When I think of my Dad I think of ketchup. He ate it on everything. No matter how special the meal, it was summarily drowned in ketchup. What I am seeing now is that so much of my understanding of my Dad, his life, his struggles, our family history were also drowned in ketchup. My father submerged his pain in humor. My sister once asked our Dad, a WWII Vet, how he lost his leg and he explained that he was riding a stallion slashing off heads with his sword when someone rode up and lopped it off. These were the types of answers we got when we tried to learn more about his life, so we stopped asking. It was only after his death that I learned that he had marched on a wooden leg for 11 miles in the Selma to Montgomery Alabama Freedom March. And it was also after his death that I learned that our family came to the US in the 1850s to escape religious persecution in Bavaria Germany. For hundreds of years my family, like all Jews in Bavaria, lived under extreme restrictions and the threat of periodic genocides. If they were lucky enough to get permits to live in towns, there were strict quotas and their children would often not be permitted to remain there after adulthood. It was under these conditions that my great great-great-grandfather Mayer left his home. Thankfully the borders in the US were open and as if to foreshadow my father’s own journey 100 year later, upon landing in Ellis Island Mayer Lehman boarded a boat heading south to carve out his new life Montgomery Alabama. 

– Brooke Lehman

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more