I thought you’d all like to see this picture Naomi sent me of Max, Sophie, Rosalie and Renee. From the ages of the girls, I am guessing that this was taken sometime between 1913-1915?
Wonderful photo! I am going to add it to the Max page as well.
After learning the name of Frieda Brotman’s husband, I was curious as to what happened to Harry Coopersmith after losing his young wife and infant son. Also, I wondered how long they had been married and whether or not Max had been born prematurely. I looked up Harry Coopersmith in the index of NYC marriages and found two for whom no bride was listed. I ordered both certificates, hoping one would be for the marriage of Harry Coopersmith and Frieda Brotman. They arrived yesterday, and imagine my confusion when BOTH certificates were for Harry and Frieda.
The first one is dated May 28, 1923. The marriage ceremony took place at City Hall in NYC, and the officiant was the Assistant City Clerk. It has Frieda’s home address wrong—it was 646 E. 6th Street, not 446 E. 6th Street. It was witnessed by L.B. Waterman and Nathan Stern and signed by Nathan Stern. The front of the form seems to have been filled out by someone in the clerk’s office, not Frieda, Harry or Mr. Stern, since their signatures all are in very different handwriting than that on the front. Also, Frieda would have known her own address. But this is certainly our Frieda—parents’ names are Joseph and Bessie Brotman. [Notice also that her age is wrong; in 1923 she was 26, not 20. Perhaps she lied about her age because Harry was younger than she was?]
The second one is dated September 2, 1923, a little over three months later. This one appears to have been filled out by someone else, not the clerk. It now has Frieda’s correct address (but not her correct age), but Bessie is spelled incorrectly. I can’t tell whether the handwriting matches any of the signatures on the back (I guess I need the FBI, Bruce!), but what’s odd is that all those signatures seem to match, as if one person signed for Harry, Frieda and the witnesses Max Sambel and Juda Kramer (?). This time the ceremony took place at Bessie and Philip’s apartment at 646 E. 6th Street, and the officiant was Selig Vogel. There is only one Selig Vogel in the 1930 US Census, and he was a rabbi. So obviously this was a religious ceremony, presumably meant to “validate” the earlier civil ceremony.
So…why did they get married twice? Was the first one a secret marriage? Why did they decide to have a religious ceremony the second time, and why did they wait three months? If Max was a full term baby, Frieda would have been about a month pregnant by September 2, 1923 —would she have even known she was pregnant that early back then before EPT? If so, were they then ready to “go public” and have a public ceremony? If Max was born prematurely, which was one possible cause of his death, then maybe Frieda wasn’t even pregnant yet. And who filled out and signed the forms? And who are Max Sambel and Juda Kramer (if that’s what it says)?
I would love to hear the speculations of the rest of you. Leave your thoughts in the comments space below. Meanwhile, I will go see what else I can learn about what happened to Harry and who those other witnesses might have been.
One of the remaining mysteries in our family story was the story of Frieda Brotman, Joseph and Bessie’s third daughter who was born in 1897 in New York, their second child born in the US. Family lore had it that Frieda died in childbirth as a result of a botched delivery by a doctor who was described by Tilly and Gussie as a butcher. That was all I knew about her—not her married name, not her husband’s name, and not her child’s name. In fact, no one knew when she died or whether the baby survived, though we assumed that he or she had not survived. Without the husband’s name, I was sure I’d never be able to find out the answers to those questions.
Then I decided that if I searched for all Friedas who were buried at Mt Sinai and Mt Hebron cemeteries between 1920 and 1930, I might find some answers. I picked those dates because Frieda was listed on the 1920 census as living with Bessie and Philip and because I knew she had died by 1930 because my mother Florence was named for her. I focused on Mt Sinai and Mt Hebron because I assumed she would have been buried either where her father was buried or where other family members were later buried. I found two possible Friedas that fit those dates. One did not pan out, but the other was buried in the same section as Bessie. Her name was Coopersmith, and when I searched for other Coopersmiths buried there, I found that there was a one day old baby named Max Coopersmith buried there also in that same section. I ordered the death certificates for both Frieda and Max Coopersmith and then waited and waited for the documents to arrive.
Well, they arrived the other day, and sure enough, it was our Frieda, as you can see from the death certificate below.
The father’s name was Joseph Brotman, mother Pessel Broat. (You should also notice that Frieda’s age is wrong; it says she was born in 1903, which was two years after Joseph died.)
The baby Max was her son: parents’ names were Frieda Brotman and Harry Coopersmith.
The baby died a day after birth; she died the following day. My heart broke for Harry and for all of her family. My mother said that my grandmother never spoke about Frieda, that it must have been too painful. After all, Gussie and Frieda were only two years apart, much younger than their older siblings, and must have been very close. They were the two girls born in America and must have had different outlooks and experiences than Tilly and their older brothers.
I sent the death certificates to my brother Ira, who is a doctor, to get his insights on the causes of death. Frieda’s death certificate says that she died of “broncho pneumonia and influenza” with “pulmonary edema and acute dilation of the stomach” as contributing causes. Ira thought that this could mean either that she died of peripartum sepsis or pre-eclampsia based on this combination of symptoms and causes. As for Max, his certificate says that he died of congenital atelectasis, which means his lungs had not expanded sufficiently. Ira thought that might have been caused either by sepsis or by prematurity. In any event Ira concluded that it did not appear that the deaths were caused by malpractice by the doctor.
I am now trying to find out more about Harry and his marriage to Frieda, though I am not sure what I will be able to find. But as I’ve learned by doing all this, you just never know what you can find. I never thought I would find Frieda. Now that I have, she is not just a name, but a real person who died far too young with her whole life in front of her. And imagine if Max had lived? How many more Brotman cousins we might have had.
[This is the second part of my post about the weekend in New York. If you haven’t read the post about the Lower East Side, that is Part One. This is Part Two.]
Before I write about my trip to Mt Zion and Mt Hebron cemeteries, let me tell you that I have never been someone who understood why people go to cemeteries, and it always seemed a little creepy to me. I don’t believe in an afterlife, and it seemed to me that you could remember those who had died without standing over the place where their bodies were buried.
I initially saw a cemetery trip this time as a way of doing more research. Then when I realized that Joseph was not buried near any of his children or his wife, I felt badly. It was likely no one had been there for a hundred years. Did that matter? Joseph didn’t know, so why did I care? I am not sure, but somehow I felt compelled to pay him honor. In fact, once I received the photos of the headstone and footstone from Charlie Katz, I no longer needed to go for research. I was going for some emotional reason that was mysterious even to me. The trip to Mt Hebron, which is only ten minutes away from Mt Zion, then seemed like an obvious addition to the trip to Mt Zion.
So off we went on Sunday morning, first to Mt Zion. It is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in New York City, and the graves are very close together with almost no open land left. I knew from Charlie Katz that it would be hard to find Joseph’s gravesite. The stones are so close together that it is very difficult to walk between and around them, and without Charlie’s directions, we might never have found it. But then suddenly we spotted it.
I stood there, not really knowing what to do or to think. I thought of his life, thanked him silently for bringing his family here, tried to imagine what he looked like. Did he have red hair? No idea. Then I left on the headstone one of the beach rocks I had collected the prior weekend. I had decided to bring a piece of something I loved to leave at the graves, and the beach is the place that always makes me the happiest. I left feeling that I had at least done something to honor his memory.
Then we went on to Mt Hebron, a much larger and much less crowded cemetery. The section where Bessie is buried is across the road from the section where my grandparents and Sam are buried. [What I didn’t know then is that Frieda is also buried there, but that’s a story for another post.] I saw Philip’s headstone right away, but did not realize that Bessie’s was right behind it, as you can see in the photo below.
It took some counting and looking, but finally Harvey spotted it. I felt the same way standing at Bessie’s grave—grateful and wistful. I found myself drawn to her name—both in Hebrew and in English—and rubbed my hand over the name Bessie, saying, “That’s my name.” I also was very touched to see that the Brotman name was included on her headstone, not just Moskowitz.
I left one of my beach rocks there as well and then walked across the street to the other section.
In that section I first saw Sam Brotman’s headstone. I never met Sam, and I really felt badly about that, given that he lived until I was 22 years old. I left a beach rock on his stone, saying, “I am sorry I never met you.”
In the row behind Sam’s grave I found my grandparents’ grave. The headstone was covered with ivy, which looked pretty but made reading the inscriptions impossible. I gently tore away the ivy so I could see the stones.
My grandfather died when I was almost five, so I have only the vaguest memories of him, but have heard lots of stories about him—how funny he was, how smart he was (he knew several languages), and how opinionated. He walked across Romania to escape oppression and poverty. I wish I had had a chance to know him better. There was a rock left on his headstone when we arrived. Who could have been there? I don’t think it could have been anyone recently, but perhaps it had been there for many years. I placed mine next to it and rubbed his name.
Seeing my grandmother’s headstone was the most difficult for me. She lived until I was 23, and when I was a little girl I loved her very much. She was fun and loving with her grandchildren, despite having had a difficult and often sad life. I have thought of her so many times while doing this research and learning what her life was like, but standing there, thinking of her, I suddenly was overcome with emotion and found myself sobbing, thinking of her and her life and the memories I have of her. As I did with Bessie and Isadore, I found myself rubbing my hand over her name, Gussie, feeling some unexpected emotion in doing so. I left my beach rock, specially selected for her, and wished I had asked her more questions while I could have.
Apparently, I was wrong. Going to the cemetery can bring you closer to those who are gone.
The Lower East Side
I just returned from a wonderful weekend in NYC. Although seeing my grandson Nate (and his parents and his great-grandparents) was the best part of the weekend, I also had an opportunity to do two things I’ve wanted to do for a while: go to the Lower East Side and see where the Brotmans lived in the early 1900s and go to the cemeteries where my great-grandparents and grandparents are buried. I am going to divide those two experiences into two posts rather than one. This one will be about the trip to the Lower East Side.
On Saturday morning Harvey and I left our hotel down near Wall Street and walked north through the financial district and Chinatown, under the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, to the Lower East Side. As we crossed streets like Grand, Henry, and Delancey, I tried to imagine what that neighborhood would have been like on a Shabbat morning a century ago. Now it is a mix of various ethnic groups, but I was surprised to see a number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox men dressed for shul, walking past us. I hadn’t expected to see any sign of a Jewish community surviving there. As we passed two men dressed in Satmar garb (big furry hats, long black coats, beards and payes), I wondered, “Did Joseph dress anything like that? Were they at all observant? Did they go to shul? Or were they completely non-religious once they got to the US?’ I know that my grandmother had a kosher kitchen at first, but gave that up by the time I knew her. She was not at all religious, and I know that my grandfather was also not at all religious. What about your grandparents? Do you know how observant any of them were?
We crossed under the Williamsburg Bridge and then down Broome Street to where it intersected Ridge Street. Joseph and Bessie lived at 81 Ridge Street in 1900; it is where they lived with Max, Hyman, Tilly, Gussie, Frieda and Sam. It is also where Joseph died in 1901. The picture below shows the corner of Broome and Ridge:
We walked down Ridge to where 81 once stood. There is now a school there, as you can see :
Although I was sad that there was no longer a tenement building there, I thought that having a school there was the best possible alternative. Education helped our predecessors and all of us get to where we are today, so replacing what was probably a run-down tenement building with a modern new school seems appropriate.
Across the street at 80 Ridge is a newer building also, so obviously the original buildings are all gone.
I took these pictures at the corner of Ridge and Rivington where there was an older building. Perhaps that was more like the one where our family lived.
As we walked up and down the street, I tried to imagine my grandmother being a little girl, living there. I thought of her being just five years old when her father died, and how awful that must have been for them all. And I thought of poor baby Samuel who was four months old and would never know his father. It must have been a sad and very hard time for them all.
New York City is a remarkable place. The layers of history are all there, and you can feel them as you walk from neighborhood to neighborhood. Ridge Street is a nice street with clean and newer apartment buildings. You wouldn’t know today that it once was a crowded street with tenements filled with new immigrants, speaking Yiddish, and struggling to survive in what was supposed to be a place with streets lined with gold. As we walked past Asian and Latino residents who themselves are likely immigrants or the children of immigrants, I realized how that experience continues to make New York the rich, fascinating and challenging city that it is. I may have left the New York area long ago, but it still calls out to me as my home. I am sure the same is true for many of you, whether you are living in Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina, California, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts—or New Jersey or Long Island.
Isn’t it also interesting how some of the fifth generation children have returned to New York City themselves?
Below are two photos, one of Joseph’s headstone, one of his footstone. (I did not take these; a very kind stranger volunteered to do so. I do, however, plan to visit the grave next weekend.) Although I don’t know much Hebrew, using a translator program I think that the headstone says, “Here lies a Simple and righteous man, Our beloved father Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham, Deceased [Hebrew date].”
The footstone inscription is longer and harder to translate, but I think that it says something like, “Here lies a simple man who woke and toiled doing crushing work in order to support his home, to see and satisfy a dream as a gift to other people, Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham, Deceased [Hebrew date].
Like I said, I relied on a translation program, so I am using some poetic license to put this into English. If there is anyone who has any fluency in Hebrew, please correct me!!
Edited: After consulting with a rabbi and working at this again, I think the footstone says, “Here lies a simple man who toiled doing crushing work to support his home and rejoiced in pleasing others.”
At any rate, I found the inscriptions very touching. At the very least we know his family saw him as a plain, hardworking man who worked to support his home and provide for their dreams in the new world.
Yesterday I received photos of the headstones of our great-grandfather Joseph Brotman, which I will post separately, and of Abraham Brotman of Brooklyn, who I have been researching to find out whether he was also related to Joseph. Max was the witness on Abraham’s naturalization application, so I assumed there was a connection, but couldn’t find any other evidence of it. Well, now I do. Joseph’s headstone revealed that his Hebrew name was Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham. Abraham’s headstone revealed that his name was Avraham ben Yosef Yaakov! Thus, Abraham was named for Joseph’s father, our great-great-grandfather. (Or great or great-great-great, depending on which generation you are a part of.)
I am in touch with two of Abraham’s grandchildren, Morty Grossman and Paula Newman, who are also second cousins of the fourth generation cousins. I also am going to add a new page for Abraham and his descendants. It’s a little thin now, but I am hoping that Morty and Paula will be able to fill in with some more information.
Brotmanblog: A Family Journey 