Origins

When I was young it was understood that my maternal grandparents were Polish. They both died long before I was born. Everyone on that side of the family spoke Polish. During visits to the Jersey town where my mom was born my brother and I sat in various parlors listening to conversations we couldn't understand and smiled at people who gave us chocolate. We went to the Polish mass at church, again long periods of not understanding a word being said. My brother wrote a college application essay on my grandparents meeting on a boat on their way to the US from Poland. As time marched on everybody died and Polish pretty much disappeared from my family's life. At some point, maybe late high school my mom started saying her father was from Belarus not from Poland at all. It was around the time the Soviet Union was falling apart and people were starting to talk about countries that no one my age had ever heard of. Suddenly my grandfather wasn't Polish he was Belarusian and had escaped from the Soviets in a small leaky boat in the middle of the night, while his brother who wasn't so lucky was sent to Siberia.
Today I was eating lunch with a young woman from Belarus. I told her my grandfather was from Belarus but for some reason my mom always said he was Polish. Then she filled me in on the whole fascinating recent history of Belarus and how it made sense that my mom just said her father was Polish. Western Belarus was sometimes part of Poland and sometimes part of the Soviet Union, and back before Perestroika who had ever heard of Belarus. In 1991 Belarus became independent and the politicals went back to early Belarus history to reintroduce Belarusian tradition to the country. Unfortunately since 1994 the country has been ruled by a communist dictator. Somehow I think it all would have been less complicated if mom had started out saying your grandfather was from a country, which no longer appears on the maps and none of your friends will have heard of. Ok, I guess I see her point.