Ethan Gutman
Memory of the Family Past
My project tries to show how my family tries to keep itself as a constant in the lives of its members no matter where they migrate to in the world. Being able to have this constant in our lives that works as a basis for our identity gives me a certain confidence and worth in the backdrop of the 20th century which had my family feel worthless. My project relates to the topics of the class emotionally in the sense that I believe it is hard to understand what other people leave behind when they make a new life for themselves in a new country. It also shows how hard it is for second-generation immigrants to understand what their parents left behind in their home country.
Photos and text, 2020
This picture is of my mother and father at their wedding in Buenos Aires a few years before they moved to the United States. We go back to Argentina every year in order to see extended family, and I always used to ask myself why they never made plans to move back when they eventually retire. All their friends in the United States are Argentine Jews, and what better a place to be among those they feel comfortable around than Buenos Aires. Having learned more and more about the history of my family I came to understand both why they would never move back as well as why the United States became home for them. While they love to be around family, the weight of the past becomes to heavy for them, and they consequently never stay more than a few days in Argentina.
My parents never told me much about their lives growing up in Buenos Aires. I knew my grandfather had died when my mom was just six years old and that my other grandfather had died a few months before I was born, so I was never able to deduce what exactly their effect on my parents was. I hear stories about what my parents, grandparents, and aunts/uncles were like back in the old days but all of the pieces that I dig up never end up fitting back together. I thought for years that my grandfather had been my father's biggest influence for years, yet a car ride with my uncle last year confirmed the opposite, that they were nothing alike.
Here is a picture of my mom and my grandfather looking at her in the distance. Since he died when she was only seven years old its hard to find out anything about him. His wife, my grandmother, apparently had a really hard time after his death in raising my mom and her two sons. Thats the explanation I got as to why all of her children resent her, and send her money just so that they don't have to visit her or hear her talk on the phone. On the other hand, my cousin told me that she also had four other husbands. That same cousin once told me (and he has a PHD in economics and advises the government in economic policy, he's no idiot) while we were smoking weed on a balcony that one of those husbands was an anarchist film maker, and that when he died she let his body rot for two weeks until she reported him dead. I still laugh when I recall that story, and knowing my xanax taking lonely grandmother it has a 50% chance of being true. Sometimes I feel like I should call her or no one else would, but I know that this benevolent feeling would soon turn into boredom in five minutes. I will just keep ignoring her until she kicks the bucket. Sorry I'm putting it in these terms, but thats what most of my family seems to be doing. No one likes to put it that way.
Here is my mother again with her two brothers and a cousin. Again, because of the supposed great trauma that it was for them to be raised by my grandmother both of the brothers don't get along too well and haven't talked much for 40 years. I'm much closer to my uncle Mario than I am with my uncle Sergio. Mario was forced to take over my grandfather's company when he was just 17. With only a high school education, he was able to not only take care of the entire family (my grandmother never worked a day in her life, maybe another reason everyone looks down on her), but also to grow the company exponentially and pay for my mom's move to the United States. To say he is like a Vito Corleone type would be an understatement. After I finished high school I went back to Argentina for a year before attending university. He saw to it that I got a job with him being put in charge of things I had no business being put in charge of. I felt that it was ridiculous, but the amount of confidence he had in me seeped in somehow. He would always tell me that I was a genius, I just didn't know how, but somehow that helped me take charge of my life, even if it was through some cheap sense of aristocratic greatness just because I was my mother's son.
On the other side of my family we have my grandma her along with my great grandparents. Me and my grandma have the best relationship that I have out of any extended family including my uncle. Every year when I go back to Argentina we just lock ourselves in a room and watch films, sometimes three in one sitting. Every night she insists that she take great care of me cooking me meals and making my bed as if I was fifteen years old. She doesn't talk about how things were from when she was younger, but stories from another cousin give me something to go on. She had been part of the communist and peronist parties in Argentina, any trouble making party that opposed imperialism, yankees, and the free world in general. It is a confirmed rumor that she missed a court date once over custody of my father during her divorce to my grandfather because she was in jail for throwing rocks at a Ford factory. She still has posters of Che Guevara and Peron on her walls, but a certain calmness has taken over her life which reduces her activism to complaining about politics over dinner. It's nice to have her intellectual mind around so that I can call her when I start to read a new book as she has probably read it. Were she my age I probably wouldn't get much along with her, I usually like to hang out with the anti intellectual conservative type, I find their views about life a lot more interesting like that of my father.
I only have one memory of my dad's brother. He had self branded himself the "black sheep" of the family and didn't like to get along with my dad and didn't want to see his kids. Most of it has to do with a jealousy which he suffered from, both being doctors but one making it big in the United States and the other never being the same after his brain tumor. Impressions of him as a black sheep throughout childhood contributed to my labeling him as a bitter man rather than someone who wanted to be recognized by those around him but could not find common ground. Since he died a few years ago, I always thought of him as an example of what not to be. Since he and my father had been on bad terms during his death, I decided that I would always take it upon me to find common ground with my father and a place that we could both call home.
It's important for me to be able to maintain a certain understanding of what my family’s past means to me in the present. Without a sense of identity which I can use as my foundation, I feel paralyzed and am unable to spring into action in the real world. This relationship between memory and practicality requires a kind of negotiation and renegotiation with myself in order to see myself as being bigger than just the insignificant human being I am in the context of seven million people, but at the same time it comes with a constant instability which I am constantly trying to make stable, at least for a few months at a time.