Family

My husband's parents... ND's grandparents... were here last weekend. We had a great time together.

In the meantime, at school I've been working with my second graders on their annual immigration project. It's a family history project in which they interview someone who immigrated to America, or interview someone about an immigrant.

The first year we did this at school, I asked my dad about the grandmother after whom I was named and who I never knew. I wrote a little about her immigration with what information we had as a way of practicing the project I was asking of my students.

I realized suddenly this year that I can't ask my grandfather now as he died in 2006. I guess I thought I didn't need to as he'd written a great deal already and I had done at least one project about him in high school. But it made me sad to realize that time had run out on being able to ask him more.

So then, with my in-laws in town, I decided to interview my mother-in-law who immigrated from Poland to Israel as a young child, and from Israel to the states when she was eleven. We'd talked about her history before, but this was my chance to actually document it and I do still need to write it all up.

It's been sad thinking about how all of ND's grandparents are so far away. U. grew up with a grandmother nearby, but I've never had family nearby except when I was living with my parents. Yom Hashoah was about a week and a half ago and thinking, too, about how much family was lost then to so many people really made me sad.

The good news is that we have telephones and internet and airplanes. People haven't always had the ability to go so far away except, of course, through loss. But just as people can go away more easily now, they can also come back.