Kaia Barth

Honors 345
Final Paper
Inherited Memories

My first memory is being pushed by Hans in my stroller.

Do I remember it because I have been told it several times?
I see Hans pushing me up the hill, Far and Mor walking behind smiling! We are on the
sidewalk almost up by Johanneskirken, St. Johns church. Mor said once that I was angry
because Hans was pushing.
- Slvi Dolland
Slvi DollandMormormy Norwegian grandmother. I received the only copy of her
memoir of growing up in the war years of occupied-Norway just this past summer, on the last
day of my familys visit to her home outside Detroit, Michigan. The unadorned brown hardback
is handwritten; pages filled with little windows into a world and a life long gone. The tilt of the
penmanship, the spacing of the words, the thickness of the lines, vary passage-to-passage as she
laid down her earliest memories piece-by-piece. I can travel in her mind, day-to-day, seeing how
one memory consumed her attention for an afternoon; another restless evening a series of brief,
sparsely-detailed snapshots jump one after the next, in a hurry to escape onto the pages. She

records what she remembersthe facts, the names, the placeswith the typical Norwegian
unemotional reticence.
St. Hans aften. Midsummers night. There was a bonfire in an ut mark, pasture
field. Lots of people enjoying themselves. There must have been food too, but it is all the fun I
had playing, I remember.
When we all left, one calf kept mooing and mooing after us. I left so sorry for that calf.
Maybe to some, the grammar is poor, the sentences, cold and unrevealing. But I
understand this reticence, this tendency to hold back feelingI am the same way. Reading
through the restraint, her words speak volumes.
Mother had a Red Cross telegram from Father every six months or so. It stated that he
was well and hoped the same with us. He sailed in convoys that were constantly torpedoed or
bombed.
The war dragged on. People did what they could to keep their spirits up.
I have known and loved Mormor as well as one can know and love a close family
member living three time zones away. She is a generous, though reserved woman; although
blunt in her opinions and prone to the occasional silliness, passive aggression is the closest she
comes to revealing emotion. She talks to me on the phone about the snowstorm they had, the
quiet weekend spent at their little lakeside cottage, the various school plays, soccer games, and
wrestling matches of my cousins all still living nearby. She lives in a little brick house with a
white wooden D on the chimney, dresses in neat blouses and sweaters, writes me birthday
cards and Christmas cards and hello, how are you? cards in that familiar slanted print.

And she had a life that I know nothing about.

Even though I just arrived home from my annual summer visit to the Midwest, I think I
need to return again, but this time, from an entirely different perspective.
~~~~
Family Roomwhat a an unoriginal name to give this twelve-by-twelve space of
warmth, rest, excitement, crowds, hellos and goodbyes, dogs bumping over the cheap paper
dinner plate youve carefully balanced on your knees, children constructing cushion forts, and
grandparents suddenly closing their eyes to the daily crossword puzzle and letting out a loud
snore. Although the family living in the little brick house still refers to it as the family room,
gangly young Susanmy tour guide tells me with the authority of the first born that, We
dont go in there much past October. Mama has me shut these folding doors cause its too cold
even colder than me and Gregs bedroom! Susan says its always been like this. I dont even
recognize those 1960s style folding doors. Were they always kept open, and therefore
unnoticed, during my stays? No, I know this room too well; they couldnt have been there at all.
Impatiently continuing on my tour of her new house, Susan, or Susie as her aunts and
uncles still call her, drags me away, past the kitchen and dining room, forcing me to refocus my
musings on the much more important and exciting room of the house, the front room. Accessed
year round, this is where the marvelous T.V. in Technicolor and the stiff new blue woven couch
sit proudly. This is the room where the Christmas tree will go up in a month, the room where
baby Kelly falls asleep at 7:00 pm, just after dinnerand then she wakes up Saturday mornings
when its still dark out and comes and bugs Greg and me so weve gotta get up all early too!
Susan adds. She paints such a happy picture of family life for this practically foreign front room

that I smile in spite of myself. But I cannot relate. I cannot help but find it slightly depressing
that the somewhat cramped space in the back of the house that I connect so closely to family
togetherness and warm summer evenings is actually just a cold, only occasionally occupied addon to the main house and the main family activity. What has changed with this family in the
intervening years to so dramatically shift the epicenter of togetherness? Will I even know this
family anymore?
Okay, if this is getting confusing, let me explain the perspective through which I decided
to return. I am taking an imagined trip back in time to the same house in Fraser, Michigan, that I
visit annually for two weeks in August, except this time, its 1967, and its November. After the
shock of discovering the near-stranger narrating Mormors memoir, I decided to visit my
grandma and her familymy familyat the earliest point I can realistically imagineshortly
after they moved into the house where my grandparents still live today. I hope to see if the
home and the family I think I know so well are indeed familiar to me at all. Im a little worried
they wont be.
As Susan fiddles with the dials on the television, attempting to show me her favorite
cartoon, Batman and Robinwho are far inferior to Cat Woman, of coursea thin, long
legged woman with bobbed dirty-blond hair neatly curled in gentle waves enters the kitchen with
a paper bag full of groceries. She is still young, but wears the maturity and subtle weariness of
years of motherhood. I know I have seen her before, but only as a memory, as shadow of a
person caught suddenly in time in a handful of faded photographs.
Susie, you could set the table for me. Im starting supper now.

Mama, Im not Susie anymore. Im Sue. Spelled S-i-o-u-x, like the Indians. And its
Gregs turn to set the tableI did it last night!
I knew this woman, of course, though I knew her from a different time, in a different
body, with a different, grown up family and a house with a family room instead of a front room.
She is my grandma, Mormor, and Sioux nee Susie is none other than my mom. They have no
notion of who I am; I am nothing more that the exchange student from Washington State that I
introduce myself as. In her supreme ten-year-old confidence, Susan fortunately fails to notice
any of my searching stares or odd thoughtful silences. If Mormor sees, she stays silent.
I came here under this unsuspicious ruse hoping that my childhood mother, so similar to
the ten-year-old me in looks and personality, could, well, show me around a bit. Let me
experience my geographically detached roots a little closer than the semiannual two week August
windows will allow. With her innately rational, slightly bossy outlook, she did just that, showing
me just how wrong my memories and imaginings of this family were.
I had thought that knew this placeif not the house, at least the air, the smells, the
feeling of being in Michigan. But outside of the Pacific Northwest, in climates where people
actually experience four seasons, a place in winter feels nothing like the same locale in summer.
The soothing mugginess, the gentle droning of cicadas, the earthy smell of lush green lawns
grown in sandy soil, soft on bare feet, seem completely foreign to this place of bare skeleton
trees, children bundled in new, too-big pea coats and mittens, and the sharp biting gusts of
incoming cloudbursts of sleet. Over the course of my twenty summers, I have spent at least ten
monthsperhaps even a yearliving in this house. Really, I have spent nearly as much time
here as Susan, as her family moved in just over a year ago, in 1965. But Susan already feels very

much at home here; she nimbly springs up one of the old houses dangerously steep staircases to
the shared attic bedroom above to nag my eight-year-old uncle to come set the table before they
both get in trouble.
With Susan gone and Mormor preoccupied over the stove, I quietly slip away from the
kitchen and through the folding white panel doors that firmly block off my favorite room. I need
to inspect the disused family room closer; I am already desperate for some sign of familiarity in
what I expected to be a familiar place. For some reason a shiver of furtive trepidation passes
down my spine as my eyes slowly adjust to the rooms darkness, like I shouldnt be here, like
this room holds some great undiscovered secret not to be disturbed for several more decades.
Fortunately, as in all situations of runaway imagination, physical senses firmly force me back to
reality. My mother is right, as always; the room is very cold. But ignoring the chill, at first I see
exactly what I wish to: the same cozy wonderful space of togetherness that I expect from a
family roomthis is an imagined trip, after all, and imagination goes first to the familiar before
it can create the fantastic.
Just as I remember, this small brick-walled space does not match any other room in the
house in feeling or dcor. While most of the house appears as a slightly dated, though well kept,
ubiquitous suburban home of the post-war period, this later addition evokes a cabin somewhere
deep in the woods. Uninsulated brick wallsthe reason, of course, for the chillunpainted
cedar wood paneling, the fireplace and hearth, the simple wooden rocking chair in the corner,
well-worn couchesmy grandmas spot marked by a pile of Norwegian newspapers and
magazines and a half-completed crossword, my grandfathers by the T.V. remote and the coffee
stained coasters on the small table. And of course, the many Norwegian photos and paintings
and trinkets covered in rosemaling designs that reveal that half of this family does not call

Michigan their only home. The rest of the house is my portal to my grandparents, to my cousins
and aunts and uncles and their Michigan home; this room is my portal to Norway, my ancestral
home and the birthplace of the young mother in the kitchen. I have never been there, and
connect myself to the country and culture only through stories. But this room, with its decidedly
un-Michigan feel, reminds me that my roots stretch farther. A shiver of longing passes through
me once more.
Hey, whatcha doing in there? Susan interrupts. Theres nothing in that room, I told
you. Come and eat, Mama says suppers ready.
Ignoring this, I ask her, Susan, whats Norway like?
Slightly taken aback, she quickly recovers and launches into a detailed and heartfelt
description of her bestemors (grandmas) tiny apartment in Bergen. And at night we sleep in
the living room because theres only Bestemors bedroom and Mama and Dad get it. But we
have lots of pretty wool blanketsmy favorite is the green and yellow one with the fringe at the
ends. You have to walk down the hall, past the other apartments, to the toilet, so sometimes I see
the neighbor children Greg and I play in the ally with, but thats not so interesting as the toilet at
the farm up in the mountains, which is outside in the barn, so youre right there with the cows
and sheep and heheheshe breaks down gigglingthey all poop at the same time as you. But
on Saturday Bestefar (Grandfather) takes us to the fish market right along the water and the
sights of tall bearded old men selling mackerel on the weathered wooden stands of Bergens
iconic fish market, the sounds of seagulls calling shrilly, and the taste of creamy Norwegian-style
ice cream you can buy on tall skinny cones, float half-formed through my head until Mormor
interrupts, calling us to the dinner table.

I say little as I slowly eat my portion of hot dogs, apple sauce and canned green beansa
cheap meal for a working class family, though satisfying, practical, very Americanletting the
attention stay on the bickering siblings next to me. My gaze and thoughts keep drifting to the
most foreign thing in the room, Mormor. Sitting in her well-ironed rayon pant-suit, you would
never suspect her anything but a poster 1960s American housewife, as, in perfectly comfortable
English, she sharply chastises Greg for shooting the food-filled rubber bands from his braces at
his outraged sister across the table. She named her children Susan, Gregory, and Kelly (not
Astrid, Hans and Solveig), she cooks hotdogs and beans for supper, and she packs a lunch every
morning for a Chrysler tool and die maker born and raised in Detroit. Is she still Norwegian? Is
her family Norwegian at all? She must have noticed me staring by now.
My grandma left Norway as soon as she could, at eighteen, moving first to Paris, where
she met and married an American serviceman from Detroit, my grandpa. She escaped a family
history of hardship and poverty, of which I know little. The few details I do know, Mormor
shared while sitting in the family room; she on her spot on the couch, hugging her knees up to
her chest, speaking matter-of-factly in her soft, still slightly accented voice; me in the rocking
chair, listening carefully as I could so that I might remember. A possibly abusive grandfather
who died young, a mother and aunts working long hours in textile factories, growing up hungry
in a Nazi occupied country with a father away at sea for five years during the war.

Mor (Mormors mother) has never talked about Simon (Mormors grandfather), except
that he got very ill. Anna, her cousin, told Mary that he turned mean towards Malene (Mormors
grandfather).

Mor was between Ineborg and Selma in age. They ganged up on her, and their mother
favored them. Mor did well in school, they did poorly. Mor was quiet and sensitive. There is no
doubt that these events and lack of love deeply affected Mors personality
~~~~
I wish I could write that life was wonderful. All during the war I thought that once the
war ended, that was how it would be; wonderful. The longer the war lasted, the more of a hero
Far became to me.
He could get very angry and unpleasant, especially when he had been drinking. Angry
words in the kitchen, Far screaming. We were not used to that, and it was mortifying to me.
He did work very hard, however, and always provided for us.

Hints and suggestions, sitting on that couch. But until I read the careful lines of her
memoir, I didnt know. I didnt know at all.
Young Susan already knows some of this painful story, and will learn it all in much more
detail in the following years, but she still feels a great affection for the simple places in Norway
that, for her, hold so many happy memories. To those who must live in the hundred year old
apartment with no electricity and a toilet down the hall, the place speaks only of poverty and
day-to-day hardships, but to the occasional visitor, it houses only wonderful memories of family
togetherness and exploration of origins. Us children of immigrants mentally preserve and assign
meaning to every structural detail and nuance of a visited home as a means of physically
attaching ourselves to that which we long to belong to, but know we never really will; a familial
homeland. The exuberance and longing with which ten-year-old Susan describes her Norway
so similar to how she will describe it decades later as an adultstrikes me with its similarity to

how I find myself imagining Michigan. Three generations, three homelands: Norway, Michigan,
Seattle. I love my familys adopted home, outwardly embracing its fleece-wearing, coffeedrinking, socially liberal, outdoorsy lifestyle as much as Mormor embraced her new American
life. But traveling back one step on the chain, to where the rest of my family lives in Michigan,
loosens my roots to the Pacific Northwest, but fails to completely attach them elsewhere.
Something always feels right returning to this second home, but it does not provide me with the
homeland I crave. For that, I need Norway.
The juxtaposition of Susans innocently joyful tone when describing her roots, with the
harsh realities of those who lived in the old country let me see why the family room in Michigan
can be shuttered off and forgotten. For the family living here, it is just an inconvenience, racking
up the heating bill, about as useful and fascinating as a toilet, and not the exciting toilets of
young Susans Norway.
The meaning I attach to the family room is not due to a particularly interesting facet of
the architecture, a secret love for mid-century suburban housing styles, or even the brick walls
and Norwegian trinkets I cherish. I have simply attached the memories and longing for roots that
visiting Michigan fills me with to the physical structure of this particular room. It is not a room
for me, but a stage. I found myself shocked and sad that the family who could be enjoying this
place every day sees it as nothing more than a small, chilly brick addition that makes a nice place
to relax in the summer. But why would they see it an anything more? In fact, how could they?
The family room is as important to me as the ancient one bedroom apartment is important
to Susan, and as unimportant to Susan as that apartment is unimportant to Mormor. Growing up
visiting a place that is supposed to be home, but really never can be, I have latched on to a small

portion of it, a physical aspect that I can come back to and pretend is my own, so if I cannot
belong to the whole place, at least I can belong to that room. How else can one ground feelings
of origin and family that span continents?
~~~~
Early glimpses from before the war.

Mor, Fru Alveer and one or two other ladies were standing by the kitchen doors talking,
while I was on my way out on the front steps. One of the ladies gave me a piece of candy.
What do you say? someone remarked. Two different words had me mixed up so I said the
one, good-bye. They all laughed.
With a knitting needle I punched holes in the seat of a wicker chair oilcloth Mor and
Far were very angry.
I helped Mor and Far with the laundry in the basement. Looking at my fingers I
wondered why they were full of furrows.
Far played hide-and-seek with us in our two-room apartment, and we had a hard time
finding him he even hid in the window sills behind the shades.
We stood on the dining table and jumped into his arms.
I was sitting on his shoulders, he is walking back and forth, Mor was sitting in a chair
crying.
~~~~
I help Mormor clear the dishes from the table as Susan prepares to wash them in the sink.
She turns to me, her grey-blue eyes meeting mine fully for the first time.

Kaia. That is a lovely name.

Thank you, I reply. Its Norwegian, I carefully add.
She raises her eyebrows ever so slightly and, with a small smile, says, I knew that. Is
your family from Norway?
She didnt ask if I was Norwegian. No, those two intervening generations must be terribly
obvious. This woman, I remind myself, lived in Norway for over half her life. Yes. My
grandmother grew up in Norway and my mom talks about visiting all the time; its a very special
place for her. But Ive never been.
Norway is much different than America, she says guardedly.
I wonder what she really means, saying this. Mistaking my confusion, she quickly
clarifies, I was born in Bergen. Thats a small city on the coast. I took Susan and Gregory there
twice, but my family hasnt met Kelly yet. Do you have family there?
I do, though I have never met them either. They live in Bergen as well.
She gives me another deeply searching look and a flicker of recognition flashes across
her eyes, but, with a small shake of her head, she lets the feeling pass. Well, you should go one
day to meet them, she says. Norway is very pretty, she adds, almost as an afterthought.
I suddenly cannot help it, and ask what I have never dared to ask in person, Do you miss
it? How can you not miss it? How can you live here, in Detroit, the epitome of America, and
feel at home?

Her face remains passive, though she continued to gaze at me closely. The clattering at
the sink stopsSusan has looked up, half-interested in her mothers response. Yes, I do miss
Bergen sometimes. I miss my sister Mary and my brother Hans, and the mountains are nice to
hike up. The United States is a much better place to live though. Things are good here.
But, are you at home? I insist. She frowns slightly at the intensity in my voice.
She does not understand. She answers with an air of impatience. Yes, my home is with
my family, of course. And we live here, so yes, I am at home. She turns away and resumes
cleaning.
Maybe I dont understand. Of course she is at home here, with her family. And she is at
home in Norway, with her family still living there. With a childhood spent jumping between
temporary safe houses during the war, a youth spent in Paris, and motherhood in America, she
must have removed the notions of home from ties to any specific physical place. How silly and
selfish of me for believing myself lost because I lack a generational homeland. However, as I
quickly resolved to refocus my notions of home on the people I know instead of places I can
never really belong to, I felt a sudden pang of loss for the family room right next to me. Must I
really detach myself fully from the physical places I fill with meaning, as it seemed Mormor
had? Must my concrete bond to Michigan and indirect bond to Norway really be meaningless
just be a chilly, shuttered off side room for me too?
We ended up living at Guri-stova. A tiny house on Severins farm another cousin.
Guri had just passed away. Her furniture was still there when we moved in, but later
some of it was auctioned off including a corner cabinet that I later recognized at somebody
elses house.

Hans was going to get something from the cabinetwhich was no longer in the corner
we all laughed.
Is that just it? Is my searching for meaning and permanence in the physical details of life
that inevitably change so much over time, laughable?
As promised, Susan had shown me in painful detail how knowing a place or a person
depends so much on the timeframe during which your lives overlap. But if I cannot claim
ownership over my home and my family outside of the present, how can I belong to anything?
Staring at this not-quite Norwegian, not-quite-American woman, who somehow feels completely
at ease with her concept of home, I feel even more lost than when I first opened up her memoir
and discovered I knew nothing about the woman who stood as the vital connection to my concept
of homeland.
~~~~
Sitting on that stiff new blue woven couch in the front room that evening, a half-an-hour
or so after Kelly had dozed off in her mothers lap, I turn towards Mormor again.
Im sorry this is rather sudden, but I think I need to cut my stay short. I need to go home
soon.
Before Mormor can respond, Susan blurts in, pleading, What?! Youre leaving already!
But you just got here, you havent seen anything yet. I wanted you to meet my friends Jan and
Judy at my school, Emerson Elementary, and go sledding at Cemetery Hill, and show you the
secret spot in the woods out back where we hide in Cowboys and Indians. Id even let you come

to our top-secret Cat Women Club meeting, only if you promise not to tell Greg bout where we
meet. You havent even seen my room yet! she adds beseechingly.
I looked at her bright young face, eyebrows raised and eyes wide in a half-worried, halfhopeful expression. I felt bad for letting this little girl down. These places were important to
her, I could tell, but she would have to wait many years to share them with me, and then, only
through stories of fond childhood memories. After all, we can never really experience another
generations life; visiting the place shows us the stage, but the significance has long since left,
and now resides only in stories.
Im sorry Susan, that all sounds so much fun. Dont worry though, I have a feeling Ill
be back here. You will get a chance to show me all that one day.
Addressing Mormor again, I say, Thank you so much for hosting me, you have a
wonderful family and home. But I need to find my own way back home now.
She nods with a look of subtle understanding, while Susan stared confusedly. My
husband can drive you to the airport on his way to work tomorrow, if youd like. You will find
yourself at home in no time, she says with confidence, the corners of her mouth twitching in a
slight smile.
I am not so confident. I am taking only two things back with me: loss of my last sound
physical connection to a family and culture I know only through stories, and clues, but no
answers, to developing a new concept of home that does not need to root itself anywhere.
~~~~

It takes a few weeks after returning from my strange imagined time travel before I feel
ready to examine the baggage I brought back. All questions still lay unresolved in my mind as I
pull that troubling brown book off the shelf once again, and let fall open at random.
Vatle.
For several years during the war, Mormor had lived in a tiny cottage crammed with
extended family in the small farming community of Vatle. Food was sparse and living
conditions primitive. But at the end of her chapter reflecting on this period, she wrote, I always
wanted to see Vatle again. In 1994 Mary drove Mor, Anna (a cousin) and me to visit Margit
(another cousin) at Haus. From there onto Vatle. A lot of the hayfields were now overgrown
with trees. The old Guri-stova (the cottage) still stood, it was now a storage shed. We also
stopped by the old little school house, where not only Anna and Margit went to school, but also
Bestemor. We peeked in the windows, and the large, wooden table that the kids sat around was
still there! The house is being restored
Stereotypically Norwegian, the passage is emotionally sparse, but through her careful
detail I see a desire to reclaim a place, to validate her memories through the physical details.
Perhaps she too felt a remarkable sense of unease seeing the familiar transformed by timethe
overgrown hayfields and misused cottagebecause she certainly smiled at the familiarity of the
schoolhouse. However, I would bet that she felt at home the entire trip, driving together with her
family, regardless of whether the physical landscape of Norway had shifted in her absence. I
guess Mormor did make physical connections to her experiences, she just learned early how to
look beyond them. Physical connections make a place feel comfortable and familiar. Sights of
them trigger old memories that will one day fill a memoir. Tracking our experiences and family
and cultural ties across a geographic map creates an abstract idea of roots, but we are more

rooted to the experiences of the place than to the place itself. As for where I belong, maybe its
as simple as where I feel like I belong, right now, with the narrow impressions of people and
places I can gain in a single lifetime. Maybe its not all so complex. Seattle to Michigan to
Norway, my life to my mothers to Mormors; I can belong to the stories, without having
experienced them directly. This is family.
When I physically return to Michigan some time in 2013, I will let myself relish in the
homey familiarity of the family room, as I know it. But one day when my grandparents have
moved away or moved on, old house long sold, I will still feel at home with my Michigan family.
I can live in Seattle, stop by in Michigan, and travel on to Norway at lasta land I can never
know or belong to like a nativeand still feel at home there, too. I owe this wisdom to my
immigrant grandma; it is not the physical places, but the memories they stage, not the geographic
origins, but the familial ties between them, that take me home.