Justifications; grandparents pt 1

I've never done a blog before. I admit I was pretty skeptical about them from the beginning. My new idea is to report on my life, but use a throwback photo as a springboard. Now in order to keep it interesting for you and for me I'm not going to do this chronologically — however I am going to start with photos of my Syrian Jewish and Swedish grandparents in the first two blog posts, because I suspect you really must start at the start, and parents, especially mothers, are the starting point. That's my feeling. But after that I'm gonna jump around.

In terms of justifying tooting my horn here — that maybe this isn’t some ridiculous exercise in lonely solipsism — well recently for some reason I was listening to Brandi Carlile. I’m probably not the first to have gotten her mixed up with Belinda Carlisle, but that's another story. Anyway I came across these lyrics in her song, “The Story.”

All of these lines across my face

Tell you the story of who I am

So many stories of where I've been

And how I got to where I am

But these stories don't mean anything

When you've got no one to tell them to

So I’m telling these stories to you.

The woman on the right here is my grandmother Milo. Some spell it Meelo, and I believe sometimes she or others anglicized it to Emily. I don't know who the other woman is, she might be a sister, maybe a friend. My grandparents were both Syrian Jews from Aleppo, who first lived in Haiti and then moved to the lower east side and then to Brooklyn. In her youth she had eight children with a big shot linen merchant, Isaac Harari a.k.a. Nahem, who apparently drowned in the sinking of the SS Vestris [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Vestris] . But she was rather a party girl and had a lot of fun after husband went missing at sea when my father was 13.

I didn't really know her at all. Our nuclear family moved to California when I was nearly 5. I would see Milo with family when we came east. And then when I move to New York in 1980, I went to visit her with my uncle Joe, who explained to her who this blue-eyed fellow was — Sam’s son. She died not too long after that, and I was given permission to take whatever I needed from her home because I was new to living in New York. Of course the neighbors called the cops and some pandemonium ensued but it turned out okay. I only had a silver cup remaining after all these years and I gave that to someone dear to me in my family.