Who Are We?

Insomnia and the great questions

The U.S. is a nation of some 349 million people. For many of us, myself included, the question of who we are as a people has lately become a matter of doubt.

Are we a people, like the people of Ukraine or the people standing up for their neighbors in Minnesota, willing to risk their very lives in defense of their beliefs about what is wrong and what is right? In defense of our country’s Bill of Rights? In defense of a notion of human decency and kindness?

Or are we like the citizens of Germany in 1939 who felt comfortable closing their eyes to injustice, so long as they and their own families stayed safe?

Photo by Paulette Vautour on Unsplash

Is it even possible to determine an identity for 349 million people who, if laid down head to toe would wrap around the Earth more than 14 times—or reach past the moon and halfway back?

Do we have the courage to call out what we’re seeing? Do we have the courage to stand up to the thuggery being carried out by the people in charge of our government now, violent and dangerous people who blatantly embrace White Supremacy? Who ally themselves with the world’s worst villains and humankind’s greatest sins?

I’ve been lying awake at night, unable to sleep, asking myself these questions. Trying to uncover my most basic beliefs about my identity and duties as a writer and poet, as a mother and partner. As a friend—and as a citizen of the world.

Photo by Slavan on Unsplash

There’s a line in a poem of mine forthcoming in Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic, the 2026 anthology forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Ireland: It can take us a lifetime to know what we know.

Sometimes I think it’s the stories from our pasts that tell us more about who we are than anything happening right now. We stand too close to the Earth to see our present-day selves with clarity—but history is far enough away, if we study it carefully, to appear in sharp focus.

They Did What?

Papa was the affectionate name that just about everyone used for my mother’s father, who emigrated to the U.S. from Romania with his abandoned mother and three of his siblings at the age of nine, round about 1910. My great-grandfather, Sani, had traveled to New York ahead of his wife and five children, with a promise to send for them when he’d saved enough from whatever job he managed to find in the New World.

Instead, according to family lore, Sani arrived in New York and promptly “shacked up with a redhead.”

Had he fallen in love during the ocean voyage? Was the redhead someone he met while pounding the pavements, looking for work?

Sani, it seems, was both a romantic and an ambitious man, who had a career of sorts writing songs for the Yiddish theater. He sold copies of his music from a pushcart on the Lower East Side—and went home to the redhead every night.

I have tried to imagine who these people really were—and what they really felt. I think my great-grandfather probably felt grateful that he’d been given what must have seemed like a chance to design a brand-new life for himself.

Did he feel guilty? If he did, the burden of guilt hadn’t been great enough to cause him to choose a more righteous path.

His abandoned wife, Sarah—my great-grandmother—is reputed to have had a magical connection to the natural world. She was dark-eyed like a Roma. When she sat on a bench in the park, the wild animals and birds approached her without fear. She was also evidently a woman of fortitude.

God only knows how she did it, but she managed to scrape together enough to send her two eldest sons, my Great Uncles Jack and Mike, to New York in pursuit of their recreant father. They connected with a Landsmannschaft, one of the immigrant benevolent organizations formed to help new arrivals from particular regions of Eastern Europe.

And, sure enough, they located Sani, in a tenement somewhere on the Lower East Side—and kidnapped him.

Jack and Mike found jobs for the three of them in a factory that refurbished felt hats. After work, they locked Sani into their apartment until the next work day dawned.

What became of the redhead? Did she love Sani? Did she bear a child by him? Unless a red-headed distant cousin comes to light one day, I’ll never know.

Jack and Mike pooled their earnings with their father’s—and sent for the rest of their family.

The story goes far to explain Sani’s behavior after he was busted by his sons. Papa used to tell me, with tears in his eyes, that his father would pretend not to know him if he passed his pushcart in the street.

I’ve imagined that scene many times: a little boy longing to see his father again. Lionizing his father. And then being utterly and cruelly rejected by him, through no fault of his own.

Photo by Sophia Shi on Unsplash

Like his mother, Papa was a tremendous animal-lover. He was famous in his Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood for having a pet chicken that he trained to peck at the door when it wanted to go out. The chicken would follow him through the streets of the Lower East Side like a dog.

But they were always poor. And one day Papa came home from school, hungry as always, to the delicious smell of a big pot of soup on the stove. “Where’s my chicken?” he asked his mother. But she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

From that day forward, Papa was a vegetarian.

How did he wind up being such a warm and loving person? How do we take the horrors life gives us and yet persist in trying to be good and loving people?

More to come…

A bonus poem…

A Californian with a Complicated History Bakes Bread in Connecticut

My hands were schooled
in the music of baking bread
long before they knew
the secrets of human flesh.

A virgin on the threshold of the many lives I’d choose
and then reject, I watched my best friend’s mother,
much revered and slightly witchy,
conjure fresh-baked loaves
from flour, yeast, and water,
time and heat.

Nothing like this happened
in the house where I was raised,
the house I knew I needed to escape.

I lift each mound of living dough in upturned hands,
caress the seams to shape a loaf
that’s silky and round.

When at the age of thirty-eight,
I held my newborn son, just so,
my hands recognized the sensation,
from so long ago, when I first started baking.

In this latest incarnation of my kitchen,
this latest version of my life as writer and wife,
the flour I’ve sprinkled on the marble counter
sings softly of the shimmering fields of wheat
far away, where it was raised.

My hands know how to do their work by heart
and I can dream while I knead and turn the dough,
recall myself in all my ages, through
fifty-some-odd years or so
of baking.

Each loaf I’ve made tied to every other,
and tied to me, by silk-satin ribbons woven from memories
of feeding the changing cast of those I’ve loved.

And I am always older than I was yesterday,
hurtling toward the end of my lifespan
like time-lapse photography, in each image my aging hands
shaping the living mixture of flour and salt,
honey and yeast, practicing the art and craft
of transformation.


Copyright © 2024 by Barbara Quick