required not just hearing stories, but seeing the places where these stories began. It meant seeing the joy on my relatives’ faces when they saw that we understood the anecdotes they told about my great-grandfather. It means carrying their stories with me as a badge of honor as I continue my adult life.
It’s cliche and probably obvious to say that it took a specific series of very fortunate circumstances for any of us to be where we are now, or at least I’ve always thought so. My relatives were able to start a new life in America because of the suffering endured by those before them.
What I’ve realized though is that we all come from a family history that we can learn to appreciate more. Whether it’s a deaf priest who drank a little to much slivovitz or a barbecue with family I’d never met before, these were the gatekeepers to my family’s past.
This family history creates a lens through which we can view our experiences as something bigger than our own lives. Hearing the stories of my family’s past is a reminder that we are the products of sacrifices made by people we haven’t met and may never meet.
I never met my great-grandparents, but they are my past as much as they are my future.
Email Fife at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.
