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 maƮtre 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)