Genealogy by Pam O’Brien

Who knows if this might be my last book. I’m 76.
There is a Jewish synagogue/museum in Prague
where a tape speaks the names of the Holocaust dead
over and over. Someone told me that Jews
needed to be able to trace their genealogy
back seven generations in order to speak in synagogue.
Jesus could trace his genealogy back 42 generations.
There is something to be said for saying the names,
telling the stories, remembering that to know who we are
we need to know who we were.
We all tread on the stories of our families.
They are the road.

The creation of Genealogy began as a story. As a young mother of three, the author found very little time to write. Life in Erie, PA, was crammed full of homemaking, child raising and wishful thinking days, until Nancy Whitelaw included her in a poetry workshop—a very special poetry workshop. The group, which met near Chautauqua, New York, began by lunching on Spicy West African Stew and telling stories from their lives over lunch. This was followed by the workshop. Members came to Nancy’s house on Salisbury Hill from as far away as the Finger Lakes and Erie for one Saturday each month back in the 1980s—one day each month to be creative.

Fast forward to the after-Covid days. O’Brien had retired from the University of Pittsburgh and moved to The Villages, Fl. She remembered that feeling of being nurtured, cared for, and given space to write her poems. She wanted to replicate Nancy’s workshop in a very different setting with a very different age group. She found ten women willing to give it a try. They named the workshop First Fridays. Some were already poets; some had never written a poem. They loved the Spicy West African Stew, the sharing of their lives over lunch, and then the workshop, with a focus on poems as memoir.

O’Brien had been attempting family stories retold as poetry for quite a while, four chapbooks and one full-length collection’s worth. She began adding on to those poems, looking for a way to remember her family from the grandparents to the grandchildren. Not wanting one part of them to be lost. In Genealogy, she also explores her own thoughts on aging, on memory, on what it is we choose to keep when there is not a lot of time left to find ways to store those memories.

This collection, which arose from both the Salisbury Hill and the First Fridays poetry time, hopes to put those lives out there for both the author and the reader. And in the attempt, it encourages others to write their stories. In the Forward of the collection, she refers to the Jewish traditions that involve naming the generations, repeating the names and the stories. She believes that “we tread on the stories of our families. They are the road.”

The book aims to do one more thing—to encourage readers to gather in small groups to share food, to talk about their lives, and to encourage each other to share both their treasures and their secrets.