The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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and boy, I just couldn’t wait, ’cause when it was too small for Genie, then I got that chinchilla coat with that big chinchilla tammy, oh goodness!
Dad was working. I think he worked part of the time and then he got laid off, that was why we couldn’t keep the house. I think he was working at Jarecki’s, a factory. It was some machine parts or something like that. I used to wait for him, he would come home from work, and we had this porch, this brick porch, and there’s always the little cutout window on the porch, I don’t know what that was for, but anyways, we had it and I used to lay on the porch on my stomach and watch through that hole. As soon as I could see him coming way down the block, you know, then I’d ask my mom and she’d say, “You can go now, if you can see him you can go now.” And he had this cap on, he looked just exactly like they show them people from the Depression. [laughter] With the cap, yep, and them kinda shaggy clothes and everything. Well, we were poor.
Fig. 13. Fran, 1951
When I was six years old, I had all the baseball cards ’cause I was the one [my dad] used to take to Valley Field to baseball games on Sunday afternoon. And I can remember at that time when Joey and I were little, Mom used to dress us, we had sailor suits, him and I had look-alike sailor suits, and she used to dress us all up in them sailor suits and then we’d go walkin’ down the street. He was very proud of us. He’d meet people on the street and he’d say these are my two children. But they say he always used to pat me on the shoulder when he’d tell people and he’d say, “This one shoulda been the boy, though.” [laughter] See, Joe was very delicate. He was pale, and he wasn’t a healthy boy to begin with, but he grew up to be big and strong. I guess I was healthy. Depression or no Depression. And so, when he would go places and this is what he would say, he’d tell the guys who we were, you know, and then he’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “But this one shoulda been the boy.” And I did do a lot of things with him. I was the one that went fishing with him. I don’t know if Joe ever went fishing with him. I went fishing with him. And I used to have all the Babe Ruth baseball cards and I knew all the baseball players at that time.
It was at that time that [my mother] sold her engagement ring, because we needed money for food. Then we moved, when we got a little bit older, when he still didn’t have a job, and then he finally went to Flint, and he’d come home just for weekends, and oh, I can remember times we went to bed hungry. You know. She’d say, “Well, there’s oatmeal if you want oatmeal,” but, you know, there’s nothing in the cupboards. I can remember many days where we just got eggs and potatoes, and those big egg pancakes—they’re still my favorite. That used to be our main meal. So, we were just poor.
But that’s when we always had a Christmas tree but we didn’t always have presents. I remember the one year when we didn’t get any presents, but Joe got one present because he was the boy. [laughter] Well, you know, it didn’t make any difference to us, you know, it didn’t bother us. He got this fire engine and I remember we were all down on the floor playing with it. We got fruits and nuts and stuff like that and maybe we got a pair of stockings, something like that, but that was, uh [pause] that was a real poor Christmas.
After the Depression my dad didn’t want to be caught with that happening again. He figured that at least out in the country he could grow food, vegetables, and he could have a cow, and that’s what we did. We had a cow, one cow! [laughter] And, uh, chickens, lotta chickens. He just didn’t wanna be caught with six children with a Depression again. But see, I can remember that’s how Daddy was, that was the reason, because what are we gonna do if this happens again? At least if this happens again we can put in our potatoes and we don’t have to buy everything.
Oh, Mom didn’t want to move out there. But then, oh, we had to move and I can remember she didn’t wanta move. But she did. And here she’s moving [to Hilliards], you know, right among all her friends and relatives. This is where she lived before, the same church and everything. But she complained about it. It’s probably the only thing I remember her really complaining about. And she just didn’t like it. She didn’t want to move back out in the country. She loved the city. She’s like me, I gotta see lights. I gotta see lights and people, I gotta see them moving around. And maybe I got that from her.
2
Ethnicity in the Belly of the Family
It’s not something I think about, but it’s with me every day of my life.
Mari
AT ONE POINT in the middle of this project, one of my aunts pulled me aside and confided, “You know, there’s not much that’s Polish about us except the name Grasinski, and that isn’t really Polish, it’s Russian.” Other family members pointed out that our bloodlines are predominantly German. Johann Fifelski, rumored to have been born out of wedlock, would have been a Von Wagonner had his father the lord married his mother the peasant. Instead, the single mother’s surname got passed down, and with it, Polishness. Or so the story is told. Johann’s great-granddaughter and granddaughter-inlaw wrote a detailed Fifelski history that never mentions this bloodline slippage. But my aunts and my own sisters have all heard this. The story that we come from aristocracy through illegitimacy is a rewarding fantasy of origin that helps us to accept our class position while at the same time reminding us that class and status do matter. In this case, status was linked to ethnicity because the lord was German and the peasant Polish.
Not only are we German, but we’re supposedly Russian as well. Mari believes she is mostly Russian; Nadine acknowledges Russian bloodlines (she sells her crafts under the label “Vineyard Couture, made by Nadja,” using a Russian spelling of her name); and Caroline, the most “practicing” Polish American of the sisters, laments, “I’m not even sure they were Polish. That Grusczynski, he could have been Russian, ’cause you see that name a lot on the Russian side, and could even have been Russian Jewish or something a little bit in there, I mean. And then my dad is German, too, because his mother was pure German, you know, Grandma Anna was pure German. And then on the Fifelski side, they say there was a lot of German and then Polish [laugh].” The older sisters support their claims to Russian ancestry (and perhaps even that they were Russian Jews) by noting that the priest wrote their father’s name with a “y” (“Grushinsky”) on his baptismal certificate (evidence of his Jewishness is found in a Catholic ceremony?), that their father spoke some Yiddish words (they remember the word shiksa), that their brother “looked Russian,” and that their mother Helen told them that their grandma and grandpa Grusczynski had Russian blood (yet, in the same breath, they tell me that their grandma Anna Tice Grusczynski was “pure German”).
The confusion in part relates to the political morass of history: because Poland was annexed in the 1790s by its more powerful neighbors Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the emigrants who left before Poland regained its independence in 1918 were not Polish nationals. The Grasinski sisters vaguely understand this. This ambiguity of borders allows them more freedom to construct their myth of origin, though they would never think of themselves as actively constructing their ethnicity. They confess to blood-mixing and lineage confusion because they understand ethnicity as a descent identity—something that is passed down the generations, that is “given” to them.1 Polishness is in the blood; they feel its primordial pulse in their toes tapping to the accordion and their fingertips moving over the shiny amber beads of the rosary. Mari finds her Polishness “in my face, my legs, and my mannerisms.” Nadine says the Grasinski Girls may be more Russian and German, but they “still got that Polish blood.”2
Their reputedly thin Polish bloodline is more than offset by their thick Polish heritage. They were raised by ethnic Poles. All records indicate the Fifelskis, Chylewskas, Zulawskis, and Grusczynskis were Polish Roman Catholics. They came from the Prussian partition of Poland and spoke Polish; their gravestones were written in Polish; they moved to a Polish rural community in the United States, were part of a Polish Roman Catholic parish, and taught their children that they were Polish.
Leaving aside bloodlines, Fran makes a more sociological argument for why “we are not Polish!” The