When I was four Grandpa opened our 1930s Colliers World Atlas and pointed to a spot on a page.
”Dis is vere ve vere born. Don’ vorry ’bout dese lines,” he said, pointing at the political boundaries. “Dey’re always moving dem.” Because they had a German name and spoke German, I grew up thinking my grandparents were German. And they were, sort of. And I decided, right then and there, that some day I’d visit the village were Grandma and Grandpa were born.
When I was twenty-one I moved to Germany with my first husband who was in the Army. We found a place to live in Trulben, a tiny village three kilometers from the French border. We were the only Americans there and thus, the village pets. People fed us and practiced English with us and taught us how to dance on the table with them during Fasching and sold us fresh head cheese and bread as heavy as concrete. Opa (it means Grandpa in German, and he was the father of the husband of the family in whose downstairs we lived) brought me warm blood sausage the day after he and his friend had butchered a pig. We ate local. We ate German.
We spent Thanksgiving vacation in 1970 in Berlin but going through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin for a couple of hours was our only experience on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I told everyone that my grandparents were from East Germany and I wish I could visit their village but it wasn’t allowed in those days . . . and wasn’t it sad . . . And I thought the food must be different in East Germany because, as much as I loved the “German” food where I lived, except for the sauerkraut, it was not familiar.
After Grandma died in 1977 my aunt made copies of some of her papers for me, including both grandparents’ birth certificates and Grandpa’s naturalization papers. The hand-written birth certificates were not in German.
I thought this was curious but it wasn’t until about six years later that my younger brother was starting to work on our genealogy, and my Hungarian brother-in-law was visiting. Sure enough, the papers were in Hungarian and Tibor translated them and my brother (this was pre-internet) found and contacted five of our second cousins in the village.
When I was fifty-five, after a long plane ride to Budapest and a long ride in a rented van I walked into my cousin’s house. Her two sisters, also my cousins, were waiting for us. On the table was a steaming bowl of Grandma’s chicken and dumplings.
And nobody had even told them that it is my brother’s and my favorite.
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Mmmm … Chicken & dumplings! I’m incredibly hungry now. My Grandma used to make Chicken & dumplings to die for.