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)

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)

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)

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?])

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)