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)