Judy sent me the photo below (THANK YOU!) and asked whether anyone could help her identify the men in the picture. We think the man to the far left is Max, but are not sure. Does anyone recognize the other two men? Can you confirm that that is Max? You may need to enlarge the page view on your browser to see the photo clearly as it is rather small.
Judy thinks the picture might have been taken near Wingdale, New York. It would have been some time before 1946.
I know that I have asked for help before, and many of you have responded by sending some pictures and other documents. Those contributions have really been helpful in learning about our family and the various personalities and relationships. For example, one wedding picture helped us figure out that Judy and I were both talking about the same Uncle Sam. One bar mitzvah picture showed that as of 1957, Gussie’s children and Hyman’s children were still connected. One hand-written family tree helped to confirm that Abraham’s children and Max’s children had met.
But now I am asking you all to try and find pictures, letters, journals, any documents that may also shed light on our grandparents and great-grandparents as well as our parents and ourselves. I know that somewhere some of you must have old family pictures like I had. Maybe you have a wedding album or bar mitzvah album, a box of random old photos or letters. Maybe someone even has a photo of Frieda or Joseph or another relative, but you had no idea who they were. Maybe there’s an old newspaper clipping or a birth certificate or draft card or some other document buried in your attic or basement.
I know that you are all busy, and I know that the thought of digging through dusty, musty boxes and albums is not that pleasant. I just am asking that you perhaps make a resolution for 2014 that you will spend one or two hours seeing if you can find anything. If you don’t have a scanner, you can mail whatever you have to me, and I will scan it. I promise to return all the originals once I have scanned them. If you can scan documents, that would be wonderful also.
No one likes a nag, and I don’t want to be one, but we will all benefit from your efforts. I hope you will consider spending a little time engaged in a hunt for these things. From my own experience, I can tell you that I have found great joy and satisfaction in looking at the faces of our relatives in those old pictures. I hope you will also.
Having looked back to see what I have learned, I have also gained some insight into to what I still want to learn and what I need to do to get there.
There are a number of unresolved questions. For me, the most important issue remains determining where our family lived in Galicia. I am currently assuming that our family came from Dzikow Tarnobrzeg, but it’s only based on two forms completed by Hyman, one referring to Jeekief as his birthplace, the other referring to Giga as his birthplace. Hyman’s forms had so many inconsistencies in terms of birth date and other facts that I do not want to rely too heavily on it being Dzikow Tarnobrzeg since, as my last post said, forms are not necessarily reliable. Plus I am speculating that Jeekief/Giga is a phonetic spelling of Dzikow. Plus there was another Dzikow in Galicia. But I have to start somewhere, so that’s my current focus.
I am just starting to work with the sources available for documents from Galicia, and I need to devote a lot more time to learning how to search and how to interpret those forms. I am networking with some other researchers who are also searching in that region or who are also searching for the surname Brotman. So far nothing relevant has turned up. I plan to take an online course in May that may help me become a better researcher with respect to these resources and documents.
The second goal I have for my research is trying to locate any other children or siblings of Joseph and/or Bessie. My brother recalls that my aunt thought that Joseph had four older children in the United States—that is, four who were older than the five children he had with Bessie. We have found two of those four—Abraham and Max. There is another Brotman family from Passaic, New Jersey, that I am trying to learn more about. From what I can tell, it seems there were two brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, who could possibly be sons of Joseph, born after Abraham but before Max. I have been in touch with relatives of theirs, but as with the Brotmanville Brotmans, I can’t seem to find anything that links their family to ours. I need to learn the name of the Passaic brothers’ parents before I can begin to determine if there is a connection. I have the same goal with Brotmanville Brotmans, but without more research of European records for Moses Brotman, I cannot get any further.
So those are my two research goals: go further back in time to learn more about Joseph and Bessie’s families and to find links to other possible families in the United States or elsewhere.
I think that this process has a learning curve similar to learning many other new skills. It reminds me of learning to ski. At first it goes very slowly; you don’t know what you are doing and figure that you never will. You find yourself on the ground as much as you are moving on the skis. It seems like you will never make progress. Then suddenly you figure it out—you know how to get down a novice trail pretty easily. You even start to look like you are skiing, and you think, “Wow, I am actually making progress. I am skiing.”
But then you decide to try a steeper trail, a blue trail. If you are a skier like I was, you suddenly find you are stuck somewhere on that trail, staring down and thinking, “Whoa! That’s really scary. I can’t do that!” And you feel like a beginner all over again. You start falling, your turns get more awkward, and you look like a klutz compared to everyone else. You start to think that maybe you will never get off those easy green trails.[1]
That’s what I feel like now. I am standing at the top of a steeper trail, knowing that getting to the bottom will take a lot longer than it did with the green trail. I don’t expect to find as many pieces of evidence as quickly as I did while looking for US documents. But I have to start down this trail—I can’t just stay at the top or return to the green trails. I need to jump off and start the next part of the adventure. The rewards may not come as quickly, but when they do, I will once again have that feeling of accomplishment.
I hope you will follow me as I go. I am not sure what I will find or whether I will find anything, but I am ready to try.
[1][1] I have to admit that as a skier, I never actually made much progress getting off the green trails. I am hoping that I can get further in my genealogy skills than I ever got with skiing. At least I won’t have to worry about breaking any bones.
As my semester has drawn to an end, as the year draws to an end, I want to take some time to reflect on what I have learned in the last six months or so since I began this project in earnest and what I still want to learn and to accomplish as we start a new year.
So first, what have I learned?
1. I’ve learned that I had two great-uncles whom I’d never known about. For at least two months of my research, I was sure that Joseph and Bessie had only had five children: Hyman, Tillie, Gussie, Frieda and Sam. When I kept running into a Max Brotman married to Sophie with children named Rosalie and Renee, I just figured Hyman had changed his name to Max. My mother didn’t know about her cousins Joseph, Saul and Manny, but she had met Rosalie and Renee, and I was sure they were Hyman’s daughters. My mother knew that Hyman’s wife’s name was Sophie. So instead of looking harder, I just assumed Max was Hyman and that the other Hyman Brotman married to a Sophie was not my relative. Only when I was able to find Max’s granddaughter Judy and Hyman’s grandson Bruce did I learn that Max and Hyman were BOTH my great-uncles, that both had married women named Sophie, and that Rosalie and Renee were the daughters of Max, not Hyman. That was a HUGE turning point for me and a big lesson. Lesson learned? Don’t trust memory alone, and don’t assume that documents are wrong just because family memories conflict with those documents.
Herman and Sophie with sons 1920
2. The second new great-uncle was Abraham, and finding him was also somewhat of a lucky break. I ran across many Brotmans in my research, but most I assumed were not our relatives because I could not find any document linking them to our relatives and because no one in our family had ever heard of them. I can’t even remember all the details, but I recall that it was my brother Ira who found Abraham’s naturalization papers—I think (I am sure he will remember and correct me if I am wrong) it was in the course of looking into the Brotmanville Brotmans. When I saw Max’s name on those papers, I did not assume it was the same Max. (There were many Max Brotmans living in NYC at that time.) Once I checked the address for the Max on Abraham’s card against the address I had for Max on the census form from that same time period, I knew it was in fact “our” Max. That led me on the search that brought me to Abraham’s headstone and death certificate, indicating that his father was also Joseph Jacob Brotman. Lesson learned? Don’t dismiss any clue. You never know where one document may lead you, even if in a direction you never expected.
Naturalization of Abraham Brotman
Max as Witness
3. Contrary to Lesson #1 and Lesson #2, I have also learned that often you cannot trust documents. Documents lie. People lie. People give bad information, and bureaucrats transcribe information inaccurately. People who transcribe handwritten documents for indexing purposes make errors. In particular, our relatives were entirely inconsistent when it came to birth dates and birth places. I now know why one relative found it so easy to lie about her age. It was family tradition. So lesson #3: Don’t assume that because it is written on some “official document” that it is reliable in any way.
Sam’s Birth Certificate
Joseph was NOT 46!
4. One of my most rewarding accomplishments was finding out what happened to Frieda Brotman. Now we know who she married and how she died and even the name of her infant son Max, who only lived one day. We even know what happened to her husband Harry Coopersmith after she died. I never thought I’d be able to track down her story. That experience is what will keep me going as I continue to look for the answers to more questions. Lesson #4: Do not give up. Do not give up. Do NOT give up!
5. There are more helpful and supportive people in the world than there are mean or evil people. I know we hear all the time about all the evil in the world, and there is far too much of it. And even if not evil, there are also many people who are rude, incompetent and unhelpful. We all know that. But we often forget that there are also many, many more people who are kind, helpful and competent. In my six months of doing this research, I have gotten help from many strangers—government employees who patiently helped me find a document, FHL volunteers who helped me track down a document request I had made, JewishGen and GesherGalicia members and other genealogists who have gone far out of their way to teach me how to find documents and how to connect with other researchers, who have photographed gravestones and given me directions to gravestones, who have translated documents for me, who have helped me find a clue when I was sure I had hit a brick wall. I cannot tell you how much these people have touched me and changed my views on human nature.
I want to express special thanks and deep appreciation to Renee Steinig, who contacted me many months ago in response to my cry for help on GesherGalicia and who has truly been my teacher and is now my friend as I have gone from being a total newbie to a fairly competent novice with her guidance. She is the one who found the obituary of Renee that led to me finding Judy. She is the one who suggested I post an inquiry on a bulletin board that led me to Bruce. When I look back, in fact, I know it was Renee who got me to where I am today. Thank you, Renee, for everything.
Lesson #5: If you ask for help, there will be generous and kind people who will reach out and help you. Don’t do this alone.
6. I have also learned that I have many second cousins and second cousins once and twice removed—people I would never have discovered if I had not started down this path. This has been probably the biggest gift of all from doing this research. What a wonderful and interesting group of people I have gotten to know—by email, by phone, by pictures and stories. When I look at the pictures and see the distinctive Brotman cheekbones shared by so many of you and your parents and your children, it gives me such a great sense of connection. This may be the best lesson I’ve learned: everyone is looking for connections, everyone is looking to find their place in time and in the world. I am so glad to have made these connections with so many of you, people who never even knew my name until this fall but whom I now consider not just cousins, but friends.
7. Finally, and in some ways the point of this whole adventure, I have really learned more than I ever could have hoped about my great-grandparents and their children and how they lived in the United States. Joseph and Bessie were nothing but names to me six months ago; now they are flesh and blood people, my flesh and blood. Their drive and courage is an inspiration to me, as it must have been to their own children. After all, Abraham, Hyman and Tillie all named a son for their father Joseph, and perhaps some of the great-grandchildren were named for him as well. I was so blessed to have been named for Bessie, as were some of you. Bessie and Joseph—they are the real heroes of this story. That’s the real lesson.
Joseph’s headstone
Bessie Brotman
Next post: Looking forward to the next six months
I have made a change in the privacy settings on the blog. As you know, the blog is a public blog. When we first started the blog, I did not know whether anyone would ever read it at all, inside or outside of the family, but over the last few months, I have found that I am seeing some visits from people outside of the family. For me, this is a good thing. Most of these other readers are also doing genealogy work. I want feedback, I want interaction with others who are doing genealogy research so that I can do a better job, and I want to be able to share my experiences and what I’ve learned about doing this research with others doing similar work. So I am happy to have as many readers as are interested in checking in.
On the other hand, I have always been and will continue to be careful about protecting the privacy of the members of my family. For that reason, I have not included birth dates or any other information about living individuals aside from occasional references to a name, usually by first name only. All the information I have about deceased individuals is available from public records (and a frightening amount of information is also publicly available about living individuals). In today’s internet environment, our ideas about privacy have had to shift (and that’s without even considering whether or not the NSA is reading our email or listening to our phone calls). Nevertheless, I do want to respect the privacy interests of my relatives as best I can.
In order to ensure that I continue to protect the privacy of my relatives, I’ve made one new adjustment to the blog. The family trees are no longer publicly available. The trees do not have much personal information anyway, but I decided that no one outside the family needs to have access to that information. In order to access those trees, you will now need a password. I am happy to share that password with anyone who is on the family tree. If you want the password, please email me directly. In the future, if I have a post that I consider to be directed only to family members, I will also protect it with that same password.
It’s sad that we cannot be more trusting, but I guess better safe than sorry.
Thank you.
I’ve been looking over the data I have for all the people on our family tree, starting with Joseph through the children born in the 21st century. By looking at the various ways our family members have supported themselves, we can see a snapshot of the American immigrant story.
On Gussie’s birth certificate in 1895, Joseph’s employment is listed as a wood and coal dealer. According to the 1900 US census, Joseph worked as a coal agent in the Lower East Side. His death certificate also listed his employment as coal agent; on Sam’s birth certificate he is described as a coal carrier. As you can imagine, this was hard and dirty work. In an article on the coal industry in Michigan, a son recalled how is father would look after working at a coal yard in Michigan: “Dad would use twine to tie his pants and cuffs so not so much coal would get on his skin. He looked like a clown with his pants blowing out, neckerchief around his neck….The dust would crawl up his pant legs—he’d soak his feet up to his knees every night.” Another son of a man who delivered coal recalled how black the water would be in the tub after his father took a bath.
In a website devoted to the history of a coal company based in Camden, New Jersey, there is the following description of the type of work Joseph did:
“The man would arrive in a wagon with sacks of coal neatly stacked on top. He would climb onto the wagon and move the sacks to the edge ready for unloading. His face and hands would be completely black from coal dust and he wore a cap or head cloth, which hung down his back. He would grab hold of a sack at the top, turn round, bend forward and pull it onto his back. He then had to walk quite a few yards to the coal cellar, maybe down some steps and then ‘pour’ the coal out of the bag.”
At that same time, Joseph’s older children were also working. In the 1900 census, Hyman is listed as working as a buttonhole maker and Tilly as a flower maker, obviously both working in the sweatshops described in Streets. They were both just teenagers at the time. (That same census reported that neither Joseph nor Hyman could read, write or speak English at that time.)
Joseph’s children, however, were able to free themselves from these oppressive and backbreaking forms of employment.
Hyman was still working as a buttonhole maker in 1917 according to his draft registration papers and his naturalization papers, but soon thereafter left the sweatshops. In 1920 he was working as a chauffeur. In 1925 he was working in Jersey City as a confectioner, and in 1930 he was working as a storekeeper in a cigar store (perhaps for Max?) and apparently supporting not only his wife and children, but also his father-in-law and his brother-in-law and his wife. In 1940 his occupation is listed as a bookseller in a bookshop, and in 1942 he simply listed himself as self-employed on his draft registration card. We know from his grandchildren and from my mother that at some point he owned a liquor store in Hoboken. So Hyman went from being a poor boy on the Lower East Side, working in a sweatshop and not speaking or reading English, to an independent business owner over the course of his adult life.
Max, a conductor on the railroad in 1900, had his own cigar business by 1910, which continued to be his source of income through the 1940s. Tillie also left the sweatshop world after she married, and she and her husband Aaron owned a grocery store in Brooklyn. Gussie, who helped Tillie and Aaron by caring for their children while they ran their grocery store, married Isadore, who worked at a dairy company as a milkman. Abraham worked as a tailor for almost all of his working life and in a restaurant in Brooklyn later in his life. Frieda was working as a “finisher” in the feather business, which I assume was in the garment industry, in 1920, not too long before she married. Sam worked as a stock clerk, then in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and ultimately as a cab driver in New York City.
Thus, by 1920 or so, all of Joseph’s children had left the Lower East Side and had found occupations that took them out of the sweatshops. Three of them became independent business owners, and the others found work in various trades that did not involve breathing in coal dust and carrying heavy loads of coal to tenement buildings.
The next generation continued that trend. Joseph’s grandchildren became professionals and business owners: teachers, a lawyer, a pharmacist, advertising firms, real estate investment, and retail stores. When I look at the list of occupations of Joseph’s great-grandchildren, my generation, born in the 1940s through the 1960s, that trend continues. Although there are fewer of us who own our own businesses, consistent with the decline of the small family-owned business throughout the country, there are still a number of entrepreneurs. We are also lawyers (fifteen of us, including descendants, their spouses and our children), doctors, teachers of all types, and school administrators. We are involved in business, finance, sales, banking, the computer industry, and the arts.
Our children, those born in the 1970s through the 1990s, continue in these fields and others—there are a number working in the creative arts and the music industry as well as medicine and the health care, finance, law, business, and the restaurant industry. You name the field—we probably have someone related to us working in the field.
As for the next generation, those who are still at home going to school, maybe even still in diapers, we’d like to hope that the possibilities are limitless. Yes, the world is a more competitive place, houses are much more expensive relative to income than they were for us, the cost of a college education is beyond what anyone would consider reasonable, and the economy is tougher and tighter than it was for many of us when we first entered the job market.
But if a 50-something year old man could drag coal from tenement to tenement to support his family, if our grandparents could rise from sweatshops to become storeowners and tradespeople, if our parents could go the next step and become professionals and business owners, then certainly we cannot be anything but grateful and appreciative and hopeful. After all, it was only 125 or so years ago that our ancestors first stepped off the boat and into the streets of New York City with nothing to their names, speaking a foreign language, and risking all they had known to take a chance that this life could be better than what they had known.
Yesterday was one of those winter days where I didn’t leave the house all day. I read the paper, did the crossword puzzle, and played on the computer. It was quiet, relaxing, but not exciting. Then late yesterday afternoon, I received an email from Judy, Max’s granddaughter, that made my day. Attached to the email was a document that Judy’s sister, Susan, had found while going through some old papers. It’s a family tree sketched out by hand by Renee Brotman Haber, one of Max Brotman’s daughters and Roz, Susan and Judy’s mother.
Take a look at it:
If you now compare this to the family tree on the blog for Abraham and his descendants, you will immediately realize that Renee had written out the family tree of her father’s brother Abraham. Judy and Susan don’t know when she did it or where, but this is definitely written by Renee and it is definitely Abraham’s family.
Paula Newman, Abraham’s granddaughter, commented on the blog a couple of months ago that she believed she had met Rosalie and Dick Jones in Florida years ago when she was there with her parents. Rosalie was Renee’s sister, and Judy said that both families used to go to Florida every year at Christmas time. Perhaps it was during one of those vacations that Paula’s family met with Renee and Rosalie’s families and provided Renee with the information she sketched out on the family tree.
This is the third piece of evidence that supports the conclusion that Abraham and Max were brothers and that Abraham, like Max, was Joseph’s son from his first marriage. First, we have the fact that Max was the witness on Abraham’s naturalization papers. Second, we have the fact that Abraham’s Hebrew name was Avraham ben Yosef Yaakov, named for his grandfather Avraham whose son was Yosef Yaakov. (Recall that Joseph’s Hebrew name was Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham. Also, Abraham named his son Yosef Yaakov shortly after Joseph died, as did Hyman and Tillie.) And now we have evidence that Renee met or spoke with Abraham’s daughter or granddaughter to write down this family tree. I don’t know how they found each other, or , more sadly, how they had all lost each other beforehand and then afterwards.
I guess you can tell how much this all means to me that receiving this document made me so happy. Who cares about snow and sleet and cold when there is a new discovery linking our families!!
This should also be an inspiration to the rest of you to look for things like this—old letters, cards, postcards, pictures. You never know what you will find. Come on, make my day!
The rest of the book was harder to read. As Bella turned twelve and became less innocent, she became more aware of the squalor and ugliness of her world. She wrote, “I was now twelve and acutely conscious of the sordidness of the life about me. To escape, I hid behind my books and built up a life of my own in the public school I attended on East Broadway and at the settlement house on Madison Street.” (p. 66)
Her mother married one of the long time boarders and soon was pregnant. Although their first year of marriage seemed fine to Bella, after the baby was born and soon developed a medical condition that left him scarred and covered with sores, her stepfather abandoned her mother, who was already pregnant with another child. They never saw him again. (There is no explanation of her brother’s condition, but it seemed to continue for several years so was not just a short-term childhood illness like measles or chicken pox.)
Supporting an extra child as a single parent created enough of an additional financial burden for Fanny that she and her children had to move to a less desirable street in the Lower East Side, Goerck Street. Bella described it as a “tough block” where there were several bars, a lumberyard, and a garbage heap. There were frequent bottle fights. Most of the residents of the street were Galician Jews, but there were also Hungarian, German and Russian Jews as well as many Italian immigrants.
Fanny and her children moved their belongings to the new tenement with a pushcart, taking several trips to do so. Bella described the new building as follows:
“Our house, like the others, had four families on each floor, two to the rear and two to the front. There were two windows to the front room which either faced the street or the yard, one window in the kitchen that faced an extremely narrow, lightless airshaft, and in the bedroom a tiny square window that faced the hall. … Separating the front room from the kitchen is what my mother called a ‘blind window.’ It was simply a square hole, framed by woodwork, which allowed some of the front light to filter into the kitchen and stop at the entrance to the bedroom.” (p. 82)
In this small, dark and airless space, Fanny and Bella found cockroaches and rats. As before, Fanny took in numerous boarders to help her pay the rent and also took on sewing jobs to supplement her income.
Bella graduated from grade school and was determined to go to high school, unlike many of her classmates and friends who had to go to work in one of the factories in order to help support their families. Fanny was fully supportive of Bella’s desire to go on to high school, even though she was told by many that she was foolish and should make Bella get a job instead. Bella enrolled at George Washington High School in Manhattan, about two miles away from the Lower East Side, and was excited to be continuing her education.
Bella, however, did also take on a part-time job, working Sundays as a trimmer at a man’s coat shop on their street. Her mother also received financial assistance and other support from the United Hebrew Charities and worked long, long hours sewing to earn extra income. When the second baby was born in May, 1913, the charity covered her rent for the time that Fanny could not work. In return, however, the charity wanted Fanny to consider sending Bella to work full time. Fanny resisted, and Bella continued to go to high school. Bella resented having to justify her desire to continue school to the charity.
Bella, however, was now much more aware of the precariousness of their financial condition, and it was often a struggle to pay the rent, which was often paid late and in partial payments. When she was not at school, Bella took care of her two baby brothers while her mother continued to work as much as possible, taking in sewing work.
Bella’s feelings at this time are poignantly conveyed in the memoir:
“I looked at the sleeping tenements and down at the street strewn with garbage and wet newspapers. Was this living?… It was all so hopeless. When would it end?” (pp. 103-104)
Although Bella still loved school and had friends with whom she had some good times, it is apparent that she no longer felt the somewhat joyful attitude she had had as a child. Although it does seem that their financial condition was worse than it might have been earlier, the poverty and squalor she described must also have been very much present in the neighborhood where she lived when she was younger. It is likely that as Bella was exposed to more of the outside world through school and books, she also became much more discerning and outraged by the conditions of her own world.
When Fanny finally was unable to pay the rent one month in 1914 and received an eviction notice, Bella offered to quit school. Fanny refused to consider it, saying that Bella was “going to be a lady. Not like me, a schnorrer!” (p.110) Fanny swallowed her pride and begged the United Hebrew Charities for assistance. They agreed to give her fourteen dollars, which she used to move her family out of the Lower East Side and up to First Avenue and 49th Street (where the UN now sits). The charity also provided her with some sewing work.
Thus, Fanny and her children left the Lower East Side and moved to what was then called the Dead End neighborhood, an area of slums that were torn down in the 1920s. This was not a move up, but a move to a cheaper neighborhood.
The last chapter focuses on Bella’s experiences while living in that neighborhood, a more mixed neighborhood where she had many non-Jewish neighbors. The accommodation was comparable to what they had had on the Lower East Side, a three room tenement apartment. Fanny was heavily dependent on United Hebrew Charities for support and grew increasingly despondent over her situation and over the health of her older son. At one point her relationship with Bella was so fraught with tension that Fanny lost her temper and began hitting Bella quite violently. Bella realized that she needed to get away and spent the summer before her senior year working at a boy’s school in the Catskills as a chamber maid and waitress.
Bella somehow managed to graduate from high school while also holding down various part-time jobs, including working in another factory, tutoring, and helping her mother with extra sewing work. She also continued to take care of her little brothers. Right after she graduated from George Washington High School in June, 1917, whatever was left of Bella’s childhood innocence ended abruptly when her sickly little brother died from whatever medical condition had burdened him since infancy. That is where Bella abruptly ends her memoirs as well.
In an afterword written by Lois Raeder Elias[1], who knew Bella for over thirty years, Elias commented that although Bella ultimately found great personal and financial success, saw the world, and knew many important and impressive people, she was permanently scarred and haunted by her years of poverty, growing up on the Lower East Side. She never felt financially secure and lived always in fear of poverty.
If the chapters about Bella’s early childhood left me feeling somewhat hopeful about how our family lived on the Lower East Side, the rest of the book left me feeling incredibly sad. How did our grandparents and great-grandparents cope with these conditions? How did Max, Hyman, and Tillie, all of whom were born in Europe, manage to pull themselves out of poverty and become a cigar dealer, a liquor store owner, and a grocery store owner in one generation? How did all our grandparents manage to support and raise their children, who all somehow managed to achieve comfortable middle class or better lives in good neighborhoods in NYC and its suburbs?
Reading this book filled me with renewed respect and gratitude for our great-grandparents and grandparents. We should never forget what they accomplished and what a gift that has been for all of us.
Bessie
[1] There was a surprise gift inside this book when I received it. I had ordered the book from a third party vendor through amazon.com, and inside the book I found a handwritten note by Lois Raeder Elias to friends named Sheila and Alan. The note reads,”At last we have received copies of Bella’s memoirs. We thought they would never come. This one is for you. I hope you enjoy it. I’ll talk to you this weekend. On to Turkey! Love, Arthur and Lois.”
I hope that Sheila and Alan, whoever they were, appreciated this book. I fear that they just passed it on without ever noticing the card left inside by their friends, Arthur and Lois.
In the course of getting some information about a few cousins I had not yet researched, the daughters of Joseph Brotman, son of Hyman and Sophie Brotman, I learned that Merle (“Miki”), one of the daughters, had been a competitive swimmer. She was an alternate on the US Olympic swim team and missed the team by one stroke; she was also named to the Maccabiah swim team.
I also learned that her father Joe had also been a competitive swimmer and had once raced against Johnny Weissmuller. Her uncle Manny, Joe’s brother, was a Big Ten varsity swimmer. Joe and Manny’s brother Saul was also an excellent athlete and a star basketball player.
Manny’s grandsons Michael, Frank and Matt were also competitive swimmers in high school, and Matt was captain of his swim team in high school and swam throughout college also. Also, Manny’s grandson Brian was also captain of his high school swim team; his brother Marc was also a competitive swimmer.
My cousin Jeffrey was also a competitive swimmer, as are his two children, Zachary and Jessie.
Could we have a Brotman swimming gene floating around? 🙂 Although athletics have never been my personal forte (major understatement there), it’s good to know that there are some athletic members of the family.
Any other stars in the family, in or out of the pool, on or off the fields? Maybe a Nobel Prize winner? An Oscar winner? Even a Publishers’ Clearinghouse winner??
Let’s share these family stories and accomplishments!
It was interesting to read about Bella’s childhood and developing American and Jewish identity growing up in the Lower East Side. Not surprisingly, there was a wide range in the level of religious observance among the Jews on the Lower East Side. Some Jews were very observant. Bella described the household of one of her childhood friends as follows:
“It was a decidedly quiet house—and more so on Friday and Saturday when religious observance forbade everything that would tend to introduce noise. On Friday before sundown, the four girls of the family would comb their hair, the mother helping the youngest who had to wear hers in curls. Before going to bed each would draw a cap over the freshly combed and plaited hair. In the morning, the cap was removed but no comb touched the hair until Sunday morning.” (p. 53)
On the other hand, Bella and Fanny seemed to live a very secular life. A few pages after this passage, Bella described how she spent her Friday nights. She would meet all her girlfriends and play loud and active games of tag and other outdoor games. Bella also wrote that she felt “no everyday kinship with the synagogue” and “had an idea that it belonged to the menfolk only.” (p. 47) She wrote that she only went to the synagogue on holidays.
Bella in fact experienced real confusion over her religious identity and at one point decided that she wanted to be Christian, not Jewish, much to her mother’s dismay. This desire seemed to have been rooted in Bella’s perception that Christians were more refined: they were gloves, had clean nails, and spoke perfect English. Some of it may also have been rooted in her experiences with anti-Semitism, such as the time she and her mother were lost, walking in a strange neighborhood, and were accosted by a group of boys who called them sheenies and grabbed and poked at them.
Most of Bella’s childhood years, however, were spent focused on her friends, books, and school. In the introduction to the book, Ruth Limmer wrote that the schools Bella attended “were both ideal and wretched—wretched in their overcrowding (class size was forty-five to fifty); ideal…in that they were rigid in their demand that the students seriously attend to learning English.” (p. xx)
The mission of the schools was to Americanize the children of the immigrants (of all backgrounds) by immersing them in English literature, American and British history, physical training and athletics, and culture. Limmer asserted that as a result, parents often became dependent on their children, who spoke English and who were much more comfortable with the American way of doing things.
The schools also tried to instill values, including discipline and obedience. Limmer wrote: “The routines began when they arrived at school each morning. No horsing around. They were required to line up in order of height on sex-segregated lines and, at the bell, were marched silently to their classrooms.” (p. xxii) Bella’s description of her day at school is consistent with Limmer’s overview:
“At school, there was first the assembly period when doors rolled back and mediocre schoolrooms became a vast auditorium. You marched in with your class holding yourself straight and stiff, turning square corners with military exactitude. You looked out furtively from beneath your lashes to see if your teacher… noticed that your shoulders were back and your stomach in.” (p. 66)
The students would then salute the flag and listen to readings from the Bible every day, apparently a common practice in the NYC public schools until after World War II, a practice that certainly conflicts with Constitutional principles as we understand them today.
Bella was also a regular visitor to the city’s public libraries and spent her school vacations at the library, reading as much as she could.
Seward Park Library
Obviously, she was well-served by those crowded schools and those libraries, as she grew up to be not only capable of communicating in English, but to be a very successful professional writer who contributed to the American culture in which she had been immersed.
Bella’s life was very much confined to her neighborhood; she was at least ten years old before she did much venturing outside of the Lower East Side. Once she and a friend tried to walk to Andrew Carnegie’s house uptown, but got no further than Fourteenth Street, where they were mesmerized by the department store and its escalator. Another time she participated in a play with other immigrant children organized by the neighborhood settlement house, another agency engaged in Americanizing immigrant children. The group of children performing the play went as far uptown as 96th Street, which Bella said was as far from the Lower East Side as any of them had ever been.
Otherwise, Bella and her friends stayed in their neighborhood, where she engaged in common childhood activities, including piano lessons and a sewing club. There is no mention of religious education. Overall, Bella’s childhood, despite the poverty and those incidents of abuse and anti-Semitism, was a happy one up through age twelve. She was a smart, studious girl, but one who had many friends and who knew how to have fun.
Perhaps Bella was looking back with rose-colored glasses, but I’d like to take away from her depiction of her childhood a better feeling about my grandmother’s childhood in the Lower East Side with her siblings. Yes, they did not have an easy life, and losing their father so young must have been terrible. But they had their sisters and brothers and a mother whom they all adored. I hope that like Bella, my grandmother also enjoyed school, played games, and had a network of similarly situated friends with whom to share some of the joys of childhood.
Brotmanblog: A Family Journey 