A Movable Famine

Thanksgiving in a time of ritual starvation

So I’m clearing out my email, half-looking at headlines as I scroll, when I learn that Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy has bought a derelict movie theater in Dingle, one of the most remote places in Ireland. I’ve been deleting articles about war and corruption and terror and crime, about geological apocalypse and cultural extinction, unread, unread unread, delete, delete, delete, but when I reach this one, I stop. Of all the news in the world, I am arrested by this story. I click and I read.

It’s not Cillian Murphy that grabbed me, though he was a wonderful physicist in Oppenheimer and an equally good gangster in Peaky Blinders. It’s not the idea of restoring a historic movie theater that drew me in, either, appealing as that is. It’s the location. It’s Dingle: a tiny town on a tiny peninsula, also known as Dingle, in County Kerry, on the westernmost tip of Ireland. Dingle, sometimes described as the most beautiful place on earth, is where Star Wars was filmed — and it’s where my Irish ancestors were rooted, where my great-great grandparents were living — and starving — when they made the terrible, terrifying choice to board a ship for New York, with no money, no English, and no idea what they would find on the other side.

Where exactly in Ireland my family is from: this was not knowledge my family possessed until I was in my mid-thirties and made it my mission to find out. Our Irish origins had been lost for generations by the time I conceived a desire to know what they were. I learned from census records that my great grandfather Michael had been born in New York during the 1860s, the child of Irish immigrants. “O’Connor” is a hard name to trace — a lot like “Smith” or “Johnson.” I knew I might not find much more out. I knew, too, that there might not be anything to trace — Irish records were terrible during the nineteenth century, and especially bad during the famine. Still, the desire to know possessed me. It took me years of research, countless obsessive hours on ancestry.com, poring over illegible old censuses and ship manifests and family trees, but I did finally find out where the O’Connors are from.

I remember where I was when it happened: I was living in a squalid faculty apartment on the Penn campus, a dark basement cave with patchy heat and sweaty walls, nominally functioning as a dorm parent for five hundred freshmen. I was making dinner, a stir fry that involved scallops and bell peppers. I was sipping wine, noodling around on ancestry.com, revisiting old records and checking for new ones. And then, there it was, the connection I’d been trying to make for years, on a family tree posted by a distant cousin I never knew I had. She had the missing pieces I was looking for — and, it so happened, I had hers. For her family had lost track of Michael and his descendants, just as mine had lost track of who Michael’s people were, and where they came from.

I was so excited I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was jumping around, I remember that. There was a loud shout of “Yes!” There may also have been a tear or two. It was just a little fact I’d found — a link in a long chain of names, dates, and places. But it was also elemental. Dingle!! Dingle!! I had never heard of it, but it spoke to my soul all the same.

II Finding Lost Family

This is what I know.

The potato blight arrived in Dingle in 1845 alongside the collapse of the local fishing industry. For the next five years, so many people starved to death that there weren’t enough coffins for them all. Many left, fleeing certain death by taking their chances on “coffin ships” bound for the U.S. Between death and immigration, the population of County Kerry had dropped by 20 percent by the early 1850s. In the Dingle area, that number was closer to 50 percent. Over the next decade and more, the exodus continued. For the famine never really ended. Mass evictions were common, the potato blight continued to kill crops, and, especially in the west of Ireland, there was no real recovery.

The devastation wrought by the famine was just too great. Too many people had died. Too many had left. Those remaining didn't thrive. They couldn’t. Too many had lost their homes or been incapacitated by starvation and disease. And so a great many made the terrible choice to leave everyone and everything they knew and loved, to try their luck in America. My great-great grandparents were among them.

They sailed to New York. They made a home and had lots of children. Their son Michael was born in September of 1866. When he was still a boy, he got a job working for the railroad and never looked back. Over the years, he worked his way across the country while also working his way up to the job of machinist. He lived for a time in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the railroad had a hub, marrying and starting a family. By 1900, the US census informs me, they’ve made it all the way out to California, the end of the line. He makes a good living, owns a lovely home, has lots of children, and even for a time, employs a live-in English servant, a fact that speaks to a sense of humor and a taste for payback.

Michael is three thousand miles away from his birthplace, now, and six thousand miles away from Dingle. If he maintained contact with anyone from his past, he didn't pass those connections along. When my father was a small boy, he was dutifully taken to pay his respects to “The Old Man” on Sundays. He knew The Old Man’s children — his spinster aunt, his wild uncles, his seafaring father — but he never met anyone else in the family, never saw any photos, never heard any stories. He never knew how his grandfather came to California. He didn’t know The Old Man was born in New York to immigrant parents, and he certainly didn’t know anything about the O’Connors who remained in Ireland.

The Old Man knew it all. He lived much of it, and what he didn’t live, his parents did. But he kept the family history to himself, passing nothing on. Perhaps he’d forgotten it all by the time my father knew him, in his nineties. Perhaps he wanted to protect the younger generations from the weight of the past. Perhaps he thought none of it mattered. Perhaps it all mattered too much. Whatever the reason, one thing is certain: My father grew up with Irish blood, an Irish name, and no knowledge of his Irish roots.

I don’t think my family is unique. I suspect this generational rupture — the breaking apart of families across time and space, the forgetting of history and tradition, the dissolving of ethnicity into a generalized Americanness — this is simply the immigrant way and the immigrant wound. Sometimes a loss is so great that the only thing to do is lose track of the loss itself.

III Losing Family Once More

I’m thinking about all of this now because, as we enter the holidays, family is much on my mind. As I write, families are gathering all across the country — and most are doing so with dread rather than delight. According to a recent poll, nearly 60 percent are worried that Thanksgiving dinner will be ruined by politics, and, ironically, it’s a bipartisan worry — Harris and Trump voters can’t agree on much, but they do agree that they don’t want to be around each other. Tensions are running so high that nearly a quarter of Americans are considering skipping Thanksgiving dinner because of political differences with their families.

Think about that. The new American normal is for families to be divided by politics. Increasingly, ideology is thicker than blood and deeper than history. Political disagreement matters more than love — and may even cancel it. The holidays no longer bring families together as vibrant, happy wholes. Instead, they force us to recognize that we have broken into pieces, and that, when we sit at the table to eat turkey and give thanks, a great many pieces are simply missing.

It might no longer be accurate to speak of family gatherings. Perhaps it would be more precise to speak of family shatterings.

It’s sad in itself. And it’s especially so when viewed in light of our unique cultural history. We are a nation of immigrants, which means we all have a family shattering in our past. You cannot leave one world for another without breakage, not even now, in the era of fast, easy air travel; free phone calls and texts; FaceTime and Zoom. Even now, immigration means loss — loss of family, loss of history, loss of place. These things are the price of entry to a new life in the United States, and have been since the beginning. Every family and every culture negotiates it all a bit differently, but the broad pattern is bright and constant over time.

One of the most powerful evocations of family shattering within the Irish immigrant experience is the folk ballad “Kilkelly,” composed of excerpts from letters an Irish father sent to his emigrant son during the decade after the famine.

The song captures the sheer heartbreak of immigration, the unhealing wound of lost family ties that is the inheritance of so very many Americans. “Kilkelly” is one of the saddest songs I have ever heard. It kills me every time I hear it.

Today, as a nation, we are replicating that foundational American experience of familial loss. Millions of families are disintegrating along party lines, breaking apart into partisan pieces. In putting politics ahead of family, I humbly suggest, we are failing to honor the sacrifice our forebears made when they came here in the hope of building a new, better life — if not for themselves, for their kids, and their kids. For us. They gave up that we may have, and they made new families in the wreckage of those they left behind. We don’t honor that sacrifice by tearing ourselves apart. We honor it by finding ways to come together in hard times, by respecting — even treasuring — our differences rather than demonizing each other for them.

After all, as our shared immigrant experience has taught us, when we lose each other, we lose each other. We may never be able to find one another again.

IV Feasting in the Midst of Famine

Western people are “ritually starved,” writes Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, a comment that feels especially apt in light of what’s happening to Thanksgiving. This is our holiday, our first holiday, a time for gathering and gratitude, for recognition of the moveable feast that is our shared American life. But we’re dangerously close to losing that ritual along with our family ties. Moveable feast is becoming — Rohr’s words again — “movable famine.”

I have never been to Dingle — except, in my bones and my blood, I have always been there. In my bones and my blood, I never left. There are still O’Connors in Dingle — lots of them. At least some of them — probably a great many of them — are my cousins.

Someday, I will go to Dingle. I’ll see a film in Cillian Murphy’s refurbished theater. I’ll drink a pint of Guinness in the pub. I’ll walk for miles in the lanes and on the cliffs. And I will search every face I see for signs of family. I’ll be looking at strangers to find the ones I have always known, who will know me in return.

Today, though, I will go to family. I will cook with them, tipple with them, talk and laugh with them, eat way too much with them, and give thanks for all of it, for them, with them.

May the same be true for you.