The Diamond Necklace

(Update: For any would-be thieves, as of ten minutes ago my necklace is safely back in its safety deposit box. Don't even.)

Dear Reader,

When I turned 18 years old, my grandmother gave me a diamond necklace.

Cat fur is the most luxurious background for a necklace.
Unfortunately cats are wont to squirm during the process,
causing the photo to be rather blurry.

The significance of this is not in the type of gift - my family was affluent and gifts like that for momentous occasions were common - but in the history of it and its relation to who I am.

Mommy & Me

I was adopted by my parents when I was eighteen days old. My biological parents were college students and I don't know very much about them. In almost every respect, the fact that I'm adopted doesn't make any difference to me; it's somewhat annoying to not be able to provide "family medical background" at doctor's appointments, but beyond that... My mom is my mom and my dad is my dad. That's it. I have so many friends who are in the LGBT community who've been ostracized by their biological families after coming out who have created their own "chosen" families, it's hard for me to count blood as the definition of a person's identity. And a person can have multiple families, especially if they live hundreds of miles from their "first" family like I do. This was very true for me when I was in the hospital last December and my doctors kept referring to the groups of friends constantly flocking to my bedside as my family.

Curly Sue, eat your heart out!

The reason that my necklace is so important to me, then, is that it was absolute proof to me that I was really a part of our family, rather than just an adopted offshoot. The necklace had belonged to her mother (my great-grandmother), Alice, after whom I'd been named. As inheritance goes, technically it should have gone to my cousin Katie since she's older than me, but because I was Alice's namesake - my lack of actual Maass blood running through my veins notwithstanding - the necklace came to me.

Pillows move less than cats, but cell phone cameras are still not wonderful.

The full piece.

I am deeply curious about the provenance of my necklace. As I remember, well over a decade later, my grandmother told me that Alice managed to smuggle this through the concentration camp and then over to New York after she and Siegfried were freed (long, long post about the awesome story of that coming later). I don't know if that's true at all, though given some of what I've read about their time in Theresienstadt I suppose it could be possible. I do know that when my grandparents and my great-aunt and -uncle came to the US they bought large amounts of expensive wearable jewelry and other innocuous transportable goods that they could sell again in New York (there were many stories of money being stolen or confiscated on ships heading overseas and my family wished to avoid that), but I don't think this was part of that collection. Certainly my grandmother wouldn't have made such a big deal of it being Alice's if it was. I don't know if there's any way to find out anything more about it, beyond details of its creation.

The important thing, in any case, is that affirmed to me that I am truly a descendent of this long line of amazing people even if it's just coincidence that I have my grandmother's Jew-fro rather than genetics.

Early stage Jew-fro.

I am a 1337 HaX0r!
(How awesome is that acoustic coupler?!)