The Million-dollar Question

 

I've been experimenting with fonts for ancient languages that are meaningful to me, those with which I feel a deep connection. Why do I feel those deep connections? That is the million-dollar question. In my mind it has to do with past lives, if such there be (as many experiences lead me to believe). That, I suppose, is really what I am delving into.

When I first started learning to read, the teacher said, "See, this one looks like a chair, and it sounds like 'huh'." I remember thinking, "this means nothing to me." Not only that, but I strongly resisted learning to read in this writing system that I use every day. I just did not grok it at all. Nor did I want to. When, on the other hand, they started teaching us about China, the teacher made up a sort of ideographic script, and I totally got it. I wanted to write that way all the time.

I've had a lot of what I would call reincarnational flashes. When I was about four and a half, I was playing outside, mashing some ice plant leaves. While I was doing that, I mentally saw an old man in a skull cap, working with plant parts, as a physician or herbalist might have done in the Middle Ages. This was before television had come into our lives, and I don't think I had yet seen a movie, so I don't know where I would have gotten such ideas.

When I was five (I didn't go to kindergarten or any kind of preschool), my mother decided it was time for little heathen me to learn about God. When she told me what she was going to tell me about, it sounded very interesting, and I was ready. But my excitement turned to disappointment when she said, "A long time ago, longer than you can even imagine, a man died for our sins, nailed to a cross." I remember thinking, "Oh no, not that old story again!" It was a letdown for me, so I must have been expecting something different. By the time my father came home from work and asked her what she was doing, she was singing "Tantum Ergo" to me in Latin. I must have adapted to "that old story," because right after high school I spent a few months in a Jesuit novitiate. I had a need for spirituality--I just didn't know where to look for it.

When I was about nine or ten, I returned to class after recess or lunch one day, winded from exertion on the playground and experiencing head congestion, and I thought to myself, "that's what I don't like about this." The "this" I was referring to was physical embodiment. Even at that age, I recognized it as a strange thought, since I would supposedly have had nothing to compare it to.

Over the years, there have been many such "flashes."

At the age of twenty-one, I developed a strong interest in Jewish mysticism and pietism. especially Hasidism. At that time I did not know that I had any Jewish heritage. My midwestern father, from whose ancestors in Sweden it had come, had never told any of us, except my mother. When he proposed to her he had said, in his artless way, "I have Jew." I didn't find out until I was thirty, and wouldn't have then, except that I was doing genealogy and he figured I'd find out anyway. He was right, I would have,

Now, of course, we have DNA evidence. I have known for years that I have a "DNA cousin" in the Ukraine, where many of the Hasidim lived, who is half Jewish. And there are hundreds of others. The relevant names in my family history are Jacobson and Bloomquist (earlier it was just Bloom/Blom, the latter being the Scandinavian spelling, also pronounced "Blum"). Recently, an automated "Super Search" on My Heritage turned up a whole family of apparent DNA cousins who carried the name "Blom" (spelled in the Scandinavian way). Most of them were early Zionists; all of them were Jewish.

Does it matter? Well, to me it does. This is a connection that has been screaming in my blood for decades. I have already added the name Jacobson to my writing pseudonym; now I'm adding "Bloom" to it, too.

Donald Jacobson Bloom Traxler (or simply, Yakov Bloom Traxler)

Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler.