This story is about emigration, about the will to leave. This fight over language was the story about my grandmother, the one that was always told. The second time the family left for New York, in 1924, she made it happen with her obstinacy. She put her foot down-her small, stubborn, newly American foot. In Norway, the child Aasta refused to speak Norwegian. My grandmother’s family sojourned for several years in America, and returned to Norway when my grandmother’s older sister, Signe, contracted polio.Īnd then something remarkable happened. When the Bergensfjord docked at Ellis Island on June 18, 1916, Esther was Aasta, a Norwegian baby, one year, one month, and five days old the day she met her father. No one photographed her first steps in America. I’ll be fifty-four myself soon, but when I was a child, she was the age a grandmother is. One blob is the lunar lander, the other is the flag. In the photo my grandmother took, the TV is a blur in a dark room. By then her mother’s bed was in the front parlor, her mother’s hair so long its ash-brown ends reached all the way back to Norway. It was the little journey of her cigarette, that slender rocket ship, its tip glowing as she watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon at the house on 56th Street. On the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, this summer, I was thinking about my grandmother Esther, in Brooklyn, and how in 1969 her orbit was bingo, the flea market, Eighth Avenue.
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