Citizen of Somewhere

It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, “Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.”
- Benedict Anderson

To those who knew him, my great grandfather was someone who was never quite able to fit in. One relative described him as a bit ‘confused’. From my position of detachment – he died years before I was born – I cannot think of a demonym that would accurately describe Roland Bachrach. He was someone to which nowhere ever seemed to be home. Sehnsucht, mono no aware, hiraeth, are all terms in German, Japanese, and Welsh respectively that have linguistically danced around the emotions felt by people in his position, but the closest our language has appeared in the 1950s. The term Third Culture Kid (TCK), coined by sociologist Ruth Useem, is a rather coarse way of describing someone who grows up in a place that is not their parents’ homeland – the ‘third’ culture being a mixture of the ‘first’ (parents') and ‘second’ (host country). TCKs are notoriously troubled; the stereotypical individual struggling with identity issues, considering themselves culturally homeless. Indeed, trying to explore, understand, and solve unanswered questions about Roland and his family quickly became a study where the subject’s identity was constantly shifting and open to interpretation.

But what does this mean for the modern era? It is impossible to read about TCKs without bringing to mind the huge increase in migration around the world, both voluntary and forced. It seems inevitable that these questions of identity that I stumbled upon whilst rifling through family files are being repeated today, hundreds of thousands of times, in families across the world. Is a generation arising who, too, will be struck by this indefinable affliction? Should we do something about it? These are not questions I can answer, but in exploring the issues of the past, we can begin to have a conversation about those of today.

The end of Roland’s journey was in 1980. My grandfather, his only son, came to clear out his house – a strange, emotionally confusing experience that nobody ever wants to do, especially when processing grief. He sorted through the relics of a life well lived and well-travelled; Chinese wall-hangings and paintings from the family’s time in Shanghai, bits and pieces from his career as an analytical chemist, photographs from across Europe, endless letters, trophies and medals from rifle competitions. But amongst all this, they also discovered Jewish paraphernalia in Roland’s house. I don’t know exactly what it was that my grandfather found. There are several documents in Hebrew, and a prayer book dating back to 1860s Vienna that I still have today. But I have also heard rumours of a tallit prayer shawl and various other items.

Roland was certainly not an average resident of the rural English community in Somerset where he spent his retirement. He spoke with a strange accent, a sort of French, from a childhood spent in Lyon, mixed with his father’s Viennese German. He and his wife, Helen, would talk in French to each other around the house and when they didn’t want other people to know what they were saying. His religion was described as ‘episcopalian’ although I don’t know if this was a reference to his participation in the Church of England, or a more specific description of his church (his wife belonged to the Protestant 'Disciples of Christ'). When a new Chinese takeaway appeared in town (a novelty in the 1960s), Roland frightened the staff by walking in and ordering in fluent Cantonese. I don’t know if he ever really identified as British. He was a British citizen, and for the latter half of his life, Britain was his home, but I think he would have lived elsewhere if he could.

And yet despite this cosmopolitan background, it seemed strange for Jewish objects to be amongst his possessions. He had travelled across Europe, but nobody ever spoke of a Jewish connection. How much his son (my grandfather) himself knew or understood why these objects were there is hard to tell, but I find it hard to believe he was completely ignorant. Once, on a ship transporting troops during the war, he was innocuously eating a pork pie when he was suddenly asked by a fellow soldier, “What would the rabbi think of that?” Evidently the soldier had picked up on my grandfather’s surname, or perhaps how he looked; he had a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon appearance – olive skinned, dark haired. And during the war, he also befriended his cousin, Roland’s niece, who had fled her home in Vienna and come to the UK to escape the Nazis. But Roland never really talked about any Jewish connection to his son.

Living in the era we do, it is easy to judge my grandfather for being uncertain. We are, after all, saturated in information to an extent our ancestors would find nauseating. I can immediately access records spanning hundreds of years from my home. In the space of a few hours or even minutes I can search newspaper archives to find where someone has been mentioned, piecing together a narrative from tiny snippets of information across decades. But silence in an era before the internet was a powerful force. Oral history is a surprisingly effective way to pass on information, but if snuffed out, it can never be recovered. Even this year, a relative of mine approached me and confided that he believed Roland had been gifted those Jewish objects by a friend.

Where oral history fades in a family, rumours and speculation fill the vacuum. As well as being secretly Jewish, Roland, the rumour went, was the illegitimate offspring of his father and an anonymous Chinese woman. Perhaps they had met whilst he was out in China on business? When his niece visited, she – having only ever seen Chinese people in books – sincerely believed Roland was himself, as she put it, “a Chinaman”.

To be fair, he did have a rather asiatic appearance in some photographs. And all the Chinese furniture, combined with Roland's tendency to speak in languages she didn’t understand, probably didn’t help the young girl drawing her own conclusions. But even only a few years ago, this rumour had never really gone away. “Obviously we’re not part Chinese,” said one relative to me when I first enquired about this. “At least… I don’t think so.”

So who was Roland Bachrach really? Did he ever have a home? There are stacks of documents that have remained in archives for years, some legally prohibited from being released until recently. There are many red herrings, unhelpful rumours, and dead-end paths. As it turns out Roland had been born in Lyon, France, but he wasn’t legally French – rather, his citizenship was Austrian. His father, Emil Ludwig, was a merchant who sold tea from the East. There are no portraits of his father that we know of, but it’s possible he appears in one photograph of my great great aunt. His daughter has stopped to pose for the picture with a friend, holding onto a railing, roller skates on her feet.

So was Roland secretly a Jew? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something he considered. His niece – who I speak to regularly, now in her 90s – grew up a Catholic in Vienna, but having ended up in America now ponders her religious affiliation. Despite his decision to keep the Jewish connection silent, I do not blame him considering the background of when he lived. What of his nationality? Bohemian, Austrian, French, Chinese, British? I don’t know either. Personally, I think the place Roland found the closest to any sort of home was Shanghai. The International Settlement there was full of people like him, denied any solid cultural identity, united only in their common homelessness. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the original TCKs that Useem studied were the offspring of colonial administrators and businesspeople in India. In Shanghai, Roland met his wife Helen and, despite their poverty, they thrived there as members of an international community. It was only the constant war that forced them to move to Britain, never to return. Whereas the journey of many TCKs begins with war, Roland’s ended with it.

As more and more TCKs are created, so too do we learn more about what it means to be one. From Madeleine Thien’s writings on the Asian diaspora in Canada, to Sumayya Lee’s stories of being an Indian-African, it is no longer as lonely a path as it once was. But this does not mean the challenges and conflicts created by the TCK experience will go away, especially when so many are not the product of voluntary migrations but rather of forced displacement created by war or disaster. I wonder how many other grandchildren will be left to piece together their family’s history and identity a hundred years later.

Family history forces us to consider our position in the world and how we got here. I am not a TCK, neither are my parents. But in families there are things that get silently passed on, from the superficial habits (my mother’s insistence on flinging open the windows all the time itself inherited from her mother, who was taught to during her wartime service as a nurse, an application of lessons learnt from the Spanish influenza), to the objects and heirlooms (Roland’s pocket watch keeps ticking today), to the deeper philosophies and ways of looking at the world. What of the latter did I inherit from Roland? I don’t know yet.

Thomas Bachrach has recently completed a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.