a sense of face

new home

2008-04-20T13:44:00.001-07:00

sense of face now lives here.

tama leah, ca 1930

2008-04-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-22T21:49:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-02T21:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-04T19:56:00.000-08:00

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)

franz, march 1930

2007-12-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

happy winter.

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

art, 1943

2007-12-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

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.

rona, 1926

2007-12-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

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)

sam, ca 1895

2007-12-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

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)

max, ca 1895

2007-11-30T09:58:00.000-08:00

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

the rosenstein family, ca 1923

2007-11-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

happy thanksgiving.

daniel and fanny rosenstein with some of their children and grandchildren

deszö, ca 1917

2007-11-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

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)

harry, bill, selma and charlotte, 1935

2007-11-08T07:20:00.000-08:00

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)

charlie, ca 1920s

2007-11-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

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)

amalia, ca. 1900

2007-10-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

anna and celia, ca. 1900?

2007-10-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

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)

emil, ca. 1902

2007-10-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

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)

rona, ca. 1911

2007-10-05T22:18:00.000-07:00

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)