Berkeley | CA
It’s 2024... and I’m 81 years old, keine hora healthy and educated and comfortable—a California girl at heart and an American by citizenship. You can see how I got here by looking at the facts on my immigration papers. Born 1940 in Lodz, Poland, reared there for years. Parents and I came through WWII intact. Came across the Atlantic on the Marine Flasher, and by train from New York to L.A. travelling first-class the whole way. That’s proof.
If you’ve read this far, it will make sense when I tell you that half of those facts are wrong, or sort of wrong, or wrong-but-for-a-very-good-reason. We might see evidence—pictures and documents and dresses and pretty backdrops—but it’s a lot more difficult to understand what that evidence means. A lot goes unsaid. Most has gone unsaid until now.
Then I decided that "facts" don't exist absent context, especially not official data. I need to present a new look at my official facts to put them into my tales for you. Official papers got me here in 1947, but they will show nothing of my history. It’s the same with the stories I love to tell about my life, with all its twists and turns. My story is much more than those stories, in the same way that I’m more than my eye color or wardrobe. I don’t want anyone to look at a sepia-toned baby picture (or a washed-out 1950s snapshot, or a groovy 1970s Polaroid) and wonder what my life was like.
It will be more fun for all of us if I just tell you. Better yet, come along and we'll walk the road together because "the road is made by walking."
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Mar. 16, 2024
New (guest) blog post: Mrs. Gabelko's Favorite (and Only) Daughter Shifts House
Belonging unfurls a richly woven memoir—brought to life by someone who saw it all, keeping it all vividly alive in uncanny memory—charting a voyage from the sharded remnants of war-torn Europe to the kaleidoscopic world of mid-century Los Angeles.