by Jeffrey Wolf

Melissa said she teared up when she first saw the church.

Our great-grandparents, Max and Esther, were married on December 30, 1923. One hundred years later, my cousin and I drove to the site of the ceremony. Now a Greek Orthodox Church at Ashland and Polk, back then it was Ohavei Sholom Synagogue.

Melissa and I have only been friends about two years, since I started digging around to write about our family. Technically she’s my second cousin. Our grandparents were brother and sister. Those same grandparents had a falling-out when we were young, and we hadn’t seen each other since. We’ve both lived in Chicago for the last decade, but no one ever told us. We’re the same age. Both living alone, making ends meet.

After Melissa’s grandmother died, she found the original invitation to Max and Esther’s wedding framed on a table. All the locations now obsolete, some streets even renamed, but I had all the information I needed to find them. So, we decided we’d do this. Celebrate the anniversary of our last common ancestors.

I drove. Off the highway, into a West Town neighborhood dominated by the UIC campus and the Medical District. Our destination rose tall on the corner, impossible to miss. Solid stone, neoclassic columns, tarnished dome above the façade. Growing larger, looking more and more like a rift in time. In the early twentieth century, this area was on the fringes of greater Maxwell Street, a port-of-entry neighborhood dominated by Jews from Eastern Europe. Overcrowded and unsteady tenements. In true Chicago fashion, almost none of it remains.

Across Ashland, empty parking lots surround cold, blocky medical buildings. Winter wind sweeps the asphalt. In the distance, the L-tracks cross above the street. There’s little plant life, aside from weeds. On a Saturday in late December, it’s also devoid of people. Like a mall built atop a clear-cut forest, something is here, but its spirit is silent.

We parked and climbed the front steps of the church. Imposing stone stairs rising high between the columns. Heavy wooden doors, all locked. Every entrance shut. The buzzer at the utility entrance rang and rang with no response. No cars in back. The adjoining playground also empty. A few blocks away, where one hundred years ago a home in the tenement rows hosted the reception, low townhouses sat distant and oddly angled behind a fence. Across from that stood an old grade school, since renamed and converted to a charter.

I had known already that it was all gone. Standing there in the cold, wanting to feel loss, I felt wooden, blank. Would going inside the old building have made it different? The dome of the former synagogue now adorned with a gold cross, the windows replaced with lead-glass crosses. No doubt everything inside was replaced, too. It wasn’t ours anymore.

*

Denied the church building, we walked two blocks to Polk and Wood, where the Chicago Cubs’ ballpark once stood; the West Side Grounds, where they won the 1908 World Series. Our ancestors would have grown up with the ballpark in their midst. Most of the players on that team had Germanic surnames. Reulbach, Schulte, Hofman, Kling. There were even rumors that some of them were Jewish, but they smartly kept the truth of it to themselves.

Growing up, my whole family were Cubs fans. My grandfather, my father, me. My grandfather was still alive in 2016, when the Cubs won another championship, finally, after 108 years. But he was so stricken with dementia that he couldn’t appreciate it. I would go to his house and a game would be on TV in the background. Sometimes live, sometimes the previous day’s replay. He couldn’t tell the difference. So long as there was something to anchor his gaseous days. I would visit and he would ask me the same questions over and over because the answers never stuck. So how are you? And a moment later, after I’d just finished speaking: So… how are you?

The West Side Grounds had also been knocked down and replaced, but at least here someone put up a plaque. I’ve always felt like being Jewish prepares you for being a Cubs fan. Or vice versa. A culture of futile optimism, persevering through endless failure and loss. Maybe even that isn’t true anymore.

On the way, Melissa and I talked about our parents and how they met. Mine in college, hers at an apartment complex in New York. Melissa’s parents started talking in the elevator and out on the street while he walked his dog. All the good ones are taken, he complained one day. And she replied, Actually, I just broke up with my boyfriend.

My parents are still married. Hers divorced years ago.

All these people, our parents and grandparents, Max and Esther. Even the crooks on our family tree, and there were several, all found love, at least for a while. Our parents’ cousin, who went to jail for multiple felonies, had plenty of boyfriends.

She probably had someone waiting for her the minute she got out, Melissa said. If the felons can find someone, we should be fine.

But that’s the thing about felons, I said. They have charisma and no morals. That’s how seduction works.

You should just get rid of your morals, she said. Do that for New Year’s. I want that for you.

I remembered that New Year’s Eve was tomorrow. A time for reflection, a new start. If I wanted to remake myself for a different future, this was the time. I hadn’t been thinking about it, or about love, yet I was also always thinking about these things. They formed a silent, unsteady backdrop to my days. Who was I, in the face of so much absence?

*

What was Esther thinking as she walked those steps? Melissa first wondered it aloud. Her wedding day, one hundred years ago. Why had it taken me so long to think of Esther?

Was she nervous? Did she feel love, or at least affection, toward this man? She had no say in the matter, or very little, no doubt. What did she say privately to her sister, Lena, the party animal, so close yet so unalike?

She barely knew him, that much is certain. Their marriage was arranged at the local grocery store. Max’s father the owner, Esther’s eldest brother a frequent customer. Esther’s parents were both dead, so brokering such deals fell to him.

I’m looking for a marriage for my son.

I’m looking for a marriage for my sister.

Their courtship, I’m told, was that he came to her family’s home, and they sat together and listened to the crystal set, predecessor to the radio. I picture them touching hands silently, not looking at each other. Max modest, shy, as crippled inside as he was outside.

They were both broken people. Max, 44 and never married, had walked with a cane since his youth. Esther, 22—in her day, already a spinster—had a reputation for hysterics. What the matchmakers would have said about them. As if either family could afford such luxuries. But things were getting desperate.

This was expected: you married, left home, obeyed your husband, started a family. Each child in turn. Max and Esther had already broken the chain by existing so long without marriage. Both had younger siblings who’d already tied the knot. It was bad luck, going out of order like that. There was consternation aplenty. And here, a solution! Mazel tov!

Was it a happy day for them? A relief? I’ve spent so much time thinking I can know, when they probably never knew themselves. Too overcome with obligation to risk feeling. Still, our bodies tell us things. And from what I know about Esther, she was never the kind to stay quiet.

*

Across from the church, the roots of old trees are pushing up the sidewalk into small mountains. Bricks and concrete slabs pitched and disordered. There’s some easy metaphor about roots here, how they demand to be noticed.

Maybe it’s my own fault that I felt so little. I went into this adventure knowing I would write about it, hoping this episode would slot cleanly into my family narrative manuscript, maybe somewhere near the end, as the larger story moved from brokenness to healing. I had plans, goals, agendas.

At lunch, Melissa and I talked about our own lives. We’re both on antidepressants and in therapy. She’s between jobs, and I’m waiting to finish my book in the hopes of finally having job security.

Melissa told me how she understood her grandmother so much better after her death. Looking through her things, unfiltered. Recognizing the signs of depression, her means of coping. Size-two dresses in the closet and pints of ice cream in the freezer. The pressure to be perfect. If only Grandma Ruth could’ve gotten help in her time.

We ate at a corner pub on Taylor Street, only two other tables occupied. One of them, far in back below the big screens tuned to college football, was a loud and festive group, and we overheard that someone at that table was just married. They passed us on their way out, and we talked with them, told them about the wedding one hundred years ago that had brought us to this place. We also told our waitress, and another couple who stopped us as we were leaving. To a person, they all thought it was so cool what we were doing.  Meaningful. Everyone agreed.

As we waited for our order, silence lingered while I scribbled furiously to record the story so far. Melissa understood this, God bless her. She tried taking my picture as I worked. A few candids. Good for your dating app profile, she said. But nothing turned out. The pictures themselves were fine, but my hair was messy and windblown. My non-writing hand oddly contorted to hold the notebook steady.

What am I even doing here? And by here, I mean these pages. As if I believe that writing will heal anything, even for me. It won’t bring our family back together, may even push them further apart. Yet I can’t stop doing it.

And I’m not doing it alone. Does that count for something? Melissa and I out in the dark, grasping at threads, trying to draw things back. Every generation, there are fewer children. Our parents have accepted their fate, but we, the youngest, keep reaching.

*

What do I imagine for my future? Success, comfort, love. A woman’s soft hand and a curtain of hair. Laughter from a low-lit room. Book signings. Never anything I can grasp. Maybe I don’t imagine it too clearly so I won’t be disappointed. I’ve always felt slightly outside this life. Bumbling around with kindness in a world that wants cunning. Gentle is not weak, but I find myself exhausted remembering the difference.

You said Max was 44? Melissa asked, So maybe it’s not that desperate for us. She paused, Or it’s not that desperate for you.

Both of us are chronically single. By this metric alone, we must be broken. We believed it, and that made it true. Yet, one hundred years later, I understood that the pressure was still greater on her. I could empathize with my cousin, but I had nothing to offer. If we each wanted to change, and embrace a different future, where could we learn it?

Max was no charisma, all morals. Esther, too. I would have loved them out of obligation, but would I have liked them? Again and again, our great-grandparents were used and forgotten by people shrewder and more exciting, including their own kin. Hardship held them together. Has this legacy come to us?

In a way, it all feels trite, but this is where I keep ending up, bending the line into a circle. I too have emptiness and longing. The hole exists, and I keep filling it with the past.

*

Before we left, we tried the church one more time. Again, its leaden doors denied us. Perhaps this is best. We must live with it in the uncanny between—moving on, yet frozen in time. As we drove away, the church rose tall once more, old majesty above a bland concrete expanse. Its columns silent. The gold at its peak dulled beneath sheets of cloud. Salt wash stained along the curbs.

Jeffrey Wolf’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received a fellowship grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and was a finalist for the Arkansas International Emerging Writer’s Prize. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · October 2025
Header image from Newberry Library

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