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I am interested in genealogy and family research, books, movies, cats, dogs, and baseball.

A World Apart, part 5: Relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Galicia

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My reading this time related largely to the relationships between the Jews and non-Jews in Galicia, socially, politically and otherwise.  Margoshes began this section by claiming that at least in the region where he lived near Radomishla, the Jews were economically and politically often more powerful than most of the non-Jewish population.   I would never have expected that at all; I assumed that the Jews were oppressed politically and economically.  Instead, Margoshes asserted that in area from Rzeslow to Tarnow to Krakow, the peasants lived under the dominance of the Jewish estate holders.  He wrote, “During the period between the 1880s and [World War I], this part of Galicia was a true paradise for Jews in some respects.” (p. 99; emphasis added)

According to Margoshes, in this region, anti-Jewish persecution and acts were unknown, and Jews and gentiles lived peacefully together.  If a peasant struck or even just insulted a Jew, the courts would punish the peasant by placing him in jail for at least two days.  Peasants would tip their hats to Jewish estate-holders when they were driving (oxen or horses, I assume) on the road and when they entered their homes.  (There is no mention of how the peasants treated and were treated by poor Jews, just the wealthier Jews, who in many instances were the employers of these peasants.)

Margoshes explains the political context for this by pointing out that in 1846 there had been a widespread revolt of the peasants against the wealthy Polish lords and landholders and that even forty years later, the politically powerful Polish aristocracy which controlled the government had not forgiven the peasants for the violence, deaths and damages caused by that uprising.  Thus, in a dispute between a peasant and a Jew, the government would generally side with the Jew.

Margoshes also attributed much of the peacefulness of the region to the Austro-Hungarian gendarmes who were responsible for keeping law and order in the Empire as part of the imperial army.  These soldiers lived in the area in barracks and frequently visited the estates to insure that all animals were registered and that everything was being managed according to the requirements of the Empire.

That did not mean that there were no disputes or problems between the peasants and their Jewish employers.  Margoshes described a number of incidents of theft by the peasants who worked at his father-in-law’s estate.  He wrote, “A Jewish estate-holder and his household had to have eyes in the back of their heads in order to make sure that the workers were not stealing from him….” (p. 127).  He also made the offensive generalization that it was part of the “inborn nature” of the peasants to steal: “he had to steal whenever the opportunity presented itself, especially from the Jewish estate-holder.  For a peasant, the smallest stolen article was an asset.”

In one story about the workers at his father-in-law’s estate in Zgursk, moreoever, Margoshes also revealed that the relationships between the Polish peasants who worked on the estate and their Jewish employers were not always quite so amicable.  There were at times hundreds of workers on the estate, and many of them boarded there.  Margoshes himself admits that their living conditions were substandard: “everyone found a place to sleep in one of the three stables atop hay and straw and that was it.  No pillows or sleepwear were provided and…a blanket used to cover horses served as a cover.” (p. 96) The estate did provide three meals a day that Margoshes described as generous.   Margoshes’ mother-in-law and father-in-law were the task masters who oversaw all the work on the estate, and his father-in-law was known to be rather cold and strict.

Margoshes described one time that his father-in-law lost his temper with some of the workers who in his view were not working hard enough and began beating them with a paddle.  In response, these workers and a number of others went on strike and refused to return to the fields. It took an intervention from the mother of the father-in-law to persuade the workers to return to work the next day.  Margoshes described this as if it were a one-time incident, and perhaps it was, but it does reveal that there was some abuse of the peasants by at least this powerful Jew, his own father-in-law.

Thus, although Margoshes initially described the relationship between the gentile peasants and the Jews as peaceful and amicable, these incidents of theft and abusiveness suggest that there was in fact a great deal of resentment and anger among the peasants towards the Jews. Perhaps he was deluding himself when he wrote that it was a “true paradise” for Jews in this region during that time.

According to Margoshes, the wealthy Jews also had good relationships with the wealthy Polish lords and landowners, called pritsim or porits in the singular.  He described his relationship with a neighboring porits  as “very friendly, although from a distance.” (p. 103) They would help each other out with favors, but were not social friends.  Margoshes did not think that this relationship was unusual.  He said that he “never heard of a case in the entire region of a porits who had negative relations with a Jew or where he insulted a Jew or harmed him in any way,” (p. 104) although he did then go on to mention one polits who refused to trade with Jews.

There was also, according to Margoshes, peaceful co-existence between the Catholic priests and the Jewish population.  Although he commented that “[p]riests, especially Catholic priests, cannot ever really be friends of the Jews” because “it is almost against [their]religion to love people of another faith,” (p.111), he reported that nevertheless for the most part there was little conflict between the priests and the Jewish estate holders.  He described a church law that prohibited Catholics from working as servants in Jewish homes, but pointed out that it was rarely enforced since the peasants needed employment and often worked in Jewish homes. Margoshes even developed a friendship with one of the local priests, but he severed that relationship when the priest tried to persuade Margoshes to come and see his church—not to convert, but just to go inside the church.  Obviously, this “friendship” was a superficial one based on necessity, and feelings of distrust and difference outweighed any sense of real connection.  Margoshes made it clear that it would not have been acceptable for him, as a Jew, to be seen in a Catholic church.

By the time I finished reading this section, I realized that Margoshes had had a very unrealistic view of the relationships between the Jews and non-Jews in Galicia during the late 19th century.  First, his viewpoint is entirely based on the experiences of the wealthy Jewish estate-holders.  The non-Jewish peasants may have seemed respectful and accepting of their Jewish employers, but beneath the surface there was likely a great deal of resentment and anger.  The priests and non-Jewish estate-holders also may have been willing to live peacefully side-by-side with the wealthy Jews, but there certainly was not a true acceptance or friendship in these relationships.  The gendarmes may have been keeping the peace, but beneath the surface the Jews were still the outsiders who were not integrated into the gentile world.

Moreover, Margoshes does not at all provide a picture of what life was like for the Jews who were not wealthy estate-holders.  Were their relationships with the peasants, priests, and wealthy Polish landowners as “peaceful”?  Or were they the targets of all the repressed resentment and anger that the gentiles felt towards the wealthy Jews?

It occurred to me after reading these chapters that Margoshes was writing in 1936.  He had no idea what was going to happen in Poland during the Holocaust. I wonder whether his naiveté about how the gentiles felt about the Jews was widespread in Poland during the 1930s and 1940s.  If only they had been more realistic, perhaps more of them would have left sooner.

Which brings me to another question: if things were so great in the 1880s and 1890s for wealthy Jews in Poland, why did Margoshes and so many others, including Joseph and Bessie, leave?

A World Apart, part 4: The Rich and the Poor in Galicia

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In my last post, I wrote about Margoshes’ marriage to the daughter of Mordecai Shtiglitz, the manager and lessor of a substantial estate in Zgursk, not far from Radomishla.  After checking Google maps, I realized that Radomishla is only about 60 miles from Dzikow where our family might have lived, so Margoshes and Joseph and Bessie may have lived quite near each other in the 1880s.  Whether their lifestyle was anything like his we do not know, but it made reading his story even more compelling to me.

After Margoshes married, there was a three year period of what he called “kest.”  According to the glossary provided in the book, kest referred to the practice where the family of the groom provided financial support to the groom and bride after the wedding to enable the groom to study without having to worry about earning a living.  Margoshes and his new wife lived with his in-laws, both of whom worked very hard to manage and oversee the estate.  Margoshes, however, spent the early days of his marriage being idle, reading and eating a lot of fruit. At one point his father-in-law arranged for him to oversee the cutting down of trees for lumber on a nearby property where the Polish owner needed assistance and agreed to allow Margoshes to keep the profits in exchange for overseeing the labor.  Margoshes did not do any of the physical labor himself, but would ride out to make sure that the work was being done.  He hired a Jewish man to help him supervise the work.  After a short period of time, Margoshes decided not to pursue the lumber business any further.  He wrote that he found it tedious and that his father-in-law and wife found it beneath his dignity.  He sold the business to someone else and returned to his “kest” lifestyle.

About a year and half after he was married, Margoshes and his wife moved to Yozefov, a 450 acre estate about a mile away from Zgursk, where his wife’s sister and her husband had lived.  The land was owned by a non-religious Jew who had leased the land to Margoshes’ father-in-law as a place where his older daughter and her husband could live and work.  When the older daughter’s husband died, Margoshes and his wife were essentially told that they had to move to Yozefov and take over managing the estate.  Margoshes lived there for ten years and, as he described it, was his own boss for the first time.  The financial arrangement, however, put Margoshes in a risk-free situation.  His father-in-law covered the expenses and took the profits, but Margoshes and his wife were able to live without cost in exchange for overseeing the estate.  When the lease was up after ten years, Margoshes still had the original dowry from when he married plus the livestock and equipment from Yozefov which he then used to set up his own business.

In this section of the book, there is a little more light shed on how “the other half lived.”  First, it is clear that there were many Jews who were not wealthy at all. As described by Margoshes, “Jewish economic life in Galicia was always uncertain.  People who had done well for years and lived an upper class existence suddenly became paupers due to unforeseen circumstances.” (p. 58) Margoshes  observed many poor Jews while living in Zgursk: “…itinerant paupers were constantly wandering through.  A day rarely passed that 10-15 poor Jews did not appear in the manor yard.  These vagrants would often wander in whole families: man and wife, several children, and sometimes even infants at the breast. Every poor person …received a generous portion of hot food, and a big piece of bread for the road, along with two kreuzer in alms.  They were just not allowed to spend the night in the manor yard; their ranks included a lot of undesirable people and thieves.  They were sent away to the nearby inn, or if space was short, to the [poor house] in Radomishla.” (p. 67)

Margoshes claimed that he was the only person in the region with the ability or desire to read books in Hebrew, German or Polish, and when his brother-in-law Mikhl wanted to learn, there was no one but Margoshes to teach him.  Margoshes found Radomishla to be more sophisticated than other towns and shtetls nearby.  In the other towns, the Jews had cows as the source of most of their income.  They would milk and feed the cows themselves and tend to their own gardens to provide a meager living for their families.  (Margoshes’ tone in describing these hard-working farmers is blatantly condescending.)  In contrast, he found the Jews in Radomishla to be far more successful merchants who engaged in trade and did not own or take care of cows. There were timber traders, cattle dealers, and many money lenders—many people who were extremely wealthy.  Although Margoshes recognized that there were also poor people in Radomishla, he claimed that there were not as destitute as poor people in the other towns and shtetls.

Often I feel really annoyed by Margoshes.  He was what we might call today a very entitled young man—someone whose family was wealthy and who never really had to do any physical labor at all and barely any other hard work of any kind.  He was handed everything on a silver platter, yet has the nerve to express disdain for those who were less fortunate.  I may react this way in part because I imagine that our ancestors, Joseph and Bessie, were probably among those poor farmers Margoshes was looking down at from up on his high horse as the fortunate son and son-in-law of two wealthy men. I am still hoping that somewhere in his story, Margoshes developed some perspective and some empathy for those who were less fortunate.

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Here’s a map that shows where Joseph Margoshes lived from birth through the early years of his marriage.  You may have to zoom out once to see the three locations: Lviv, Tarnow and Radomishla.

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A World Apart, part 3: Marriage in Galicia

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I am continuing to read Joseph Margoshes’ A World Apart in order to learn about life in Galicia in the late 19th century.  Last night I learned something about arranged marriages in Galicia.  When Margoshes was only fourteen years old, his mother began to look for a prospective bride for her son.  Since Margoshes’ father had died, Margoshes was a candidate for an early marriage in order to relieve his mother of the burden of supporting him and caring for him.  Margoshes also said that early marriage was a way “to avoid moral lassitude, or strange and sinful thoughts, God forbid.” (p. 58)

Margoshes then described how shadken, or matchmakers, would come to his school to observe and evaluate the young boys in his class as potential grooms. Margoshes was considered a very attractive candidate: he was tall, good-looking, well-educated and from a well-regarded family.  His mother was presented with many different potential matches. Margoshes reported that parents never spoke to their children about these potential matches; it was all out of their hands and determined by the parents.  His mother rejected a number of potential brides because they were “unrefined upstarts of a very low social status…[who] would bring shame to his father’s grave…” (p. 60)

Eventually his mother agreed to an appropriate match, the daughter of a very successful man, Mordecai Stiglitz, who lived in Zgursk, a village near Radomisha, a town not too far from Tarnow where Margoshes and mother and brother were then living.  As described by Margoshes, Stiglitz had a big estate that he had acquired through successful leasing arrangements with the descendant of a Polish count who had owned several thousand acres in the area.  Stiglitz’s estate was itself thousands of acres, and he had many head of cattle, 40 horses, 40 oxen,  70-80 milk cows, and about 30 peasants who lived and worked on the estate.  They grew grain and grass on the estate and needed workers to tend to the livestock and to cut and care for the grain and grass, which they baled and sold in the market.

The Stiglitz family met Margoshes’ mother’s standards, and Margoshes was subjected to an evaluation of his knowledge of Gemara, Talmud and Jewish law in general.  He passed the test and was approved as a groom for Stiglitz’s daughter (whose name is never mentioned by Margoshes in his telling of this story).  Margoshes was only sixteen years old at that point.

After a lavish wedding with three feasts, including one for the poor Jews and beggars who lived in the area, Margoshes moved to Zgursk to live with his new bride on her father’s estate.  As Margoshes wrote, “Initially I did not really know my bride; we had only seen each other and talked very little during the engagement ceremony, and then not even exchanged a letter.  However, as soon as we got to know each other better after the wedding, we became as intimiate and loving as if we had known one another for many years.  This heart felt love has continued to this day, thank God, for over fifty years and will remain until the end of our lives.” (p. 65)  Two teenagers whose marriage was arranged by their parents and who did not know each other at all somehow managed to fall in love and create a long and happy life together.

I have heard and read about arranged marriages before, not only in Jewish families, but in many other cultures as well.  We recently watched an excellent movie, “Fill the Void,” about contemporary Israel and arranged marriages among the Hasidim today.  I know that often these marriages did not end up so happily, but it does seem that more often they worked—that two people who did not know each other somehow fell in love or at least developed a strong enough bond to create a lasting relationship.  It is so foreign to my own experience—I cannot imagine letting my parents select a life partner for me or marrying someone I’d only met once.   Yet I also cannot pass judgment on the practice since it does seem that often parents do know what is best for their children.

I have to assume that Joseph’s marriage to Bessie was itself an arranged marriage.  Joseph was a widow (or so we assume; perhaps his first wife had left him) with at least two young sons, Abraham, who would have been about nine, and Max, who would have been about three.  Bessie was his cousin and at least ten years younger than Abraham and about 24 when she married him.  Based on the customs of the day and the circumstances, most likely a matchmaker put together these two cousins so that Bessie would have a husband and so Joseph would have a wife and a mother for his children.  Did they grow to love each other? Or was it purely a convenient arrangement? The inscription on Joseph’s footstone certainly suggests that he was a good husband and father, so I’d like to think that, like Margoshes and his bride, Joseph and Bessie developed a loving marriage.  But then I am a hopeless romantic!

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A World Apart, Part 2: Life in Galicia

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In the segment of the book I read last night, Margoshes described his childhood and in particular two aspects of it: his education and the role of the synagogue in his life.  One thing that had not been clear to me in the first part of the book is that Margoshes and his family dressed in traditional Hasidic clothing.  That is, even though they considered themselves maskilim and not Hasidic, they dressed like Hasidim and not in modern clothing.

Here is what Margoshes has to say about his teachers in Lemberg, where he lived until he was fourteen: “I don’t have much to recount about the [teachers] I had in my youth.  One thing I realize now is that they knew very little themselves and were therefore incapable of accomplishing anything substantial with their students, even though their pupils included boys with good heads on their shoulders.”  (p. 39)  Some of his teachers were worse than incompetent—they were psychologically and physically abusive, though no one would have thought of it that way back then.  Margoshes reports that there was an understanding among the boys at the school that they would not report what the teachers were doing to them.  Only when a servant noticed a huge bruise on Margoshes’ leg from a teacher’s painful pinching did his parents learn of the abuse and have him change schools (though not have the teacher removed or disciplined).  Although Margoshes did have one teacher whom he found effective and knowledgeable, overall his experience in school was not a positive force in his life.

The school was for boys only; there is no discussion of what girls his age would be doing while he was in school.  Margoshes did have two girls who became his friends when he would visit their house to pick up papers for his father.  He would sit and play cards with them while he waited, but he never told his family about the friendships because apparently playing cards and being friends with girls would not have been considered acceptable behavior.

Other than these two girls, Margoshes only discusses male friends—boys he would read and discuss books with in an area where they would gather in front of the synagogue, books that he describes as Haskalah books.  He does not explain what that means, but from what I can infer, these were books written in Hebrew that went beyond traditional prayer or holy books and discussed broader issues and views of the world.  There were 15-20 boys who would gather every night to do this.  Margoshes wrote, ”Above everything, we would talk a lot and wonder at the young people of Lemberg who had thrust themselves into the wide world several years earlier.  … [This] was our ideal, and we all aspired to reach those heights.”  (p. 47) Interestingly, although these boys knew Yiddish, Hebrew, and some German, they did not know Polish, the language of their country, and had no desire to learn it.  “Our spirits were focused on ideals and we had no interest in practical life.” (p. 48)

The institution that played a huge part in the daily life of Margoshes and his community was the synagogue or “kloyz,” as they called it.  Men attended the kloyz twice a day every day and drew people from across the region.  Poor people as well as wealthy people prayed at the Lemberg Kloyz. There were many wealthy men in the community, and the kloyz was also where they made business connections.  Overall, however, it was more a place for religious and social gathering and played a central role in the lives of these people.  Margoshes wrote, “I loved the Kloyz with all of my heart and always felt at home there; after all, I was there twice a day over several years for prayers.” (p. 51) He considers it the place where the best times of his childhood took place.

When he was fourteen and after his father had died, Margoshes and his family moved to Tarnow, a city where there were over 15,000 Jews (somewhat smaller than Lemberg). Sadly for Margoshes, he did not find a similar community of boys in Tarnow who were interested in reading Haskalah books.  His traditional education continued with one of the most respected rabbis in Tarnow, but his intellectual life and interest in more worldly matters seems to have been limited after the move away from Lemberg.

Although the descriptions of his education and religious life were interesting, I found this whole section of the book somewhat frustrating.  Margoshes grew up in a relatively wealthy home (they had servants, after all) and a home where he was encouraged to receive a traditional education.  But the book nowhere reveals up to this point what life was like for those who were not so fortunate.  What did the girls do while the boys were at school? What about children from poor families? Did they get any education? Margoshes is rightly proud of his accomplished family, but it would be more interesting to me (and I assume others) if he had revealed more about the rest of his society.  Perhaps that will come now in the next section which describes his marriage and presumably a more adult perspective.

Maybe Joseph and Bessie were among the educated and wealthy Jews in their community, but it seems more likely that they were not.  I am hoping that Margoshes at some point talks about the lives of people from different social and economic backgrounds.

A World Apart, Part 1: Life in Galicia in the late 19th Century

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I ordered a book on what life was like in Galicia in the late 19th century.  The book is A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia by Joseph Margoshes. (The book was written in Yiddish in 1936, but translated into English in 2010 by Rebecca Margolis and Ira Robinson.)  Margoshes was born in 1866 in Lemberg (Lvov/Lviv), which is now part of Ukraine.  According to the introduction to the book, he was born into a family with a “distinguished rabbinical ancestry” and “received a traditional Jewish education in Bible and Talmud, as well as grounding in the German language and European culture.” (p.vii)  As an adult, he spent several years administering agricultural estates in western Galicia, the region where our family most likely lived.  He emigrated to America at the turn of the century and became a well-known writer for the Yiddish press in New York City.

He wrote A World Apart as a memoir not only of his life, but of the culture and world he left behind.  The book is considered to be an important documentation of what life was like in Galicia during that time period.  As Margoshes himself wrote in his forward to the book, “I have lived in a different generation and under completely different circumstances from my own children and many of my friends and acquaintances.  I thus hope that it might interest them to read the memoirs of my past.” (p.3)

Since the author lived in Galicia and left Galicia during the years that Joseph and Bessie, Abraham, Max, Hyman and Tillie lived in and left Galicia, I hope to be able to get a better picture of what their world was like.  I’ve only read the first thirty-five pages or so, but can already report some sense of that world.  What struck me most about the first segment of the book was its portrayal of a diverse Jewish society.  In my mind I had an image of Fiddler on the Roof where everyone was relatively indifferent to secular education and the secular world and completely immersed in Jewish life.  Margoshes immediately breaks down that image.

In fact, Jewish society in Galicia was not unlike Jewish society in Israel or the US today with a wide range of subgroups with varying degrees of religious observance— from the Hasidim to what we might now call Modern Orthodox to very assimilated or what Margoshes refers to as “German” Jews.  By that he does not mean that they were from Germany, but rather that they had abandoned traditional Hasidic garb, wore modern clothes, did not keep kosher, and spoke German more than Yiddish.  Margoshes family itself had representatives across the spectrum.  His father was descended from a long line of scholarly rabbis and considered themselves “maskils” or members of the Haskalah or Enlightenment Movement, which promoted not only Jewish education but also secular education, much as the Modern Orthodox movement does today in the US.  They were deeply observant, but not cut off from the outside world, unlike the Hasidim who lived much more insular lives and were not interested at all in secular education.  On the other hand, Margoshes’ maternal grandfather was a highly educated cloth merchant who traveled to Vienna for business and raised thirteen children, only two of whom were religious.  His sons were all “Germans,” and his daughters were well-educated and read the German classics.

Margoshes’ mother, however, was one of the two children who were religious, although she was well-educated.  Her first marriage ended when her husband began to dress and act “German-style.”  She then married Margoshes’ father, who was himself a maskil —religious, but not Hasidic.  (Interestingly, Margoshes’ father was a widower whose first wife was his niece, an indication of how liberally families allowed marriage among close relatives, as Joseph and Bessie reputedly were.)

After providing this family background, Margoshes describes events surrounding a major rift in the Galician Jewish society.  His father had originally belonged to an association of educated but religious Jews (maskilim) called the Shomer Yisrael Society.  In the late 1860s, however, his father left the Shomer Yisrael Society because it had become far too assimilationist.  For example, the Society submitted a proposal to the Imperial Ministry in Vienna that would restrict who could be a rabbi recognized by the state to those with more “German” tendencies and that would also impose reforms to the education provided in the Jewish schools, such as requiring German language classes and limiting Talmud classes to those twelve or older.  The Ministry was in favor of these proposals, as it favored modernization of the Jewish society.  Margoshes’ father and others were vehemently opposed and aligned themselves with the Hasidim to fight the proposal.  They formed an opposition group called Machzikei Hadas to organize their opposition to the Shomer Yisrael Society.

Margoshes wrote in detail about the long political battle between these two groups and how the maskilim and Hasidim worked together to fight the assimilationist Shomer Yisrael Society.  He also describes the overall status of Jewish society in the Galician world:  “In that era, the leaders of the province of Galicia were adopting a more liberal outlook.  Jews were granted full rights as citizens and they were allowed to vote as well as to be elected to the Galician Landtag and the Austrian Reichsrat.” (p. 18) The battle between the two groups became therefore also a battle for political representation of the Jewish citizens in the secular governments, not just a battle over religious practice and education.

In order for Machzikei Hadas to function as a legitimate association and publish newsletters legally, it had to obtain state permission.  The Shomer Yisrael Society engaged in political maneuvering to prevent this, but ultimately Machzikei Hadas was able to obtain approval and publish a newspaper after some political maneuvering of its own. Their ultimate coup was in 1879 when they were able to elect the Krakow Rabbi, a Hasid, to the Austrian Reichsrat, the first rabbi to be elected to such a position. As Margoshes wrote, “The election of the Krakow Rabbi to the Austrian Reichsrat made a tremendous impression on the entire Jewish world, and Galician Jews anticipated salvation.  It gave them enormous pleasure to see even a single Rabbi achieve the major honor of sitting among so many great personages.” (p. 24)

As I read these pages, it raised several questions and thoughts for me.  First, I was struck by the fact that Jews even then (and before then) fought among themselves over issues of observance versus assimilation, rather than trying to unite against the non-Jewish majority who controlled the laws and the government.  I thought of that old joke about the Jew found after being stranded on a deserted island for several years.  His rescuers noticed he had built two structures and asked him what they were.  His response:  “This one is my shul, and that is the “other” shul.”  We always need some group of other Jews with whom to disagree and debate, don’t we?

Second, I was surprised by the fact that at least at that time, Jews were not necessarily poor or poorly treated by the Austrian people or government.  Perhaps more will be revealed as I read further, or perhaps Margoshes’ family were more elite and comfortable than most others.

Finally, his description of the various segments of the Jewish society made me wonder where on the spectrum our great-grandparents lived.  Were they Hasidic, maskilim, or “German” in the way they lived their lives? Were they educated in worldly matters? Did Joseph wear payes and a streimel or did he dress in modern clothes? My guess is that they were not Hasidic, not even very observant, but only because I know that my grandmother was not religious (though she did have a kosher home), but I really don’t know.  She was born here, and perhaps Joseph and Bessie changed and assimilated once they settled in America.

To be continued, as I continue to read….

 

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Tillie’s Story

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Although I have no memory of meeting Aunt Tillie, I heard her name all the time when I was growing up. (I don’t know which spelling she preferred; sometimes it is Tilly, sometimes Tillie.  I have used both spellings throughout the blog.)  She was very close to my grandmother Gussie, and my mother and her sister and brother adored her.    She was described to me as a lot of fun: vivacious, outgoing, funny and loving.  It seems she was the one who provided a lot of the happy experiences for my mother and her siblings growing up.

Like my grandmother, she had a tough life.  She was born in 1884 and came to the US with Bessie and Chaim when she was 6 or 7 (census reports are in conflict; some say 1890, some say 1891).  In 1900 when she was sixteen, she was living on Ridge Street with her parents, her brother Hyman, and her two little sisters, Gussie, who was five, and Frieda, was three.  When her father Joseph died a year later, my guess is that Tillie must have become a second parent to Gussie, Frieda and the infant Sam.

In 1905 when she was 22, Tillie married Aaron Ressler.  At the time she was still living on Ridge Street with her mother and siblings.  Aaron was 26 at the time and was also living in the Lower East Side.  By 1910, Tillie and Aaron had three sons, Leo, Joseph, and Harry, all under five.  They were living at 94 Broadway in Brooklyn, where they owned a grocery store at 100 Broadway.  In addition, Gussie had moved in with them, choosing to live with Tillie instead of moving in with Bessie after she had married Phillip Moskowitz.  (Bessie and Phillip were still living on the Lower East Side in 1910, so moving to Brooklyn must have been a big deal for twelve year old Gussie.) Gussie helped take care of the boys while Aaron and Tillie worked in the store.  Family lore has it that my grandfather spotted my grandmother while she was sitting in the window of Tillie and Aaron’s store.

Life must have seemed pretty good for the Ressler family in 1910.  By 1918, however, things had changed.  On Aaron’s draft registration form of that year, he reported that he was not employed and was suffering from locomotor ataxia, a condition that causes pain and loss of muscle control and movements.  The 1920 census did report that Aaron worked at a grocery store, although it also said he worked at home.  They no longer lived on Broadway, but on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn.  Aaron died six years later in February, 1926, leaving behind Tillie and three sons aged 20, 19, and 17.

Tillie continued to run the grocery store for some time after Aaron died. I cannot find any record of Tillie and her two younger sons in the 1930 census, but in 1940 she was living on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx with Joe and Harry (Leo had married Mildred and moved to Connecticut by then).  According to the census, she had also lived at this same address in 1935, so at some point Tillie had left Brooklyn as a widow with two almost grown sons and moved all the way to the Bronx.  She never remarried and died at age 72 in 1956 after suffering from painful arthritis.  My mother remembers that she was treated with cortisone, perhaps excessively, and ended up dying in a public hospital on Welfare Island in NYC, where my grandmother would go to see her every week.

I don’t know why she moved to the Bronx, perhaps to make a fresh start.  My mother remembers that Aunt Tillie lived in an apartment on the then-glamorous Grand Concourse with her two adult sons, Joe and Harry.  I don’t know how she supported herself after Aaron died, but somehow she did.  My mother was born after Aaron died, and so she only knew Tillie as a widow, yet she remembers Tillie as a happy, upbeat person who would bring my mother baked goods (and once a large easel) that she carried on the subway from the Bronx to Brooklyn on her weekly trips. Tillie was the one who held the family together—the one who encouraged my aunt Elaine to go stay with Leo and Mildred in Connecticut to broaden her horizons, who took my mother to baseball games, who could occasionally get my shy grandmother to socialize. When my sister was born in 1955, Tillie brought treats not only for my mother, but also for the other new mothers who were sharing the same hospital room.   She was a woman who was born in Europe, but spoke English like an American, who brought up three sons, took care of her sisters and brothers, and was one of the most positive influences on my mother and her siblings. She was strong and positive despite all the hardships she had faced.  I wish I had had a chance to know her.

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What’s next?

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I am currently waiting for three more documents that I am hoping will provide some clues to where our family lived in Galicia: Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate, Tilly’s death certificate, and Max’s naturalization papers. It may be quite a while before I get these three documents since (1) the FHL is currently not processing requests because it is upgrading its system; (2) I just ordered Tilly’s death certificate from NYC, and that will take at least a few weeks, and (3) USCIS estimates a 90 day wait for naturalization records, and I only made that request four weeks ago.  Thus, I may not have any new information for quite a while. From my experience with marriage and death certificates, I am not too hopeful that I will get anything too helpful from the first two; I have no idea what the naturalization papers may provide, but they may be our best chance for finding another clue as to the hometown.  I remain determined to find the answer to the question of where our family lived.

I also may not soon have an answer for the other big question: are we related to the Brotmanville Brotmans, and if so, how? Without some way to learn more about Moses Brotman’s parents, I can’t make a connection between Moses and Joseph. Even though I was able to find two of Moses’ living descendants, neither can answer any questions about his parents, and the other living descendants have been unwilling to respond to my inquiries.  To be honest, I doubt they would have that information anyway.

To answer either of these questions will require access to documents from Galicia that date back before 1890, documents that are obviously not in English.  Although many Galician records exist and are indexed on various websites, I have not been able yet to find anything that relates to our ancestors or Moses’ Brotman’s ancestors.  I need more help, more training, more experience before I can do that effectively.  I will be consulting with some others with more experience to see how to get the education I need. I have just joined a Yahoo Group for people interested in genealogy research in the Tarnozbreg region of Poland, which is where Dzikow is located, the town I think may be the most likely place our family lived in Galicia. I just have to be patient and willing to work hard, and I believe I will find the answers to these questions.

That does not mean that there is nothing to do until then.  There is still a lot to do to make the blog a real resource for our family and for future generations.  I need your help for that.  Yes, more photos and documents would be great.  But I’ve been thinking that it would also be nice to add more personal information about some of the family members I never knew. I’ve added some personal touches to the descriptions of my grandparents, aunt and uncle, but I didn’t know Abraham, Max, Hyman, Tilly or any of their children.  I need help from the rest of you to add a personal dimension to their portraits. Right now I am working on a portrait of Tilly and her life, for example.  Even a brief description of a person’s career, interests, or personality will add some “flesh” to the facts and dates that are currently reported on the blog pages. Are any of you are interested in writing either a “guest post” or in providing a few words to add to the page about your parents or grandparents?  What would you like future generations of Brotmans to know about their ancestors?

Miracles

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There has been more than enough media attention paid to the fact that Hanukkah coincides with Thanksgiving this year.  There have been menu suggestions, historical comparisons, mathematical calendar explanations, and rabbinic messages regarding the coincidence.  It’s all been fun and interesting, but in the end nothing too serious since it only will happen this year for any of us living today and for hundreds of generations to come.  (Apparently the next time it happens will be almost 80,000 years from now.)  It’s a once in many lifetimes coincidence with no deeper hidden meaning.  And yet here I am, looking for meaning.

Aside from planning to have latkes with the turkey, I hadn’t given this whole thing much thought myself, but now that the two events are about to occur, I have been thinking about what this means to me.  Both holidays celebrate freedom and specifically freedom of religion.  The Pilgrims left England and came to the New World to be able to practice their own form of Christianity; the Maccabees fought the Syrian army in order to be able to practice Judaism. When we light the menorah, we not only celebrate the miracle of the oil lasting eight days. we also celebrate the miracle that we have survived—not only then, but every time before and after that time when some army, some nation, some maniac tried to exterminate the Jewish people.  It is indeed a miracle that we, the Jewish people, are here.

Although Thanksgiving has no particular miracle associated with it (aside from the miracle that at least for a short time, the settlers were not trying to kill the natives who lived here first), we celebrate the miracle of America—its bounty, its beauty, and its identity as a place of refuge not only for the Pilgrims, but for all the immigrants who came later to escape religious, political or economic oppression.  This year when we eat the turkey and light the candles, I will be grateful not only for what I have now, but for all those who came before me.  I will think of Joseph and Bessie and be grateful for their courage and determination.  It is in many ways a miracle that they were able to come here with their children and survive with few resources or skills other than hard work, determination, hope, and love.  I am so thankful for all they did and for everything their descendants—my grandparents and my parents —have done to provide me with the life I live today.  It is indeed a miracle that we, all of our family members, all of the descendants, are here.

Of course, this year I am also grateful to have found all of you, my long-lost cousins, and for all my relatives everywhere.  Enjoy this crazy coincidence of Thanksgivukah in whatever way you celebrate it, and let’s hope for continuing miracles in our lives and the lives of all people everywhere.  It is indeed a miracle that we are here.

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A Brief Introduction to Genealogical Research

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Some of you might be interested in how to do genealogical research yourselves, so I thought I’d provide a very brief introduction for those who might want to try.

I would start (and did start) with ancestry.com.   You can get a short free trial subscription (14 days) just to see if you are intrigued. (And no, I don’t get a kickback from ancestry if you subscribe!) Ancestry provides digital copies of many documents including all US census reports up through the 1940  census (the later census reports are not yet available), except for the 1890 census which was destroyed in a fire. (That is particularly frustrating and sad for people researching ancestors who arrived in the 1880s.  We will likely never know where Joseph, Abraham and Max first settled, although it appears that all three arrived sometime between 1888 and 1890. )

Ancestry also has many other records available in digital form: some naturalization papers, some draft registration forms, some yearbooks, phone books, directories, and ship manifests.  Many records, however, are not directly accessible through ancestry.  For example, NYC birth, death and marriage certificates are not viewable through ancestry; you may find a record that indicates some of the information found on such certificates, but not the entire certificate.  For that, you have to order a digital copy or a photocopy elsewhere.

I have found the Family History Library to be a great resource for this.  The FHL is run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City; apparently the Mormons are trying to collect the names of anyone who ever lived as part of a religious mission to save everyone’s souls.  Fortunately, you don’t have to be a Mormon or support their mission in order to be able to use their services.  I guess the Church sees helping others find their relatives to be part of that overall mission.

At any rate, to request documents from the FHL, you need to find the NYC certificate number[1] and then the FHL film number.  Sometimes ancestry.com will have the certificate numbers, but usually I go to another website, http://www.germangenealogygroup.com/records-search/, to locate the certificate number.  It provides an index of NYC birth, death, and marriage certificates, but only for those years for which NYC has made them accessible to the general public.  For example, death certificates only run up to 1948; birth certificates are even more limited in terms of availability.  (I assume this is for privacy reasons, just as with the census reports.)  If, however, the certificate you are seeking falls within the date range, you can find the certificate number and dates through the germangenealogy website.

Once I have that information, I then go to another website, http://stevemorse.org/vital/filmnotes.html, where I can enter the information into the appropriate boxes, and then obtain FHL film number.  That website also includes a link to the FHL Photoduplication Request form.  By filling out that form with the numbers I now have, I can make a request to FHL for the certificates I am seeking.  There is a limit of five per month, and it can take several weeks to receive them, but it is free.  Amazing, it is free!

For other documents, for example, more recent death certificates and other documents like Social Security applications or immigration papers, the process can be more complicated, involving notarized documents, some fees, and much longer waits.  But starting with ancestry.com and using the FHL process can give you a good start on finding out more about your ancestors.  I found most of the documents that I have used in my research and reported here through those two sources and have only turned to the less efficient means of obtaining information more recently.

Of course, there have been lots of other sources of information: all of you who gave me clues and information, my mentor Renee and other experienced genealogists who helped me dig up clues, and many other websites like http://www.jewishgen.org/ and Findagrave.com.  There are still lots of other sources I have yet to explore, but those will require more time and more training before I can use them very effectively.

[1] This website only indexes NYC documents and some Nassau/Suffolk County documents.  For other locations in New York State and other states, you need to check the appropriate website for vital records for that county or state.

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