But What About The Einsteins?

On choosing one family history to explore, while largely ignoring the others.

Tool:

Are decision trees a tool? I guess they are, and I guess I used one—albeit not one that I put into flowchart form, because nobody but me needed to see it—when I decided what the boundaries of this book’s scope would be and to decide that, I had to name who I am, which meant figuring out which part of my family history I identify as having made me that person. I’m not a Roland (my paternal grandmother’s family), and know no other Rolands. I’m not a Puckett (my maternal grandmother’s family), and other than my first cousins (who I love, hi Muirs!) I know no other Pucketts. I am most definitely a Polan. I know a lot of Polans. Many, maybe even most, of my beloveds are Polans. I’ve got Polan features (that white hair, those deep-set eyes). I’ve got Polan ways of being, or I like to think so: spoil children, be loyal to family, try to be a good person in the world. So it made sense that that would be the branch of my family I’d explore to find these answers.

But what about the Einsteins?

The Story:

Writers are often told to find “hooks,” and it’s possible to make a career writing about Albert Einstein; several people have. And I can trace my way back to the family of Albert Einstein. My distant cousin, Ted Einstein, provided me with this handy genealogy several years ago that shows how:

Sarah&albert Relationship Chart (1)

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But I don’t feel like an Einstein, or even like my Einsteins are Einsteins. My great-great grandfather Moses Einstein emigrated to the US around the same time the Polans came, and in either that first or second generation, the family left behind their Judaism. My great-grandfather, John Einstein Sr., was a protestant minister and ran a school for girls, though he wasn’t successful at either of these things. My grandfather Einstein owned a wholesale grocery warehouse in Stanton, Virginia and was a raging bigot. (He once introduced me to his golfing buddies as his “little kike granddaughter.”) My grandmother Bonnie was an abusive drunk. Growing up, we saw them only as often as we had to.

If I wanted to make a particular claim to an Appalachian identity, Bonnie would be my strongest argument. She grew up in Peterstown, WV, and my father told stories about visiting her mother and sleeping with the other kids under mounds of quilts on a big feather bed in a house heated only by a wood stove. We called her “Granny,” and not “Grandmother,” as we would have called my mother’s mother if she’d been alive. Her proudest achievement was winning the Golden Horseshoe, a history prize given to West Virginia students, and she never fully lost her accent. She made biscuits (though not particularly distinguished ones), was of Scotch-Irish descent, and identified deeply as a protestant (she loved televangelists) although nobody would accuse her of having been Godly. But I can’t make that claim, because I feel no kinship at all with her.

But this lack of fellow-feeling for my father’s family does say something about whether or not I am an Appalachian. I am certain they would have said, both of them, that I’m not. For them, my Jewishness was enough to always make me—and the rest of my family—other. And so I can’t leave the Einstein part of my family entirely uninterrogated, because whether or not they would be right to claim that I can’t be both Jewish and Appalachian, growing up knowing they thought of me as other has a lot to do with why I even think it’s a question. So while we are on the research trip, I will go to Ulm, and I will think about the Einsteins who are what I expect Einsteins to be—smart, Jewish people who are lovely—and the ones who were not. There will be a very strange little chapter in this book about being from that most unlikely of things: the asshole redneck branch of the Einstein family.

Mostly, though, it will be about how my dad, who was a lovely (if complicated) man without a bigoted bone in his body, managed to somehow grow up in that toxic household and still become a good and loving father to his Jewish children. About how he both was and wasn’t an Appalachian, and how that does and doesn’t make me one.