Category Archives: Family history

July 28, 2014 · 3:24 pm

Inheritance

by Bonnie Widerman (Irvine, CA)

There is a hole in the fabric of my Jewish childhood,
something missing, gone, nowhere to be found,
though I’ve searched my childhood home high and low—
Not for a beautifully crafted Tallit left behind.
I was never given one—no girl was in those days.
Not for a handmade Challah cover,
embellished with my awkward scrawling and designs.
Surely that fell apart years ago.
Not for my mother’s Shabbat tablecloth,
white patterned fabric with a neatly scalloped edge.
All her tablecloths lie exactly where she kept them
when she was alive.
No. The treasure I inherited and lost all at once
was the very fabric of my mother’s Jewish life,
embodied in her Shabbat candlesticks—
A wisp of white smoke threading through the air
from an extinguished match.
A blessing in two voices, intertwined.
Two dancing flames casting shadows on the wall,
knitting our family together in Sabbath peace.
After my mother passed away, her candlesticks vanished
as if they were that matchstick smoke.
When I stand in her kitchen and look up at the shelf
where those pillars of blue-green enamel and brass once stood,
I feel the weight of their absence—and hers—in my heart.
I cannot bring back what is gone.
But the pattern of lighting candles with my mother
week after week, year after year,
is woven into the fabric of my life.
It unfolds into blessing every Friday night
as I light Shabbat candles at my own family’s table
with my daughters by my side.

Bonnie Widerman is the Director of Marketing & Communications for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, a national non-profit organization. She has been a professional writer and corporate communicator for more than 20 years. In her free time, she writes stories and poetry and her work has appeared in Ladybug magazine and Fandangle. Bonnie is currently editing a manuscript entitled, Her Kaddish: A Jewish Woman’s Journey through Mourning, which she wrote during the year she spent saying Kaddish for her mother, and which she hopes to share with others facing a loss.

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June 30, 2014 · 9:43 am

Berlin afternoon

By Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

I was on my way home from school that wintry day. It was a long walk for an eight-year-old carrying a school bag and a lunch box. That day it seemed even longer because there was no one to walk with.

Most days my mother came to pick me up at school and walk me home. This day something had prevented her from coming.

In my childhood memories of Berlin I see empty streets lining endless blocks of grey tall apartment houses. The buildings cast dark shadows onto sidewalks where no trees grew. I see no people on the streets, only a silent landscape of hard grey shapes.

When I look at a map now, so many years later, I find street names long forgotten. Suddenly the names are back and I remember the streets on which I walked daily on my way home from school.

I didn’t mind being by myself. I was always a bit of a dreamer and thought of all sorts of lovely things when I was alone, thoughts that could not run around in my head if someone was talking to me.

Adults always tell children, “do this,” or “don’t do that,” even on walks. I suppose children must do what they are told. I was told not to talk to strangers on the street, and I never disobeyed that admonition willingly. Yet, that afternoon …

I was daydreaming when someone appeared at my side and started talking to me. It was a young blond German man, but I couldn’t tell how old he might be. He suddenly came out of nowhere. I wasn’t even aware know how long he had been walking and talking with me.

“Little girl, I need some help,” he said. “You look as if you are just the person to help me.”

I was startled when he put his hand on my shoulder, but he continued to speak as he walked with me.

“You look like such a nice little Jewish girl… you are Jewish, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Then I am sure you can help me to find Rabbi Silberstein who lives on this street. I have been looking for his name in most of the houses on this block. Do you know in which house he lives?”

I had no idea who Rabbi Silberstein was or where he lived. I did tell the man that I didn’t know. He was talking so fast I am sure he didn’t hear me. Or want to.

At that moment I became quite desperate. I wanted to run away, but I was afraid to be so impolite. The nice upbringing won out.

Within a few seconds he stopped at the front door of the nearest large apartment building and asked whether I would help him look inside. Once in the lobby, I noticed that he didn’t look at the large area of mailboxes where each box had a name affixed to it. I showed the mailboxes   to him.

“No, no,” he answered impatiently. “His name isn’t there. We must look on the second floor.”

He pointed to the large staircase and motioned for me to go ahead of him.

It got dark early that time of the year. I had never before been aware how dim the insides of those big apartment buildings were. The late afternoon sun filtered through the leaded glass panels on the landing barely enough to light up the stairs but left the rest of the building in semi-darkness.

The man pretended to look at the nameplate of every door on that floor. Then he shook his head again and pointed upstairs to the next floor, making me walk up ahead of him again. I thought of the punishment that awaited me at home if my mother found out about this.

I got a tight grip on my school bag and turned around to face the man who stood just a step below me on the stairs. I wanted to tell him I could not stay any longer to help him and that he would have to search by himself.

Suddenly, before I could say a word, he reached out, grabbed my waist, and knocked me down. In the darkness of the stairwell I couldn’t see his face but his heavy rapid breathing warned me that I must get away quickly. Like a trapped animal I felt a desperate urge to escape.

It was suddenly clear there was no Rabbi Silberstein in this house. The man had lied to me. Intense fear warned that I must get away quickly. In desperation I looked for an escape.

At the same time I was terribly angry. Hot anger boiled in me and gave me the strength I had not felt before.

I sat up, ducked, and ran right through the man’s legs, swiftly down three flights of stairs, and out of the house. Never looking back to see whether he was behind me, I did not stop running for at least ten blocks. When I finally reached home I darted into the house entrance, up the steps, and into our apartment.

Not until the door was closed securely behind me did I feel safe.

I rushed into my room and lay down on my bed. I cried and cried. When my mother questioned me, I told her the man had wanted to hurt me. I sobbed too hard to be coherent. She felt my head for a temperature and put me to bed for the rest of that day.

The scare did not pass easily. The next day I did not go to school, nor the next. I was calmer and could tell my mother some of the facts, but I was still afraid to go out on the street alone. Perhaps the man had found out where I lived and was outside waiting for me?

My mother finally went to the police without me. When she returned from the precinct station, she said the police had taken down her story and promised to look for the man who fitted the details.

She took off her coat and sat down in a chair next to the warm, safe bed I did not want to leave and talked to me. She fed me sips of hot tea. She looked sad and gazed past me out of the window into the winter sky.

My big pink teddy bear, dressed in my outgrown clothes, sat in another chair and listened, too.

I wondered what she had really been told at the police station. Perhaps they did not believe my story and said it must have been a child’s fantasy. Or did they care at all and had put her off politely?

I had always taken my problems to my mother, confident she would find the solution to them and set my world straight again. Her sad face suddenly revealed that my protector was not as strong as I had always believed. That day I knew for the first time that my mother too, was vulnerable.

About six months later I thought I saw the man again.

My mother and I were with friends on a Sunday outing in Berlin’s Grunewald at an outdoor cafe where strollers stopped for coffee and cake after a hike through the woods.

My parents had recently decided to divorce. No one explained to me what that meant.

All I knew was that my father was no longer living with us. My mother and I now lived in a newer apartment complex in West Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district. Walking home the long blocks from my school on Bleibtreu-strasse to our new home took much longer. After that past winter’s episode I had been unhappy and withdrawn. When spring came she took me out often, hoping that fresh air and exercise would perk me up.

That Sunday afternoon we sat at a round table covered with a white cloth. The waitress had already brought our order. Suddenly I was aware of a pair of eyes looking my way. They were the eyes of a young, good-looking, blond German man who smiled in a way that was not nice at all. I could not understand that kind of smile, and I stiffened with fright.

I was not sure he was looking at me, or that he had even seen me, yet somehow I sensed he had recognized me and that his smile dared me to open my mouth.

“That’s him, that’s the man, “ I said to my mother. I pulled her hand to get her attention for she was talking to someone at our table.

“Mother, that’s the one.”

I was anxious to go home. Those staring eyes, that smirking smile had spoiled the Sunday outing for me.

During the months that followed there were several occasions when I thought I saw the man again, especially among crowds of people. Perhaps it was my imagination.

As time passed I could no longer completely recall his face. His eyes, however, stayed with me for a long, long time. Now, after many years, the eyes too, have disappeared from my memory. Only in an occasional nightmare do they still linger.

Just prior to the start of my third school year the Nazi regime decided its good German children should no longer be exposed to daily contact with undesirable minorities and permanently barred Jewish children from attending public school.

I did not mind at all that I could no longer go to school.

I was glad.

Born in Germany, Ellen Norman Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

 

 

 

 

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June 16, 2014 · 8:36 am

Unlocking the Past

by Shira Sebban (Sydney, Australia)

We did not expect to find the diary. A non-descript, navy-bound volume, it had been stashed away in a drawer of the massive wooden study desk at which our late mother had worked for so many years. Perhaps she had simply forgotten writing it? Or perhaps she had chosen not to share her youthful passions and agonies with her daughters… We will never know.

I had long abandoned any hope of uncovering more details of my mother’s past, her memories having been gradually extinguished by Alzheimer’s disease, which had afflicted her for the last decade of her life. Now, as I turned the diary’s yellowed pages filled with her distinctive script, I felt grateful for the opportunity to discover her anew, albeit in a younger form, becoming acquainted with the person she once was before I was born.

Written in English in the mid-1950s, when a postgraduate traveling scholarship had taken her back from Melbourne, Australia, to her birthplace of Israel for two years, the diary provides a glimpse of what life was like then for a single, 20-something woman. Attractive and bright, she was courted by a host of mostly unsuitable admirers, although occasionally, one would become the focus of her hopes and dreams. After all, as she notes, her mother had advised her to “secure a future” for herself, urging her to work hard to accomplish her purpose: in other words, “get married”.

Part-travelogue and part-social commentary, the diary reads like a film script, the vividly portrayed characters flitting in and out of various settings. One moment my mother is at a party or concert, describing the dating scene: “Noticed some very good looking men in the audience. Wonder where they usually hide.” The next, she is on a crowded bus, discussing the four young Yemenite girls seated behind her: “probably recent arrivals to the country. Full of joy of life, laughing and continuously talking in high pitched voices, cracking small black seeds and throwing shells on the floor of the bus.”

A picture builds of what life was like in what was then the recently established State of Israel. Many of those she meets are keen to move elsewhere, believing there is more opportunity overseas. A certain unease lurks behind the pages too, and on one occasion, she even has to identify a suspect at the police station after an elderly woman is raped across the street from her home. More often, however, she is scared to walk alone in isolated areas, having heard about “some unpleasant and unfortunate encounters with Arab infiltrators”.

The term, “infiltrator”, with its connotations of menace, danger and evil, has recently been revived to refer to African asylum seekers to Israel. Its origins date back to the early 1950s, when there were several attacks on Israeli settlements, resulting in around 100 casualties and culminating in the “Prevention of Infiltration Law” of 1954, which defined those citizens of surrounding Arab states, as well as Palestinians, who entered Israel illegally, as “infiltrators”, punishable by law, especially if they were armed or had committed crimes against people or property.

Emotions certainly ran high within Israel itself too. On a morning walk through the Carmel market near the family home in south Tel Aviv, my mother describes police arresting an “old Arab who was selling baskets… He was yelling his protests. Bystanders said he was allowed to sell his products in the main street, but not in the market.

“Further on I heard terrible cries, saw a young fellow who had slashed his own throat in protest at having had his cart full of vegetables taken to the police station. Apparently, he too had no permit to trade in the market.”

I had long known that after leaving Israel, my mother had undertaken an epic sea voyage to Italy, also visiting Paris and working in London before deciding to make her way to Montreal, where she would ultimately meet her future husband and my father. Until now, however, I had thought that those often-recounted stories had been buried with her. So imagine my delight to discover that the diary also contains a record of the first part of the journey she undertook by ship from the northern Israeli port of Haifa to Venice via Greece and then on to Milan by train.

Penniless, she could only gaze longingly at the elegant Italian shop window displays, but could “afford nothing no matter how cheap the prices were”. Arriving in Milan and not wanting to stay on her own, she was on the verge of boarding the night train to Paris with nothing to eat bar a box of biscuits, when she finally managed to contact the aunt and uncle of one of her best friends in Tel Aviv, who invited her to stay with them. Successful furriers, my mother writes, they had “made a name for themselves”, their shop frequented by “a good class of clientele”, including members of the aristocracy and movie stars.

Although most of the numerous names that appear in the diary remain unfamiliar to me, the family name of my mother’s good friend stood out. Hadn’t I gone to school with a boy of the same name?

It so happens I had been reminded of that particular family at the beginning of this year – before we discovered the diary — while on holiday in Israel, when I had learned that Michael, my old school friend, was staying in the same hotel. We spent some time catching up and also exchanged contact details.

Now, as I turned the pages of the diary, I realized that the characters so vividly depicted by my mother included various members of Michael’s extended family. My mother’s friend was Michael’s aunt, meaning the Milan furriers must have been his great aunt and uncle. I sent an email to Michael, who immediately put me in touch with the Italian branch of his family and all was confirmed. Even better, his elderly and frail aunt in Tel Aviv could still remember my mother and recalled the deep friendship between various generations of our families.

As it transpires, our familial ties date back at least a century to Poland via Tel Aviv and on to Australia: A tale of friendship and support, harking back to the days of our great grandparents, with the diary key to piecing together the puzzle of just how we are connected.

The ravages of Alzheimer’s disease had prevented my mother from recounting her memories long before her death last year. Her diary provides a portrait of her, as I never knew her: a young, passionate woman searching for intelligent companionship and the man of her dreams. It provides the key to unlocking a part of her past with which I was unfamiliar, a past that I thought had been lost forever.

Shira Sebban, a writer and editor based in Sydney, Australia, worked as a journalist for the Australian Jewish News. She previously taught French at the University of Queensland and worked in publishing. She also serves as vice-president on the board of  Emanuel School, a pluralistic and egalitarian Jewish Day School. You can read more of her work at: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13636, as well as https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/category/australian-jewry/ and http://shirasebban.blogspot.com.au/

 

 

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April 7, 2014 · 8:48 am

My Olympics

By Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

I didn’t think I had remembered. Or perhaps it was something I had wished to forget over the many years since it had happened.

But then the sight of the five interlocked Olympic circles, the flag-bearing gymnasts marching into the crowded spectator-filled stadium, the familiar melody of the Olympic hymn sounding through the television screen brought back a long-forgotten memory best not remembered.

In the summer of 1936, Berlin experienced an uncommon heat wave not usually felt in this temperate European zone. Earlier that late spring, as an eight-year old, I had suffered a heat stroke while playing in the school yard. As a consequence I was forced to spend the many days until summer vacation at home, dizzy and nauseous, lying on the bed in my darkened, spinning room, with a wet cloth covering my head.

Like everyone else in the city I hoped to be well again by the time August came around.

Then the much-awaited Olympic Games were to start in Berlin. The capital city was looking forward to become the site of a world event.

I had the fervent wish to be a part of it. To walk through the avenues flagged so splendidly with the banners of the Olympiad and Germany, its host country. To be in the crowd welcoming the many top sports champions from all over the world. To see them perform, perhaps. To witness their receiving the medals for which they had all struggled so hard.

How I would manage to achieve my dream I did not yet know. Nothing in the real Germany of the day favored the daydreams of a small Jewish child.

And yet…hadn’t I heard of things loosening up in the anti-Jewish world around me? Even from the hushed sound of voices in my parents’ living room rumors reached me that most of the fashionable restaurants in town were starting to remove the signs in their front windows, signs that spelled out Jews Not Welcome. “Even Dobrin and Kempinsky are among them,” I heard them mention two of Berlin’s top cafes. Many friends of my parents looked for every possible sign that the icy spirit of Hitler’s Germany was thawing before the eyes of the world.

Not many days later the sob-filled telephone call of my father’s secretary informed us that he had been arrested right within his office and that we had better not expect him home that evening because she assumed that he was taken right to prison. She had no idea what the charges were.

It took my mother several days of frantic investigating to discover that the charges were “bicycle theft” and were brought by an unknown party.

This type of “denunciation” had become a standard procedure in our day. Anyone with a grudge was using it to get “even” for an unknown slight. Especially if it was against a Jew.

However, it seemed particularly ridiculous in the case of my father. Even I knew that he hardly needed to stoop to such a crime. While we still lived in Hannover, prior to moving to Berlin, he had been a successful businessman driven by a chauffeur; my mother, a fashionable, artistic lady whose household had included a cook, cleaning maid, and a laundress. Why then, bother with such a lowly accusation?

A clue emerged a few days later when my mother received a letter from the police. She opened it with shaking hands, only to drop it with an outcry of horror.

“You are hereby informed to report immediately to the Olympiastadion in Grunewald where you are required to help in the construction of the “Reichssportfeld” by doing Feld-Arbeit clearing the grounds for the upcoming Olympic Games.

“This action is required in reparation for the charges incurred by your husband’s prison sentence and subsequent costs borne by the German government.

“Heil Hitler!”

I, of course, had not the slightest idea what all this meant. All I knew was that at last we, my mother and I, would be traveling to the site of my dreams, the Olympic Stadium in the Grunewald. And I was overjoyed!

Every morning of that summer of 1936 my mother and I boarded the U-Bahn (subway) at our stop in Charlottenburg and rode to the end of the line in the Grunewald Forest. Since no one was at home in our family, my mother was forced to take me along every day of her work. Each day she carried a sandwich for me and a bottle of water, plus a sunhat and appropriate clothing for me to wear during the heat spell. After all, I had already experienced one sunstroke.

This area was to be the future home of Berlin’s 1936 Summer Olympics. It had been designated long before, in 1912, by the International Olympic Committee.

The First World War had prevented any games from taking place. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, the party decided to make the most of the tremendous propaganda occasion by using the Olympic Games as a showplace for the upcoming progressive world of the Third Reich.

The plan was the construction of the Reichssportfeld, a huge arena that was expected to take two years to build.

One of the sites included in the field was the Waldbuehne, an amphitheater with the capacity to seat 25,000 people.

It was this location which would require the labor of my mother and the many other women who were forced to convert the area into a showplace.

I had no idea of any of this when we arrived for work the first day.

With other women who had shared the train ride we climbed up the subway steps. A huge rock-strewn field of weeds awaited us at our destination.

I held my mother’s hand with one hand and carried my sandwich bag and a book with the other. We were met at the top by brown-clad SA men who registered us and turned us over to matrons who led us to a nearby cabin. There the women changed their dresses into more appropriate attire for the work ahead. Before each person left the cabin she was handed a rake and a hoe.

I do not remember any other children present. My mother settled me into an available chair, said that she would check on me whenever she could, and told me to be good.

And then she stepped outside into the burning sunlight and was assigned a stretch of the large field.

I could see her from my chair inside, although she was out of reach of my voice. In the stuffy heat of the cabin I saw my pretty mother chipping away at rocks or bending down to pull out the weeds she had loosened. It was an unreal, nightmarish view I wish I did not have to witness. It may well be the reason I have tried to forget this episode for a major part of my life.

So began each long, hot day, boring and tiring and far from my dreams of the Olympic experience. It was not until the sun began to set that the hoped-for hour of going home arrived.

August 1 arrived, and with it the opening of the 1936 Olympiade.

It was a time before television brought events into every home. I was not able to view the grand episodes I had hoped to see.

Eventually I saw pictures of the rock-strewn weed-filled field, which was now a lush green carpet terminated by a beautiful amphitheater named the “Dietrich Eckhard Buehne.” Another area of the terrain housed the special box of honor where Adolf Hitler greeted his guests. Everything was grand and splendid and politically motivated. The “Fuehrer” was shown bursting with pride, just as another evil dictator named Vladimir Putin would posture unsmilingly in a similar situation in another country many years later.

The sound of the Olympic Hymn in 2014 brought it all back. How little things have changed!

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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February 24, 2014 · 9:46 am

Exploring “Emotional Genealogy”

What is “emotional genealogy” and how does it differ from traditional genealogy?

Award-winning travel journalist Judith Fein describes “emotional genealogy” as a combination of a family’s history and the behavior of family members who have created that history.

An acclaimed speaker and workshop leader, Fein is the author of Life Is A Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel and the just-released The Spoon From Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands. (If you’d like to read an excerpt  from The Spoon From Minkowitz, click here: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/minkowitz-and-me/)

She was kind enough to share some thoughts on “emotional genealogy” with readers of The Jewish Writing Project:

JWP: How did you first come upon the idea of emotional genealogy?

Fein: I noticed that when I saw names and dates on my family tree, I fell asleep under the branches. I so admire people who do genealogical research, but I realized that I am definitely not one of them. On the other hand, whenever my parents or relatives related the slightest crumb of family stories, I became ravenously hungry.  “Hmm,” I thought. “What do you call it if you are mesmerized by the tales of those who came before you? Emotional genealogy. It seemed to fit.

JWP: What is emotional genealogy?

Fein: It is not only the stories that are told and have been handed down, but it is also the family behavior patterns that are transmitted. There are positive behaviors–like optimism, the thirst for social justice, kindness, an artistic or musical bent–but also the dark ones like rage, violence, lying, addiction, stonewalling silence.

JWP: What if I don’t know anything about my ancestors?

Fein: There is always a snippet of information or a piece of a story. Even the most minor details are pieces of the puzzle. If you have older relatives who are living, they are a prime source. If you have cousins, they may have some stories. As a child, you certainly observed behaviors of your relatives. Do you see them in yourself?

JWP: What if no one in my family knows or wants to talk about them?

Fein: Then you go to Plan B, which involves research or using your intuition. Are you particularly drawn to a certain country? You may have had ancestors there, even without knowing for sure. Are you attracted to certain types of people? Well, you may have an ancestral connection. Your own intelligence, creativity and intuitive instincts are sources of a different kind of information.

JWP: What did you gain from approaching your genealogy search in this way?

Fein: First, by learning the stories, I feel that I have roots in a very rootless world. They give me a sense of meaning and purpose. That is why I wrote my book, The Spoon From Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands.

Second, I have understood the behavior patterns in my family–especially the toxic ones. I have seen how negative traits are passed down from one generation to another. And I have vowed that the buck stops with me. As someone recently told me, “If you don’t transform it, you transmit it.”

JWP: Thank you, Judith. Good luck with your explorations!

If you’re interested in exploring your own emotional genealogy, visit Judith Fein’s website for more information: www.emotionalgenealogy.org.

And if you’re interested in hearing her speak, click on this link to hear her inspiring TED talk on the beauty of travel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GErjagMyrYk&feature=youtu.be

You can view more of her work at her website: http://globaladventure.us

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February 17, 2014 · 9:39 am

Sell Me The Child

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY) 

I first heard the story many years ago and at the time, quite frankly, never gave it much thought. But when I heard the story a second time, I was shocked and bewildered. How would things have worked out had my parents relented and given their blessings to an arrangement that few could ever fathom? How could any sane individual make such a proposal and expect a positive reply? But judge for yourselves. Listen to my father’s story as he details an event that occurred right before the birth of my younger brother.   

On the days immediately following liberation, if a survivor had gained enough strength to stand before a mirror, he or she would probably have had a difficult time recognizing the image appearing on the glass surface. The reflection would likely be that of a  stranger dressed in rags with shaven head, emaciated body and deeply  sunken  listless eyes. That is how we looked as we emerged from years of darkness and entered a world ablaze with freedom and light. The years of suffering and abuse had taken its toll leaving us both physically and emotionally disabled. How could we ever regain all that we had lost and how do we go about rebuilding our shattered lives? Entire families were murdered, our homes and  possessions were long gone and we had virtually nothing but the clothes on our backs. We were the broken remnants of a forsaken people who had been sadistically tortured and systematically exterminated while much of the world stood idly by without raising a whimper in protest.

Who but a survivor could best appreciate  another survivor’s needs, fears and aspirations?  We quite naturally gravitated to one another. Friends became more than friends and often assumed the role of siblings and parents providing the comfort and support that could only come from a close family member. Each survivor knew that only another survivor was able to appreciate the  pain and sorrow that would  remain deeply implanted within each of us. After liberation, we were all displaced orphans who placed our trust in one another, relied on each other and yes, married one another.

I was liberated by US military forces while on a death march that originated in the Flossenburg concentration camp, the site of my last confinement. My struggle first began in the Lodz ghetto, continued in Auschwitz and finally ended in Flossenburg, a slave labor camp located in Germany. How we managed to survive when so many had not is a question that I am often asked but unable to answer.  After considerable thought, I came to the realization that perhaps it is better for all concerned that this question remains unanswered. Each response, each and every attempt  at providing an answer tends to appear so utterly superficial and woefully inadequate.

I was now free but had no idea how to go about restarting my life. My wife and three children were gone; I had no home, no source of income and no  documentation. Like most other survivors, I decided that my first priority was to return home in hope of locating any family member or acquaintance that may have survived the war.  Most would soon learn that few, if any, had survived.  And to make matters even worse, returning Jews were not welcomed back to their hometowns and were often threatened, beaten and, in some cases, murdered without the slightest bit of hesitation by the local citizenry.

Many survivors were quick to marry and start families. Survivors often married out of necessity and on many an occasion, for reasons that would often be frowned upon  today. We were pragmatic rather than romantic and realism far outweighed love and the idealistic and fanciful images of securing the ideal and perfect mate. I married a former neighbor who had lived with her family just a floor above my apartment in a working class neighborhood in Lodz, Poland. We were the sole survivors of  our respective families and our marriage proved timely and sensible for both of us.  We knew each other and trusted one another and that was more than enough. We were married in Poland but with anti-Semitism still an overriding concern, we decided to seek safety in Germany of all places. Two healthy children were born in a displaced persons camp a short while before we set out for the United States.

Survivors formed close bonds with one another. How could an outsider ever appreciate  what we had gone through? They could never possibly understand and there were times when outsiders, including those amongst our own people, became adversaries rather than advocates. Whenever Holocaust experiences were discussed, there were a good number of individuals who voiced outright disbelief and often accused us of exaggerating facts or spreading falsehoods. Some even advised that we not talk of our experiences so as not to upset friends and acquaintances.

I was once asked how I felt about bringing children into a world that tolerated the murder of so many innocent Jewish children. My response was simple and to the point. I had never come across any survivor who had the slightest reservation about having children. In fact, not having a child, left many emotionally devastated and deprived of joy and fulfillment. Now that you have the necessary background, permit me to share a story with you.

My family had befriended a couple who, like us, had married after the war. He was considerably older than she but what did it matter? They were both vulnerable and isolated and, like many survivors, decided to wed. Try as they may, they were unable to have children.  As each year passed, both grew increasingly despondent and were desperate for a child whatever the cost. They would often come to visit and showered my children with love and affection. We comforted the couple as best we could but their desperation worsened with each visit.

Approximately four years after we settled in America, my wife was pregnant with our third child.  We were once again paid a visit by our childless friends who now learned of the pregnancy while we were all sitting at the kitchen table talking about life back in Europe. I could sense that something was not right as they both fidgeted with their tea cups and eyed one another in a way that I found troubling.

Our friend placed his cup on the table and suddenly gave us a look unlike anything we had observed  throughout the many years of our friendship. With eyes awash in tears, the tormented fellow began speaking somewhat haltingly but with a tone that could only signify deep pain and desperation. “You already have two children and could likely have more if you so wished….sell me this unborn baby. I’ll pay you whatever you want but we need a child. Without a child we have nothing, nothing at all.” He continued in this vein without letup for a minute or two hoping to convince us to do the unthinkable, to consider the impossible. He promised the world if we would only agree.

I had to put an immediate stop to this madness and as my neck and chest began to tighten, I started out by telling them that I understood their grief and felt their sorrow. “This is nothing but foolish talk, the talk of sheer desperation. I know what you feel, believe me I know,” I whispered. “But we could never do such a thing. I wish there was some other way to help you but we cannot do such a thing.” Not another word was said. As I looked at this sad and desperate couple, I saw tears streaming down their ashen faces. My dear friend knew that I had already lost three children and would never agree to his request. But what was there to lose? He had to ask.

We remained close and whenever the couple  came to visit, they paid particular attention to my younger son, the baby they so desperately wanted for their own. I also noted a slight change in behavior whenever they rose from the couch as they prepared to leave for home. While adjusting their coats, they would take a longer than usual look back at the giggling toddler before slowly approaching the front door.

We were like brothers, perhaps even closer than brothers. Our experiences bound us together in a manner that defies description and can never be adequately put into words. My wife and I  would have gladly done  anything for this sad couple but this was one request we could simply not honor. Two or three years were to pass before they finally succeeded in adopting a baby girl.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the author of Our Frozen Tears (http://tinyurl.com/kuzlscb), as well as the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust. “Sell Me The Child” is excerpted from Our Frozen Tears with the kind permission of the author. 

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January 20, 2014 · 9:43 am

Minkowitz and Me

by Judith Fein (Santa Fe, NM)

When I was 10 years old, while other girls were playing with dolls, I was obsessed with the shtetl, or village, my grandmother came from. I begged my parents to take me to Brooklyn, so I could sit next to her, feel the softness of her skin, and ask her about her village in Russia.

My grandmother was not forthcoming. Nor did she know exactly where her shtetl was located because it was an isolated village, and the only time she ventured any real distance from it was to come to the United States when she was 17.

“Grandma, where do you come from?” I would ask.

“Far.”

“What was it like?”

“Feh.”

The less she said, the more my imagination went wild, conjuring up images of a dark, mysterious place in Russia with sinewy alleys. I was awed that my grandmother, the woman who was my mother’s mother and called me “mamaleh,” lived in such a place and knew its secrets.

“Please, Gram, tell me.”

“It’s better to forget about it.”

She never spontaneously talked about Minkowitz, and I never gave up questioning her or trying to find out about her life before she came to America, before I knew her. Who was she before she was my grandmother?

“Tell me what you ate there, Gram.”

“Food.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“There was a market once a week, on Tuesdays. We had beans, potatoes, beets, corn….” her voice trailed off. She went into the kitchen to stir the chicken soup, and I watched the yellow chicken legs float to the surface and then disappear.

“Are you hungry, mamaleh?” she asked.

When I nodded, she opened the refrigerator and took out a jar full of schmaltz—rendered chicken fat—that was speckled with burnt onions. She spread half an inch of schmaltz on a piece of rye bread, and handed it to me.

“Did you eat schmaltz in Minkowitz?”

She nodded yes. I took a huge bite of bread, relishing the schmaltz, because it linked me to my grandmother’s village.

I was never very interested in religion, but I loved everything about my grandmother’s culture: the Yiddish newspaper that was folded up on an overstuffed, upholstered armchair in the living room; the front parlor, where I slept, and which looked out over the street; the pantry closet which smelled vaguely from matza. Most of all, I loved that she came from Minkowitz. It sounded so exotic. It was somewhere across the ocean, in a vast country called Russia. She wasn’t born in America, like I was. She came from a mysterious place and she was a foreigner with secrets. I felt about her the way the ancients must have felt about travelers who arrived in their midst; they wanted to hear stories, to learn about how people lived in faraway lands. The slightest details that my grandmother divulged about Minkowitz became indelibly imprinted on my brain.

“Gram, did you go to school?”

“No, mamasheyna.”

“Why not, Gram?”

“We weren’t allowed to.”

“Why couldn’t you go to school?”

I was like a little prosecuting attorney, and my grandmother softened on the witness stand. She got a faraway look in her eyes.

“I stood at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the school where the Russian girls studied. They wore blue uniforms. I wanted to be educated like them.”

“But you couldn’t….?”

She shook her head no. I wrote down everything she told me, and thought about it until the next time I saw her. Then I started asking questions again.

“If you didn’t go to school, what did you do all day in Minkowitz?”

“When I was 10 years old, like you are now, I was working.”

“What kind of work?”

“I dried tobacco leaves in the field with the women.”

I had never seen a tobacco leaf. Why did they need to be dried? I wrote down what my grandmother told me, and mulled it over until our next conversation. My mother said I was making my grandmother crazy. I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I loved my grandmother. I was just asking her about her childhood.

“Tell me about your house, Gram. What did it look like?”

“The floor was made from goat dreck.”

Goat shit for a floor. Were there clumps of dung? Who spread them out? Did they stink? What happened if you walked on the floor with bare feet? I clung to each tidbit, marinating it in my mind and imagination, repeating it to myself as though my life depended upon my remembering it.

On one visit, I was playing with cans of food in my grandmother’s hall closet, stacking them, and unstacking them, using them like big tin Legos. She walked by and patted me affectionately on the shoulder.

“Where in Russia was Minkowitz, Gram? Do you know the name of the biggest city in the area?”

“Oy. Always Minkowitz. The biggest city was Kamenetz Podolsk.”

Again, I wrote down every word she said. I thought I was getting ancestral gems, but later, when I looked at the content, it was paltry indeed. No stories. No slice of life anecdotes. Just six facts about my grandmother’s life in Minkowitz. That was it. The weekly market was on Tuesday. When she was 10 years old, she dried tobacco leaves with the women. She lived at the bottom of a hill. The Russian girls went to school on top of the hill. The floor of the house was made of goat dung.  Kamenetz Podolsk was the big town. I repeated the scant facts over and over, clinging to them, imagining what they looked like, felt like, smelled like. It was so vivid that I felt as though I had lived in Minkowitz too.

I knew that in Minkowitz they spoke Yiddish. I started trying to imitate the sounds of the language since I couldn’t speak it. Instead, I invented a sort of fake Yiddish. I would call my grandmother, and, when she answered the phone, I would cheerfully ask, “Grandma, vus habastups-du?”

“Judie,” she would say sadly, “I don’t understand your Eedish.” That’s how she pronounced it: “Eedish.”

The next time I called, I greeted her with the bogus, “Grandma, hoison boisin galempt.”

“Judie, I’m sorry. I just can’t understand your Eedish.”

When I was 19, bedridden with mononucleosis and hepatitis, I didn’t have the energy to roll over or kick the covers off when it got too hot. My grandmother got on a train in Brooklyn, which was unusual for her, and came to see me in Queens. She sat next to my bed, on a folding chair, and informed me that she finally figured out why she didn’t understand my Yiddish. “Because you go to college and you speak a very educated Eedish.” If I had had the energy, I would have leapt out of bed and hugged her.

Judith Fein is an award-winning travel journalist who has written for more than 100 publications. An acclaimed speaker and workshop leader, she is also the author of Life Is A Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel and the just-released The Spoon From Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands, from which this piece is excerpted and reprinted with the kind permission of the author. Her website is http://www.GlobalAdventure.us

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December 23, 2013 · 2:42 pm

Christmas Eve

by Richard Epstein (Washington, DC)

I wore socks on my hands as I played
kick-the-can in the middle of the cobblestone court.
The neighborhood kids asked me to sneak
some of my mom’s potato kugel and mandle bread.
They promised to trade pierogies and kielbasa
the next time we play.

No one asked about the flickering candles
in the front window of our house.
No one asked why we didn’t have
a Christmas tree. That night, I sat
on the parlor floor in front of the tall
Philco radio, while mom darned socks
and dad fell asleep with the newspaper
held high in his hands.

I listened to Buffalo Bob to see if Santa
received my letter. I asked for a Red Flier
and Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring.
Grandma stopped rocking and looked up
from her knitting when she heard Buffalo Bob
announce my name on the radio.
“Vas es daas?”  she asked.

We listened to the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny,
the Shadow and the Creaking Door.
After every one was asleep I tip-toed
down the creaky stairs and left a glass
of milk and cookies on top of the radio.

I shut my eyes tight and made a wish
for Santa to bring me a something other
than a wooden dreidel, a cap and bag of socks
from my Aunt, Chanukah gelt
and a shiny lump of coal.

Richard Epstein lives in the Washington DC area and is active in the Warrior Poets sponsored by Walter Reed Medical Center, the Veterans Writing Project and he hosts an open mic venue for veterans and friends of veterans on the National Mall in Washington, DC every Veterans Day and Memorial Day.

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December 16, 2013 · 9:22 am

An Unexpected Discovery

by Laurie Rappeport (Safed, Israel)

Several years ago I became involved in guiding a group of students who were studying the history of the American Jewish Experience through music. The kids were examining Jewish America of the 21st century.

Toward this end they explored the traditional liturgy and music of successive waves of immigrants who made their way to America’s shores over the past 400 years. It was probably one of the most interesting subjects that I’ve ever tackled with a group of students.

The project first brought me into contact with the Milken Archives of American Jewish Music, which provided the students with a significant percentage of our research material. Much of the Milken material relates to the first Jewish immigrants who arrived in South Carolina from Brazil in the mid-1600s. These people were refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and, after fleeing to South America, were forced to run again when the Inquisition reached South America.

The students had a wonderful time and I put the experience in the back of my mind until recently when I suddenly discovered that the history of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and forced to wander the world, looking for sanctuary, was, in fact, my own history.

Until that time, as far as I knew, I was a bona fide gefilte fish and kreplach Jew with roots in Poland, Belerus and Lithuania. However, it turns out that one of my grandfathers, who hailed from England, was the descendent of Dutch Jews who were almost certainly of Spanish origin.

In 2008 I received an email from a man in New Zealand. Geoff had been born in Birmingham England and immigrated to New Zealand in the ’50s with his father and brother. However, recent documents had come to light that indicated that Geoff had, in fact, been adopted, and that his biological father had been Jewish.

In following through the family history that my family knew, as well as the history that Geoff had been able to determine, we were able to ascertain that Geoff and my mother were second cousins. A subsequent DNA test with my mother’s brother confirmed the relationship.

Throughout the following year Geoff showed great interest in his Jewish ancestry. Still living in New Zealand, he read voraciously about Judaism and Israel and contacted me on Skype several times a week to find out my take on the things that he was reading. In 2009 Geoff and his wife, Jenny, came to Israel to meet the family and attend my son’s wedding.

Geoff and Jenny continued to research our family’s history but they were also fascinated by Judaism. They returned to Israel the following year to celebrate Rosh Hashana with us and in February 2011, under Israel’s Law of Return, made aliyah. To say that no one was more surprised than I was is an understatement!

Geoff and Jenny joined an ulpan course to learn Hebrew and completed a formal conversion program in February 2012 with a giur and a Jewish wedding celebration as a new Jewish couple. The story of their return to Judaism was featured as a Friday spread in Israel’s largest newspaper. They bought a home and now live a 20-minute walk from my house in Safed in northern Israel.

Geoff has continued to explore our common genealogy and discovered a number of interesting details of our family’s life in England. The majority of England’s Jews are, like America’s Jews, descended from Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (One interesting note: many of these immigrants had intended to make their way to America but, when the ships docked on the eastern shore of Scotland or England, were tricked by the sea captains into thinking that they had arrived in America and never completed the train ride that would have taken them to the western shore and their second boat to America.)

What Geoff discovered was that, in at least two lines of our family, our lineage can be traced back to Dutch Jews who were welcomed to England by Oliver Cromwell in the late 1600s. (Jews were expelled from England in 1266 and were not allowed back into the country until Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, invited them to return.)  The majority of the Jews in Amsterdam during that period were descendants of Jews who had fled Spain in 1492.

Suddenly, my students’ project took on a whole new meaning as I realized that the art, music, traditions and customs of the Mediterranean and Sephardic world comprised my own heritage as well.

There’s still much left to determine about our family’s history, but access to the increasing availability of both English and Dutch records may open the door to new discoveries. One far-flung cousin was able to find her ancestor’s ketubah in Italy while another break-away branch of the family has been located in Australia and New Zealand. It turns out that one of their descendants lives up the road from me in the Golan Heights!

In the meantime, Geoff and Jenny have become core members of our local synagogue. (Geoff arrives every Shabbat morning at 8:00 am. I told him that, in my entire life, I’d never made it to shul before 10:00 am.) Their latest project is wine-making, which they undertook so that, when they spend time in Italy (which they do every summer), they’ll have plenty of kosher wine.

Laurie Rappeport is originally from Detroit. She is an online educator who works with Jewish day school and afternoon school students to teach them about Judaism and Israel. She frequently uses the Milken Archives as a resource for historical studies about Judaism. 

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November 18, 2013 · 9:28 am

Bearing Witness

 by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

I never knew my grandmother.
I never knew why she left her Polish shtetl.
I never knew why she was Austro-Hungarian and Polish at the same time.
I never tasted her stuffed cabbage with raisins in white sauce.
I never ladled the cholent she left on the stove all day for her boys.
I never ate her boiled hot dogs on a bun on Market Day.
I never went by two buses with her to the Prince Street Market.
I never sat on her knee while she kibbitzed with neighbors by the front window radiator.
I never appreciated her generosity as she doled out clothing after the celluloid explosion of ’33.
I never rang her cash register.
I never witnessed her haggling with New York City wholesalers.
I never saw her hold fabrics between her fingers to decide what to sell in her store.
I never scolded her for wearing such thin flowered dresses.
I never noticed the flash in her eyes before a belly laugh.
I never beheld her penetrating gaze or fell victim to her caustic words.
I never addressed envelopes in English to her sisters in Europe.
I never spotted worry lines on her face with three sons in the U.S. Armed Forces.
I never accompanied her to the Joint to sponsor her only surviving relative to America.
I never visited her, wracked with cancer in the hospital.
I never felt her joy when her brother arrived from the DP camp.
She never knew me.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Poetica Magazine, Jewishfiction.net, Nimrod,Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Minerva Rising, The Copperfield Review and others. She teaches creative writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She is the author of Discovering Your Jewish Ancestors (Heritage Quest, 2001) and the forthcoming Goldie Takes a Stand! (Kar-Ben, Fall 2014), a tale of young Golda Meir. You can read more about her at her website www.barbarakrasner.com and her blog The Whole Megillah – The Writer’s Resource for Jewish Story.

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