Diving Deep Into My Family History
It started by accident. I began interviewing my mother not simply because she was dying and time was running out, but because, as the chemotherapy made her weaker, and the waking hours between medicated sleep became shorter, I wanted to present her with a distraction.
I already had most of her life story on record: as a Holocaust survivor she had taken part in the recording of several lengthy videos about her war experiences. She’d also recounted many stories about her life to me when I was growing up. I knew everything about her already, didn’t I?
Still, I turned on the recording device, and I began simply. I was prepared to hear the tales I’d heard previously, the ones I could repeat by heart. “What do you remember about your home life?” was one of my first questions, gently inquiring about my grandparents who’d been killed in World War II. “My father had a beautiful voice and used to play the violin…” she began to say, and then she went on to weave a scene that was unfamiliar to me.
Long before her parents had to hide their children in the roof of their barn, when life was still normal, her family had a ritual. Whenever a musical theatre production came to town, the family would attend together. Before they went to sleep on the night after the performance, when the family of seven were all tucked into beds in separate rooms, my grandfather would break the evening’s silence with the lyrics and music from the show that were still swimming around in his head. Soon, his children and wife would all chime in, harmonising from their rooms, inventing silly lyrics in place of the real ones, laughing and singing for hours until they’d sung every song they could remember. It was a painfully beautiful story, given that four of them would die at the hands of Nazis in a matter of years. But it also gave me such an important insight: I realised that my mother’s childhood had been suffused with beauty, love and joy, and not just tragedy.
It explained so much. Until then, I could never understand how my mother had experienced such brutality – her father had been shot before her eyes, her mother killed the next day – and yet did not embodying that as an adult. The day she turned 18 was, coincidentally, the day she was liberated from her fourth concentration camp, and one would think she would be forever shadowed by the horrors she’d endured. Instead, she was sunny, vital, optimistic – a woman who woke up in the morning humming a tune, often filling our family home with peals of laughter. This tiny story from her childhood explained so much of the puzzle for me.
As our interviews went on – stretching over weeks, and then months – I realised that knowing the broad strokes of her biography wasn’t as important as the revelations that came in between. For example, I had never thought much about my parents’ marriage; if anything, their relationship was characterised in my head by their occasional, stormy clashes. So it came as a surprise when my mother started relaying the story of their early courtship.
Her eyes shone when she spoke about him, as she recalled so many little details. Throughout their marriage, she said, he would leave little love letters for her hidden in crevices: in her work lunchbox, or beneath her car’s windscreen wipers. “But what about the arguments you had?” I asked. “Oh, we were passionate people,” said my mother. She told me that he was the love of her life and hearing the way she described him made me revise the way I’d seen my entire childhood.
Soon, other memories came to the fore: how they played a vigorous game of cards every night, with my father throwing a mock-tantrum whenever he lost. How they would dress up in their finery for an evening out with one another, my father looking like Clark Gable, my mother like Eva Gabor. I had passed judgment on my parents’ marriage when I was 10, and it had never occurred to me that there was another perspective.
I thought I knew my mother because I’d known her for 50 years, but much of what I knew was seen through a child’s eyes. Once I started asking her questions, prodding her gently and really listening to her nuanced answers, I didn’t just see her life differently, but mine, too. Even more than that, in the last six months of her life I was handed a vital gift: the intimacy and connection we shared through these conversations brought us even closer together. I wouldn’t say it made our farewell easier, but it added beauty, like the shadow of a tree casting darkness on a sunny pavement.
How To Do It
How well do you really know your family history? Do you know what your mother’s favourite meal was growing up? What your father got praised for when he was young? Most people don’t know the itty-bitty bits, and there’s poetry in that.
If you do want to dive deeper, here’s how to do it.
Set a regular meeting with the person. Make it informal. Phone calls are fine; there are apps that will record your conversation for you, and most phones have a recording function. Don’t do it too often so that it becomes a chore. Perhaps the last Sunday of every month is a start. Stop the interview when it starts to lag, whether it’s been going for 15 minutes or an hour.
Don’t feel the urge to go through someone’s life chronologically. When the conversation naturally veers into a different direction, go with that.
There’s no need to think up questions in advance. If questions are too formal, your subject will respond formally. Think about what you would like to know. Some of the things I asked were: Did your parents have a good relationship? What did your mother like doing? How were they viewed by their friends or in their community? What do you miss most about them? How did you celebrate birthdays? Not all of these questions are inherently interesting, but they will lead to other conversational bits that you can pounce upon. Don’t be afraid to get lost.
Go for detail. They enjoyed school? Get them to describe it in as much detail as you care to hear. What would they eat for lunch? What was school like back then? Can they describe what their classroom looked like? How did they get to school? What did they do after school? What games were played at lunchtime? These kinds of questions not only give you an insight into the person, but a slice of history, too.
Think about how you want to tackle hairy questions or family secrets. Not everything has to come out on the record. You could also offer to stop recording those bits. If you think your subject is willing, give them a heads up a few days in advance, to give them time to prepare themselves.
After each interview, transcribe it (sorry, this is the boring part). There are transcription services online, but rather than have the audio tapes build up and then – gulp – you lose them, have them backed up on your computer and transcribe them as well so there’s always a written version. One day, you’ll be grateful for the audio – there’s nothing that brings a person back to a moment in time than hearing the sound of their voice.
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Photo_ Felix Mittemeier/Pexels