Whether fleeing Nazis, Cossacks, wildfires or ICE, we all need a ‘go bag’
Across the years and miles, we carry the weight of the difficult choices that have to be made
The author’s maternal grandparents. Jack and Anna Lome. Courtesy of Joan Afton
I have a go bag. And so does my cat Gigi. After 20 years in LA, we are now People With Go Bags.
You may have heard we had a spot of fire hereabouts recently. In all this time of frequent fires and earthquakes and mudslides — surely, locusts and murrain aren’t far behind — I’d never bothered to make a go bag before.
But this time, the fires got so close to my neighborhood, I sheepishly wrote out a list on a notepad, and started collecting things and putting them into bags: a small sporty purple corduroy duffel from American Apparel for me; a series of Ziploc bags for Gigi.
Just like in the Old Country.
What was on my list?
- Warm socks
- Clean underwear, of course
- T-shirts, short and long-sleeve
- Some old jeans
- Back-up meds and toiletries
- Specialty senior-cat-style diet food and Cat Attract litter (in two SEPARATE gallon Ziplocs)
- A few band aids and things
- Paperwork!
- Chargers? Into the laptop bag, and onto the pile
- A pashmina (because that’s what me, being practical, looks like).
I was doing fine — feeling all active and solutions-oriented — until I got to thinking about the jewelry.
The things they carried
All four of my grandparents were immigrants. They came separately — as children and young teens — at the turn of the last century: from Romania, Latvia and Ukraine. They met and married and raised families (and took The Daily Forward), in Chicago.
My grandmothers were each around 40 when they had my parents, and then same thing for my folks with me. We are, therefore, as I explain to my non-Jewish friends with no other frame of reference, Fiddler on the Roof Jews, not Schindler’s List Jews.
The “running across the rooftops, carrying our things” I’d always heard about was “to escape the Cossacks [ptui!],” not the Nazis.
Unlike in some other strikingly obvious current parallels, all of my grandparents were eventually reunited with their families. They banded together and set up new lives here. But the nervousness, the conviction that nothing is ever stable, that your own country might turn on you at any time never completely fades: Show your papers, remember your story and your new name, the address you’re supposed to go to, the name of the cousin you’re supposed to meet.
Since I was so very small when the grandmas were quite elderly, I never heard in too much detail what had driven them all to come here. There were slivers of anecdotes about bribing various border controls along the way (called, somewhat confusingly to me, “Shtupping,” a phrase that was accompanied by the gesture of stuffing money into a balled-up fist); choosing which children to go in which order, and how to send for the next. My grandpa, for example, was sent all alone at age 13, to avoid lifetime conscription in the Czar’s army, taking with him only a salami and a small “valise” — a go bag.
Keep calm and carry on
Back to the jewelry. What to take in this small cute duffle bag? Whatever would fit in this pretty little fabric pouch I could tuck inside, I thought. How about:
An art deco pendant with a diamond and little sapphire chips in it:
In the 1920’s, my grandfather on my dad’s side briefly became wildly wealthy; he had learned English, somehow gone to college, become a lawyer, and gone into land speculation. For a time, he even owned a golf course. He had a chauffeur, pros to teach his two little boys to golf, fancy jewelry for his wife. Then, The Crash.
The story (as told to me and filtered through my childhood memory) goes like this: He got on a bus from Chicago to New York to try to get any amount of money from any of the relatives he’d funded in prosperous times. Not only did no one cough up, so to speak, “no one would even lend him a coat to wear” in the freak snowstorm that hit just before he started his bus trip back to Chicago. Resulting in him having the nerve to die of strep throat, leaving behind a widow and two young sons, just three years before penicillin was invented.
Somehow, through the following years of poverty and making do, though, she hung onto a few things including this piece, which is now mine, and I have worn only on the most special of occasions. In it went.
The pearls:
Mom’s family, unlike my dad’s, more slowly and lastingly, became not quite so dramatically prosperous, but “comfortable.” But that grandma came from a family where it was Very Important not to be too showy, or [said with deep disapproval] “ungapatchka.” Fur coat? Sure, if the fur is on the inside, for warmth. And never ever pierced ears. I have that grandma’s pearls, and her ring from the ‘50s, when grandpa was able to buy her “a real one” to go with the plain band she’d always worn. So sedate, so not my style. Yet in they went, as well.
We have a picture of my mother wearing the pearls as her Something Borrowed on her wedding day: gown with train, gloves, little pillbox hat thing for her veil, very Jackie-O.
My own “jewels”:
- A ring I’d had made out of one of mom’s clip-on earrings missing its mate (because remember: PIERCING EARS IS FOR GREENHORNS)
- Bold gold earrings from my one international business trip to India
- Intricate and dangly silver earrings from a walk on the Camino de Santiago, Spain.
Overall, I tried to focus on items that were practical, that would take a beating if necessary. Or those that had “actual” value, but are also easily portable — after all, what if the Cossacks are chasing us, setting fire to the buildings? What if we’re never able to come back?
So no art, no tchotchkes, nothing fragile. Like The Ivories.
An exception to that grandma’s non-showiness was that she loved to collect ivory figurines, antiques even then, but now a little gross to think about. They were divvied up between my mom and aunt after grandma died, as it was also Very Important to share: “No, no: you take that one, Mom would’ve wanted you to have it!”
Oddly, all of these had made it through one fire already.
In the mid-80s, there was a fire in my childhood home. I was away at college, and my brother was even farther away, in grad school. Poor Mom came home from work to find a little fire merrily blazing out of the electrical outlet in our den and growing fast. She turned right around and ran to knock on neighbors’ doors to find someone to call 911 for her. The fire department came quickly, and apparently (she admitted much later, didn’t want to UPSET us) held her back when she suddenly was sure Daddy was asleep upstairs. She tried to run back in — just as he came driving up to see what all the hubbub on our street was about.
They put out the fire, and in the process, did so much damage ripping up the roof and breaking windows, never mind the smoke damage, that we lived in an insurance-provided rental apartment for a year and a half while the insurance disputes and the rebuilding dragged on. Among the salvaged items were a few of those ivories, all a bit the worse for wear. So after our parents died, my brother and I did our own “no-no-no, YOU!” I wound up with a shabby but proud few: a fisherman with the fish missing from the end of its pole, a decorative lady with only part of her butterfly kite remaining.
These didn’t make it into the go bag.
As I write this, I note that all of these anxieties I was feeling — all this sense that things had become dire enough to warrant needing a go bag — do not come from my own memories, not even directly from the memories of the people who did the escaping from their parts of Eastern Europe. This feeling has been imprinted some other way.
Turns out, of course, this feeling has a name: “Intergenerational Trauma.” Being me, I went and looked it up.
“Trauma reactions vary by generation but often include shame, increased anxiety and guilt, a heightened sense of vulnerability and helplessness, low self-esteem, depression, suicidality, substance abuse, dissociation, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, difficulty with relationships and attachment to others, and extreme reactivity to stress,” says the American Psychological Association. “The role of parental communication about the event, and the nature of family functioning appear to be particularly important in trauma transmission.”
So here we are.
We carry what we carry. Legacies are physical, and not. But here’s another thing: Now that the dust has literally and figuratively settled and I’ve been literally and figuratively unpacking, I can see that all of this running and fear and starting over (and over and over) and anxiety and loss, and depression and guilt when we compare our loss to that of others — has served us as a form of resilience. And courage and pride and resourcefulness. And loyalty to each other.
I have both family and friends who live — or, rather, lived — in the Palisades, who lost everything, but we are of course grateful that no one was hurt, that they survived. And miraculously, their synagogue is still standing.
Carry that weight
Once the imminent danger seemed past, one of the first things I did was take off grandma’s ring and put it back into its proper jewelry box. Then I took a couple of cautious, masked-up breaths. The air was still heavy, and full of unknown toxins.
Meanwhile, in my neighborhood and in neighborhoods across the country, I am seeing today’s immigrants having to train their children what to do when officials try to round them up, round up their parents and families. How did we get here? Our government (and yes, it is ours) seems to have become the brownshirts, the Cossacks. It’s unbelievable to me. A whole new worry: Do these families have their own go bags? Can I help this generation if they need to flee — from us?
Last week, after several days of false alarms and a few light sprinklings, it rained in earnest for three days straight.
Miraculously, there have been no mudslides — not yet, anyway. And of course an earthquake warning, but too far away to get the go bag. Literally and figuratively, we are now able to start breathing deeply again. For now, we are OK — and grateful for everyone who continues to look in and check on us, and we try to do the same in return. I have left my packed-up sporty go bag in my bedroom and I put the cat’s bag by the front door, so she can get more used to it for the inevitable Senior vet visits.
In the name of Grandpa Jack’s salami, we are staying.
For now.
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