By Tonya Harmon—

I’m writing a memoir. It’s an exploration of the generations of my father’s Slovak family and what I inherited from them. I certainly don’t speak Slovak, and I wasn’t born in Slovakia. What, then, exactly did I inherit?

In conducting research for the book over the last 20 years, I became immersed in the past lives of relatives who were long gone and, in many cases, people I’d never even met. Their names appeared in a church registry for a birth or baptism, marriage or death, and little else. I wanted to know so much more about them: how they lived, what they ate, what they stood for, and what they believed in.

Where do you go to find these details, and can you even unearth them for a person who died nearly a century ago on another continent?

I decided to start with the living. I studied the picture of my family on the day they left Yugoslavia in 1938 and tracked down a woman who was a teenager at the time.

Julka was 14 when our families emigrated to Canada together and was in her late eighties when we met. She remembered my great-grandfather’s bakery and how she would walk past the other bakeries to go to his, the best in town. Every day at the end of the school day, my great-uncle Andy would ride his bike to the schoolyard and ring his bell. His basket was filled with baguettes and zemle, plump round rolls, and kifle, the crescent-shaped rolls said to have inspired the croissant.

Julka remembered the taste of the kifle and how she had spent her whole life searching for one that tasted as good as she remembered but never found it. Julka died a few months after our interview.

She remembered the day the picture was taken, that it was raining, and that her boyfriend had arranged the send-off. My great-grandmother had stood behind the camera, taking one last picture of her son, daughter-in-law, and only granddaughter, Datka. “My eyes will never see you again,” she said.

I traveled to Yugoslavia to meet relatives and learned about my great-uncle Stefan, the family jokester. Once at a wedding, he’d sprinkled hot paprika on the toilet paper and sat back laughing as people came out of the outhouse hopping and itching. He also hid ammunition in the water well for partisans fighting against fascists in WWII.

On the internet I found a website in Slovak written by an elderly man who had lived his whole life in the same village as my family. He had written about the history of the town and my family. I tracked Jan down and we began a decade-long conversation through Facebook, him in Slovak, me in English. We traded stories and genealogical facts and became friends. I was devastated when he died suddenly two years ago.

As I traveled to meet people and collected historical facts about the places and times they lived in, the lives of my long-gone relatives slowly started to come alive for me. I found the family recipe for the kifle Julka remembered and made them, enjoying the taste as much as Julka did. I saw bundles of drying peppers hanging from the porches in the village where Stefan had lived. I wrote to the German government requesting details about family members who had been arrested and read bureaucratic records containing unanswered letters from relatives begging for information about their loved ones.

In 2011, Jaro Miklović took me from house to house in my family’s hometown. At each stop, food appeared before we had finished asking questions: sausage, bread, cakes, glasses raised in welcome. Albums came out. I took pictures of photographs hanging on walls and held family samplers stitched more than a hundred years earlier.

Again and again, someone who had been a stranger, appearing only as a name in the family tree, stopped feeling like one.

Over the years, recipes crossed oceans. Photographs resurfaced. Distant relatives found one another. Objects and stories moved from one branch of the family to another.

Living in Mexico has made me think differently about what it means to remember the dead. Here people sometimes speak of Las Tres Muertes, the Three Deaths.

The first death is when the body stops working and the heart stops beating. The second is when the body is buried. The third comes when the last living person who remembers you forgets your name. That is when you disappear completely.

The idea is often connected to Día de Muertos. Families build an ofrenda and place photographs on it, lighting candles, telling stories, and putting out the favorite foods of the people who have died, believing this may entice them to come home for the day.

It is one of the most beautiful things about living in Mexico. It is colorful and joyful, but underneath it is something very serious. Remembering is an act of love, and perhaps also an act of preservation.

I thought about this when I received an email from a woman looking for an old friend named Juan Carlos. She had known him in the early 1970s. He was the first cousin of my aunt’s former husband, part of another Slovak immigrant family whose members had settled in both Canada and Argentina. She found me because of something I had written about the death of my aunt’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Karla, in 1993.

I vaguely remembered Juan Carlos. He had visited our family in Montreal once. He was tall and thin and very kind and was studying to become a pediatrician.

I had to tell her that he had died young, more than forty years earlier.

A few years later, she wrote again.
This time she wanted to speak to his sister.
I sat looking at the email.
After all those years, she still remembered him.
His body had died, he had been buried, but his name had not disappeared.
She still remembered.

Maybe Slovak families have been doing the same thing in their own way all along, not with marigolds and sugar skulls, but with recipes, family trees, photographs kept in drawers and hung on walls. And with names repeated at our kitchen tables.
With a woman writing to me more than forty years later asking about a young man she had once known. Memory, it appears, traveled farther than the people themselves.

I came to Mexico believing I had followed my own route very far from home. Instead, I found myself living in a place that understood what I had been doing for years.

My great-grandmother’s crystal bowls in my armoire are part of that ofrenda. So is the kifle, the family tree, the photographs I copied from albums, and the stories told at the kitchen table.
So is this book.

For a long time, I thought I was collecting evidence.
I understand now that I was also collecting people.
Julka. Andy. Stefan. Jan. Jaro. Karla. Juan Carlos.
Each time I recover a name from a church register, identify someone in a photograph, translate a letter, or repeat a story, that person is back with us for a little while.
Perhaps that is what family history is for.
To delay the third death.

Tonya Harmon lives in SMA and is a wealth of knowledge about food and cheese: http://www.EmpressofCheese.com