My Last Name

Note: This was my feature for my journalism class. Unlike most articles on this website, it's not humorous, not bullshit, and edited.

As a child, I used to ask my father big questions. “Why is the sky blue?” (The ocean reflecting the sea, he told me.) “Who was the worst person in history?” (Hitler or Stalin.) There was one question he couldn’t answer, though.

“Where does the name ‘Stodalka’ come from?” He paused. He was sitting on the couch. I was at his feet. “We think the name is Czech.” He didn’t know? He was supposed to know. We had an identity, didn’t we? A family left behind in some old country? But he didn’t know. Culturally, I was suddenly a spaceman floating in zero gravity – no north, no south.

Was I Czech? Polish? German? Russian? Slavic? Stodalka was a nowhere name, and it haunted me.

I choose a lot of things about my identity – how I view anything over

$10 as a luxury, my decision to write, how I mutter to myself. But there’s nothing to ground me, no foundation. It’s just me, making my own history, trying to define myself. I wanted to know which culture, what familial house I belonged to.

When I was 17, I was on the computer, overhearing my parents talk after dinner. They were discussing my father’s family. Apparently, my uncle had shown a letter around the family, which completely changed the history they thought they had, and what we thought we had.

I didn’t particularly like my last name, growing up. Stodalka is a drawl. Stuh-dawl-ka. “Duh?” “Y’all.” “Kuh.” Stodolka is not a proud last name. Translated, it means small barn…or shed. I’m William Shed. Go to the stodolka, get my shotgun and beer.

William – shades of Shakespeare, a British, English name, yoked forcibly to Stodalka, an Eastern European name. It’s the name of my father, the name of his father.

My great-grandfather, “Jack” Stodalka, was born John Stodolka. Breaking away from his relatives in Minnesota, he moved to Canada, changing his first name to Jack reflects his tough, rough character (a former amateur boxer.), changing the second “o” to an “a” in Stodolka family made it easier to spell. A practical man.

Stodolka is the more common name, if you believe the phone books. But this mutation made it unique. We are perhaps the only Stodalka’s in the world. How many people can say that?

Still, my name – Stodalka -- is not a Forelli or a Fuji or a Fordingham. Those names are specific to places, while my name is specific to nowhere. We always believed it was European, but were only guessing. We don’t have a lot of cultural practices, facial characteristics, we see in others. We’re like a drop of water in the ocean, there and nowhere all at once.

The California State University psychologist Jean Phinney said ethnic identity is a construct, something people make up, to refer themselves to an ethnic group. It’s not fixed, but changes as people learn about their ethnicity and come to understand themselves. But I couldn’t do that -- I didn’t know where to start.

Which brings us back to that letter. In 2005, Ron Workman, an art dealer, was browsing through the Manhattan Flea Market. He came to a table selling old letters from the beginning of the 20^th century. One caught his eye. There was nothing special about it, except the Hitler stamp – it could be worth something. He bought it for $60. There was an odd name on the front, started with “Stod.”

The Workmans found out the stamp wasn’t worth anything, but Ron’s wife Maxine wasn’t through with the letter. Her grandmother had emigrated from Austria, and had tried to find out what happened to her relatives left behind in Austria, in vain. Maxine dedcided she had to find out who the Stodolka on this letter was, and try and give that family something she never had. Maxine contacted Renee Steinig, President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island.

Steinig found Mike Stodolka, who was living in Minnesota, one of the sheds the Stodolkas left behind. Mike had been researching his name, leaving out lures on genealogy websites about Stodolka. Steinig found Mike on the internet and sent him the letter. Mike translated its contents, and sent it to us. It was a horrible illumination on the name.

I started to look into a family tree, started by a relative, online. My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Johann Stodolka, was born in Envy, a small town in the region of Upper Silesia, unGoogleable. I envy how he knew his origins. His great-great-grandsons settled in Minnesota. We knew we had moved from Minnesota to Richmound, a town in Saskatchewan that was predominantly German Catholic. That was as far as we could trace our relatives, before we found the letter.

Stodalka…we thought it was German. We were proud of being German. My grandmother can speak German. We were taught German. Hell, I got an A in my German class, and second-place in the Saskatchewan German Oratorical Contest. My family assumed that, yes, we were likely German.

I always doubted this. Stodalka did not sound German. It was not harsh sounding, like Rathaus or Heinrich.

Before the letter came to me, I wondered: If I did find out my true culture, attempt to imitate that culture, would it be an act? Was our new surname, with an “a” now our inherited house, really connected to anything? It’s what we live in, where our family is, what we inherit, but does it link us to other people, or a history Had we abandoned our old shed for a new shed? If we saw it, would we even recognize our old shed?

But when my family became the Stodalkas, we started building our own house, our own cultural identity, alone from the rest of the world. We weren’t German or Polish or Czech, because we had no connection to that culture, even in an abstract sense. We are simply Stodalka.

Until the letter came along. Mike, in searching for his family, came upon my Uncle John. Mike showed his genealogical research to John, but ultimately the letter was the compelling proof. My uncle shared its contents with our family. The lines were blurred, scratched in. In German, everything was hand written neatly on lines, except for two words, in a smaller typewritten font: “Auschwitz, den.”

It strikes me as a horrible irony – in this tragedy, among all the lives lost, where history’s horrible forces wiped out millions -- I found my history. We don’t know if he died there. We don’t know why he was sent in the first place – if he was Jewish, Communist, gay, a political radical, too Catholic. All I’ll probably know about Wladislaus is that we shared a name – Stodalka, Polish. He was defined by a nation, he was Polish. And he suffered for it when history crashed down upon him.

My mother, born Anderson, got some humour out of the revelation. As she puts it in private, “It’s nice to know we were on the right side of the ovens.” She could joke. But my grandparents hometown was German Catholic. In Richmound, all the dogs barked at the one Polish guy named Bimbo. I suppose, no one called the dogs off.

When my grandfather found out about Wladislaus, all he could do was ask, “Why?” Still, my grandparents research Stodolkas in Germany and Poland, strangers, to help find their roots.

My uncle will head down to Minnesota for a re-union of the US Stodalkas. My immediate family probably won’t go. Like them, I didn’t feel any different. In truth, I feel no more Polish than I had German.

Last Christmas, as usual, my family gathered – this time at my uncle’s large house, the fourth he had bought in ten years. At a Boxing Day party, late at night, my father a lawyer, and his brothers, an oil executive and a lawyer also, lit up their big Cuban cigars in my uncle’s big house and looked out over the sprawling Medicine Hat valleys and hills, probably talking about baseball. They had no problems, no black sheep in the family, no stereotypes, no defining traits. We’ve traveled a long way from being shed workers. We were rich and content.

When I’d found out I was Polish, I was disappointed – not because being Polish is something to be ashamed of. But I expected it would reveal who I was, or who I might become. But it didn’t. The name does not define me, or my family; we defined ourselves, not an old nation. The hard work of cultivating an identity remains ahead before me. And our future remains as vast, unseen, and empty as the hills surrounding my uncle’s house. My father and his brothers only looked on, while I wandered.