People ask if this is a true story.
“Looking for Louie” is a play, a creation.
As such, it is my effort to unearth from the
rich stew of memory
some kernel of truth.
It may not be factual, but it is true.
It’s as true a story as I can tell.
SYNOPSIS
Stacie Chaiken spent her childhood making up fantastical stories about this so-called Louie, the mysterious Russian great-grandfather—the one who came over from the Old Country—about whom nobody would ever speak. “You don’t want to know,” Grandpa Irving, Son of Louie, would warn. Oh yes she did! Looking for Louie chronicles her dogged search for him.
When Chaiken finally persuades her grandfather to break his 90-year silence by promising to bring a video camera (”I’m gonna be famous on the TV!”), she finds herself face to face with the shattering history of her family’s arrival in the US, and the source of the shame and rage she has sensed rippling down through the generations.
And she asks, What do we do now? Is there a way to move on?
AN IMMIGRANT FAMILY STORY
I’ve performed Looking for Louie for people from many different backgrounds. As personal as my Russian Jewish immigrant family story may be, I’ve discovered that it is an immigrant story, a family story. My friend Juan, who came here from Mexico at age 11, says it’s his story. Irish, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, African Americans -- whenever they came to the US— say the same. The specifics may be different, but the soul of the experience of immigration is the same, cross-culture, cross-generation, cross-era.
We leave whole worlds behind in order to start New Life, to embrace New Possibilities. In my family, and so many families, anything about Old Life was unspeakable. So we lost all the richness of story, where we’re from.
I believe those stories are important. We need to know and give honor to where we come from, in order to know who we are, in order to move forward. Even if those stories are dark and terrible. And funny. And humiliating. And whatever. They need to be spoken.
FORGIVENESS
I didn’t set out to to write a play about forgiveness. I was fascinated by this guy—my grandfather’s father whose name was never spoken, but which, according to my own father, “might have been Louie.” I’d been making up Louie stories since I first caught wind that he existed: I imagined that he had committed some delicious, non-suburban crime that I could not only relate to, but would be proud to be heir to. In my fantasy, the spirit of that mysterious adventurer was my legacy.
But as I sorted through the morass of information I was uncovering about my own family story, and Grandpa agreed to tell me what happened, I realized that living and thriving in the petri dish of Grandpa’s 90-year silence about his father was shame and rage. That shame and rage was my real legacy, and would be my children’s children’s, as well, unless I did something about it.
THE SEVENTH GENERATION: THE GIFT OF STORY
In Native American cultures, there is the tradition that every seven years, there comes a person whose mission it is to collect family and tribal stories, before they are lost forever. No one says: Do this! They just know that’s their job, and they do it.
That seems to be who I am in my family: The one who is driven by some force of nature to gather the family story, before it goes to ashes. Grandpa was still around at age 96 and, softened by time, and appreciative of my need-to-know, and the promise of the video camera, was willing to tell me his story, as painful as it was. It was a gift.
As, I believe, my curiosity and persistence was a gift to him. Grandpa refused to speak of his father, refusing even to say the word “father” (Louie was “this man...”). In the hospital at age 100, he was asked by a nurse where he was from. “I was born in Manchester,” he declared. “That’s England! I was born in England!” And then glancing at me, he turned back to the nurse and proclaimed with pride, “And my father was born in Kiev!”
