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tama leah, ca 1930

I always found my great-great-grandmother Tama Leah intriguing, mostly because of her name. When my grandfather first told me about her, neither of us knew how her name was actually spelled and I wrote it down as Tomalea. It reminded me of tomatoes and I thought it was funny. Later, I found out that it isn't as unusual or strange a name as it seems and how it's actually two names -- like Mary Ann -- but still. There is something about Tama Leah that reminds me of tomatoes.

As my grandfather told me once, Tama Leah was a rather "ungainly" woman - at least during the time he knew her. She was married to the always dapper Frank, but obviously they had very different metabolisms, in addition to the fact that Tama Leah bore 6 children that lived into adulthood. When she was about 70, Tama Leah fell and broke her hip. As happens now with older people who fall and break things, she had to spend a long time in bed, being cared for by a nurse and waiting for her bones to hopefully knit back together. But, lying there in bed, she caught pneumonia, which eventually killed her. My grandfather was at camp when she died in July 1933. "I was only a kid," he says and they called him at camp to tell him about it.

There is another part of the story about Tama Leah's illness, one which involves the nurse caring for her and her oldest son, Herman. Herman was the most successful businessman in the family and worked as an executive for the A. Hollander & Sons fur manufacturing firm. I am secretly convinced that the Hollanders were cousins of some kind, but regardless - Herman employed a wide range of relations (brothers, brothers-in-law, cousins) at A. Hollander and supported other family with his own generous earnings. Herman was married to Ernestine - Aunt Ernie, that is - and they had two daughters. But then Herman met Tama Leah's nurse and they had an affair and he & Aunt Ernie got divorced and it all sounds very traumatic. Needless to say, this was probably not an outcome that Tama Leah would have wanted to have anything to do with. Thankfully, there is redemption in this story: Herman & Ernie reconciled and remarried in Maine in 1939.

Tama Leah's first grandson was born to my grandfather's favorite cousin Blanche, after Tama Leah had died. The baby was named after her: the slightly more melodious Thomas Lee.

Tama Leah Rassler Fenning (ca 1863-1933)

rona, "uncle art" and the maxwell, ca 1909

This is a picture of my great grandmother Rona riding with some cousins and "Uncle Art" in her father's circa 1909 Maxwell motorcar. She's the little one with the giant bow and the rather unhappy expression; Uncle Art is the one with the "5" over his head, which corresponds with the little key in the caption below that tells us that this is "The Maxwell" and "5 Uncle Art." No names for anyone else are supplied, which is too bad, because I have absolutely no idea who they or Uncle Art are, because as far as I know, neither Rona nor her parents had any uncles named Art. The only Art I know of was not an uncle, but a first cousin by marriage. But I don't think this is him (that cousin, Arthur S. Leppel), because on further inspection, this man doesn't look like a first cousin by marriage, but a flesh and blood Brown relation. And the fact that he is probably a flesh and blood Brown relation is probably the reason why I don't know who he is. Why? Because searching for Browns in the city of Chicago is like searching for Cohens in New York City: very difficult and almost endless. So unless Rona's brother, my great-great-uncle whose 98th birthday fast approaches, can tell me who Uncle Art is, I have very little hope that I will ever be able to figure that one out.

But back to the car, which seems to be the reason that this picture was probably taken. It's an awfully nice one and my great-great-grandfather Sam was obviously quite proud of owning it - note his initials "S.E.B." on the passenger door. And let's also take into account that the caption of the photograph is "The Maxwell" -- not "Rona and Uncle Art in the Maxwell" or any combination thereof. I have a couple of other pictures of Sam and his family with various automobiles, so I have to guess that - like most of his male descendants - he was a guy who really liked cars. If all my cars were this fancy and monogrammed with my initials, I'd take a lot of pictures with them too.

Rona Brown Rose Richman (1906-1992) with unknown individuals

sherman oaks, california, 1949

in 1949, it snowed in the san fernando valley and by "snowed" i mean snowed: snow fell and it actually stayed on the ground. my grandfather frank took pictures - an entire roll of pictures, in fact - of the snow that fell around his family's house in sherman oaks that day and this is one of them.

the hoffer family, 1966

in my family, we have certain idiosyncratic terms that no one else in the world uses besides us. i'm sure lots of families do.

my sister and i did not realize until some few years ago, however, that this was actually the case. we thought everyone walked around calling the national council of jewish women thrift shop the "jewish ladies," for example. which they don't.

this is not dissimilar from our mother thinking that her father was just making up nonsense words when he would say, "let's go schloffen" at bedtime or mix together rice and peas when they were served at dinner and call it risi-pisi.

my family also says "sleep-away camp" to denote a summer camp at which one stays for a period of time (as differentiated from day camp) and my saying this out loud to friends not from california has literally made them laugh. really. i don't know if this is a weird family thing, or if it's just a regional difference, but the fact of the matter remains that i have tried to train myself not to say "sleep-away camp" in front of certain people.

which brings us to the above photograph, a place holder for a picture i can't find right now, taken at the sleep-away camp where my mother was in her element, where my parents met, where my cousin fell off a bridge, where a little piece of my heart will always live even though a large percentage of my time there was often lonely and sad. this place is simply known as "camp." there are no qualifiers because we all know exactly what we are talking about.

from time to time i think about how i would like to go visit camp - which is not very far away at all - but i never do. i will one of these days.

frank markus hoffer (1909-1991), helene, ethel kalisch hoffer (1918-1991), kathi

rona and dione, 1929

the caption on the back of this photograph says:

"sleeping beauty and oh-so-tired"

rona brown rose richman (1906-1992) and dione

frank and jacob, ca 1930

frank and jacob, the older brothers of anna and celia, rocking here in a souvenir picture of some kind, illustrate the notion that sartorial know-how and snappy dressing run in the family. though jacob (the younger brother, on the right) was relatively well-off in his career as a real estate man, frank, my great-great-grandfather, did not find the same prosperity as a tailor and presumably was not always able to dress quite this well. his children sacrificed education to get out into the world and work to help support the family -- my great-grandfather was a telegraph boy, his brother william won money as a prize-fighter, sister sophie worked as a milliner. however, when frank's sons grew up and became successful, they helped to support him -- something that they would have been doing at the time this picture was taken. my grandfather, son of the above telegraph boy, remembers quite well frank's always dapper figure walking down the streets of newark, reading a different section of the forward at each newsstand and candy shop along his route, so that by the time he arrived back home, he'd read the whole paper for free -- a thrifty streak that i see traces of every time my sister and i get excited over the clearance racks at macy's.

frank fenning (ca 1865-1936) and jacob fenning (ca 1869-1940)

ethel, becky and frank, 1981

my mother's parents were taken away from me 17 years ago this past tuesday, and it will never not hurt.

ethel kalisch hoffer (1918-1991), me, frank markus hoffer (1909-1991)

charlotte, ca 1917

my great-grandmother charlotte was a liar. i didn't know this when i was small - in those 8 years we spent in the same world - and i'm not sure anyone else alive during those 8 years knew it either. if i weren't a snoop, no one would know she had lied about anything, and i used to think that my revealing the truth would be some kind of betrayal.

grandma told everyone that she was born in charleston, south carolina, and that is the place my grandfather filled in on her death certificate when she died, the place she herself gives on her marriage license and passport applications. i thought this was pretty exciting - no, fascinating - because it simply reeked of something exotic and exciting, of mint juleps and azalea bowers and evenings on verandas with rhett butler.

the thing was, though, that south carolina disagreed with charlotte: they couldn't find her birth certificate anywhere. strange, i thought. at the same time, though, i had found other documents where charlotte gave her birthplace as new york city, the place where i knew she spent most, if not all, of her childhood and young adulthood. at first i didn't think it was strange that new york city couldn't find any sign of her birth certificate either - i had other relations who were born in new york city, whose names were so mangled in the writing down that they were almost impossible to find.

that wasn't the problem with charlotte, though. nope. the problem was that she wasn't born in new york city, or new york state, or even in north america.

instead, she was born in what is now the minsk region of belarus and came to the united states in 1899 as a 5 year old named chaje (later americanized to sadie) with her mother and her sisters.

i found this out because i one day, by fluke, found an entry for charlotte's father, the adorable sam, in an online index that led me to his naturalization papers. these papers listed his particulars and those of his wife, minnie, and those of his five children - rose, ida, sadie and jennie - all born in belarus - and william, born in manhattan. this was quite perplexing indeed, because, um, where was charlotte? and who in the hell were rose and ida and sadie? i had been told that charlotte's siblings were jennie and william - no mention of anyone else. but this had to be my family, i thought. how many other sam & minnie hurduses could live in new york city, let alone the world?

then i took a closer look at the papers in front of me and realized that sadie had the same birthdate as charlotte: august 18, 1893. and then i said, "wait, what?"

belarus is a long way from charleston or new york city, sadie is quite different than charlotte, and this all meant that grandma was lying.

my grandfather couldn't believe it either. he and his sister had always been told their mother was born in charleston and that her name was charlotte, but those were certainly her parents, most definitely her younger brother and sister, most assuredly her birthday... but what about rose and ida, i wanted to know. oh yes, my grandfather and his sister recalled, now that i mentioned it, there were some older sisters named rose and ida, but charlotte didn't really get along with them that well - they were older, more jewy, less assimilated. plus they lived in florida and one of them died young. jennie talked to rose and ida because she was "soft," for which charlotte used to reprimand her. but really, no one remembers all of it, and i still have never been able to discover anything substantive of these sisters on my own.

all of this information has been percolating in my head for several years, giving me a chance to figure out what it all means and why she did it. i am still not completely sure. it would have been easier, in a way, to fully comprehend if charlotte had denied any ties to her old world family at all, but she didn't. she and her husband, my great-grandfather, spoke yiddish in front of their kids when they wanted to tell secrets and she was close to her parents and her younger siblings - even if she was distant enough from rose and ida that her kids forgot they existed until prompted. it wasn't a desire to efface her entire background, to deny family - but a desire, perhaps, to be more fully the person she thought she was: charlotte, not chaje. a "real" american, not an immigrant. i still struggle with this, and with trying to understand how the mere appearance of something so relatively unimportant in this melting pot of a country could become so important that you'd keep it from your children their entire lives. and i think i will probably always struggle with it, because i will never know for sure exactly what she was thinking.

charlotte hurdus fenning (1893-1989)

henry, ca 1930

the other night, i saw an our gang short that featured a lot of impressive ear-wiggling. not only were the girls onscreen entranced by the mysterious ear maneuverings of their male counterparts, but i was too. mostly because i wanted to know how the hell one little boy could wiggle his ears so damn well.

it also made me think of a story that i'd forgotten i knew, one about ear-wiggling.

henry here, my grandmother's first cousin, could wiggle his ears. when my aunt helene was a toddler and refused to eat, henry was invited over a lot, precisely because of his ear-wiggling talents. what would happen is this: helene sitting in her high chair would refuse to open her mouth to admit any spoonfuls of pureed broccoli, or whatever was on offer. henry would wiggle his ears and she'd open her mouth in astonishment, allowing for the surreptitious deposit of food into her mouth.

this seems like a pretty good system, though potentially a little awkward since henry wanted to marry my grandmother at one point and ardently pursued her, even though she said no. i don't think henry was married yet when helene was a baby and the ear-wiggling-aided feedings were taking place, but maybe he was. and anyhow, maybe it wasn't awkward at all: henry and his wife were friendly with my grandparents, up until henry's death in 1979, when my grandmother one day received an angry letter from his wife, who i will call r. this letter was fueled by jealousy and sadness that henry was (i guess) always in love with her (ethel, that is) instead of with r, and after that, they never talked again (to my knowledge, anyway).

ethel, for her part, though i'm sure she felt badly about the whole thing, didn't want to marry her own cousin, because first of all it would have been creepy. secondly, she wanted to have a family and would never have dreamed of introducing children with their shared, first-cousin genes into the world. and thirdly, she was always in love with his older brother, dorian, which is another story for another day.

henry (heinrich) kalisch (1905-1979)

rona and charlie, march 10, 1935

yesterday, i was working with someone else on organizing his family photographs and i was slightly jealous, seeing the sheer number of photos this family had taken and posed for on their myriad travels around the world. i'm not completely sure why i was jealous, because it isn't as though i come from a family of stay-at-home, unadventurous and untraveled people. i suppose it had something to do with their somewhat meticulous arrangement, organization and labeling. it had to do with how well-preserved those kodacolor images of fashionably dressed americans in front of the trevi fountain were. it had to do, too, with my own lust for travel and my jealousy for where these very very well-traveled people had been.

but then i come home, look at my own collection of familial memories and don't feel quite so jealous. they may not have been kept organized in albums and labeled with dates, but that doesn't matter. the fact that they are my people on their long ago (or relatively recent) travels is what makes the difference.

rona brown rose richman (1906-1992) and charles harold rose (1894-1964) in agua caliente, mexico.

belle, october 1942

my grandfather's cousin belle was born in new york, grew up in detroit and moved to los angeles in the early 1940s. she was a businesswoman - owning, according to my mom, a company that manufactured reeds for musical instruments, and her death certificate says she was a owner of a music production company of some kind. when my grandparents frank and ethel married and moved to l.a. she was a close friend of theirs and i can see why: besides the simple fact that she was my grandfather's first cousin, she looks like fun. she looks like the kind of person who laughed easily, didn't bow out of a good time, and would tell funny jokes; the kind of person who drank black coffee, smoked cigarettes and called people "doll" without any sense of irony. the kind of person i would probably like.

but belle was also a lesbian. this meant that despite the fact that she was a great pal of theirs, my grandparents distanced themselves from her when they became the parents of two daughters. it wasn't the fact that they became parents and that they had no more time for fun, but the simple fact that she was a lesbian and they had two daughters. they didn't cut her out completely - my mom played the flute when she was a kid, a flute that belle gave her - but they did push her away from their little family on purpose.

i know that it was ignorance that did this - that maybe they told themselves they, as mature adults, had no problem with belle's "choices" or "lifestyle" (not "sexuality" or "orientation" or "identity") but that such an influence could be somehow pernicious to young, unformed girls. or maybe they were worried about what people would say.

i can understand and appreciate the time and place in which this decision of theirs was made.

but all the same.

that doesn't really change it. it still doesn't change how sad it makes me to see this picture, to know the history, and to know that with the passing years, belle and my grandparents fell out of each other's lives completely. she didn't know - unless maybe she read the obituaries - when they died the year before she did, mere miles away in the same city. and we didn't know when she died, didn't know anything of her at all, until i found the records several years later and saw how close in space we were to one another, but how far apart the ties had stretched.

i'm sorry, belle. i wish i could have made up for it somehow.

belle loretta hoffer (1912-1992)