Fair hair and blue eyes? Check. Fair skin? Check. Tendency to avoid eye contact, be emotionally reserved and slow to trust others? Hmmm...
For a long time now I have wanted to visit Oslo, or at least Norway, with Oslo being the most obvious destination. Since my early twenties, since I started to see more of the world and meet more people with diverse and sometimes unimagined backgrounds and experiences. Since a longing awakened in me to have my own rich ethnic history, to throw back the solid white one hundred percent cotton kitchen towel, bought on sale at ShopKo and with a soda can pull tab sewn into one corner, of 'just plain midwestern American' for a cultural identity and reveal the complex, sensual and deeply compelling mixture of spices and flavours that make up my true lineage.
The commonly held view in my immediate family, though not authoritatively researched, at least not by me, is that I am descended from German and Polish on my mother's side and from English and Norwegian on my father's side. With a family name of Krueger, accepting my maternal grandfather as Germanic is easy. My grandmother is Paulus, which doesn't seem so Polish to me, but one must bear in mind many surnames were altered as they passed through Ellis Island, especially if they were difficult to pronounce or spell, as many Polish names are, or if they sounded 'too Jewish' or whatever was running through the immigration officer's mind; anyway the Polish designation is regarded with reasonably confident conviction. Hoping that White is anything but English is futile (it just seems so microscopically more interesting than Wisconsinite). And my paternal grandmother, Pauline Bradway; the name doesn't scream Norge to me but is plausibly Scandinavian, especially if we invoke the Ellis Island effect again, and though I can't recount an avalanche of names of family members, Ingeborg leaps to mind, I have seen a pretty deep family tree and am satisfied of her Norwegian pedigree.
Having collected this information, I gravitated most strongly to Norway. Why? Almost certainly all justification can be reduced to it simply seemed the sexiest of the bunch.
German is a decent start, but it's not terribly exotic. And with that simplistic young person's mind not so far out of high school history class, unable to see beyond the holocaust to appreciate there is so much more to Germany, especially in my generation, than World War II, and being blonde-haired and blue-eyed enough to be once dubbed 'Hitler's wet dream,' I just didn't want to be German at the time.
Where I grew up, Polish was not a sexy thing to be. There, they were the go-to butt of the joke. Simpletons, at best in a sort of charming and cuddly yet ultimately dismissive way (the slot for genuine ethnic prejudice and sub-human regard has long been solidly occupied by Native Americans). And being a child of the 80s, indoctrinated in Reaganomics and Cold War neo Red Scare rhetoric, I imagined Poland as a dour, monochromatic hell hole like every other coutry behind the Iron Curtain. Having my eyes opened since then, Poland is actually a very attractive lead. I identify strongly the broad underdog status, the fiery spirit, the fits of cerebral passion; though I am probably too upbeat and lacking in languages spoken and engineering degrees and tolerance for grain alcohol to be properly Polish.
English I have already touched on. I love English humour, and music and literature, but it just wasn't tasty enough for me. I have a memory of poring over the family tree and deciding that English must have traveled exclusively along the patrilinear edge with the surname and the rest of my paternal grandfather's heritage was in fact Norwegian as well. Perhaps it was one of those cases where an Ellis Island officer of English descent simply substituted his own family name when he was utterly baffled by all those mad diacritics? Male names like Finn, Welby and Almon certainly seemed unusual enough. Perhaps they were at least Welsh? I haven't given up hope.
So I settled on Norwegian. It certainly fit with my physical appearance. Indeed when abroad and people try to discern my marred and somewhat acommitted accent, the guesses usually start in Scandinavia. Swedish is often the initial attempt, being by far the best known source of Scandinavian blondes. I often take this opportunity to point out (like a good Norwegian) that Norwegians (as though I was one of them) aren't terribly fond of being almost-the-same-thinged and absorbed into Sweden; Sweden is to Norway as the US is to Canada and Australia is to New Zealand. Norway is proud, deserving of distinct recognition but doomed to sit in the shadow of its more famous cousin. In fact, just last night, I watched a young woman become a little heated when giving her opinion of Swedish neutrality in finger quotation marks during World War II.
And so I have come to Oslo, to solidify this long time identification, perhaps only as much as a quarter in fact but much more in spirit, with Norway.
Alas, I have not really penetrated the essence of being Norwegian. Not yet. I think my visit will prove too brief, and I am a little underprepared for the task. I would love to return, armed with more information about family lore, use that as a framework for exploring the whole of Norway, and that pretext I hope would also warm the elusive hearts of the locals and deepen my sense of belonging.
I have noted a sharp increase in the normalness of my complexion, though it is quite short of the ocean of lookalikes rumour led me to expect (and dread). As much as (I think) I long to be seen as just like everyone else, I think in my heart I am very attached to feeling special. Of course, the real magic trick would be to let go and settle into knowledge of those things that truly make me special...
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