Climbing All Over the Family Trees

By Stefan Kanfer

Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors. So thought De Tocqueville, the observer who for more than a century trapped the American character in his shrewd apercus. That character is too mutable to stay contained. Today it is frantically climbing family trees. After Haley's comet, not only blacks but all ethnic groups saw themselves whole, traceable across oceans and centuries to the remotest ancestral village (see LIVING).

But the hunt for origins had been building for a decade. Leery of a homogeneity that could suffocate the individual, wary of quota systems that specified "Black, Hispanic, Other," Americans began to perceive themselves beyond the melting pot. They met their fears with a fever of ethnicity and a quest for forgotten countries and families.

The recent "white roots" phenomenon is a reversal of U.S. tradition. In other periods, immigration was the sincerest form of flattery. Many of the populations that came to the U.S. were in flight from the past. To them, the concept of a new world was no metaphor: for the first time they were free of regal decree and military repression, released from the specters of famine and caste. In fact, the importance of lineage had been eroding since the Middle Ages. Rising middle classes demanded recognition for performance, not tradition. The Industrial Revolution identified the worker, like his machinery, with the job. Voltaire crystallized the sentiments of the arrivistes: "Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors." His was a romantic ideal, however: only in America were immigrants truly unhooked from history. In his classic study The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin observed: "The immigrants could not impose their own ways upon society; but neither were they constrained to conform to those already established. To a significant degree, the newest Americans had a wide realm of choice."

The realm came at painful cost. Immigrants conceded more than the accessibility of old familiar places and persons. They lost an unrecoverable currency: their language. Prejudicial taunts drove immigrant children to absorb the style and speech of Americans. Their elders were caught between memories of the land they had left and bewilderment at a nation whose mainstream they could not enter. This dilemma of language lost and found is classically illustrated by the mother in Henry Roth's immigrant novel, Call It Sleep. To her son she speaks a poetic, even florid Yiddish; her attempts at English sound like the utterings of an illiterate child. Foreigners and their children saw only one safe route to the American Dream: assimilation. Had the old family been locked in geography? The secular pilgrims wandered through their adopted land. Were the old occupations handed down from generation to generation? Americans sought jobs far beyond the imagination of their ancestors. Young immigrants were proudly told of peasants' children who became doctors or wrote laws; of peddlers' sons who ran the movie industry; of progeny of Irish railroad workers who were political power brokers. Was tradition revered in the past? New arrivals relinquished much of their moral background, their old songs and folk tales. Oral history went the way of the daguerreotype. Save for a battered Bible, a faded album or an antique brooch, little remained of family heritage. By the time of the post-World War II influx of refugees, merely to inquire about a person's back ground seemed an un-American act.

Now all that is altering. Americans have become like those adoptees who demand the long-denied knowledge of heritage. Families anxious for stability and identity reach out for the past with bloodlines and charts. Pedigrees as long as the Duke of Norfolk's are abruptly trotted out by commoners. What was invalid a generation ago is invaluable today. Says Michael Arlen, who recovered his Armenian heritage in Passage to Ararat: "There is a good chance now the clearheaded, impatient young will set their fathers free."

The act of liberation may be difficult. The standard appurtenances of modern life -- birth and death certificates, tax records -- are sometimes unrecoverable. Family trees have a tendency to run down to the soil.

Does this mean that genealogists are living off the fad of the land? That the search for roots is another exercise in ethnic narcissism? Hardly. The new sociobiology stresses the importance of genetics over environment; in his new book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins goes so far as to suggest that human behavior is predesigned by heredity. Moreover, it is rather cheering to hear the question "Who are you?" instead of "What do you do?" And after all the searching is over, by stressing their differences, most groups end by realizing their similarities. The oppression of the 19th century Irish worker is not very different in character from that of the French or German or Russian. The victims of the holocaust have their counterparts in the genocidal frenzies of Asia and Africa.

History is a combination of geography and biography. By examining the lives of remote cousins or the land of great-great-great-great grandparents, descendants can find a usable past that no map or textbook can communicate.

Yet only so much can be derived from a study of origins. There is another literary work entitled Roots, a newly published poem by the late John Berry man:

Young men (young women) ask about my 'roots, '--

as if I were a plant . . .

Exile is in our time like blood . . .

O really I don 't care where I live or have lived.

Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me, memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.

In the deepest sense, pride in ancestry or place cannot mitigate the individual's task of coping and making do. In the still-valid American tradition -- the reason immigrants came here in the first place -- it is not the roots that count so much as the branches and the leaves.

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