Ancestry illuminated / Coffee burn
Today: Kim Kelly, author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, and founding editor of the metal newsletter Salvo; and Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War.
Issue No. 573
Tattoo-charest
Kim Kelly
The Squeakless Wheel
Trevor Alixopulos
Tattoo-charest
by Kim Kelly
The first in a series of reports from the author’s Transylvanian adventure
When I tell people at home in the U.S. about my recent solo trip to Romania, the most common reaction is a head tilt and a puzzled “... Why?”
And look, I get it. The Central European nation isn’t exactly a top-ten tourist destination, though its affordability and European Union membership have made it increasingly popular with “digital nomad” types. Much like its Balkan neighbors, Moldova and Bulgaria, Romania is a bit of an unknown quantity here. It doesn’t help that Romania has been in the Western news recently courtesy of “manosphere” chud Andrew Tate’s 2022 imprisonment and ongoing sex trafficking charges there. On top of all that, Transylvania—where I spent most of my visit—is best known for Dracula, a vague impression of gothic castles, and, as of late (thanks to director Robert Eggers) as the realm of sexily decaying vampires. Romania doesn’t have the best PR, is what I’m saying, but that didn’t stop me from waltzing into Bucharest late one night with a carry-on bag and a mission: I was hoping to find someplace that felt like home.
My Romanian great-grandmother, Maria Peters, landed in New York City in 1912, leaving her home in the countryside near Braşov behind. The man she married, Nicholae Lupucz, was second generation; his own father had left Romania in 1906. Like many a thirtysomething East Coast mongrel, I’ve gotten very into Ancestry.com lately, and have been doing my best to sift through the scant handful of documents available there to learn more about that journey. The swirl of Irish, Scottish, English, and Dutch that makes up the rest of my bloodline is more familiar; the ghosts of those ancestors are far less intriguing than those who were born in the shadow of the Carpathians and made the grueling voyage to New Jersey, of all places, in search of that fabled better life.
No more than a million Americans claim Romanian descent, so it always felt like a more interesting connection to have compared to the typical East Coast Irish Catholic world in which I was raised. Our family stories about earlier generations of the Lupucz line—which morphed into “Lupex” post-arrival—have mostly faded with time; everyone remembers the time a priest was called out to perform an exorcism at Grandma Maria’s haunted dairy farm, but no one can tell me exactly where our ancestors were born, or why they emigrated in the first place. I’ve been able to piece together a few clues, though, and when the opportunity arose to go digging around in the motherland, I took it.
Keep us breathing fire!
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