A few weeks ago, I was at a small plates restaurant on the Lower East Side with a friend. His wife had just left him, and we were discussing the total relief brought on by the impending divorce. He wanted to leave it all, he said, and fly directly to Ireland to kiss the Blarney Stone. Of course, he was an Eastern European Jew, like myself, with no relationship to Ireland, but he’d decided kissing the Blarney Stone would be a great symbolic end to his failed marriage. He wanted to spend a full year in Europe, doing odd jobs, visiting relics, learning languages and forgetting his own name. 

I told him that sounded like the perfect balm, and that I could probably help him with his trip. I had recently procured Polish citizenship for myself, in a long and arduous process in which I’d learned more about consanguineous marriage than I’d care to admit. I was now awaiting the crisp burgundy EU passport sent by my immigration lawyer Kryztyna in Warsaw. I suggested he contact her and attempt the same. As I was giving my friend Kryztyna’s contact info, which took a few attempts given the extravagant Polish spellings, our waiter approached and said he’d overheard our conversation. He, too, was interested in procuring Polish citizenship. Would I mind taking a look at the email he had just received from his great-aunt Bernice?

This waiter had, over the course of this short meal, made quite the impression. He first brought us lukewarm soup and, when we asked for it warmed, insisted we put hot sauce in to heat it up. Then, he poured a glass of water into our half-drunk bottle of Gamay, as he said, to make the wine last longer. I found this email from his great aunt to be totally elucidating about the waiter, and I thought I’d share it with you before I forward it on to Kryztyna.

Dear Glupisky Family,

This is cousin Bernice with the 2024/5785 Glupisky Bulletin!

I am so excited to first and foremost share the findings of our family genealogical research project. I apologize for the delay in updating you all, as almost all of you (I’m looking at you Maura!) have generously contributed to hiring our researcher, Aaron. I was planning on keeping that to myself, but my son Eli thought I should tell you all what happened so you can plan ahead…

As some of you know, each Friday afternoon before Shabbat I email out 75 photographs of cute things like bunnies, flowers, and kitty-cats to a list of people including yourselves, the Glupisky mishpucha. I source these photos myself from all across the internet, and I know that my hours of tireless work curating these images is well worth it, as I get so many replies! It warms my heart to read each one of your emails as they “bounce back” to me.

Well, in response to one of these Shabbat emails I received a cry for help from a young man claiming to be the deposed Crown Prince of the nation of Swaziland. Now, old Bernice Glupisky is no dummy, I know as well as any other regular Jeopardy! viewer that the nation of Swaziland recently changed its name to Eswatini. So I came right out and asked this Crown Prince if he took me for a rube: of course I knew he had been ousted from power, since the country he was Prince of no longer existed.

Well, he said that he was humbled by how much I, an American, knew about his faraway country and their internal problems. He knew that he had been blessed by God to have connected with someone who was so on top of world politics and also curated such wonderful photos of bunny rabbits and flowers. Sensing in me an ally, he told me about the issues he’d had with his father, the King of Swaziland, who had refused to give him his inheritance until the Prince reached his 30th birthday. Fortunately, he’d had enough money of his own to last him until now, at age 20 and two-fifths. In exchange for a five thousand dollar loan—can you believe my luck, that’s exactly the amount I’d raised for the genealogy hunt—he told me he would send me back twice the amount and fly me and my whole family to Eswatini for his birthday party. Now I pulled one over on him, because he didn’t ask me how many people were in my family. So everyone please mark your calendar for October the 22nd as we’re all going to Eswatini, expenses paid by the royal family.

Anyway, gang, because of that minor delay, I ended up fronting the money from my own retirement fund to pay Aaron. I was planning on using that money for a trip to Atlantic City, so I postponed it. Then, suddenly, my grandson Simon told me not to cancel my trip, because he could get me the money back and then some in just a few weeks through investing in something called Fartcoin, which is a cryptocurrency tied to an influencer’s food consumption. He says this is just like buying Intel stock in the 1980s! What a lucky Bubbe I am.

Now, to the results which you have all been waiting for. Aaron, our researcher, who is a sixteenth-year PhD student at Ball State, informed me that, after studying our family letters and records, the Glupisky family, contrary to what we’ve believed for all these years, are not from Lviv. We are from a small town in present-day Poland that is now called Chełm. I don’t know why they crossed the letter l out, but Aaron promised me I can’t just write Chem. When our ancestors lived there, as they did for generations he tells me, it was just called Chelm, no ł.

When Aaron said that I was from Chelm he started laughing right on the Zoom camera. He said “I knew it all along!” and then laughed out loud. Anyway, I asked him if I looked like people he knew from Chelm, and he said “I could have guessed you were from Chelm from the first moment I met you.” I took that as strange, because the first time I met him he actually couldn’t hear me for the entire Zoom meeting. No matter how loud I spoke, he kept screaming that he couldn’t hear me. I did hear him say “I’m charging this Schlemiel one thousand dollars an hour,” and of course as you all know Schlemiel was my great-grandfather, so I figured Aaron was a fantastic researcher and sent him the money.

Aaron says that Chelm is a famous town, known in the Jewish community for its community of wise men. He said that we are probably direct descendants of the very same Rabbi who, in the 16th century, attempted to get the full moon to shine bright every single night. I simply couldn’t believe that was possible, since now, about one hundred years later, we still don’t have that technology. Aaron said it was simple. The wise Rabbi of Chelm captured the moon in a well full of water, but every time he opened it to show people, it would escape, so he had to stop showing people. I’m so proud to be related to such a brilliant sage! We must all plan a trip to see if the moon is still in the well at Chelm!

Chelm seems to have been a truly gorgeous place, but I’m a bit confused about what we were doing there, since it is totally landlocked, with no lakes or rivers for miles and I always remember my Zaida saying our family in the old country was always “in deep water” and “up shit’s creek without a paddle.” Perhaps he meant they enjoyed canoeing in Shatsk lake, which is 50 miles away.

On to the really great part—it turns out we have a huge number of famous relatives whose ancestors also came from Chelm! The most famous is Mark Zuckerberg, who invented a way to keep in touch with your friends and family even if you prefer spending all your time at home by yourself. But some of them I have never heard of, like this person Meadow Rain, who comes from Deb’s branch of the family. He helped popularize something called Breatharianism in the United States, which involves getting all the nutrients that you need from the sun! It’s a shame because Deb’s Kugel is so delicious—the secret is ketchup and cinnamon! Still, we should really contact this Rain character to get a lesson! It sounds highly economical for people like Barb down in Florida with great access to the sun!

Of course, the famous aren’t the only ones we need to celebrate in this family. I wanted to give a huge congratulations to our cousin Madeline for her record Amway sales figures this month. At the bottom of this email I have included the link to Madeline’s store! I know that many of us Glupiskys have stockpiled house cleaning supplies and nutritional shakes for decades to keep those numbers up, so we should all be proud of ourselves too! Madeline has asked me to tell you all to pass along her shop link to your friends and neighbors, so that they can also have access to these fine products. Many of my hair products from Amway were just recalled for health concerns, which Madeline says is great because it will let me try out all of the brand-new products! Plus the old shampoo I’d been using for years can actually be used to unclog stubborn drains! Win-win!

I also have some sad news to report. Amiel and Rebecca Glupisky-Narish have lost their house in Los Angeles to a fire. No, it wasn’t that terrible fire that took out most of the city. They were spared by that. Their fire happened many months later when they conducted a séance to communicate with their missing parakeet Camille, who had escaped and was presumed dead. As their medium instructed, Amiel and Rebecca scattered birdseed around the perimeter of the house, and made a trail of seed into the cage. They then lit exactly 47 candles in the living room and invited friends over to hold hands around Camille’s cage to see if she had anything to tell them. Well, just as everyone was chanting here birdy birdy, the ghost of Camille, which had taken the form of six pigeons, flew right into the house, knocked over the candles, and set fire to the dozen or so printed-out photographs of the bird that lined the cage. Rather than put the fire out and risk breaking contact with their beloved pet, Amiel and Rebecca allowed the fire to rage on, and can you believe it, the fire practically exploded the armchair that Camille always pecked at when she was anxious. Well, along with many other things. They’re slightly disheartened, after setting up their house so nicely, to have to move back in with Rebecca’s parents, Sy and Marion, but the house was no longer a home without their precious parakeet.

You know, I wish my own son would have some kind of terrible accident in his house, maybe a flood or a hurricane, that would make him and all the grandkids come to stay with me for a few months. As I write this note, I can’t help but think of our ancestors all together in that little town of Chelm, working together to capture the moon. We’re all so far away from each other, with Barb in San Diego, the Florida cousins, and those crazy Philadelphia Glupiskys! I hope everyone’s houses get flooded, so we can all hunker down together!

Well, I guess I should wrap things up here, given this was meant to just be a quick update. Our entire family tree is available online at the link at the bottom of the email. I’ve forwarded the tree, also, to the Crown Prince of Eswatini, so he knows where to send your plane tickets! Look out for an email from him!

All best,

Bernice Glupisky