Category Archives: Family history

November 15, 2010 · 8:45 am

My Grandmother’s Kitchen

By Ferida Wolff (Cherry Hill, NJ)

My grandmother’s kitchen smelled of
allspice and cloves,
hot frying oil,
pungent sour salad
all mixed up with summer heat
and years of family dinners.

Give me the recipes,
Grandma, I begged
as I sniffed at the pots
on the old-fashioned stove.
She smiled her Mona Lisa smile
and told me to take
a glass of this,
a soup-plate of that,
mix it and fry it
and there it is;
no magic about
the nose teasing smells,
the tongue pleasing tastes.

But when I tried it
somehow mine wasn’t the same.
Perhaps my soup-plate
was too big or
too small.
The pinch of salt
she neglected to mention
made a difference
though not enough –
something was missing.
When I asked her why
she shrugged with innocence.

It took me years to discover
that the food she cooked
was her gift to us,
our inheritance,
her life reflected
in the shimmering oil
of the frying pan.

Ferida Wolff’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Moment Magazine, Midstream, Horizons, and Woman’s World, among other periodicals. An author of seventeen books for children and three essay books for adults, she has also contributed stories to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and HCI’s Ultimate series, as well as online at www.grandparents.com and as a columnist for www.seniorwomen.com. You can visit her website for more information: www.feridawolff.com or her blog at http://feridasbackyard.blogspot.com/

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October 4, 2010 · 7:10 am

Mr. Blumen

by Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

Stiffly they sit, side by side
In sepia-flavored photo on the shelf
Their hundred-year synced stories
Now torn by jagged scythe most quick
From the banshee-screaming reaper:
The cossack’s rapier brandished high
In Warsaw, slashed and missed them.
The dysentery, the loneliness
Vale-filled tears, endless pain:
They survived it all,
Two lovers near burning in the ghetto;
Sixty years on, now one off
So how shall he presume?
Without her skin to smell,
Her wisdom and nags
Her giggles and word-arrows
Piercing his cast-iron armor
Or lighting his slow-built ardor
Why breathe? But he will
Most assuredly go on,
For the Eldest Cossack
Has missed yet again.

Chaim Weinstein taught English for more than thirty years at two inner-city junior high schools in Brooklyn, NY. His poem, “The Shul is Dark,” appeared on The Jewish Writing Project (February, 2010), and an early short story, “Ball Games and Things,” was published in Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Nocturne. He is currently working in several genres and is hoping to  share a larger selection of his work in the future.

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September 27, 2010 · 7:34 am

Devotion to Faith

by Roma Talasowicz-Eibuszyc (New York, NY)
Translated from the Polish by Suzanna Eibuszyc (Calabasas, CA)

Painful though this will be, I have decided that she is right. I do this not so much to preserve my own story, but rather that my brothers and sisters will not have perished with their stories untold. I risk feeling again the tormented sleep on an open field with one, thin blanket between me and the sky. My stomach will again be gnawed away by the constant hunger.  I will see the German planes over Warsaw and hear the explosions of bombs. Will those who read of my life be ready for the lice, the humiliation, and the never-ending fever and chills of malaria? Will they understand that it is possible to lose one’s mother two times?  Should I describe the beatings that put Sevek at the edge of death, or the cold that seeped into my bones and never quite left? They tell me I am to ‘bear witness,’ that I ‘have an obligation.’   So be it.  It was beshert, meant to be that I live the life I’ve had, and I suppose beshert that I now write what I remember:

We lived in Warsaw in a tiny fourth floor apartment in an old tenement building on 54 Nowolipki Street. That apartment comes back to me in my dreams. I see the eight of us living in one room, although in reality I could never have seen this; I was a one year-old baby.  The First World War had not yet ended when my thirty-six year old father died.  It was a sudden death from something as simple as an ear infection.  When I was older, I remember going with mother to the cemetery. A cut down tree trunk marked his grave.

I can not imagine how mother managed with no husband and six young children in a city ravaged by war where most everyone was struggling to survive.  My oldest brother, Adek, was twelve at the time father died. It was a blessing that the owner of the textile factory where father worked let Adek take father’s job. I am sure that it was thanks to that owner’s generosity that we survived that first year, as well as later on. My twin sisters, Pola and Sala, were eleven, and as hungry as we were, Mother did not have the heart to send them off to work. That this was not the case with other parents says so much about my mother. Many children were sent to work at a younger age than twelve.  My sister, Andza, and brother, Sevek, were seven and four at the time of father’s death.

My first memories still haunt me to this day. I don’t know how old I was but I see myself with my brothers and sisters, hungry, cold, and alone in our room waiting for Mother to return. It is not difficult, even now, to feel the gnawing hunger and the cold in my bones from that day.  I sat on the edge of the narrow bed I shared with Mother and watched the door for hours, just waiting for her to come home. We didn’t know where she had gone but she had been gone all day.  My fear that she was never coming home grew stronger as darkness descended. We were forbidden to light the kerosene lamp when we were alone.  I remember how mother looked when the door opened. She was disheveled and out of breath as though she had been chased. She paused for a few seconds, walked over to me, and gave me the small piece of bread she clutched to her chest. I devoured it turning away from my starving brothers and sisters. Intellectually, rationally, there is no reason to feel guilty. I know I was too young to be accountable. But, in my heart, I ask myself over and over, how could I have eaten this piece of bread and not shared even a bite?

Regardless of how little money she had to feed us, mother secretly saved for the whole year to make sure we had a proper, religious Passover. She made sure we understood the importance of this holiday, and of celebrating the Exodus of our people from Egypt. Today, when I contemplate Mother saving like this, in view of the fact that on many days we had practically nothing to eat, I am struck by her devotion to her faith.

At age 50, after working in a factory all day long, Roma Talasowicz-Eibuszyc enrolled in night school and soon became fluent in English, was able to get a job in a bank, persevered and never gave up, and always tried  to better her situation.

In her youth Roma joined the Bund movement.Their philosophy had a great impact on her way of thinking for the rest of her life. While still in Warsaw she endangered her life many times fighting for workers rights, for socialism.

Before her death in 2006, she wrote her memoir, Beshert – It Was Meant To Be, from which this section was excerpted. To read more of the memoir, visit: http://www.theverylongview.com/WATH/ and click on “Mothers.” In the left-hand column you’ll see chapters 1 – 4 of Beshert – It Was Meant To Be.

Her daughter, Suzanna Eibuszyc, translated the manuscript from the original Polish in 2007. Born in Poland, Suzanna graduated from CCNY where she took classes in the department of Jewish studies with Professor Elie Wiesel, who encouraged her to translate her mother’s memoir into English. She now lives in Calabasas, CA and writes: “On the day my mother died, I opened the box containing the memoir which she had brought six years before from NY to Los Angeles.  Her handwriting, her words, connected me to her.  As I started to read her pages, she came to life. Translating and researching her story took me four years.”

All rights reserved to “Devotion to Faith.” No part of this work may be used or reproduced without written permission of the Author/Translator/Rights-Holder, Suzanna Eibuszyc. For more information about the work, write to: suzanna_eibuszyc@yahoo.com

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August 2, 2010 · 8:35 am

Shiva

by Leslie LaskinReese (San Rafael, CA)

Lori asked if we would sit shiva and  I said no, who would come that knows Mom?  That was my knee jerk reaction.  Raised a Jew but not trained a Jew.  We never sat shiva growing up. I didn’t even know what it looked like when I was young.  But the day after Mom died I realized I needed to sit shiva.  When I told Dad he sounded almost relieved.  Or maybe I was imagining things.

We are Reform Jews.  Orthodox Jews sit shiva for seven days.  That’s what shiva means: seven.  Reform Jews sit shiva for three days.  I don’t know who picked three.  Officially shiva begins as soon as the funeral finishes.  I checked in with my friend who is studying to be a rabbi and she said shiva can begin when I need it to begin.  So my shiva began on Sunday.  My dear dear friends brought lunch and dinner and spent time with me.  They let me talk and they listened.  They made me sit down and they fed me.  They gave me room to breathe.

Last night and tonight we had a service at home.  Our wonderful cantor and my friend who is almost a rabbi officially, and is clearly a rabbi in every other way, led beautiful services and gave me room to pray and remember and cry surrounded by friends who will wrap themselves around me and my family.  It gave me a place to begin.  I stopped holding my breath.  And I told them about Mom.

So yes, I did sit shiva Lori, and it was amazing.  Thanks for asking.

Leslie LaskinReese is a writer and restaurant designer living in Northern California.  Leslie’s writing can be found at something’s burning (http://leslieedie.wordpress.com/) where this piece first appeared.  When she is not writing, Leslie is either designing restaurants  or tending her family.  Someday, Leslie will have the courage to seek print publication for one of her many writing projects.

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July 12, 2010 · 6:01 am

“Man is a Wolf”

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

My demanding and charismatic mother has been dead for eleven years but I
still often think about her, wishing she were alive.  There’ll be a question I want to ask her about her past, or an event in my current life I’d love to be sharing with her, and sometimes a regret for something I did or said as a child will crop up.  I know she would probably dismiss bringing up the past like that as “Quatsch,” the German word that’s so much more dismissive than “Nonsense.”  She loved to use it as magisterially as if she were in fact a judge pounding her gavel and rendering a verdict. But it doesn’t stop me from imagining the scene anyway.

There are times, though, that I’m glad she’s not alive.  As whenever I read about the conditions at Gitmo, or the Orwellian-named policy of “extraordinary rendition,” or the American use of waterboarding, which has been re-branded in the American media to cover up its illegality.  I feel sure she would be outraged and even sick to her stomach.  I certainly am.

In the late 1940s, not long after she was liberated from her slave labor camp in Germany and met my father, she spent a few weeks in London and among the souvenirs I still have from that trip are tiny photos she took at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.  As a child, she said that the medieval tortures–like a witch in the Chamber of Horrors having water poured through a funnel down her throat–reminded her of things she had seen during the Holocaust.  I didn’t ask what those “things” were, I was stunned enough by descriptions of the waxworks cruelty, and by her oft-repeated “Homo homini lupus est”: Man is a wolf to other men.  This was the voice of dark experience speaking, the voice of history, though I think she took some comfort in summing it all up with the Latin she had learned to read and declaim in school in Poland, situating herself in her own pre-war past and that of Ancient Rome.  My mother liked to take the long view when she could, and I’m sure the museum helped her by siting cruelty many hundreds of years ago.

But I’ve always known that torture for her was no mere exhibit, it was a reality, however hazily defined it might be for me.  It became disturbingly clearer when photos from Abu Ghraib were released on the Internet, and when accounts of torture there and elsewhere in the American gulag were published in magazines like The New Yorker.  Yet it was still always at arm’s length–until I had an hour and a half of it myself, not as a media stunt like some reporter on CNN having himself tasered, but, unexpectedly, while undergoing a medical procedure.

Trying to track down a persistent throat problem I’d been having, an otolaryngologyst had referred me to a neurologist so as to start ruling various possibilities out.  The cheerful neurologist found I had no signs of Parkinson’s whatsoever, but wanted to be sure there wasn’t some neuropathy she was missing in her personal exam.  She described the procedure she wanted me to have as “they’ll stick some needles into you.”  “You mean like acupuncture? Will it hurt?”  Her reply:   “There’ll be some discomfort.”  That didn’t sound so bad to me, and because I was so busy, I didn’t bother to explore on my own exactly what the test, an electromyogram, would entail. I wish I had.

A few weeks later I lay in a hospital gown in a cramped, overly bright, featureless little room waiting for the test after some small talk and a brief physical examination.  The doctor was assisted by an Austrian intern and because I’m studying German, this gave the whole experience a surprisingly relaxed feel.  She and I chatted a bit in German, but pretty soon, after an initial examination, the human side of the interaction was completely over, and I was reduced to an object.

What exactly is an electromyogram?  By inserting electrodes into muscle tissue, doctors can test  the electrical activity of muscles at rest and during contraction to see if there’s nerve or muscle damage. So for about an hour, I had needle electrodes stuck into various places on my legs while a nurse or I moved my limbs as instructed.  Information was gathered and the machine that I never got a good look at crackled like a Geiger counter. At first I felt almost nothing, then it was like a nasty pin prick, then each successive jolt was more and more painful, sometimes so much so that I gasped or groaned “Jesus!” or “Wow!”  At more than one point my leg shot in the air because the current was so strong.

This went on and on in a kind of nightmarish rhythm: first fear, then pain, then relief the pain was over, then fear of more pain coming, then the pain which kept getting worse.  As the cycle continued,  my consciousness shriveled until the world was reduced to a series of sensations and noises, both those that came out of my mouth and those being made by the machine.  When the doctor finally told me that the next part of the test didn’t involve electric current, I thought I was over the agony, but it actually got worse.  He stuck needles of some kind in my hand at the joint of my index finger and thumb, in my arm, in my shoulder, and each time I had to move my hand or arm in certain ways to to provide the information they were looking for.  Not only did this part of the test hurt more, I had soreness in my hand and arm for weeks afterward, and large bruises.

I don’t remember well the short consultation that followed, but I do remember feeling exhausted and humiliated when everyone filed out: neurologist, test administrator, Austrian resident, nurse.  I was so stunned by what had happened to me that I didn’t even check out, just wandered the halls till a nurse pointed me to an exit. I managed to drive myself home, glad that I hadn’t started crying during the test, even though the pain had been so intense I almost did so twice.

What seemed like the greatest violation of my dignity, of my selfhood, was that I had come to this hospital for healing, or at least a diagnostic exam that would lead to healing, but had found something very different instead.  The people administering the test didn’t intend to torture me, they weren’t evil, they weren’t remotely like my mother’s tormentors, but they had left me feeling crushed and shattered just the same.  I’d been mugged once in New York, but that was a pat on the back compared to this assault, to suddenly no longer feeling safe in the world, as if my personal boundaries were meaningless and anything could happen to me.

I told a dancer friend of mine about the test and she said she had walked out of a similar one.  “You can’t do this to me,” she said to the doctor, “I’m not a criminal.”  And when she described the scene, I felt like an idiot.  Why hadn’t I stopped the test?  Why hadn’t I told the doctor to turn the fucking machine off and let me go?

I couldn’t.  I was paralyzed and not thinking straight, barely thinking at all.

The morning after the test, I woke up at 4:30 AM, shaking.  My bed had turned into that hospital table and though the room was dark, I felt bright lights beating down on me.  I knew I had to flee that scene somehow.  I got up quietly so as not to wake my partner or the dogs, grabbed a Valium in the bathroom, and headed to my study to escape into the morning’s news.  Over the following days, whenever I answered somebody’s email about how I was feeling and the test flitted through my mind, or if I even mentioned it, I could feel the terror and pain coming back.  Anyone who’s been in a violent accident, or victim of a gross physical assault, will probably know what I mean.

After talking about the test with my therapist, I knew that writing about what happened was essential to getting over it.  He made the connection for me between my experience and my mother’s in the war, something that amazingly hadn’t crossed my mind until he said it.  Yes, it was only an hour and a half of agony, not years, months, or even days–but it linked us in the most unexpected way.  I had entered a prolonged situation of helplessness — or that’s how it felt to me.

I realized that I had to write to the neurologist who was in charge and share my experience, not to apportion blame, but so he could help future patients.  I had never had a test like this before; it had never occurred to me that I could stop it.  But the administering physician should have offered me the choice before the test even started. What added to the nightmare was the wall that suddenly shot up between me and everyone in the room as soon as the test began.  I was a source of data and they weren’t people, either: just soulless technicians who never responded to my obvious distress.

It’s not melodramatic to realize that if the test had gone on longer without hope of release, and had they been after any secrets I held, I would have told them anything to make it stop.  Now I understand something of what happens in places like Abu Ghraib, and I was only tortured for an hour and a half.  But at least it ended, and I’m free.

I’ve been able to seek relief in writing.  Once, decades ago, I suggested  that my mother write about her past because the world needed to know what happened to her, but that made her furious, “I don’t owe the world anything!”  How could I argue with that?  But writing about her is something I have to do, and each year I discover new ways.

I’m on a Second Generation listserv and recently we’ve all been discussing our middle-aged health issues, and after I described what happened to me, one member told me that this same test was being recommended for her 89-year old father.  Hopefully my story will spare him pain, or at least inform him that he can make the pain stop.  I’m not remotely happy to have had this ordeal, but it gave me a strange gift: brief, visceral understanding of what my mother experienced during the war, being trapped and victimized.  It made me marvel at her courage to go on, to rebuild her life, even while it fills me with sorrow to know that her story can never be fully told.

Lev Raphael, a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of nineteen books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities. A former public radio book show host, academic, and columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.

You can check out his latest book, the memoir, My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped, at http://www.levraphael.com/mygermany.html.

And you can view a YouTube excerpt from one of his talks at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFhrajH-6AE

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June 14, 2010 · 8:00 am

My Father Is Arrested

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

The knock on the door of our Berlin apartment came around five o’clock one dark morning in May of 1938.

It was the favorite time of day for the Gestapo to make house calls. Their victims were usually asleep and not many other people saw them at such an hour.

When my mother opened the door, two men in dark raincoats stood outside. One of them muttered, “Geheime Staatspolizei,” and pushed the door open and let himself and his partner in. Their clothing was as anonymous as their faces. Perhaps secret agents are picked for their faces. Only members of a Secret Service look like this, no matter what their country. No one ever remembers them afterwards.

We lived in a time of constant rumors, all of them threatening. Even I, a child, had recently heard of an impending roundup of Jewish men in our Berlin community. There would be a mass raid, a razzia. Why–and what was to happen later–no one knew. A pre-dawn knock on the door was dreaded, almost expected, that summer. The only speculation was for whom that knock would come and when. Yet when it came for us, it surprised my father and mother.

Inside the apartment, the agents confronted my father in the foyer and announced their orders for his arrest. My father asked permission to take a little of their time: he needed to shave and dress. There was no way of resisting.

Permission granted, one agent remained in the bathroom with him and took up a position by the window facing into the room. The other man stayed in the foyer with his back against the slightly open bathroom door.

I tried to be unobtrusive. From my spot in the small entrance hall, I peeked into the bathroom. Inside, I saw my father’s face in the mirror over the sink. I thought him calm and accepting. But I noticed how his hands shook while he freshened up.

My father had suffered several recent gall bladder attacks. My mother said it was bad nerves. Conditions in Berlin were more than favorable to nervous tensions that spring in 1938, especially if you were Jewish and in a prosperous business.

Now she went into the kitchen and got ready a dose of his medication. She came out holding a small bag in her hand and said he must be sure to take it with him. One of the agents remarked drily there would be little chance for using it.

I saw my mother’s eyes starting to blaze. I cowered as she turned on the two Gestapo agents. Fearlessly, she chastised them for barging in on our peaceful household at such an hour, for taking away an innocent man when everyone knew how wrong that was. How could they face their consciences performing such a mission?

I like to think the Gestapo men remembered that scene. I did, all of my life. It took incredible guts to speak out the way Mimi did. She remained lady-like, even in her scolding. But she certainly exploded that morning. She had good reason. The Gestapo men knew that, too.

In later years, when her health and mental strength failed, she was often afraid of things that seemed childish to outsiders. But I remembered Mimi’s courage and I recalled how she stood in the hallway of our fashionable apartment, wagging her finger under the nose of the Gestapo agent, backing him against our bathroom door. Would I have such guts were I put to the test?

That dark morning the man at the door just shrugged his shoulder while the other one inside the bathroom ignored her. None of that deterred her. “Where are you taking my husband?” she asked repeatedly until the second man finally answered.

“To the police station.”

The landing outside our apartment door was still dark when they took my father out. My father, wedged between both agents, turned to Mimi.

“I have a cousin in America. He lives in Louisville (he pronounced it Lewisville), in the state of Kentucky. Try to contact him and see if he can help.”

Mimi dressed quickly, then she helped me with my clothes. We began the rapid walk to the police station just a few short blocks away. Just as we arrived, breathless, at the precinct, several police vans pulled out. All the vans were fully loaded. The razzia had already produced sufficient results.

Inside the station Mimi asked again and again about the destination of those departing vehicles.

“Alexanderplatz,” was the desk sergeant’s brusque reply.

She decided we would follow them. A long taxi ride brought us to the center of Berlin. The driver stopped at a large, dark gray, forbidding-looking building. Threatening, just like the mood of everything else that morning.

Many years later I saw the dreaded headquarters of the Gestapo in a television newsreel. Even after many decades that view crystallized the special and horrible aura I once felt. I could not know what went on in that building, what unspeakable and excruciatingly painful torment people experienced there. What I sensed at age ten was that it was an evil place.

The day I entered it with Mimi, I saw a warren of dark corridors filled on either side with windowless, small, brown cubicles. In one such sparse hole in the wall I waited quietly at her side while Mimi faced a heavy-set official behind a desk. The chubby man rustled some papers pretending to look up my father’s name.

The prisoner, Leopold Nussbaum, he informed us, was on his way to an interrogation center, but the family would probably have some news from him within a few days.

Not encouraging information, yet the official was a shade kinder than others we had encountered on our way in. Why that was, I couldn’t tell. The way he looked at Mimi was definitely less insolent and arrogant.

We stood waiting for the streetcar at its Alexanderplatz stop. Buildings just as dismal and forbidding as the one we had just left surrounded the traffic-filled square. I glanced across the street at another evil-looking dark, tall structure. I felt Mimi shudder as she looked at it, too.

“The Volksgerichtshof,” she volunteered without my asking.

In later years I learned more about the People’s Court and its use by the Nazi regime.

Mimi might have known even then what kind of place it was. Few prisoners left it without an order for their execution, if they left the building alive at all.

The long ride home on the streetcar was bleak. Mimi looked discouraged and fearful. My feelings of course, were a reflection of hers. She was quiet and sad and barely spoke. It was May, yet everything around us was still gray and cold. It started to drizzle. Times were suddenly desperate. I had a dreadful sense of foreboding.

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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May 10, 2010 · 7:23 am

An Old Bogart Film

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

My parents protected me from the war.
They seemingly made a pact that
whatever happened in Europe, stayed in Europe.
They spent those years in Austria,
full of foggy intrigue, shadows and doorways,
like the ending of some old Bogart film.
Did they run, fight or hide?
Were there secret deals and flights into the night?
Exactly how many relatives died,
and what was the nature of the commodities
that secretly changed hands?
I know nothing of those days,
except what I’ve read in books.
I know nothing of the pain and the excitement
even as I grew up safely on American shores.
My parents protected me from the war.
I should be grateful to my parents, shouldn’t I?

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

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March 22, 2010 · 8:04 am

Life in America

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov and how he made his way to America. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this final segment, he describes his arrival in America and his courtship with the woman who became his wife.

BB: How did you get to New York if you didn’t know any English?

HL: I didn’t know nothing. Just this word I knew: “Ticket, New York.” Then I didn’t know which train to take and I looked for Jewish faces and I said to a couple, “New York? New York?” And they said, “Yeah, New York.” And I went on the train and I took an English magazine and I’m reading because it was American inspectors, too. They could take me off from there again and send me back to Canada.

And I was reading and all of a sudden the train, in a certain place, stopped, and we had to change to another train. I had to run again and find out if the train goes to New York. And then I went up to the other train and didn’t say a thing, and I read the English paper, the English magazine, and then, when I come here to Grand Central, I went out and I looked if they don’t run after me.

And then I went up on a streetcar. I paid five cents and I said to the man, “Hundred Street, a Hundred Street.” I was sitting there in front and he was going, going, going, going. And then, when it was a Hundred Street, he said, “Here, go out here.” I went out to a Hundred Street and I walked over and there was my brother, Izzy, living. I was in America.

BB: So you lived with Izzy and his family?

HL: I was by my brother Izzy. I was living there a little while by him as a boarder, and then I didn’t want to go to be a bread baker. I wanted to be a cake baker. So, my brother Meir sent me in a place and I got ten dollars a week to learn how to be a cake baker. I went in there til I worked myself up to twenty-five dollars, and I worked myself up to forty dollars, and I was already that time about three years in this country, and then I got acquainted. I lived downstairs where my brother used to live, and there was a girl, Becky. And I lived there as a boarder for a little while and right away she fell in love with me. When I came home from work, she started to make me tea and talk and this and that, and then I said, “Have you got some nice pictures from friends?” She showed me this beautiful picture, and I said, “Oh, I would like to see this girl.” She said, “Oh, she’ll be here Sunday.” I said, “All right, I’ll be here Sunday with my friend.” But when we came to see them, they walked away.

BB: Why?

HL: They walked away. You know, those times, you used to have a Victrola in the house, and I said I’ll come back home with my friend and we’re gonna dance. But they walked away to Central Park. I didn’t run after them.

But then I used to belong to a place where all the lansleit came together every week, every two weeks, and we used to have somebody to have a speech and then they had some little music and we used to dance a little bit. We used to enjoy ourselves. So, a bunch of landsleit.

So I said to Becky, “Come, you want to go to dance at the place?”

She said, “All right.”

I said, “Take along your friend, too.”

And she took her along.

And she was a very beautiful girl.

Then, after the dance, I took her home. She lived in Second Avenue. Then I took Becky back home to a Hundred Street and that’s all.

Then, one time when I came down from my brother to go to sleep, it was about 9 or 10 o’clock, I came down and Fanny, this girl, came out from her friend’s house, from Becky. I said to her, “Fanny, can I take you to the bus, to the– what it used to be–an elevator.”

She said, “All right.”

I took her to the elevator, and I said, “Fanny, can you give me a date?”

She didn’t seem too eager.

I said, “It doesn’t have to be this week, it could be next week.”

She gave me a date for another week. And we made an appointment that we should meet at a certain place there. I came there and I walked up and down and down and up and up and down about a half hour, but I didn’t think, I never thought she was going to leave me out. And I stood there. And then all of a sudden, after a half hour, she came nice and dressed up.

I said, “Where were you? What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” she said, “my family was there and I told them that I want to see a boy. ‘What kind of boy? Ah, you’re not long in this country, what do you have to see a greenhorn?’”

She said but she didn’t care, she didn’t want to disappoint me. She came. She came, and I went with her for a visit.

We went around, you know, we went for a soda, we went there. In those years, I don’t remember how much it was, five cents or ten cents a soda, and I took her for a soda, and I took her for a little ride, and I made an appointment for the next time. All right.

Next time I made an appointment and we went to Coney Island. For five cents we went with the subway to Coney Island. There for a few cents I bought her a frankfurter. I don’t remember how much it was, ten cents or something.

BB: Nathan’s?

HL: Yeah, Nathan’s. And we ate this and sat around. She didn’t bathe, and I didn’t bathe. She didn’t want to bathe. And then a few of my friends were there in Coney Island and they were bathing. And after they were finished bathing, they all got dressed and they took a taxi to go back home. They said I should go into the taxi with Fanny. So I wanted to go in, but Fanny didn’t want to go in. It was there four boys in the taxi. She didn’t want to go in. So she said that she wants to go home with the subway. So I said all right we’ll go home with the subway.

And I made a date to see her again and again and again. And I worked myself up. I got a job already on 23rd Street in a pastry shop and I started to save up already a few dollars, and I used to go out with her. I used to take her for a ride. I used to go to a restaurant. It used to be fifty cents a dinner, you know? We used to go in for a dinner or something. Everything was nice, everything was good.

And then, after a few months walking around with her, I bought her a little fox, and I gave her this, a present. And we kept on going for a little while, and then I said to her, “Fanny, let’s get married. I got already five hundred dollars saved up. Let’s get married.”

And she said, “All right, I got two thousand dollars in the post office. We’ll put it together and we’re going to get married.”

I said, “Okay.”

So we made a date to go to the rabbi that was on 12th Street, and she lived on 8th Street. I dressed myself up in a nice blue suit and she dressed up beautiful, and we walked to the rabbi, and the rabbi had there about ten people.

BB: Friends of yours?

HL: A few friends, a few from the family, another few. He just made ten people to make the brachas and everything. Fanny’s mother made a dinner. About fifteen or twenty people were there for the dinner. My brother Meir was there for the dinner, too. His wife wasn’t there but he was there.

BB: How old were you?

HL: I was twenty-two years old. And she was the same, maybe a year younger. I was just three years in this country when I married Fanny. She was I think the same age, twenty-two. And we got married and we went for a honeymoon.

BB: Where did you go?

HL: A little town in New Jersey. With the bus, we went there. When we came there, the electric lights were out, and we had to be there in that place with candlelight overnight. The next day I had to go back, I had to go to work again. That was the honeymoon–one night.

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March 15, 2010 · 7:49 am

Ticket to New York

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
Interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov and how he made his way to America. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment, he describes how he made his way from Europe to America.

BB: So you came to the Jewish section of Berlin?

HL: I came there with another two boys, and the people came over and said, “What’s the matter with you?” And I told them the story that I ran away and I wanted to go back to Vienna.

And they said, “All right, we’ll buy you the ticket. You’ll go to Czechoslovakia and from there you’ll go to Vienna.”

And I said, “A ticket? That’s very nice.”

But when we came to Czechoslovakia, the inspectors looked up and asked, “Where’s your passport?”

I said, “I have no passport. I just got a worker’s book that shows I worked in Vienna.”

They said, “That’s not a passport.”

So they kept me there, again arrested in Czechoslovakia. If I wouldn’t have the book, the inspectors said they’d send me back to Poland. But I had the book showing that I had worked in Vienna, so they sent me back to Berlin.

They sent me back to Berlin with a soldier on the train. Back to Berlin.

BB: And when you got back to Berlin?

HL: I came back to Berlin and went again to the Jewish section, and they said, “All right, we’re going to buy you a ticket to go the other way through Dresden.”

They bought a ticket to go to Dresden. We went to Dresden. We went down, me and another boy, we had a few pieces bread, and we came there.

And we met a boy there, and I said, “You should smuggle us over to Vienna.”

And he said, “All right, I’ll go in and ask my father.”

If his father went along, he would smuggle us over to Vienna. Not to Vienna, but to the border. And that’s what happened, you know? He smuggled us over  the border, and then I took a train and went back to Vienna. And I was in Vienna.

That was the terrible time I had when I went to visit Zharnov.

BB: Where was your brother, Manny, during all of this?

HL: He was in Vienna. He didn’t go. I was the only one who went crazy.

BB: Did he know the trouble you were in?

HL: He didn’t know, but he found out when I came back to Vienna.

BB: Once you were back in Vienna, what did you do?

HL: A little while later we ran away to Paris.

BB: You and Manny? You didn’t need special papers to get to Paris?

HL: We couldn’t get passports. So, I bought a passport in a Polish consul. And that was my trouble. I bought a passport.

And the fellow says, “What should I write in?”

And I heard in America they needed engineers. So I told him, “Write in that I’m an engineer.” And Manny wrote in that he was a tailor. If I would write in that I am a baker, I would be safe. But I wrote in an engineer.

And I had the passport, you know. And in Paris we were about three months there. We kept on going to the consul and going again, and we had to wait, and every time he told us we needed something from America to prove that we got there somebody in the country.

We got letters from Izzy and everybody but the consul didn’t recognize it. So we were about three months in Paris and we spent a lot of money there. And then I decided, “Well, if we can’t go to America, we’re going to go to Canada.” So I got somebody, you know, and he made me out to go to Canada. I gave him some money, you know, and he made me up to go to Canada.

BB: So you went straight from Paris to Canada?

HL: We decided that we got a brother in England that we’re going to go to England to visit him and from England we’re going to go to Canada.

We came to England and he was very nice to us. He was a tailor, too, and Manny worked for him a little bit and me, I wanted to go there to work in a bakery, but I couldn’t do nothing.

Anyhow, we were there about two weeks and decided that we should go to Canada. We bought tickets, you know, to go to Canada. When we came to Canada, they let Manny out, they let my brother out, but me? They arrested me.

BB: Arrested you? Why?

HL: Because I wrote that I’m an engineer. They said, “What kind of engineer are you?” So they kept me back, and I was there, not just me, it was about fifty boys they kept back. We were in a prison, a house, and Manny wrote letters to Meir, to my brother Meir in New York.

He told him if they sent me back to Poland, they’d kill me.

So Meir was a very good person. He decided to come to Canada and take me out from there. He came to Canada, you know, he took me to the consul, and he said, “He’s in the bakery business and he’s all right.”

He said that he was going to take me into the bakery, but the Americans wouldn’t give me the okay to go there. Just because I said I was an engineer. They thought I was a liar, a Communist or something. They wouldn’t give me an entry visa.

So Meir paid for a lawyer to take me out. He paid $500 for the food while I was there, and he paid a lawyer $200 to take me out. And then I had to pay some money, you know, to a fellow to smuggle me over to America.

And that’s what it was. I went on the train and I went to a farmer about 4 o’clock in the morning and he put in a horse and wagon and he took me over.

I thought he was going to throw me down somewhere in the woods. It was winter, you know? But he took me over and he showed me the station, Over there, he said, you have to buy a ticket to New York.

That’s all I knew. Meir spent about $1,000, you know, my brother Meir. He spent about $1,000 to take me out of Canada.

When I came to the station, I said, “Ticket to New York.” And they gave me a ticket.

Next: Finding romance in New York…

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March 8, 2010 · 7:31 am

Turmoil in Vienna

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov, a small village near Lodz and not far from Warsaw, and how he made his way to America. He was a baker, with bright blue eyes above a thick nose, a warm smile, and broad, strong shoulders, and he spoke with the thick Eastern European Yiddish accent of his youth. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment, he shares scenes from his life in Vienna.

BB: You were involved with the Black Market while you were in Vienna?

HL: I don’t want to say anything about it.

BB: Why not?

HL: I don’t want to talk about it, that’s all.  But I made a lot of money, and I used to go dancing, and I had a nice girl and I had a very good time. I used to go to operas and I used to go to shows. I had a very good time in Vienna.

And I figured a little later, I was already about 18 years old, I was already about four years in Vienna, and I knew everything and I spoke beautiful German and I wrote beautiful German and everything was nice. And I figured I’m going to buy myself a little business there and get married and stay there in Vienna.

And then when Hitler started to talk, Hitler, he was in Austria, you know? Hitler, he started to talk about Jews and all that stuff and right away there was a lot of trouble in Vienna, you know? The government was a socialist government, and there was a Communist Party and they marched to the Parliament, and I marched, too.

BB: You were a Communist?

HL: I marched with the Communist party. I marched. And when we came there, they threw fire, you know, the things that fire, they threw on the Parliament. As soon as the marchers did that, the soldiers came out with machine guns and they started to shoot and everybody ran. And I ran, too. But somebody pushed me up to a tree and I was hurt.

I went to the doctor the next day and I told him. He said, “What the hell? Why did you march? Who told you to march?”

I said, “Nu, I marched.”

And that was the end of my time in Vienna when I had money in my pocket.

BB: So what’d you do?

HL: I figured that I would go back to Zharnov. I used to have in Zharnov my uncle and a nice girl that I left there, a girlfriend. And I wanted to see them. And I went back to Poland.

When I came back home, I was over 17 years old, so they wanted to take me for a soldier. They wanted to take me for a soldier. But I didn’t want to go to be a soldier for the Pollacks.

When I went home, the soldiers on the train, when they saw a Jew with a beard, they grabbed his beard and they did all kinds of trouble to the Jewish people. So I should go to be a soldier to fight with them? I didn’t want to.

I said to my uncle, “I want to run, to go back to Vienna.”

So I went back, I tried to smuggle myself over to Germany, and it wasn’t easy. When I came to Breslau, I was sitting on the train by a German officer, and I told him I wanted to go to Vienna. And he said, “You better hide yourself. The Polish detective is going to be here. They’ll take you off.”

So I hid myself in the toilet and I didn’t let anybody in. And I was laying there in the toilet. I was laying for a long time there and I was so tired already from laying there that I came out and I said “Can I go out already?”

And the German officer said, “No, not yet.”

And I had to go back again until I came to Berlin and the Polish inspector couldn’t take me off no more.

So I came to Berlin and I went over to the police and asked, “Where’s the Jewish street?” And he told me which street car to take to go to the Jewish section.

Next: From Berlin to New York

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