In 2002, my mother Carolyn James (1936–2023) and I traveled to Berlin, to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, to Danzig, to Suwalki, to Warsaw, and to Auschwitz in search of our ancestors and relatives. This essay, from 2002, reflects on what I, a descendant of these lands but also of Africa, found.

There is a different view of Europe when you look at it as if it were North.  The month I spent this spring crisscrossing the continent was not my first encounter with semi-post-imperial Europe as an African.  But it was definitely the first time I was traveling to find my way home. 

The trip was something my mom had been dreaming of for a long time — back through months of Saturdays we spent tracing the pathways of our family before microfilm machines or hitchhiking her amazing record-keeping on my computer skills.  I inherited or learned the need for detail, for stories, for a map to the past, and threw in history, sociology, and mysticism. 

I needed these tools not just to assist my mother’s effort to create an almost-encyclopedic genealogy of both sides of my family, but to truly get a handle on what I inherited from the past.  Jewish, Polish, German, and African; Kabbalah and animism, goddess and Christ; resistances and fascisms: by high school I would summarize my background and then add “Most of them one of wanted to kill each other.”  When you know your most intimate identities are a battlefield, walking about on disputed territory is almost a sacred experience — pushing these forces out of your head and into history.