In Search of ..... myself?

This post started out as a book review of two excellent books I read recently, but it has ended up with me staring at myself and asking questions I have successfully dodged for most of my life.  Before I get deep, the books I read:

These are two very excellent books, and I have my neighbor's son to thank for A Polish Son in the Motherland.  It was a thank you for having given him the entire ownership line for his parents' house. 

A Polish Son is the search of Leonard Kniffel for his Polish family, and as I read it, I felt there was a deeper search for identity: his grandmother's identity, yes, but more so his identity.  He lived the genealogist's dream, that of being able to go back to the "old country;" of seeing where his family came from and what influenced them; of being able to track family that may be left, with the help of his grandmother's surviving letters.  That is a long, awkward sentence that would make Henry James proud, but that is the book in a nutshell.  It is an intensely private story, yet it doesn't read like that. It is the work of a talented writer.  I suspect that those of Polish descent will be able to sympathize with his story in a way that I cannot, but more about that later.    

The glimpses of his life as a child piqued my curiosity, as he mentioned both the creek down the road from my house and the very road I live on.  Living as I do in "the Great Nothingness," to see my area in print was enough to make me say "Well, flying potatoes!"  For certainly, should I see flying potatoes I would no longer be surprised.  I suppose one would have to live here to understand how a place can exist and yet not exist.  At my house, we live by this line from The Hip's song "Fireworks,"  "... And believing in the country of me and you."   

All that said, once I had finished A Polish Son, I was curious if he had written anything about growing up out here.  That book is called Busia.  I felt that book was entirely too short, but that isn't a bad thing.  It really lays the groundwork for A Polish Son.  After reading the memories of growing up with his grandmother, his Busia (in Polish), one understands the love and the curiosity which caused him to go to Poland.  For certainly, it takes love to pack up and walk in footsteps almost a hundred years old, in a land where the language is not your first.

Then I asked myself, "Why isn't there ever anything written about us of German descent?"  

The next post deals with that question.