Tag Archives: books

When I Assume, I Make An Ass Out of ME!

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As we saw in the last post, the four daughters and one of the sons of Therese Spier Baer escaped from Germany before Kristallnacht and ended up in the United States. Klara was in Baltimore as was Paula while Jenny and Selma were living in New York. Their brother Meyer/Manfred settled in Baltimore. Another son, Arthur Baer, escaped with his family to England.

But I realized after publishing my last post that I had made an error in my research about Arthur Baer and that he had never spent time in Buchenwald. I have updated my last post to correct this error, and I’ll write more about Arthur Baer’s actual story in a later post. I only realized I’d made that error when I discovered I’d made a similar error in researching Arthur’s brother Julius. In researching both Julius and Arthur, I made stupid assumptions that led me down a deep rabbit hole that led me nowhere for quite a while.

According to records in the Arolsen Archives, a man named Julius Baer was arrested during June 1938 as part of a mass arrest of Jewish men to force their emigration from Germany. The record revealed that he was released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp on July 16, 1938.1 There was no birthdate or birthplace on those records, and I made the fatal novice genealogist error of assuming that this was my Julius Baer. That assumption was unfortunately reinforced when I saw that that a Julius Baer also was sent to Buchenwald and released on the same day as an Arthur Baer.2 I assumed—incorrectly—that the two brothers had been released together after some pressure from their relatives. After all, their names were listed one after the other on one of  the Arolsen documents (along with many other names).

But then I hit a dead end on Julius. I knew only that at some point my Julius Baer ended up in France because he died there in 1981.3 But I didn’t know when or how he got to France or anything about his life there during or after World War II.

When I found that there were Stolpersteine laid for Julius and his wife and sons in Butzbach, Germany, that report that the family fled to France in 1936, I was confused. How could Julius have been in France in 1936 if he was arrested in Germany and sent to concentration camps in 1938? I dismissed it as an error on the Stolperstein and shrugged.

Stolperstein in Butzbach, Germany, for Julius Baer, GeorgDerReisende@Vicuna, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

But it turns out that I was the one who’d made errors. And I learned that when Bryan Knobloch, another genealogist, sent me scans of pages from Hanno Muller’s book about the Jews of Butzbach.4 Bryan had seen my first post about the Baer family and commented on my blog about Muller’s book and its content related to the Baer family. I wrote to him and asked if he would scan the relevant pages, and he graciously did so.

On page 50 there was this entry about Julius a/k/a Jules Baer [as translated by Google]:

  1. Baer, Julius
    171 | 15.05.1900 | 03.11.1929 | France
    He was born in Griedel, was a merchant (in 1927 he founded a ready-made clothing store together with his brother Arthur Bär; see Chap. 9.3.2: 1926) in Butzbach, Marktplatz 20 and Weiselerstraße 14, and was a marriage witness in 1929 for Arthur Bär; V: Adolf Bär in Griedel. He is said to have been a communist and was brought to the Osthofen concentration camp near Worms in February 1933 together with Josef Oppenheimer [105] (WOLF, 1988 p. 45). His textile business had to close in 1934 as a result of the boycott of Jewish businesses (WOLF, 1988 p. 47). The wife was born in Nonnenweier in Baden, and the marriage took place there too. The family moved to Molsheim in Alsace on February 19, 1936 (HELLRIEGEL, 1968 p. 45). From there they fled to Southern France in 1940 and in early October 1942 to Switzerland (WOLF, 1988 p. 51). After the end of the war, they returned to Molsheim in Alsace, where both died in 1981 (according to Arnold BAER: Mein Vater Julius Baer, Jerusalem 2005, in: Stadtarchiv Butzbach Judaica Familie “Bär”).
    oo Wertheimer, Erna | 19.07.1907 | France

That paragraph tells a far different story about Julius. It indicates that the Stolperstein was correct—Julius did flee to France in 1936. And it also reports that once World War II started, they fled to Switzerland, returning to France after the war ended.

It was also Muller’s book that alerted me to the fact that Arthur Baer had not spent time in Buchenwald. As with Julius, I had incorrectly assumed that records for an Arthur Baer in the Arolsen Archives were for my cousin because the two names—Julius and Arthur—were listed together on one of the documents.

But how could I verify the information in Muller’s book? I requested the original files from Germany regarding Julius’ arrest in 1933 and from Switzerland regarding his time there; I also have asked another researcher to help me find information about his life in France, including possible descendants. In my next post I will report on what I learned from the German documents I’ve received and what really happened to Julius Baer and his family.

I will be taking a break from blogging until after Labor Day to enjoy the next two weeks with my children and grandchildren. Enjoy the last days of summer, everyone! And this might be a great time to read The Women Before Us!  It’s available on Amazon here in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.

 

 

  1. Name Julius Baer, Nationality H., Record Type Register, Departure Date 16 Jul 1938, Prisoner Type A. S. R., Prisoner Number 5268, Reference Number 00115100112, Arolsen Archives; Bad Arolsen, Germany; Group 1 Camp Lists, Reference Number: 00115100112, Ancestry.com. Arolsen Concentration Camp Lists, 1939-1944. ↩
  2. Julius Baer, Religion Jude, Record Type Register, Departure Date 28 Dez 1938 (28 Dec 1938), Prisoner Type Schutzhaft, Prisoner Number 20699, Reference Number 00116100004, Arolsen Archives; Bad Arolsen, Germany; Group 1 Camp Lists, Reference Number: 00116100004, Ancestry.com. Arolsen Concentration Camp Lists, 1939-1944 ↩
  3. Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/283584356/jules-baer: accessed 14 Aug 2026), memorial page for Jules Baer (1900–26 Jul 1981), Find a Grave Memorial ID 283584356, citing Cimetière Israélite de Rosenwiller, Rosenwiller, Département du Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France; Maintained by Laura (contributor 48852786). ↩
  4. Hanno Muller, Familienbuch Butzbach Band V: Judenfamilien in Butzbach und seinen Stadtteilen (Family Book Butzbach Volume 5: Jewish Families in Butzbach and its Districts). ↩

Another amazing review of The Women Before Us!

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Thank you to Phyllis Karas, New York Times best selling author of the book  Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob and over ten other books as well as a journalist and professor of journalism.

She who wrote this wonderful review of The Women Before Us:

How wonderful to read a historically accurate female driven story that is also charming and intriguing. Cohen creates such a warm and fascinating story of the women who lived such intriguing lives so many years before us. From her first chapter, I was swept into the story and loved getting to know each and every woman Cohen so beautifully describes. She tells such a warm and touching story of each woman that I could easily have read another 100 pages. I can hardly wait for Cohen‘s next delightful historical novel that not only entertains me, but actually educates me of a fascinating time long gone!

Karas’ most recent book is Curse of the Blumenthals, a fascinating exploration of her own family and its history. As described on her website, Curse tells “the history of one close-knit New England-based, Jewish American family and their dark relationship with alcohol, from bootlegging arrests in 1920s Providence, a drunk driver killing six members of their family in 1935, the 1954 murder of a Boston seamstress committed by teenager Ronnie Blumenthal, to Ronnie’s death and burial in 2012 in an unmarked pauper’s grave, ending the curse.” You can purchase Curse of the Blumenthals here.

curse-cover_617_lg.jpg

I had the great pleasure of helping Phyllis with some of her research. She found me through this blog where I wrote that her cousin Ronnie had initially confessed and bragged about his killing of Orna Schornath to my cousin Lois Kane. It was Lois’ brave decision to go to the police that broke the murder investigation wide open.

I highly recommend that you read Curse of the Blumenthals. It is a well-crafted and insightful mix of a true crime story, a revealing look at the history of a tight-knit Jewish family, and the author’s personal reflections on how we face the hard truths about the people we love the most.

And please, of course, I hope you will also read The Women Before Us, which is available here on Amazon.

 

More Five Star Reviews of The Women Before Us

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I have received two more five star reviews on Amazon for The Women Before Us. Here are excerpts from the reviews by the authors of two wonderful family history books:

From Joy Neal Kidney, author of Leora’s Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family During World War II:

“This is a compelling historical novel based on the lives of women in the author’s life, Jewish women who immigrated to the US. It’s a story of daughters marrying and moving away, births and losses, Jewish customs, lost hopes and dreams …. The realities of life through generations of women.”

From Helen Joyce, author of Good for A Single Journey:

“A thoughtful and moving story of three generations of diverse women from one Jewish family. Spanning a period from the late 19th century to post-WWII, the tale moves between Philadelphia, Denver and Santa Fe. Describing women with different lives relationships and experiences, the book ties together the universal themes of love, marriage, childbirth, grief and loss. Matriarchy and its evolving role over time is a central theme. Thoughtful, well written and researched.”

I highly recommend both of their books as well.

You can purchase The Women Before Us here.

Another wonderful review of The Women Before Us!

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Thank you so much to Luanne Castle for her wonderful review of The Women Before Us.  Luanne is an amazing award-winning poet and author (as well as a genealogy blogger at The Family Kalamazoo), so her words of praise mean a great deal to me. I recently reviewed her latest book, Scrap, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Here are a few excerpts from her review:

As a genealogist and family history blogger, Cohen has completed the mountains of research necessary to delve into the lives of these people. But Cohen doesn’t leave it at the usual pedigrees and timelines. Her research leads her to explorations of personality and motivation. She does this in her books and on her blog.

This time, Cohen focuses on the lives of the women of three generations of Jewish women and how their lives are determined by who they marry. This can lead to happiness or it can lead to misery….The brains of this book is the way it demonstrates how dependent women were on their marriages. These women were not Orthodox Jews, but like all women of their time, they had little chance of a life outside of marriage. And who they married dictated whether their lives would be hard or less so, happy, or even unsafe. …

All night I dreamed about the book, the characters inhabiting every dream I had. Edna, Mae, James, Harriet, and the others. It’s hard to believe that these are not Cohen’s actual relatives, but these fictional people were touched with the magic of Cohen’s sympathetic understanding of her own grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

You can read Luanne’s whole review here.

A reminder to those who read the book: I am happy to speak with your book groups or libraries about The Women Before Us. Just let me know.

 

 

Another Five Star Review!

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Another five star review of The Women Before Us! This one is from Helen Joyce, the acclaimed author of the wonderful book, Good for a Single Journey. I am so pleased that she enjoyed my book! She wrote:
A thoughtful and moving story of three generations of diverse women from one Jewish family. Spanning a period from the late 19th century to post-WWII, the tale moves between Philadelphia, Denver and Santa Fe. Describing women with different lives relationships and experiences, the book ties together the universal themes of love, marriage, childbirth, grief and loss. Matriarchy and its evolving role over time is a central theme. Thoughtful, well written and researched.
I hope you all will also enjoy The Women Before Us.
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Coming Soon! A New Family History Novel: The Women Before Us

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Coming in a few weeks! My latest family history novel, The Women Before Us, will be available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon!

The Women Before Us was inspired by the stories of my female ancestors and relatives, women who had little power in the outside world and often little power over their own lives. Many of them married and then moved far from their families and friends to start a life with a man they probably hardly knew and in many cases didn’t even choose. Many then gave birth to numerous babies, often losing some of those babies as infants or young children to diseases that today are easily treated or prevented. And many faced painful obstacles—poverty, illness, unhappy marriages—but persisted nevertheless.

And so many of these women then watched their own daughters endure the same kinds of choices and painful decisions and losses.

In The Women Before Us, we see how this pattern plays out in one family, the family of Edna Schwartz, a young woman who falls head over heels in love with a man who lives far from where she and her family live, a man she has known only for a very brief time. Will she marry him and leave her family behind? Will she find happiness? Will she learn from the experiences of her mother and grandmother and the other women before them?

Read my latest book and find out. If you like family history, if you like love stories, and/or if you are interested in stories about the lives of women, you will enjoy this book. It is a work of fiction, but inspired by the people I’ve discovered through my family history research and by the times and places they lived in.

The book will be available on Amazon in multiple formats starting June 20, 2026. More information to come as we approach publication!

Scrap–Salvaging A Family by Luanne Castle: A Must Read

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Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing what to expect, and become so wrapped up in the story and the writing that you just don’t want to put it down? That was my experience  reading Luanne Castle’s newest book Scrap: Salvaging a Family. From the first page until I finished it, I was spellbound.

Luanne has published four volumes of poetry and many poems and flash prose pieces1 in numerous publications, but I first encountered her writing through her genealogy blog, The Family Kalamazoo, and although Scrap is not about genealogy per se, it is about family history: how our parents and our grandparents and those before them all shape the people we become. In this memoir, we see how Luanne’s father was affected by his family history and how that in turn affected the author, his daughter.

The book is written in a series of short “flashes” of specific memories tied together into a revealing and heart-wrenching story of her relationship with her father, a man she both loved and feared. Her writing is clear and beautiful and although written in prose, the language is poetic. The images she creates are powerful and resonant.

Here are two examples, one showing how much she loved her father when she was a little girl, the second showing how much she feared him. Notice how she uses images of his arms in both, each image serving to evoke a specific emotion.

“A man throws his efforts into the project. A little girl, face like a cup, watched his Superman arms crank on the vise handle and tighten the grip. The girl is me, and the workbench, its surface scarred by hammer blows, belongs to the shoemaker’s elves that visit the man when I am asleep. He presides over the saw, aiming for the pencil line, sawdust falling away on each side as snow does from a plow. On the pegboard, pliers and screws line up by size like Goldilocks’ bears. I sit behind the man who is my father, the chilled concrete floor twanging my backside.”

In this second memory those arms she admired for their strength as she watched him work turn into something much more threatening.

“Daddy tickles me, and when I squirm away, giggling, he rolls me on the planked floor where we play wrestle. When I tickle him, he belly-shake laughs. When I don’t want to go to bed until it’s black outside, his joy dissolves fast and leaves an unpleasantness that charges to anger. I watch for the inside of his tanned arms. When I see the flash of their snake-white underbellies, I try to run. One of them catches me by the back of my shirt. The other pulls up my skirt and down my panties. Daddy raises that arm up above us before he smacks it down on my bottom.”

Those arms reappear many other times in Luanne’s memories, most often in ways that are threatening and angry. But I will leave it to you to read the book to see how the author’s story develops and how she learns to understand her father’s anger and where it comes from. I promise you that you will be moved to tears, some of grief, some of anger, and some of joy. There were even times I laughed. And there were many times that I sat back and re-read a page a few times over, marveling in the language, the depth of feeling, and the universality of some aspects of her story. Aren’t we all somewhat mystified by who our parents are and why they are the way they are? Luanne Castle had the courage to dig deeply enough to learn who her father was and why he was the way he was.

You can purchase the book here or here, and you can learn more about the author and her other works at her website here.

Luanne Castle’s story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, and many other journals. She has published four award-winning poetry collections.  Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026.

 

 

 

 

 

  1. I was unfamiliar with the literary term “flash” until I started reading Luanne’s works. I asked her for a definition, and she sent me this explanation: “Flash–both fiction and nonfiction–is a prose story told in fewer than 1,000 words–and frequently less than 300 when it can sometimes be referred to as microfiction. Unlike short stories which can be up to 7,500 words, flash cannot contain unnecessary words and images. This does not mean that flash should not contain specific and important details. Finally, much is told by innuendo, by suggestion, and by placement of one image or phrase next to another.” ↩

Simon’s Secret! Now Available on Amazon!

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Simon’s Secret is now available on Amazon in e-book, paperback, and hardcover!

My third family history novel, Simon’s Secret, is a story inspired by the lives of two of my Goldschmidt relatives, Simon and his daughter Hannah. Simon came to the US in the 1840s with a secret, one he wanted to hide from his family and his new country. His daughter Hannah never understood why he was such a curmudgeon. What was Simon’s secret? Will Hannah ever find out? And will she understand her father better if she does? Like all children, Hannah struggles to understand her father and his secrets.

This book follows the life of the fictionalized version of Simon Goldschmidt from Germany to America. We see how Simon and his family adapt to their new country while also trying to keep the traditions of Judaism that he brought with him from Germany. The story begins in 1826 and extends over a hundred years as we see what happens to Simon, Hannah, and Hannah’s children and grandchildren.

This is a story about a Jewish family, but its lessons are universal. Every generation has its secrets, and every immigrant brings their strengths and weaknesses to their new country as well as the gifts that will come with their descendants.

Celebration of the real Hannah Goldsmith Benedict’s 90th birthday in 1938.

You can find Simon’s Secret here on Amazon. I hope you enjoy it, and if so, please tell your friends and family and leave a review on Amazon.

Thank you!!

New for 2025!

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Happy New Year to all my friends, family, and readers! I hope you all had a joyful and safe New Year’s Eve.

My first big news of 2025 is that my newest family history novel will be released at the end of January just thirty days from now. It’s titled Simon’s Story and was inspired by the story of my three-times great-grandfather’s younger brother Simon Goldschmidt. Although Simon’s life was the spark that led me to write this novel, the book itself is fiction wrapped around the skeleton of Simon’s life.

As described on Amazon, “Simon … came to the United States from Germany, a poor Jewish man whose first wife had died, leaving him with young children. After he remarried, he and his new wife and the children came to the United States. But Simon had a secret that he kept from his children. His daughter Hannah struggled all her life to understand her mysterious and aloof father. Why was he so cold, so withdrawn? What made him the way he was?”

The book is available for pre-order on Kindle now and you can find the link here. The paperback version will also be sold on Amazon and will be available on January 31, 2025.

I hope you will consider reading Simon’s Story, and if you enjoy it, please let me know and also please leave a review on Amazon.

Abq Jew Blog: A Post about Santa Fe Love Song

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Thank you so much to Marc Yellin, the author of the blog Abq Jew, for his delightful blog about my latest novel, Santa Fe Love Song. You can read his blog post here.

Abq Jew ® Blog