Peter Olsvewski

Peter Olsvewski

I remember the day I set foot in Manhattan for the first time. I was together with my ex-wife and daughter Alex, who was then two years old. It was August 1989. The city was flooded with sunny heat, your feet were sticking to the street. If it weren’t for the borrowed stroller, I would have had to carry Alex in my arms. Carrying her in such heat would have been a challenge for me.

Alex, who then discovered that the mouth is used not only to put in everything that comes across the road, but also to make sounds. She spent hours practicing her new language. That day she was speechless, staring at the city and people with her mouth open. New York City was unlike anything she knew.

Despite the terrible heat, hundreds of people and cars created a jumble that attracted her like a magnet. And although Alex censored her food, which was a challenge for us, that day she swallowed everything that my ex put into her mouth without a “word” of objection.

I looked at this amazing city and thought about my great-grandfather who landed on Ellis Island in 1912 with my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Nomen omen, she was two years old.

Did he feel the same thrill of excitement in discovering this New World? How he felt looking at the world that was just being born? Did he walk along Fifth Avenue, or maybe he walked around the East Village, where European emigrants gathered? What did my great-grandfather feel when he looked at the people passing him, were they, as they were for me eighty years later, a great unknown and a challenge?

The city and the people had changed over time, but were the feelings similar? For me NYC, this city, is a mystery and a great challenge. Every house has its own story, every person we passed has its own story, and whether the people we passed had family or friends who met my great-grandfather. Walking around Manhattan that day, I felt the spirit of my great-grandfather and the challenges he had to face.