SWITCHBACKS // Who Is Family?
Seeing Myself in Strangers
How my adoption story changed the way I see my neighbors—and my cultural inheritance
by Lisa Grunberger
EXCERPT //
As an adopted daughter, I’m able to see myself in strangers, for these strangers could be my siblings, my aunt, my birth mother. As a mother, I teach my daughter that we’re all interrelated; in Martin Luther King’s words, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Am I:
The adopted child of Robert and Rachel Grunberger, a child of immigrants
The genetic child of Susan and Leon, Holocaust survivors
Grafted from two Jewish, Holocaust-survivor Polish-Ukrainian-Austrian-Hungarian trees
The granddaughter of a Slovenian Catholic resistance fighter and potato farmer who was interned in the same Italian internment camp as my maternal grandmother, Eva Bass
All of the Above
For now, I’m All of the Above. But there is more to me than this double helix of nature and nurture. I’m heir to my literary, philosophical, poetic, and spiritual ancestors. I contain Walt Whitman’s multitudes––Joni Mitchell’s jazzy riffs, Wallace Stevens’ snow man, Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse, Kafka’s castle. //
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