I read things about the Ukraine war, I look for answers.
There is not.
I wonder what my great-grandfather, my Syrian grandfather and grandmother, my Austrian great-grandfather, my German great-grandmother, my Italian great-grandparents would say about the refugees, the displaced, the dead.
I exist because they fell from grace.
I exist for wars.
My Austrian great-grandfather and my German great-grandmother fled their countries before Hitler was Hitler;
my Syrian great-grandfather and grandfather fled conscription in conflicts that were not theirs;
my Syrian grandmother traveled to South America alone, at the age of 12, to meet her father, whom she barely knew;
my Italian great-grandparents fled in terror from post-war famine.
If we leave it unadorned: I owe my existence to the misery of others.
Who are, by chance, my relatives.
My life was paid at a very high price:
my Austrian great-grandfather and my German great-grandmother could never be what they wanted to be—brewery owner, actress—and had a marriage of hardship and dead children;
my Syrian grandmother, who had already lost her mother in an epidemic, abandoned the woman who had raised her – her own grandmother – hers in the desert village where she would have wanted to spend her existence raising worms of silk;
my Italian great-grandparents were never able to return to the olive trees of Basilicata.
They all arrived in Argentina dragging bad verbs: leave, flee, abandon.
They never returned to their land.
They received news from their loved ones in sporadic letters that, sometimes, said “so-and-so died today”.
They wept in stoic silence for dead unknown to me.
When I asked them if they would not have preferred something else – to stay in their country, to remain at the origin – they told me: “My love,
If I had stayed in my land, I would not have met your grandfather, I would not have had children, you would not have been born”.
It's an awful response.
It is always atrocious when the only thing left, the last consolation, is to thank misfortune.
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