Linda Gartz
Two photos of foreign-looking people hung on the walls of my paternal grandparents’ home. In one, a fifty-something man and young boy stand side by side. The man, roughly handsome, looks off-camera, strength carved into his face. The boy, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, stares ahead, expressionless.
The woman’s photo shows a smooth face, about thirty-five, head wrapped in a traditional navy-blue scarf decorated with details of white flowers and plaid. Her eyes are sorrowful, as if she carries a heavy burden.
I understood the man was my Grandma Gartz’s father, the boy her half-brother. The woman with the headscarf was my Grandpa Gartz’s mother. Both my grandparents were ethnic Germans from the Carpathian mountains of Austro-Hungary, today Romania.
After my grandparents died, in the late nineteen seventies, their possessions came to rest in our attic on Chicago’s North Side. Then my dad died in 1989, and Mom passed away in 1994. As my two brothers and I readied their house for sale, we discovered both my parents and grandparents had saved thousands of pages of letters, diaries, documents, and photos, including the two images of my great grandparents, in their original oval, convex frames.
We separated our most treasured finds into twenty-five bankers’ boxes and stored them in my garage. For years they lay holding their secrets as I raised two small boys. In 2002 I finally started hauling box-after-box into my house.
There were scores of letters from the “Old Country,” but I couldn’t read the indecipherable ancient script. I advertised in a German newspaper for anyone who could de-code the handwriting. Meta, ninety-years-old, took on the task. For years, she emailed me readable German of the letters, written from 1910—1977, I had sent to her. I had been a German major, so I could translate each into English. At least half were from the man and woman in the photos, my great-grandparents.
I learned my great-grandfather, Samuel Ebner, had planned to come to America, but an eye infection sent him back the homeland. He went blind. His son, Sam Jr., was killed in World War I.
Katarina Gärtz had been widowed when my Grandpa Gartz was four. To eke out a living, she took in laundry, beating clothes clean on rocks, as she stood in a frigid stream. No wonder she looked sorrowful. So many details of my ancestors’ lives emerged in the letters. The two photos now hang on my “family photo wall.” The letters had transformed these “foreigners” to family.