Migration: Tales, History, and Me
Max Lemuz
A family man traveled far and bought a forest plot to build his house. He cut down the grand fir and oaks and built a sturdy home for his family. Soon after, his daughter was playing outside, just beyond the plot’s boundary, a dense thicket. When the daughter came back inside, she coughed and her voice had changed. It was a gilgul, a wandering soul, that had taken possession of the daughter. Bring a rabbi, the gilgul said. The family man brought a rabbi and the gilgul told his story. He was once inside a wild dog, and then it was killed, and then he went into a horse, and after the horse passed, he went into one of the trees which the man chopped down. The story was told and the gilgul cried through the daughter. Both sides made a pact. The gilgul left the young girl’s body and the family left their new home and emigrated to America.
Siemiatycze, a small town in Poland, was home to a large Jewish population in the 1800’s and into the 1900’s. Through and after World War I, the Jews were subject to pogroms and anti-semitism, both by the new nationalist Polish party and by the increasing power of the Nazi Party. By the end of World War II, Siemiatycze’s Jewish population was almost completely exterminated.
My mom told me a story about my great-grandmother. She was eighty-five when her children took her on a trip to Tijuana. She ate tacos de lengua and enjoyed the mariachi music. On the way back through the border checkpoint, an armed guard asked each person in the car where they were from. While the rest of her children said “San Diego,” my Yiddish grandmother took the question literally and answered “Siemiatycze.” She had left her home for America in 1920, yet she still remembered where she was from. The armed guard immediately pulled them over to secondary, and kept them there for another hour.
Max Lemuz is a Jewish Mexican-American writer who creates from the personal. He currently teaches creative writing and composition, and he is working on a novel dealing with growing up, divorce, and identity. Max has been previously published in Soflopojo, Triggerfish Critical Review, Cholla Needles, and more.