December 28, 2007

franz, march 1930


happy winter.


franz markus hoffer, (1909-1991) and friends.

December 21, 2007

art, 1943



today is the winter solstice so here is a wintry photograph of my cousin art jr. in york, pennsylvania in 1943.  his father, art sr., was my grandmother's much older brother, an allergist who was probably serving in the army when this picture was taken. he died from a stroke when art jr. was only 7.

December 13, 2007

rona, 1926


the heat in my apartment is broken and my feet are cold, so i went looking for a little bit of a summertime frame of mind to warm me up - in spirit only, since i doubt the power of photographs and memory when it comes to the physical warming of feet and hands.

my great grandmother rona went to hawaii in the late spring of 1926 with her maiden aunt rose. i don't know who was supposed to be acting as a companion for whom - if rona was invited so rose wouldn't have to travel alone - or if rose was asked if she minded acting as rona's chaperone. it doesn't really matter because no one ever complains about a trip to hawaii, unless there is a monsoon or a shark attack or an accident with a volcano.

so here is rona, 20 years old, standing under a palm tree on waikiki and posing for a picture with diamond head in the background. it doesn't really make me feel any warmer, but it does make me wish i were in hawaii - preferably in 1926 when it looked like this.

rona brown rose richman (1906-1992)

December 6, 2007

sam, ca 1895




my great-great grandfather sam came to the united states in 1895, leaving his wife minnie and four young daughters behind in russia. i am assuming he took this picture relatively soon after his arrival, maybe taking it on purpose to send it back to his family, though that is just hopeful speculation on my part. it would be a good story, but unless i become an expert on dating men's ties and collars overnight, there is very little chance that i can determine what the story behind this photograph - taken in a not-very-fancy photograph studio in a nice-looking suit - really is. his family joined him in 1899, and lived first in brooklyn, then manhattan (where son william was born in 1903), then the bronx. sam owned a series of stationary stores - the breed of store that sold toys and candy and cigarettes and newspapers and cards and other mundane sundries. this was never a particularly successful line of work for sam, and the family was very poor. according to my grandfather, sam's grandson, minnie was the hard worker in the family and sam was perhaps either (a) somewhat sickly or (b) a jewish scholar whose studies took time away from money-earning hours. i think the former option - sickliness - is perhaps the real reason, as sam died of stomach cancer in 1925, something that probably was the source of lingering illness. plus he hardly looks like a talmud scholar in this very american suit and tie and watch-chain. after sam died, his younger daughters and william (who made a fortune in the artificial flower business, a story that will wait until i can find a picture of him) financially supported their mother minnie, for of course there were no savings and no money in the store itself.

i always think of him, for some reason, as a relative who died young though in reality he was 70, which is perhaps on the younger side, but certainly not young. maybe i do this because by contrast he was young - his wife minnie lived into her 90s and died in 1956; minnie's mother died in 1924, in her mid-80s; and his daughter, my great-grandmother charlotte, lived to be 93. maybe it's also because he did not live long enough for my grandfather to actually know him very well, and therefore, he is a very vague personage about whom we don't have any stories. we have this picture, though, and a handful of records and maybe that is good enough for now.

sam hurdus (1855-1925)

November 30, 2007

max, ca 1895

my great-grandfather max was obviously a cutting-edge sort of guy. here he is on his safety bicycle and sporty cycling outfit in maybe around 1895, which would make him 20 in this undated photograph. bicycling was, at this time, quite the thing to do among the upper and middle classes all over america and europe and i feel like this photograph of max on his bicycle was probably taken to commemorate how very fashionable he was, just as someone might pose for a photograph with their fancy car today.

i personally think that max is one of my most adorable ancestors and the stories i have heard about his kind heart seem to amply back this up. one of the youngest of 16 children, born to a wealthy family in l'viv, ukraine (then, lemberg, austria), max emigrated to the u.s. in 1899. the family lore says that this was so that he could escape compulsory service in the austro-hungarian army. i am not sure if this can actually be true, because the internet informs me that the universally compulsory military service within the austro-hungarian empire began at age 20 and lasted 3 years, after which came an additional 9 years in the reserves. since max was 25 when he came to the united states, he was probably not evading this initial conscription but it is possible - i guess - that he could have been avoiding being called up as a reservist. whatever the case (and i really wish i knew what it was), max settled in york, pennsylvania where he became a tobacco wholesaler.

as i have written before, max married my great-grandmother anna in 1905 at which time he was living in what the clerk filling out the marriage license noted as "redelheim, pa." for a while i puzzled over this - wondering why i couldn't find what i supposed must be a small german enclave called redelheim anywhere in york county or, for that matter, in all of pennsylvania. then i realized (or perhaps someone pointed it out to me) that redelheim and the german pastoralism that name somehow evoked in me was a sort of mondegreen perpetuated by a clerk who (and i don't blame him) didn't realize max and his austrian accent were actually saying "red lion," a town in york county that most assuredly does exist.

max and anna lived in york with their three children - arthur and ethel, who lived to grow up, and william, who did not - as well as an occasional influx of nephews from l'viv who had also come to the united states (whether to escape army service or to find opportunities not available to them in europe, i am not sure). the son of nephew joshua z. stadlan told me that his father lived in york with max and anna (and ethel) for a short time after his arrival in the u.s. in 1921. max wanted joshua to stay and live in york, to join him in the tobacco business as a son, a gesture of generosity and open-heartedness that i see with a certain level of sadness and longing to it. this kind little (and he was very small) man, physically distanced from the large family that he grew up with and left with only a tiny family circle - with a often-ill hypochondriac wife and two children greatly separated in age with the ghost of a dead brother between them - must have yearned after the chance to invite in his brother's and sister's sons, to expand his local family fold and restore something of the close big family of his past. though joshua went his own way as a labor organizer and jewish educator, he always (i was told by his son, emanuel) thought fondly of his uncle max and his cousins, keeping in touch over the years and various distances that separated them, as did emanuel himself. joshua and his wife bessie even had a tree planted in israel on the occasion of my first cousin eric's birth in 1977, which i know because my grandmother kept the certificate in a box with other mementos.

max's same gesture of openness greeted the nephews who came to america after joshua. even though no one has told me this verbatim, i am sure that it did. both of those other nephews - dorian and henry, brothers who came to the u.s. at different times - were very close with max and his children, and though dorian didn't live in york with them, he did work in the tobacco business and spend a large-ish amount of time around his little cousin ethel, who had a huge crush on him (a story for another day).

max instilled the importance of family into his daughter, a girl who grew up without grandparents and cousins her own age, whose address books from the 1930s thru the 1960s now live in my closet and are filled with the locations and birthdays of cousins and relations i never realized she had known. and i am glad that this value of max's has also spread its way to me. i am sure that he would be happy to know about the way i and his distant acht cousins have rediscovered and redrawn the family bonds that connect us. i am also pretty sure he would be slightly disappointed that my sister does not know how to ride a bicycle.

max (meyer) kalisch, 1873-1947

November 22, 2007

the rosenstein family, ca 1923



happy thanksgiving.


daniel and fanny rosenstein with some of their children and grandchildren

November 15, 2007

deszö, ca 1917


deszö was my great-grandmother's youngest brother - the youngest son of amalia and nathan - and according the general rules of such things, was much beloved by everyone. as a married man, he lived in mahrisch ostrau, czechoslovakia and worked for one of his brother-in-laws, sigmund natzler (married to big sister hermine). hermine and sigmund's daugher, franziska, with whom i corresponded for almost all of my high school career, was the main and, really, only source of all of my information about deszö. she told me about how he was well-liked and how he "did fine" until he married a beautiful redhead named ella, with whom he had one child: arnost egon, born in 1923. spoiled and ambitious, ella did whatever she wanted and she wanted a great deal, which deszö gave her to the best of his ability. she wanted her own store, so she got one. her baby had to have everything in silk and the best in everything, so that's what he got. then, one day, she decided she wanted to be an opera singer, so she divorced deszö and left him and egon behind. when the nazis came in, franzi said, ella married one of them; when the soviets came in later, she took up with one of them, and in this way, franzi wrote, "she survived them all."

she may have survived, but her son and her ex-husband did not. on april 28, 1942, deszö and egon were deported from prague to the terezin ghetto. two days later, they were taken to zamosc, poland, where they might have worked building luftwaffe airfields, because they were strong, healthy men. or maybe they were simply shot, or sent on to belzec and gassed. whatever happened, they did not return from it.

i find it sad that the only stories i have to tell about deszö are not really about him, but about someone else who was once close to him. all i really know is that he was a good guy and that people liked him and that though he fought for his country during world war i, he was betrayed by it just like thousands of other jewish men like him. i wish i had more to say about him as a person, this golden boy, but i don't know anything else to say. he's just a ghost who belongs to me.

david (deszö) bass, (1888-after April 1942)

November 8, 2007

harry, bill, selma and charlotte, 1935



i am in tucson, arizona this week for a workshop on cataloging and archiving photographs, which somewhat ironically leaves me with very little time to muse on my own photographic family history. so instead, i leave you with a picture of my grandfather, his sister and their parents -- in tucson, arizona in 1935.

a. harry (1893-1955), william m., selma, and charlotte fenning (1893-1989)

November 1, 2007

charlie, ca 1920s



my great-grandfather charlie met my great-grandmother rona because of business. he and his brothers, in business as the cleveland wrecking company (based in minneapolis, not cleveland, at the time) bought paint or otherwise had dealings with the armstrong paint company, a business in which sam brown, rona's father, was an important person, though i am not exactly sure what it was he did there. sam and charlie's older brother, lou (who was, according to sources, not a very nice person), were friendly and rona found a short-term job giving elocution lessions to lou's children upon her gradation from the school of expression in chicago. i am not sure how long she was in minneapolis - at least a couple of weeks, i guess - and in the course of her visit met charlie. when it the time came for her to return back home to chicago, charlie took her to the train station, boarded the train with her, stayed on after it left the station and proposed marriage. rona was, at the time, engaged to someone else whose name no one seems to remember, poor guy. no one remembers his name, of course, because rona broke her engagement with him and married charlie instead.

this is one of the only pictures i have of charlie as a young man where he isn't formally posed or looking slightly awkward, and i like it because it's casual and so human and familiar. unlike my dad and my cousin john and many other tall relations who look quite a bit like charlie, charlie didn't attend school past the age of 11 or 12 because his family needed the income generated from his doing jobs like selling newspapers. like his brothers, like my other paternal great-grandfather harry and his brothers, a lack of formal education didn't matter because his native intelligence and close-knit family business saw him grow up into a successful adult. this lack of schooling didn't hamper him in other places either: he had beautiful penmanship that showed itself perhaps to best effect in the wonderfully lovely love letters he wrote to rona in their not overly frequent time apart.

charles harold rose (1894-1964)

October 25, 2007

amalia, ca. 1900



there is a 50% chance that this is the grandmother with the hole in the head.

when my grandfather frank was a little boy, his mother and their maids did a thorough spring cleaning every year. not content to just sweep up dust and clean out closets, this spring cleaning also included taking pictures off of walls so that the walls themselves could be cleaned. now, it so happened that, being a little boy, my grandfather liked to get into mischief whether or not the house was in spring cleaning disarray. one time in particular, he decided he was going to climb on top of a tall bureau and from there, catapult himself onto the bed.

so he did.

i don't know how he didn't notice that there was something on the bed before he launched himself off of the bureau, but maybe he thought he could jump around it. he couldn't though and that's how he ended up landing with one foot clear through a portrait of his grandmother, which had been taken off the wall and placed on the bed for spring cleaning. and, as you might guess, his foot happened to land right smack in the middle of her head.

oops.

amalia looks so dignified in this picture that it's hard to believe she could have been the grandmother this happened to - but she might have been. i don't really know very much about her or about the other candidate for grandmother with the hole in the head (who was named katharina and of whom i don't have a photograph). from one of frank's first cousins, who i corresponded with when i was in junior high and high school, i know that amalia died of heart problems in an oxygen tent in vienna. i also know that she was the sixth child of ten, born in a small town in slovakia, and she looks pretty darn good in this photograph for a woman who bore twelve children. but that's it.

so i'm going to pretend that she was the grandmother with the hole in the head, which is hopefully not horribly disrespectful. i don't mean it to be. but it at least gives me more to embroider into amalia's story, one which i wish i knew more about.

amalia friedenfeld bass, 1847-1906

October 19, 2007

anna and celia, ca. 1900?



at his grandfather frank's funeral in 1936, my grandfather bill remembers waiting for the hired cars to take him, his parents, aunt, uncles and cousins from the memorial service to the cemetery. (i don't remember if this is actually part of the story, but i imagine it raining. i don't know why.) when the cars arrive, a little old woman pushes her way in front of everyone and gets into one of the cars before anyone else. my grandfather's aunt ruth (who once sat in a topless bar with my grandparents and my great-grandmother, discussing the nipples of the dancers, and is one of those relatives i really would have liked to know) confronted her, asked who she was to be pushing in front of the mourning family like that.

"what?" the old lady said. "you don't know your tante zippre?"

i actually don't know the rest of what happened - i assume some kind of vague embarrassment and recollection that yes, now that the old lady mentioned it, they did know their tante zippre, who (they guessed) had a right to ride in the hired cars to her older brother's burial.

(caveat: this story is much funnier said aloud, when you can hear my grandfather's old yiddish lady voice.)

tante zippre - or aunt celia - was one of my great-great-grandfather frank's 3 sisters. she was married to a butcher named jacob buxbaum who died relatively young, after which she lived with her sister anna (tante chaje) and brother-in-law, sam (uncle blaustein), who was a grocer. there was also a sister named rosa, who was married to a chiropodist named joseph and died before my grandfather was even born. no one i know apparently remembers anything about them - not even their names.

these people and their stories live at a double remove from me: apart from my grandfather's story about tante zippre, the cutter-in-line, these are not people he (or his cousins) really knew, but people they heard talked about. this is the reason why he knows the name tante chaje, but nothing about her. or the reason why our cousin alan remembers uncle blaustein living with them for a short time, but wasn't sure how uncle blaustein was his uncle. they are names that largely circulate in memories of childhood, of overhearing stories while sitting on the floor of the screened-in porch with cousin bobby in summertime, while the adults talked.

this picture of tante chaje, a baby, and tante zippre is one that my second cousin alan emailed me several years ago. before he got in touch with me, he wasn't really sure who these ladies or this baby were, despite their names underneath. he remembered there being an uncle blaustein in his young childhood but didn't know how they were related, tante zippre and tante chaje were names he didn't know, stories he hadn't heard about - just as my grandfather remembers the aunts but not the uncle blaustein. now, knowing the family structure the stories and the photographs emerge from, childhood memories of vaguely related people and funny names begin to make sense.

the baby in this picture is still one face that doesn't have an anchor in that structure i build behind the scenes. i don't know which sisters' baby she was - i assume anna's - but i do know that she must have died very young - probably not too long after this photograph. she was born in between federal censuses and lived so short a life that neither sister ever told the census taker that they had once had a child that died (which is a question those census takers used to ask you, before the government sent people in person and not just forms in the mail).

my grandfather told me last night that it's too bad i wasn't there with him and cousin bobby, sitting on the floor in the screened-in porch, listening to the adults tell stories in the summertime, and i have to say: he's right.

anna (chaia leah) fenning blaustein (1872-1932), baby cousin, and celia (tziporah) fenning buxbaum (1870s-1939)

October 11, 2007

emil, ca. 1902



sometimes, i speculate about the nature of my great-grandparents' marriage.

my great-grandfather emil was a young widower with a 3 year old child when he married helene 10 months after the tuberculosis death of his first wife, rosalia. helene was a somewhat of a spinster by 1908's norms: at 34, this was her first marriage. the one tangible sort of fact i know about helene was that she liked to read (one of her nephews once wrote me that she would be delighted that i was going to library school because she loved to read so much) and i unfairly begin to typecast her as a bookish old maid, set up into a marriage of practicality. perhaps this was not the case - perhaps helene, the oldest daughter, was taking care of her dying mother and aging father before this or maybe she was jilted by an unfaithful lover. whatever the case, i still wonder because there is no one who can tell me otherwise. i wonder if they were set up by family members or mutual acquaintances, or if they already knew each other because their families issued from the same almost-neighboring villages in slovakia. transposed into the city of vienna, these familial and geographic connections might have been what threw them together - and i like to suspect it is, regardless of the nature of this marriage itself. i wonder if in fact i am wrong - that this was not a marriage of convenience and practicality - but i am hard-pressed to really believe it otherwise. whatever the case, helene and emil were married for thirty years, until emil's death in 1938, and lived comfortably in vienna with their two sons - hans, the above mentioned 3 year old who did not know helene wasn't his birth mother until he was an adult, and my grandfather, franz, who was born the year after their marriage.

emil, as i have mentioned before, was a man with rich tastes. he enjoyed good food and drink, but he also enjoyed women. i don't know if there was more than one mistress - maybe there was just the one - but this also makes me wonder about the nature of his marriage to my great-grandmother, and the complexity of the relationships that bound them, his mistress, and his children.

the story goes that emil brought home a mistress from the russian front after world war i. he was able to get some kind of cushy commission because of his status in vienna (a clothier with a store on the ringstrasse, who allegedly made clothes for the emperor), and instead of fighting in the trenches, he lived in relative safety somewhere behind the front lines. the only story about this mistress is a painful one: one night, emil and helene went out to dinner somewhere emil apparently frequented, but helene did not. before they were seated, the maître d' asked, "and where is mrs hoffer tonight?" not knowing that the lady he was accustomed to seeing in his establishment was the mistress, not the wife, a personage who was in fact right in front of him. i don't know how the story ended, but i can speculate. i don't know helene well enough to know how she would have reacted, but i can speculate about that, too. i can also speculate about the emotions telling this story might have stirred up for my grandfather as he passed it on to my mother and aunt.

the mistress, of course, had a name, but that is not in the stories. i would bet cash money that my grandfather was well aware of what it was, but he never spoke it to anyone alive who can repeat it to me now.

aloisia swoboda was from the city of breslau (now wroclaw), poland and twenty years emil's (and helene's) junior. i know this because she is mentioned in a codicil of emil's will, which i sent to vienna for a copy of. this codicil was not the reason i sent for the will - in fact, i didn't know it was going to be there at all because i did not know about the person whose existence was the reason for it being there. as such, it came as quite a shock to me to read this codicil and realize that i had a great-aunt named emilie.

it came as even a greater shock to me that my grandfather necessarily knew about emilie's existence because he was the executor of this will and its codicil (which, by the way, provided for emilie's education until she came of age), but never once mentioned the fact that he had an illegitimate half-sister thirteen years younger than himself. this truth, scrupulously held, would have been a secret forever, were i not a snoop.

were i not a snoop, my mother would never know the reason why her dad so vigorously rejected the idea that my younger sister be named "emily," in honor of emil. and my heart wouldn't break when i try to imagine the pain and the burden he felt, simultaneously despising and loving his father and loving and protecting his mother.

i don't judge emil for his indiscretions. indeed, i would judge him a lot more if he hadn't provided for emilie and her mother. but it makes me speculate and it makes me sad for my great-grandmother who loved to read.

emil hoffer (1874-1938)

October 5, 2007

rona, ca. 1911



a short story i learned last night:

like many small children, my great-grandmother rona once decided to run away from home. i sort of think it could have been over a grave injustice (such as putting away her toys) imposed by her mother, but this information has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. her runaway attempt was more successful than some, in that she actually made it out the front door without being foiled by her mother or anyone else.

this was where she ran into trouble.

when her father came home from work, he saw her standing forlornly on the street corner near the house. "what are you doing?" he asked.

"i'm running away from home."

"then why are you still here?"

"i'm not allowed to cross the street."

rona brown rose richman, (1906-1991)

September 27, 2007

jacob and margaret, ca. 1900



my great-great-grandmother ella used to tell people that her father was the bootblack to emperor franz josef of austria.

this wasn't true.

instead, her father was a tavern-keeper in a small town in hungary (now, slovakia) where he probably never set eyes on the emperor, but nonetheless raised at least 7 children over 30 years with (possibly) three different wives and immigrated to the united states in his 80s.

this might not be as impressive as shining the emperor's shoes, but it's still not half bad.

that is jacob, sitting there with his cigar and his youngest daughter, margaret. he looks uncannily (i think) like ella's son, my great-great uncle stanley, who turned 97 this past june and still plays bridge on occasion, even though he doesn't quite recall all the rules anymore. margaret, on the other hand, ella's younger sister, does not look like anyone i know. a beautiful little girl, she grew up into a beautiful young woman. i am not sure if she grew into a beautiful old lady, but i don't want to know if she didn't.

margaret and jacob came to the united states in 1908 - or rather, they were fetched and brought here by ella, my toddler great-grandmother rona, and aunt rose, jacob's oldest daughter. the three ladies sailed to europe for a visit, and returned with their little sister and their elderly dad. in hungary, they would have seen their brother, adolph - the only sibling of the 7 who chose to stay in europe and died with his wife and 2 of his daughters in auschwitz - and the other members of their extended family. after leaving the urbanity of chicago, where ella and rose had both lived for more than 12 years, coming home to little rural rudno would have been quite a shock. i have seen pictures of it now - a little rural hamlet that would have been even more rural and hamlet-like in 1908.

when they all returned to chicago, jacob lived with ella, and her husband sam, and rona (later joined by little stanley) until his death in 1912. i'd like to imagine that this was a peaceful time, though i can't wholly convince myself that it would have been, given the personalities contained in their house on paxton avenue.

margaret, during this time, was basically adopted by rose, the maiden sister old enough to be her mother (30 years, approximately, separated them). sometime in the early teens, the two sisters moved to san diego, california, perhaps because one of them (margaret?) had some kind of health problem that was ameliorated by the warm climate and lack of winter. rose grew into an old lady who later chaperoned a teenaged rona to hawaii; margaret grew into a lady who married an anti-semite, hid her jewishness her whole life and lived on a farm in san ysidro where my grandmother was horrified by bugs on the vegetables.

but those are both stories for another time, for other pictures.

margaret holzman wilms (1892-1969) and jacob holzman (1827-1912)

September 20, 2007

the acht brothers, 1891


this is not about these men. not directly, anyway. i know very little about them - indeed, i can only identify two of them with any degree of certainty. no, this is about how i got this picture - the web of their descendants and relations that led to this picture being on my hard drive. it is about the choice to be related to someone, the chance to reconstruct family ties that are so old and broken that they might as well be invisible - and are, for all intents and purposes, except to me and the cousins who try to unearth them.

these seven men are the brothers of my great-great grandmother ettl leya acht, therefore my great-great-great uncles. an inscription says it was taken in 1891 - or maybe 1894 - and i suspect it was taken in what is now l'viv, ukraine, where they were born. at this point in time, they did not all live in l'viv - one brother lived in timisoara, romania, another lived in budapest - but it would seem rational to assume they all gathered in l'viv for some reason. what that reason is, i don't know. just like i don't know much else to tell you about these men, besides the dry information of their dates and the names of their wives and their children. instead, i will tell you about my miraculous circle of cousins, the way the common genes and (apparently) values these brothers (and sister!) passed down to us show themselves even now, and about the wonder of recreating a family that you thought was lost - or perhaps never existed at all.

three and a half years ago, i did not know that these men ever lived. indeed, i tacitly assumed that any family that might have lived in their place were exterminated, that the line ended in dust. i was wrong, because three and a half years ago, i received an email from a man in israel. he had decided to see if he could verify a familial oral history and in the course of his research, found me - or rather, something i had written on the internet. his email, which i received during a very rough time in my personal life, was like a revelation of sorts, a little ray of light, and a complete surprise. where i thought there was only dust, there were hundreds and hundreds of cousins including this emailer, my fifth cousin shuki, the first distant cousin i'd ever met who wasn't at least a generation older than me and was more importantly a collaborator, someone who cared about these things as much as i did and possessed research skills that still make me sigh a little bit in awe.

other cousins followed, populating a tree i thought was mostly dead: francesco, who too emailed me out of the blue, called me on the phone and took me out for breakfast in san francisco one morning; richard, who sent a relative a letter that circled into shuki's lap when he found the same lady himself, who tracks down the email addresses of our living relatives, invites them to lunch, and sends me email updates that illuminate little corners of people's memories; steve, who submitted pages of testimony to yad vashem in 1978 that we found in 2005, who collected and circulated this picture and others to cousins all over the world, and gave me car shopping tips over brunch just a few months ago.

these cousins of mine are not close relatives - third and fourth cousins, all - but they are the family i choose. what binds us is not the close blood ties and complex emotions we may share with our siblings, first cousins, aunts or uncles - but i like to think that the commonality of our interests and passions is the manifestation of a gene passed down to us by the ancestors of these acht brothers (one, which, by the way, also manifests itself in a statistically improbable number of professionals, academics and smarty-pantses amongst acht descendants) and in that way, bridges the gaps that divide us. we are cousins because we choose to be - it would be just as easy to decide not to acknowledge our shared origins, being so loosely related to one another. but instead, we cherish these bonds we have unearthed from forgetfulness, creating a little community that i am incalculably glad to be a part of. we may not talk very often, know the intimate details of each others’ lives or even have met in person, but there is something to be said for simply knowing a connection exists, for knowing that there are these small things we share in common. i know that my life is made richer because of these connections - and in this i speak not just of these cousins, but the others i have found in different places, who share different chromosomes. somehow in meeting people, in talking to them, i feel as though i gather up pieces of myself that i didn’t know were there, in some measure unraveling essential truths about who i am and where i am from.

once when i was talking about becoming an archivist, francesco said something about how people like me are needed in a world where history is cheap. i like knowing that i am related to other people like me, who think that history is in fact immeasurably precious, that memory and its relation to us is something worth the time it takes to think about it. like it or not, men like these acht brothers are a part of us whether we know it or not, and i am glad that i know it.

salomon (b. 1831), sanel (1833-ca. 1902), aron (b. 1835), bernard (sitting, first on the left; 1837-1904), michael (b. 1841), lazar (perhaps standing, second from the left; 1842-1928) and chaim acht (dates unknown)

September 13, 2007

dione, ca. 1933



seeing pictures of people you know only in their adult form as small children or babies is an uncanny sort of terrain. in the true meaning of unheimlich, there is something familiar about their sometimes pudgy baby faces, something that you recognize from their grown-up faces, while at the same time, something completely alien. in pictures of family, there is that added dimension that comes from the fact that childhood and babyhood seem to boil us all down to essential familial appearances and we can trace resemblances between our old childhood faces. we don't quite see this when we look at our own baby albums, because of course we can trace those changes in our faces - my face at 10 is quite recognizable to me as being mine. however, a good friend who saw a picture of a 10-year-old me hanging over my desk recently had no idea he was looking at a picture of me.

this picture of my grandmother dione is one of those sorts of images. obviously, because she is my grandma, i can recognize or at least deduce that this is her at maybe 3 or 4, but this little peanut does not bear a lot of resemblance to the lovely grandmother i know now. however, seeing little dione is like putting a name to a face, for even though she doesn't look completely familiar as someone i've met before, she is definitely familiar as someone i have heard a lot about. there is the story about the visit to aunt margaret's farm in san ysidro, a reprieve from city and suburban life and a definite educational experience wherein dione saw how many bugs were crawling all over the growing vegetables and was so disgusted, she refused to eat any vegetables for weeks. this is not really something i can picture the dione i know doing, but i can imagine this little dione doing so perfectly. hearing stories like this one, which has to be one of my favorite examples of the sheltered city childhoods and childhood whims, i used to try to picture the scenario in my head but i couldn't picture my little grandmother correctly, in any way approximating truthfulness. it was never as cartoony as when my first grade teacher told us about how she used to hide under her parents' weeping willow trees to read, and i pictured her middle-aged face perched like a bobble-head on a little body wearing a sailor outfit (and hat!), but still. one needs to know all the pieces and all the faces of a person to be able to reconcile them with their past selves, or your picture will always be somewhat distorted.

now that i know this particular little face better, i am better able to imagine one of my very favorite conversations of all time. dione, in approximately the year this photograph was taken, was told she was going to be a big sister. when asked, "would you like a brother or a sister?" she replied "i want a dog that smiles."

(note: she got a sister and has still never owned a bulldog, mostly because she grew up and learned to prefer terriers)

September 6, 2007

anna, ca. 1905



the first time i heard about the cohen crazies was in 1998, sitting in my cousin cynthia's living room in greenwich village. it was the first time i had met cynthia and her brother david, who was the one speaking of those cohen crazies. since then, the cohen crazies has become something almost mythical, seamlessly interwoven into our immediate family's framework of collective familial memory.

david and cynthia are my second cousins once removed - or, to make it simpler, the grandchildren of sadie cohen, the older sister of the above pictured anna, my great-grandmother. anna had a stroke in her 40s and spent most of my grandmother ethel's childhood in a more or less invalidic state. so then, when david brought up the cohen crazies, in conjunction with a story about a female relative (i honestly can't remember who) of the prewar era who did not leave the house for two years because she, well, had the cohen crazies, my mother (who was sitting next to me) and i of course immediately mentioned anna: she must have had the cohen crazies, too! well, maybe. though neither of us ever met anna and perhaps some of her crazies could be explained away by medical ailments and psychological trauma (the death of her second child), the stories that had been passed down about her not coming downstairs for weeks at a time or the strict rules she made my grandmother live by (no active playing! no walking on the same side of the street as a dog!) seemed maybe slightly nutty. this supposition of nuttiness was confirmed a year later, when we visited a girlhood friend of my grandmother's in pennsylvania. mary said that it was never clear if anna really was an invalid, or if she was just a hypochondriac and a neurotic - she seemed to suggest the latter more than the former.

after we first heard about the cohen crazies, we started talking about them all the time - speculating about their nature, if they'd been passed down to us, if they were something you could medicate now. for a while i thought i had the cohen crazies when my thyroid malfunctioned for a couple months when i was in college, and i manufactured a whole hypothetical chain of crazies to explain myself, finding a kind of solace in the idea that i had some genetic ailment of the sort that probably would have been labeled "hysterical" by dr freud. somewhat later, we decided that the crazies, seemingly exclusive to females in middle age, were probably a menopausal hormonal imbalance - something that is borne out by the fact that we don't have any present day relatives locking themselves inside for two years in this current age of medication - and i suppose that maybe one day i can find solace in our family inheritance of hot flashes, though i think i'd prefer not to.

these kinds of familial explanations and linkages are, of course, something i always find appealing and without the false thyroid hypothesis about the crazies, i am not sure what links me to anna besides our blood. i simply don't quite know her well enough and i really don't know her at all before she had the crazies, but then again, neither did my grandmother, her daughter, the gatekeeper of any anna-knowledge that has been passed down this far. i sort of wish i knew her as a girl, or when this photograph was taken, probably sometime around 1905, near the time of her engagement and marriage to my great-grandfather max. the crazies had not manifested themselves then, but without them, i have no idea what constituted her character or her person at all. nothing. she was the daughter of a probably quite poor hebrew teacher named moses, the youngest of 5 children and born on the lower east side of new york city. i am sure she was happy to be getting married to max, a young man from a wealthy family in lemberg, austria who was going to take her away to the comparatively rural land of york county, pennsylvania, where he was working as a tobacco agent. she was considered very good-looking for her times and the story goes that she met max when he drove by and saw her sitting on a cousin's porch in harrisburg, pennsylvania. she was so pretty, he had to go back to meet her, making it possible for me to be telling you this story right now. however. what went on in her head, what she liked to do, what she thought of manhattan or of york or of anything - these are things i can't even guess at and teasing my sister about the cohen crazies does not really make up completely for that.

anna cohen kalisch (1879-1937)

August 30, 2007

franz, march 1930



today is my grandfather frank's birthday. it would have been his 98th birthday, but it isn't because he had a heart attack at 82 while driving to work. i still don't really like driving down my grandparents' street (which also happens to be a main thoroughfare) on my way elsewhere, because i don't want to look at or acknowledge the tree the car slammed into when he lost control, that dumb helpless tree (still there!) that took not just him away, but also my grandmother and my belief that bad things only happen to bad people.

i really don't want to talk about that though, but about what my grandfather was like before i knew him.

he already had an entire adult life in austria before he came to the united states in 1939, before he served as an infantryman in the u.s. army, before he married my grandmother in 1947 - before all those things, when he was still franz instead of frank. in those days, franz was a playboy who probably learned the arts of certain excesses (parties, women, fun) from his father, a successful men's clothier, who brought home a mistress from the russian front after world war i. i say "certain excesses" because it seems that there were other lessons - the what-not-to-do kinds of lessons - that franzl possibly also learned from his father emil, who happened to suffer from chronic gout as a result of a diet too rich in schnitzel, sachertorte and cigars. far from suffering from gout, franz was a champion athlete: a skiier, a soccer player, a water polo player, a swimmer. maybe it was just the health culture of the time, floating by osmosis over from weimar germany, where athleticism and gesund were valued and celebrated all over the place, and had nothing to do with emil's foibles - but i like to think that some kind of family-based psychology could have had something to do with franz's athletic prowess.

skiing is something that franz and i share, something i didn't know we shared until a few years ago. it would be nice if i could say that we shared a love of skiing, but that would be a bald-faced lie, because skiing scares the living daylights out of me and i haven't been on a pair of skis in the last 13 years. no, what we share in common is something i discovered when i found an account he wrote sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, entitled "erinnerung au meinem oberschenkel-brauch." this "recollection of my broken femur" does not have a counterpart in any "story of my broken tibia," though it probably should.

franz skiied in the days before ski lifts. in the picture above, sitting with his wooden skis almost parallel to the photo's frame, franz sits at a ski hut on mount rax with a bunch of his friends in march 1930. they would have hiked up the mountain to get there and sometimes they would be so warm when they arrived at the top that they'd lay out in the snow in their underwear (which i know for a fact because i have pictures of it). when franz went skiing with his friends on the schneeberg, the day he broke his oberschenkel, maybe it was a day just like this one on mount rax. that day on the schneeberg, franz brought slalom flags with him in his rucksack and after they were in place, cannonballed down the mountain. what happened exactly i don't know, because my german does not exactly exist, but he ended up with a compound fracture of the femur. he writes about how his three friends found a sled and splinted him up as best they could, skiing him carefully down the mountain with his head facing downhill so he could absorb all the shocks with his shoulders. eventually, he was taken by a horse cart to puchberg, where he was put on the train home to vienna. unable, perhaps, to fit in a regular passenger car comfortably with his splinted leg, he had to ride in the cattle car, where it was very cold, despite the three blankets he was bundled in (it was cold, then colder and then damned cold, he said). then, i assume, he was brought somewhere (home? doctor? hospital?) where they fixed his leg and stitched him up, leaving him with a scar on his thigh.

the story of my broken tibia is not quite as impressive. i was 5, in a ski lesson with some family friends at the top of a lift in brianhead, utah. we did not do any hiking, we did not do any laying out in the snow in our underwear, we did not wear collared shirts under v-neck sweaters. instead, we were making our way across a vast plain of powdery snow, from the lift over to the start of a run, skating in that way you skate on skis when the ground is level. then, all of a sudden (no slalom flags, no slope) i fell in the powder, twisting my legs and falling on the ground. had i been franz, i probably would have been fine, in my leather boots and leather bindings, but i was wearing modern ski boots with modern bindings that decided not to free my poor little feet from their locked-in position. it hurt. it hurt like a mother. i don't really remember that, though, but i assume it did. somehow someone called the ski patrol, and they came and picked me up. i don't remember waiting for them, and i don't remember being loaded onto the toboggan they brought, but i do remember (vaguely, like a fever-dream) bumping softly down the hill behind them, snowflakes falling softly onto my face. i remember (vaguely, in a way i can't fully grab ahold of) waiting in the mountain emergency room for my parents. i remember (vaguely) only getting an ace bandage, sleeping and crying fitfully on a couch in our rental condo, sleeping and crying fitfully on a night-time airplane ride home to los angeles. i was disappointed, i recall, because i always had wanted to fly through clouds, and now i was told we were flying through clouds that i couldn't see because it was night, and it was nothing like i expected flying through clouds to be. i remember, too, getting to ride in a wheelchair from the airplane to the car. i don't remember being brought somewhere (a doctor) to have my leg fixed, but apparently i screamed so loudly as the doctor tried to set my leg that i made him (a grown-ups' doctor, not a kid doctor, who would have known better) nervous and my leg was not set straight at all. i wore a cast for 16 weeks and became a whiz on crutches. i don't have any scars like franz, but i do have a crookedly set leg with a foot that turns out funny and i never liked skiing ever again.

franz did not have that in common with me. like a person who gets back on a horse after they've been thrown, he put his skis back on and skiied until he was in his mid-70s. me, like a person who gets back on a horse after they've been thrown and cries the whole time, i was never able to conquer the fear of falling, the fear that sets in when you look down a steep (or in my case, bunny) slope and think "no way." still, though, somehow i like that there is this shared family story of leg-breaking on skis (one that franz's daughter, my aunt helene, now also shares with us). i am not sure why - it is just somehow pleasing, in a perverse kind of way - but at the very least, it helps me to support my assertion that skiing is a very dangerous sport that one should never attempt. and it gives me something in common with my grandfather, who lived so many different lives before he found himself in the same one as me.

franz markus hoffer (1909-1991)

August 23, 2007

charlotte and harry, 1919


my great-grandparents charlotte and harry got married twice. once, in march 1918, they were married by a staten island justice of the peace before harry shipped out to france as a corporal in the radio detachment of signal brigade company a. after he came home, they were married by a rabbi in august 1919, presumably in front of friends and family. it's a love story out of a silent film.

after this second wedding, they shipped off next to south america, to honeymoon from august through january. this was only the beginning of their travels: they took their firstborn billy to south america as a little boy, spent winters in florida, visited the southwest, went to maine in the summers. i'm not sure if my own passion for going new places comes from them - it would be nice to think it did.

as i write this, sitting in a hotel room in santa fe, on an adventure somewhat less exotic than south america in 1919, i have a hard time thinking of anything else to say. but this photograph fills me with a kind of wonder - because of how young and cute they look, how informally they're standing in front of those mountains, how immediate this scene almost becomes to seem, until you realize it was taken 88 years ago.

charlotte hurdus fenning (1893-1989) and a. harry fenning (1893-1955)

August 16, 2007

fanny and daniel, ca. 1927



fanny had a twin sister, a girl whose name has been lost to the sands of time. i don't know if they were identical or fraternal twins, but regardless, they were apparently not identical in the realm of culinary arts. when a prospective husband for fanny materialized and was to come to the family home for dinner, the nameless twin was pressed into service to cook a delicious meal for which fanny would be credited. this was a good plan, whoever came up with it, for because of this good meal and sisterly kindness, fanny married daniel and i am here today, with the full benefit of daniel's genes for height and fanny's for minor falsehoods.

fanny and daniel, my great-great grandparents, came to the united states in the 1880s from a small town in poland called rajgrod. in cleveland, surrounded by a huge extended family transplanted from poland around the same era, they raised 7 sons and 3 daughters, as pillars of the jewish community. though they did not have much money at all, their table was always open to others - as was the rest of their house, where multiple nieces, cousins and sisters lived for at least some small period of time when they needed support. the youngest son, sidney, was the only child to go to high school and when he earned a degree as a mortician, he and his father went into business as undertakers (the hearse was apparently a very popular vehicle for my great-grandfather charlie and his brothers to borrow for dates). the older brothers did not have the benefit of much education at all (though charlie still wrote a beautiful hand, as my grandmother will point out), but with their native intelligence and street smarts began a family-owned salvage and wrecking company in the 1920s, a company that my father and grandfather still ran throughout my childhood.

later in their lives, fanny and daniel lived pretty comfortably, perhaps helped out by their prosperous sons and sons-in-law. pictures like this from their circa 1927 golden anniversary, show them in fancy clothes, surrounded by children and grandchildren. many of those children and grandchildren were very tall, and all of them impeccably dressed.

last year, i went to my first family reunion ever, where i was surrounded by the other descendants of daniel and his 4 siblings. for the first time in my life, in this room of almost complete strangers with whom i shared the intimacy of my genes, i was not tall but simply average. when we took a group picture, i thought of 1927 and how in this picture, too, many of us were very tall and all of us impeccably dressed. whether i am the only one with fanny's talent for the white lie remains to be seen.

daniel harris rosenstein (1861-1938) and fanny zitofsky rosenstein (1857-1932)

August 9, 2007

wilhelm, summer 1909


long-ago people seem at their most old-fashioned dressed in their bathing suits. corsets and celluloid collars and other accoutrements of proper dress are foreign to us, yes - but they retain their dignity. bathing costumes, however, never fail to look anything but slightly goofy and generally unflattering. there is something that is reassuring, really, about the fact that bathing suits have been slightly goofy and generally unflattering since the beginning of time, but i digress.

i did not know my great-great uncle wilhelm, nor do i know very much about him. the fifth person from the left, in the striped bathing costume and smugly amused expression, he was one of my great-grandmother helene's older brothers (there were 11 children altogether). he smirks a bit like this in several of the photographs i have of him, and i'm not sure if this is a sign of potential fun or potential obnoxiousness. either way, he's a good looking fellow, on vacation with members of the taussig family (i don't know who they are) in grado, an island near trieste that is now in italy but then in austria - one of those strange tricks of world war i's moving borders. this photograph is the front of a postcard, which he sent to my great-grandparents at their summer apartment on the demelgasse in mödling, austria, the week before my grandfather franz was born in that very place in august 1909.

wilhelm had a beautiful wife named theresa (or resi, as everyone called her) and a brilliant daughter named grete. they lived in vienna, probably in the same fashionable district as my great-grandparents, and did things like travel in the alps with various family members. and send postcards. the postcards are the only way i know either wilhelm or resi, and since my german is not exactly existent, it is a very sketchy way of knowing someone. resi's postcards always seem warm and friendly, slightly gushing; wilhelm's seem more reserved, but nonetheless affectionate. of course, maybe part of why i feel that way is the fact that these postcards - and all the other postcards i have from this branch of my family - begin with the typical greeting "meine lieben!" (my dears!), something that always touches my heart, even though i know it's the same as my beginning a letter "dear so and so." but. the fact that i know the end that was waiting for these extended family members who loved each other so much and sent each other such postcards, makes it all the more tragic and all the more touching (meine lieben!).

when world war ii came, grete was living abroad (either in london or the united states - i can't remember) and her parents were stuck in vienna. as laws against them became stricter and stricter, jews were relocated into smaller, crowded apartments in the city, their belongings liquidated. wilhelm and resi were finally deported to the riga ghetto in december 1941, where they presumably died. there is no record of their deaths, and in fact, their daughter grete had to petition the austrian courts to declare them dead in the 1950s.

i don't really know anything else about them other than that: that they died, perhaps during a freezing winter in a latvian ghetto, that they were very attractive and that they sent postcards. but i'm going to hold onto the idea that resi was sweet and pretty and thoughtful; that wilhelm was a fun time, a person who made sarcastic, dry jokes under his breath if you were lucky enough to sit next to him at dinner, and who always remembered to send a postcard to his sister.

wilhelm bass (1872-1941?) (and therese feuer bass [1888-1941?])

August 2, 2007

ella, september 1931


ella was born in what is now slovakia in 1882. she came on a ship to the united states by herself at the age of 15. she married, had 2 children, got divorced in the early 1930s, moved to california and lived until the age of 89. somewhere in between all this, she went to glacier national park and posed for a photograph with some indian men in front of their teepees. now, i didn't know nana ella, my great-great-grandmother, but this - glacier national park, teepees, indians - is not something i would have guessed she did. and, in fact, the entire idea of this picture continually amazes me.

on second thought, though, i don't know why this is really particularly surprising. nana was not a boring person, though apparently she was obsessive-compulsive about things like mopping floors. my great-aunt francine tells stories about nana taking her to multiple double features in one day and pursuading her, as a newlywed, to paint a wall in her first apartment purple. these are stories that don't get told about uninteresting people, people who you would never suspect of taking a trip anywhere.

there is not even anything really that surprising about a 49 year old lady visiting glacier national park and having her picture taken there in 1931. the many glaciers hotel, which the caption on the back of this photograph mentions, still exists. a hotel in the best tradition of grand old national park hotels, it was (is) part of a string of hotels and chalets built across the park in the 1910s, something that wouldn't be out of the question for a 49 year old lady from chicago to visit, even during the depression. in fact, it was probably something pretty fashionable to do, and if nana cared about anything, she cared about fashion and class. then there are the indians. it isn't hard to imagine an encampment of teepees and indians standing by near the hotels for photo opportunties with idle visitors from the east (and i'm hoping, a sizable tip from ladies like nana). today, even just teepees (and a chuckwagon breakfast) at dornans in grand teton national park draw a crowd fascinated with the notion of the west.

but still. somehow, even though i know these things, nana and the indians never fail to, for lack of better words, completely blow my mind.

ella holzmann brown(1882-1971)

July 26, 2007

billy, ca. 1930


my grandfather bill tells stories sometimes about his summers at camp cobbossee in winthrop, maine: about hiking into town to have strawberry phosphates, how his parents and sister would come up from new jersey and stay at a nearby hotel with other parents of campers, how someone told him he had funny knees once and it made him self-conscious. you can't really see his knees in this picture, but i think they look okay. you also can't see much of maine in this picture, but as soon as i saw it, i knew that's where it was and my heart gave a little leap in my chest.

when i went away to college in maine, i thought that the fact that it had been the subject of my 5th grade state report meant that it was fate. i liked that somehow when i picked maine for my project (because, by the way, it was the state closest to prince edward island and therefore anne of green gables), i was truly connecting myself to something without even knowing it, anticipating another decision i would make many years later. in reality, though the line that connected me to maine was much longer than that, begun by my grandfather on the shores of lake cobbosseecontee when he was 7 or 8 and sent to camp for the first time. i didn't know he had gone to camp in maine - or anywhere else, for that matter - until i went to college and he began to talk about it, and every other piece of information he knew about the state (which is a prodigious amount because he knows everything about nearly anything): about the fact that potatoes come from aroostook county, about those strawberry phosphates, about the number of soldiers maine gave to the civil war. this place that we both spent time in and have very fond memories of became yet another thing that we share in common, another little secret that no one else in our family really shares.

during one of my last weeks before graduation, i drove up to camp cobbossee by myself one day - just because. my grandfather had been sick and was still in the hospital when i did this, and i think i intended to go take some pictures to amuse him and cheer him up. i was also, of course, doing this for me, because i wanted to see where it was that billy spent his summers. i didn't actually make it out to the camp itself, because it was down a long private road and i was afraid of getting yelled at (because i am always afraid of getting yelled at), and i didn't take many pictures of anything, because i saw nothing to photograph. but driving around lake cobbosseecontee, down roads that my grandfather might have crossed when hiking in to town with his friends and counselors, i realized for the first time how close together the places (the lakes around winthrop, the seashore around brunswick) we both hold in our hearts and memories are in space, if not in time.

i love this picture, which i'd never seen until a week ago, because it places this little boy who i only know as my grandfather in a world i can recognize, a landscape that i know and love.

July 17, 2007

ethel and arthur, ca. 1927



this is my grandmother ethel and her older brother arthur, in what is possibly my favorite photograph of all time. her expression could only be more perfect if she were raising one eyebrow.

because i like to concoct stories, i like to think that this picture was taken in baltimore, when ethel and her parents were visiting arthur at college. art was 13 years older than my grandmother and she idolized him. that's why she's making this pleased as punch, silly little bunny face, while he is humoring his baby sister even though he feels like he's too old for this kind of thing.

ethel kalisch hoffer (1918-1991) and arthur kalisch (1906-1949)

July 15, 2007

I have an obsession with blood, with the invisible past running through my veins and capillaries, pumping through my heart.

I want to untwist the skeins of my own DNA, unravel the path that has brought it to me.

I want to map my face, draw borders around each region of resemblance.

I am driven by a compulsion to uncover my past, to draw the lines that silently exist between my mothers and fathers and myself. It is, in the end, a selfish quest – this is not for posterity, but for me. I operate subconsciously under the notion that locating the source of by blood will lead me to myself, a presumption that most likely has its flaws. By uncovering the invisible, unconscious and secret journey I took through my ancestors to this place, to this amalgamation of their bodies, hearts and minds, I will in some measure discover my true self.

But it isn’t just that.

By renaming all those long forgotten faces, I repopulate the world. I invert the order and rebirth my progenitors. By naming, I recreate life out of long-quiet death and forgetfulness. I name, enumerate, remember and we all live again – their blood is not mute within mine.

By remembering, I form my own monument to those that made me. I owe them this much, to thank them, and to thank them by name.

(April 2003)