When I was growing up, and even into my young adulthood, I was not interested in pursuing information about my ancestry. Of course, I knew that I was born of 2nd generation Polish and Italian parents, but in the 50’s and even longer there was great prejudice against both ethnicities, causing me to feel shame about my heritage. Some areas in West Hartford, CT, a town in which I attended a private Catholic girls’ high school, banned those of Italian background from buying homes there.
Girls with last names like Sullivan, Murphy, O’Connor, and Moran formed the student body of my school; those with Italian and Polish last names were in the minority.
Born with the name Sharon Lee LaMontagna, I was in kindergarten when my father began his long career in the real estate business as Larry LaMont rather than Tony LaMontagna. Suspecting the change concerned masking our long Italian name, I asked him when I was older why he’d made it. He answered that it was “an easier name to remember.”
So, my name was legally changed to Sharon LaMont when I was five years old.
That must have been very confusing for a kindergartner.
I deeply loved my Auntie Rose and Uncle Sal, with whom we shared large Italian Sunday dinners in New Haven for many years, but it’s my Polish grandparents, Albina Nagorski and Frank Pisarek, I want to tell you about here. Because of my daily rage and grief over the war in Ukraine I have thinking much more about my Polish roots, as well as ones I’ve recently learned are in Belarus and L’viv. In fact, it occurs to me that the constant and mounting anguish I feel over this monstrous, cruel war may have its roots in a kinship with these incredibly brave and strong Ukrainians, as I did not know my grandfather was born in L’viv, although it was Austria at that time.
Let me tell you more.
My mother’s mother, Albina Pisarek, figured largely in my life, as my mother and I lived with her during the war while my father worked three jobs in Hartford, she visited us often and we spent a good bit of time at her house in Milford.
Albina was a survivor. I’ve often thought of her as a pioneer woman, who could have ridden one of those covered wagons out west, making do with whatever she had to. Born in Grodno, Poland (now part of Belarus) in the late 1880’s, she came to this country with her parents and three sisters, and settled on a large farm in Milford, CT where my great grandfather practiced herbal medicine.
Albina had four children, the first two severely developmentally disabled. My mother was the cherished blonde youngest, doted on by her father Frank until she was five, when he died at home of a ruptured appendix, having refused hospitalization.
After his death, the family, formerly well-off, was forced to live in reduced circumstances. My grandmother rode the trolley from Milford to Bridgeport, her fur coat covering the work clothes she wore to clean the tenements they owned there, left to her when Frank died. She went to work at Sikorsky Aircraft during the war. She cared for my great grandmother “Bopcha” while renting out rooms to help with expenses, which she did as long as I can remember. I recall her on ladders painting, or wrapping rags around leaky pipes until she was well into her 80’s.
She was a feminist role model, though I didn’t appreciate that then at all.
Nana as we called her, was intensely proud of her Polish heritage and loved to talk about Queen Jadwiga, and much other Polish history she wanted her disinterested granddaughter to absorb. “Sta-leen” I remember her disdainfully spitting out as she spoke of the Russian ruler and his role in the partitioning of Poland, with a similar hatred I imagine the Ukrainians feel today for Putin.
How I wish I could speak with her now, hear more of her stories, swell with the same pride she did of her heritage. How completely enraged she would be at what Russia is doing to Ukraine. How we could share that rage.
My second Cousin Chris, a retired history teacher who knows much more about her ancestry than I do, wrote me recently to tell me about our shared Ukrainian roots. As I said earlier, I had always thought my grandfather Frank was born in Austria, which then became part of Poland.
I should have listened more carefully to Nana’s stories. Or studied my history.
It is complicated. But the important part is this: 19th century Poland was wiped off the map, divvied up between Russian, Prussia (now Germany) and Austria. Present-day Ukraine was under Austrian rule, so our grandparents listed their birthplace as Austria; they resided in Podhajce, very near to what is now L’viv, Ukraine.
Chris called me a few days later to say she’d just discovered we had second cousins living there right now, in L’viv, the “safe” city near the Polish border, that was viciously bombed as Biden spoke to the Polish people last Saturday.
Once again, I had to realign my thinking about who I was and where my roots resided.
Her words explained a lot.
Following closely the news of this catastrophic war, sometimes I am so sickened and shaky I’ve had to walk away from it and practice some deep breathing, or more often, anger management. I’ve always been a voracious consumer of news, and passionate about justice and peace, but this time feels different, more a claimant of my energy, more demanding of finding ways to feel less powerless in its face.
It all had felt amplified, and I hadn’t grasped why.
Until now. It’s personal. It’s tied to my ancestry, my roots, my family, my grandfather Frank, whom I never knew. I’m meeting him, and my other relatives, in the pictures I see in the paper and on television. As Andrew, our guide when we went to Auschwitz years ago, said to me as I cried before a picture of a heap of dead children, “Madame, if your grandmother had not emigrated, you could be here.”
Glory to Ukraine.