Posted on by rjonakait

I Am my Own Ancestor

The Jonakait family has not been particularly interested in family history. When I reported that a grade school classmate bragged that Abe Lincoln was somewhere in his background, my father responded, “And if he looked hard enough, he would also find a horse thief in the family tree.” My mother told me that when she was asked to fill out a form as a schoolgirl about her ethnicity, her father replied, “It’s none of their damn business. Just tell them your family is New England Yankee.”

Although none of my immediate family has studied our ancestry, one of my mother’s seven (or eight?) sisters produced an extensive family tree. My mother’s maiden name was Dewey and the tree placed its roots back to 1600 England. My maternal grandmother, who died long before I was born, was a Clement, whose roots went back to ancient England and Holland. The chart claimed that the progenitor Deweys came to America on the third or fourth boat after the Mayflower. That amused me. The passengers on the Mayflower are well documented as they might be for the next boat. I am not sure, however, that passenger manifests exist for later vessels. Who can prove you wrong if you claim the family came over in the late 1600s?

It is clear, however, that this side of my family is WASP. The tree-forming aunt did not appreciate it when I said, “You mean we are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and came to America before 1700. And yet we are all poor. Is this something to be proud of? What does that say about our stock? Certainly we have no excuses for our lack of wealth.”

Another part of the family tree did interest me. A nineteenth century branch noted that a female ancestor lived in upstate New York and was named Freelove Dewey. I wonder how that played out for her.

I know little about my father’s parents, even though they lived in the flat above us on Tenth Street. I never discussed anything with my grandparents about their lives. I am confident, however, that my grandmother was born in what was then Germany but is now Poland. She came to this country when she was 16-18, I think. I never heard mention of any siblings or of her parents. I assume the teenager came alone, a trip in my youth I did not think much about. I know that she strongly disliked Germany, and although my father went to a Lutheran school, she also had disdain for the church.

My paternal grandfather was born in Pennsylvania to what I was told was a German immigrant family, but perhaps it was a Lithuanian family since the part of Pennsylvania where he was born had many Lithuanian immigrants. My grandfather’s family, legend has it, moved back to Germany, but my grandfather stayed in America. I have no idea how he ended up in Wisconsin or how he met my grandmother. I don’t know what he might have done before, but he I know that he worked in the Kohler Company factory for 35 years.

I have often been asked the derivation of the Jonakait name. Most times I answer that it is a corrupted Lithuanian name. Those who know better than I say that it has Lithuanian roots but is no longer Lithuanian. Those names almost invariably end in “as” or “us.” It is clear, however, that the name was changed before anyone came to the U.S. My theory: At one time Lithuania bordered what was then East Prussia in Germany. I think a Lithuanian family moved to East Prussia and the name became modified to become less Lithuanian and more German. I think of my father’s roots as German, not only because of the altered name. Lithuania is a Catholic country that had a significant Jewish population. East Prussia was Lutheran, and my grandfather identified as Lutheran. I believe he spoke Lithuanian, although I never heard it, but I know he spoke German with his friends and his wife. My father spoke some German, but no Lithuanian. I also think of Jonakait as German because when I have googled the name, I have found a few with the name or close to the name in Germany, almost always in eastern Germany, and none in Lithuania.

One thing is clear: there are few of us Jonakaits. Some are sprinkled around the country with slightly altered spellings—Jonakeit, Jonekait, etc.—but not many. Outside of my immediate family, I never met another Jonakait.

This lack of ancestral knowledge does not bother me. Even though I know that it can’t be entirely true, I want to think that I am my own creation. However, part of who I am surely came from my parents, and then part of who my parents were, surely came from their parents. So ancestry must make some difference. There is some truth in the Chinese proverb, “To forget one’s ancestors is to be a book without a source, a tree without a root.” It must be, however, the further you go back in the ancestral tree, the less influence today and the more irrelevance. I want to be judged on what I think and do, not on who my great grandparents were or weren’t. As Russian General Mikhail Skobeleff supposedly said, “I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate.” (He clearly didn’t live in 19th century England.) Andoche Junot, another general, this time Napoleonic French, when asked about his ancestry, put it more succinctly, “I know nothing about it. I am my own ancestor.”

But perhaps my true driving force on this topic was stated by a modern sage in a tweet: “I will never understand people’s fascination with their ancestry; isn’t knowing your current family bad enough?”

Posted on by rjonakait

Put Labor Back into Labor Day

Labor Day is not a lonely and forgotten holiday. It is celebrated as the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The schoolyear begins as does the football season. But how often do we commemorate the supposed purpose of the holiday, the labor movement? At least on most Labor Days, however, I think about a laboring man, my grandfather.

 I was raised in a working-class family. My parents, sister, brother, and I lived on the ground floor of a two-story house. My father’s parents lived upstairs. While I talked with my grandmother some, I spent almost no time with my grandfather, who just seemed silent with us most of the time. I have no idea how he ended up in Wisconsin. He was born in Pennsylvania to an immigrant family, most of whom migrated back to Germany. I felt like I knew only two things about him: He played skat, a card game, at a local tavern on some weekends and evenings, and he worked at the Kohler Company, the firm that makes toilets and sinks and bathtubs. Other than that he was some sort of laborer in the factory, I didn’t know what he did.

I do know that he started at Kohler in 1917. I am confident of this fact because I now have my grandfather’s Hamilton pocket watch, which was awarded him by his employer on his twenty-fifth anniversary of working for the company. His initials are inscribed on the back. A cover opens revealing his name and further inscriptions: “1917 SERVICE 1942” and “KOHLER OF KOHLER”.  A goldish chain is attached to the watch and to a medallion, which is inscribed on the back with my grandfather’s name and the obverse has a relief of a factory worker, “Kohler” boldly written across the medallion, with a slogan on one side: “He Who Toils Here Hath Set His Mark.” (When I used to wear three-piece suits to court, I would carry this watch and medallion in my vest pockets. The watch still works beautifully.)

My grandfather continued working at Kohler for another dozen years, but then a strike came. Kohler was by far the largest employer in the area, and the walkout, with my grandfather joining the strikers, had a huge effect on the town. As the strike went on and union benefits lessened, families faced tough times. Some strikers sought other work, but there was not much to be had. A few decided to return to work. Loyalties were tested. In a town with a tavern culture, some regulars found they were no longer welcome at their favorite bar. Sporadic acts of violence occurred. I was only eight or nine when it began, and the kids seldom mentioned it. Child friendships did not follow the fault lines fissuring from the strike, but at home I learned the epithet “Scab” and the words to Solidarity Forever.

And I saw the effect on my grandfather. He was now home at times I had never seen before. And he looked lost, bewildered. Part of his life, his identity, had been stripped. I have no idea what kind of economic strain was weighing on my grandparents, and from the sanctuary of childhood, I never thought about it, or I never thought about it until a few years after the strike started. I was with some friends, and we wandered into a park behind our school’s playground. And there was my grandfather raking leaves. Until then, I was not aware that he worked for the city’s Parks Department. He saw me; I saw him. We made no signs of recognition. He looked embarrassed. Raking leaves was the kind of demeaning make-work projects of the Depression. It was akin to a handout. It was not the real work of making something as was done at the Kohler Company. Or perhaps, my grandfather was fine, and only I was embarrassed for what he now had to do. I know that I did not want my friends to know that the lonely-looking figure under the trees was my grandfather. Perhaps my grandfather was truly embarrassed or perhaps he recognized that I was or perhaps both, but we exchanged no greetings.

The strike lasted six years, then, and I still think today, the longest strike in the country’s history. The National Labor Relations Board eventually found that Kohler had not bargained with the union in good faith, and that set off another round of contentiousness about what back pay was owed the strikers. The year the strike ended my grandfather died.

My sister recently told me something I did not know–that my grandfather waited by his upstairs window watching for me to come home from school. He knew that I was studying German, a language that he considered his native tongue (he also spoke English, of course, and Lithuanian), and he was proud of my German studies. Although I would try to exchange a few words of German with my grandmother, I never said a word of German to him. I am sorry for that, and I am sorry that I did not go up to him in that park. We did not hug much in my family, but I wish that I had given him one. He may no longer have had the job that had been part of his identity for forty years, but work was still important to him, and the many others like him. I try to remember that, especially on Labor Day.

(continued August 30)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I thought that Ross Perot, who recently died and is now largely forgotten, looked like Howdy Doody, but Howdy had a more engaging more personality. And sometimes I lie awake at night listening for that “giant sucking sound.”

If the 2016 election brought increased sales for Brave New World and 1984, will the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein do the same for the marvelous and deeply disturbing Lolita? Or for The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman that chronicles the abduction of a young girl, an episode that mirrors and may have influenced Nabokov’s book?

I am Donald J. Trump.

I never admit a slump.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

Of my brain, thou shalt not speak.

The handyman had come to look at a small project. I was wearing an anti-Trump shirt. He said that he liked it. I replied that I was careful where I wore it. He said that I should be because people got so angry nowadays. I realized that he had not absorbed all the writing on the shirt when he said that Trump had been sent from God. He had only limited times to do the job this week because of church obligations and volunteer work at a Christian radio station. He was an evangelical. And he was black.

I don’t understand many things. For example, I don’t understand many Americans’ fascination with British royalty.

A reason that I am not a conservative: I do not believe that wealth equates with moral worth.

My ears perked up when I heard that the podcast Planet Money was reporting from where I grew up, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The story focused on how employees in a time of strong employment were gaining power. To illustrate its point, it discussed Kohler Company, which the podcast said was in Sheboygan, and interviewed one of its workers. I wanted to correct the report. As a native of Sheboygan, I never would have said that Kohler is in Sheboygan. It’s in the village of Kohler, which is in Sheboygan County, but not Sheboygan. Sheboygan and Kohler are separate places. The studio reporter asked the man in the field where the Kohler employee might go if the workers’ demands were not met by the company. He replied, “They could go to Sargento Cheese or Johnsonville Brats.” The studio guy sounded amazed, asking, “They are all in Sheboygan?” This Sheboygan native rebelled at the affirmative reply. Sargento is in Plymouth and Johnsonville Brats is in, hold your hat, Johnsonville. Both near Sheboygan, but not in Sheboygan. But then the field reporter said with a hint of smile in his voice something I had not known from my years there, “Sheboygan is a feast for the senses.” Even so, I am not planning a move back.