My Other History: Part One

As you're probably all too well aware by now, I am a self-defined fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew of European Jewish ancestry. It's the strongest association I have, the one with the most resonance, and when I see Leah in the mind's eye, she's superimposed over those generations of Jews, the old photos of the bearded ones and the Yiddish speakers. But there is another part of my past, as improbable in its time as a paw-paw tree in the arctic ice...

My father, Alexander Paul, was the son of a very unlikely union: a beautiful, volatile daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, and a laconic Baptist scofflaw from Kentucky.

The story of that match is strange and sad, with a precipitous, romantic beginning and a tragic ending, and to think that it is in part my own story fills me with no small amazement.

My paternal grandmother Marion met a Southern boy, a Merchant Marine on leave: Leonard "Buster" Wilson. Where they met is a source of family debate. My mother claims the setting was a bar in NYC. I seem to remember something about a Long Island dancehall. But never mind. The fact is that they met, there was a kiss and a chemistry, and a romance. Marion was only seventeen. Buster was perhaps as foreign to Grandma as an American man could be, although I'm only speculating.

Grandma Marion, Oceanside NY, 1940s

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Grandpa Buster, insouciant slouch and tipped hat, Louisville Kentucky 1940s

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The initial meeting between Marion and Buster begat an inexorable chain of events: an unseemly pregnancy, a shotgun marriage by a justice of the peace, and, ultimately, my father.

My grandma, in love, made a trip to Kentucky to meet Buster's parents and his five sisters:

Grandma (#6) and the five Kentucky sisters, Russell Springs, Kentucky 1942

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What these born-and-bred Kentucky baptists must have thought of the Long Island Jew, a pregnant adolescent at that, I am not sure. They seem congenial enough, in the photo. They probably liked her, as she had an apparent sweetness and a definite charisma, even into her old age. She was funny and outspoken when I knew her, and she must have been that and more so as a girl. But still, she was a stranger in a strange land, in Kentucky.

Buster went off again with the Merchant Marines, Grandma Marion returned to her mother's house in Oceanside with my baby father in tow, and the marriage ended in divorce almost immediately. My mother tells me that Great-grandma Sadie, Marion's mother, had an order of protection against Buster, insuring that he could not come near his ex-wife or their son. Why? I don't know. But if true, it speaks to pain and turmoil, fights and anguish. Not a peaceful dissolution of a marriage, but a fraught beginning to my father's fatherless childhood...

to be continued in Part Two: wherein my family makes a secret journey to Russell Springs, KY to discover dad's past

My Kentucky Forbears:

My Kentucky-by-way-of-Scotland great-great grandpa Alexander Logan and great-great grandma Susan Josephine Wilson

Great-great grandpa Alexander Logan

Grandpa Buster, 10 years old

To see more wonderful photos and amazing ancestral stories of Sepia Saturday, I highly recommend a visit to News from Nowhere