In search of bits of our family history, I’ve dug through many repositories and travelled to the places we’ve come from… but I’ve avoided perhaps the most likely source of real data, JewishGen, until now, when I’m wrapping up.

I’ve found my great-grandfather’s birth record:

and, with it, the knowledge that the spelling of our last name was more often Polian than Polan when it was transliterated into the English alphabet.

And then, again, I stopped.

Much of JewishGen is about discovering one’s proximity to victims of the Shoah. And I feel certain that if I were to keep exploring, I would discover siblings and cousins of my great-grandparents who died in the camps or the pogroms. This is why I have stopped exploring.

Before you object, hear me out:

1. On my next birthday, I will be sixty. For all my years, I have understood myself to be the recipient of the great good fortune of my ancestors’ foresight in leaving Europe when they did to come to America. I have also understood that I, and all the descendants of those who came during the Great Migration, owe a debt of care to the descendants of survivors as well as an obligation not to center ourselves in stories of the atrocities. What is a cousin I would never have known compared to grandparent my own parents still mourned? What is a distant relation compared to growing up in a house with parents who still bore the tattoos and the emotional wounds of the camps? My family history is not a Holocaust history, as it was told to me or as I have understood it. I don’t need it to be.

2. It’s also true that if this is not my family’s history, it is nonetheless my people’s history, and that is enough to make it also my history. Inside Jewish community, it makes sense to separate out those to whom we owe care and those of whom care can be expected when we talk about the Shoah. Outside of Jewish community, it doesn’t. Passover teaches us to be grateful for what G-d did for us—each of us, individually—when he lead us out of Egypt because what happens to us or for us as a people happens to all of us. This is what it means to be a people.

Of all the lessons I’ve learned from writing this book, that one has had the most profound effect on me. I don’t need to know whether cousins or great-great-great uncles and aunts were murdered in the Holocaust because I know that six million of my people were. I also don’t need to parse the safety of my people through the lens of my safety as an American Jew: I am relatively safe, while Jews worldwide rely on Israel for their safety. Nobody else will take them when, as has happened so often in recent history, they are expelled from the nations in which they live. We are expelled from the nations in which we live.

In your own research, friends, is there knowledge you have avoided? What was it and why? Is it okay to avoid knowledge, or do we have to track down every piece of information we can?

In other news, the first real episode of Jews in Space with author Sarah Blake is live! After ten years of looking at the past, I’m excited to look instead toward the distant future. I hope you’ll join me!