August 1990
Dear S*:
By the time you will have learned to read, I'll be 85 and your grandmother Emma will be 83, if both of us are still around. By the time you will be able to understand all this, and, hopefully, be interested in this, we will most likely be gone. So, this is a way of communicating things about us and your family history while I'm still able, for when the time for it will have come.
Like most of us, growing up to be adults, you may have wondered how it happened: You were born in California, and as an American. This part of the country is rather new - it was sparsely settled by primitive people just 150-200 years ago, and only the 1848 gold rush put it on the maps. When people came here from the Eastern USA, then from Europe, and finally from everywhere, it became the California you know and take for granted.
And so, your four grandparents came to California from other parts of the world. Your father's family came from Louisiana (your grandfather B*) and from Canada (your grandmother C*). Your father, being a writer, will probably enjoy telling you (or writing down for you) all about his family history.
Your mother suggested you might like to hear about your other grandparents, her parents, from us. And so, I'll tell you a few things about the two of us, and a little about the families before us.
First, your grandmother, Emma. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1912, because her mother, Sophie, had come there from Russia in 1906. She, and many other Jewish people fled Russia because of the pogroms (anti-Jewish persecution and violence) near her home, in Kishinev, Moldavia (then called Bessarabia). She soon married another emigrant, Misha Mirmovich, who was born in Smolensk, Russia, but soon after Emma was born, the marriage broke up. Sophie went to the USA with Emma, arriving on the S.S. Vauban in Feb. 1918. Emma still remembers the very cold waiting rooms in Ellis Island, New York, until they were rescued by Sophie's brother Oscar, who already lived in New York. In order to be free to work, Sophie put Emma into a boarding school in Yonkers, New York, visiting her once a week. Emma still remembers how she was hungry and treated badly in this school. After a few years in this school. Sophie was able to make other arrangements and Emma grew up in New York. When she reached the end of her high school years, the Great Depression of 1929 had started, and life for everyone - including them - became very hard. No jobs, no money - people lost everything and lived from day to day. But by the time Emma and I met, things had become easier - but just 2 years later, there was the start of World War II.
Emma's father had also come to New York, and briefly attempted to get back together with Sophie, but it did not work out and he left. As a result, I have never met him and he died, a few years ago, without any of us knowing him. Sophie, however, was a very close member of our family, and lived until we reached California. She died in 1962, having living with us on and off over the first 20 years we were married, and helped us to raise N* and her sister J*. Sophie worked in the New York garment industry until she retired.
My family came from Germany. Father Max was born in Bad Hersfeld in 1883, the second oldest in a family of six sons and three daughters. Grandfather Samuel (1851-1924) was a cattle-trader. Father was apprenticed to become a tailor, and went to the big city of Berlin to make his life. There, he met my mother, Charlotte Pollak, born 1886 in Cologne - where her parents had come from Bratislava / Pocsony / Pressburg (it's known by a Czech, Hungarian, and German name!) in Hungary-Austria, and 1882. Grandfather Jakob Pollak was a tailor, later designed and made costumes for the theater and for carnival. He lived to 1928, but had a stroke which put him in a wheel chair for many years. But during my childhood, in 1914-1918 and during World War I, he and my grandmother Eleanor lived with us to help my mother, who had to work to support the family. I got to know and love grandfather Jakob, who taught me many things. There remain memories of that war: standing in line for rationed meat with mother, visiting a farmer to beg for black market food, going very near the Russian front in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, where mother hoped to see father - who was a canonier in the German army, then pulling out of Russia after a failed offensive. After the war, we lived in Berlin where I was born in 1910 and where my parents were contractors in the garment industry (mother had been a seamstress) - through a harsh period of revolution uprisings, terrible inflation, depression, until Hitler and his Nazis arrived. Within a very short period, we were transformed from German citizens with a business (and a chemistry student) to undesirables, Jews. Since I had become a Zionist and seriously thought of going to the Jewish settlement in Palestine (now Israel) (- an idea you may sometimes consider worth reading about -), I wanted to leave as soon as I could, but was persuaded to go to another country to finish my degree in chemistry (I had begun to work for a PhD), so I ended up in Italy for a year and 3 months. In the meantime, my parents went to the USA with the help of my father's brothers, in Oklahoma and in New York. When I got my degree in Italy, there were no jobs for non-Italians, the Nazis had arrived to get control of Musselini and his Fascists, and I could not get papers to go to Palestine. So, I, too, ended up in New York, in April 1935 (on the Cunard liner Berengaria - there were no Transatlantic planes in those days!). That's where I met grandmother Emma - on a vacation in Lake George, New York, in 1939. By then I had found work as a chemist, and could afford the trip. We were married on July 24, 1941. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the USA was in the war. Since I worked in war production, I was not drafted, but I came close a few times. As a chief chemist, I was essential to the war effort. When it was finally over, in 1945, we undertook to raise a family - and there you are. There is much to tell about our migrations - mostly in search of better jobs - first, to Boston, back to New York, from Greenwich Village to Astoria to Bensonhurst, then on to Detroit in 1954, and finally to California in 1958. Your mother can tell you about these years - I think she remembers the snow, sleds, and snowmen from the Detroit period. There were other things in which our life changed.
There were trips by airplane, propeller planes at first (in 1946), until jet planes arrived in the early sixties. When N* and J* were quite young, television arrived and soon supplanted radio, which had amazed us in the early twenties (I heard my first "crystal set" in 1923). Electricity had arrived in the early teens - I think, about 1912 to 1914, and I remember the excitement when our gaslight chandelier was wired to hold bulbs! There remained a gas-burner lamp in our only bathroom (a new thing then, replacing outhouses!) because it's heat kept the plumbing from freezing during the winter. The telephone was new, too, and one was connected to other people by an operator - one did not dial a number oneself.
Autos also were still a novelty then, and for most people they were a luxury. Only one relative had an automobile (Uncle Walter Kaminsky, and he was the "rich uncle," having his own business!), and he employed a chauffeur to drive him! We travelled by trains (steam-driven, then), by horse-streetcar, later electric; and by the 1920s, Berlin had a subway system. Only in New York, there was an extensive subway system (two separate private lines, the IRT and BMT, were taken over into a municipal system before WWII, and then the IND lines were built. When I first got to New York, there were still "elevated" (everybody called them "Elevator"!) lines which were torn down about 1940, and the rumor was that they had shipped the steel to Japan, who melted it down for the shells and cannons being used to fight the USA, soon after. Now, subways are nearly in every big city in the world, except here. I did not own a car - and did not know how to drive - until 1951 when we realized that it was quite a chore to travel with two babies and their paraphernalia by public transportation. Our friend Carrie Hagen (later Elliot) who hailed from St. Louis told us to buy a car and learn to drive it in no uncertain terms! It changed our life.
Owning a car was a big factor in deciding to leave New York to go west. Another factor was the ever-worsening traffic. It took me two hours or more every evening from the job I had in Kearny, New Jersey, to our home in New York, which meant very short evenings with the family every weekday night.
The first travels by car, to Montauk, to the Catskills, and to Detroit were big adventures. When time came to drive to Los Angeles, I was a seasoned driver. But I had never seen the mountains, the deserts, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest - your mother and her sister J* grew up with it and most likely took it all for granted. Ask her about it.
One more chat about the family. Just as the pogroms and other threats pushed [your grandmother's] family to leave Russia and try for a new life in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and the USA (and some of their descendants are still spread out in those places), my family were pushed to leave Germany and Austria. Descendants of the Pollak family, who had started out from what is now Pressburg in Czechoslovakia, and who were (all but a few) living in Berlin, fled Germany and went to South Africa, Shanghai, India, Argentina (and eventually Israel and Australia, back to Germany, Holland, and England). Descendants of the Goldschmidt family, with the help of my father, made their way to the USA, joining my father's brothers in Oklahoma and in New York. A few were bolder or had other connections, and wound up in St. Louis and in San Francisco.
This would leave you with family connections in lots of places - we have tried to cultivate them where possible, but the younger generation have mostly lost touch, exceptions being cousins in Buenos Aires ([Russian family]), South Africa (Simon, Wollschlager), Israel (Arielli), Australia (Kaminsky), and the USA (Kant in New York City, Goldsmith in St. Louis). By the year 2010, your mother's generation will have become the seniors, and the babies of now will be carrying on. Who knows - they will probably all have lost touch with one another.
Also, when our parents, or your great-grandparents, grew up, families were large, lived near one another, and as a result knew (and sometimes liked) each other, making it family. People now (at least white middle class) have smaller families; some were bruised enough by the wars and by the horrible experiences of the Holocaust) (about which you might find it instructive to read - though not pleasant!!) to have no children, so their branches will have disappeared by 2010, some even before.
A word about us. Your grandmother Emma and I have loved life and the wonderful things it offered, along with pain and sorrow. We did not always like our work, but we enjoyed what it brought us: a home of our own, vacations. A good life, on the whole. Surviving a real crisis in 1946, when Emma had an operation (to cut hemorrhoids), followed by pleurosy from a blood clot, and could have died except for a wonderful doctor, who made house calls even in the middle of the night (Dr. Reich, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, and a well-known doctor in Vienna before it all). We enjoy the Arts, danced, square-danced here in California, Emma swam, I skied: we went hiking in New Jersey. We acquired paintings, first in Greenwich Village where we lived for about seven years, later elsewhere. And we loved taking trips. Beginning in 1973, when inherited money cushioned our savings account, we started travel out of USA, starting with a three-month stay in Israel (where I had a chance to lecture at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but don't think I did too well in teaching). Subsequently, we took trips to Tahiti, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Europe (Italy, Spain, France, England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland). Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan. Till then, we had only been to Mexico. We visited eastern Canada in 1982. We took lots of photos, even made some friends on these trips.
By now, the older generation is nearly all gone. Great-grandmother Sophie died here in 1962, when your mother was quite young. My mother, Charlotte, died in 1971, in Long Beach, and my father, Max, died in Los Angeles in 1977. Only my father's youngest sister, Ida, still lives in New York City, and is 95. Even the next generation has begun to leave us, both here and around the world. We, too, have begun to feel our age. I retired from chemistry at 70+, in 1981. Emma retired from work in a local high school, back in 1975.
Since I'm writing this to you - your mother's suggestion - while you're still quite young, I'd like to say we enjoy you as our first and only grandchild. We got to know you fairly well, since we stay with you about once a week, and watch you learning the tricks of life. This will be old stuff by the time you read this. There is, of course, a lot more to tell on your father's side and I assume your father will enjoy telling you about it. Since both your parents were no longer youngsters by the time you arrived, they may have a lot to tell you about themselves, their life away from us parents. There were a lot of things our parents experienced which they did not tell us. And perhaps we did not ask, which is a pity.
Lovingly, your
grandpa, Henry
P.S. There are so many more things to tell. Perhaps the next time! Over the years, I've collected information about the generations before us, and about our far-flung families. This may still be around after we're gone, and you may want to learn about this. Only since photography, movies, and now videos - has it become possible to actually experience the people who are gone. We did not have any record of most of the people before 1900, so they'll remain just a name and perhaps a date or two, along with a batch of old photos and films. Before 1850, even these are no longer available, and we descend from a very blurred background, filled only by generalities. Is all this important? Our ancestors and their lives are like shadows around us, seen and felt but very distant and without substance - except that we carry some of their traits and our culture derives - ever so unconsciously - from theirs. Much depends on the contact we've had with other family members. For instance, Emma knew only her grandfather who had also come from Russia, but who ended up in Safed, Palestine, in 1927. [Emma's family] now has members in Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico. We know some of them, but few of your generation.
Also, I hardly knew my father's parents, Samuel Goldschmidt (1851-1924) and his wife Johanna Fürst (1857-1933), except that they were observant orthodox Jews, which my father and mother were not. (My father's reason: he was a soldier in the Kaiser's army, and there was no such thing as kosher food, Sabbath or holiday observance. When "God did not strike me down for breaking all the rules, I decided it was alright to continue".) I do remember spending the Sabbath with my grandparents, who went to the synagogue and did not light a fire or switch on the light, the meal was cooked on Friday and kept warm in a sort of thermos box. And I remember celebrating the Seder for Passover - a long, all-evening ceremonial meal, with prayers, songs, and even some fun for the children - the desert (or afikomen) was hidden by the eldest man who presided at the Seder. I also remember going to the Sukkah - the lean-to leafy branches in which one spends Sukkot, the harvest festival. In Europe, where it usually rains at that time of year, the hut is usually built under a glass roof or in the attic, under a window, because one is supposed to see the stars through the roof of the hut. Young people often enjoy these customs as treats, in spite of all the rules one must live by to be a "proper" Jew.
I knew most of my uncles, aunts, and cousins - as an only child that was all I had! But in 1933, when I was 22, I left the country, and never saw many of them again. Only in recent years, I renewed acquaintance with some of them - all of us now old people - and met a few of the younger generations. Some of the cousins liked us, and we like them, and so we've become friends. Unfortunately, no one lives close by, which we regret. There is a lot to be said for having a larger family - but it does not always solve the problem!
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July 6, 1991
Dear S*:
Here is another letter about your family - for the time when you grow up and, hopefully, will ask about yourself questions about your several backgrounds. All four of your grandparents were from different worlds. I can only tell about my own, and would hope the others will tell you of their worlds - Louisiana, Canada, the USA.
As I said in the first letter, I grew up in Berlin, then (and now again) the biggest city and the capital city of Germany. Berlin is not a really old city, and had only become important with the growth in power of Prussia as the strongest force in Germany. But by the time I "arrived," it had become a major center of commerce, wealth, and culture. The effects of the industrial age had made it a center of science, engineering, as well as the Arts (which always require a wealthy and intellectual society to sponsor them). There were theatres, museums, a symphony orchestra, two major universities, as well as an extensive choice of cafes and restaurants, bars and nightclubs. Berlin was famous for it's nightlife. But I was too young and too poor to see much of it. After World War I (1914-1918) was lost by Germany, things were very tough for all but a thin upper class, many of them war profiteers ("Kriegsgewinnler"). There was therefore a large group of disillusioned people, who hated wars, and those who had caused the last one, and this is reflected in the culture of the period - just like the twenties in the USA reflected the wealth and optimism of the victorious USA. Left-wing ideologies - Communism and Socialism - were considered to offer an alternative to the capitalist-monarchist ideas that had plunged Germany in to the war. Many artists and writers expressed such ideas, but this was also true in other European countries. The aftermath of Germany's defeat was terrible - revolution, counter revolutions, uprisings, inflation (where money, investments, and savings all became worthless), followed by a brief period of recovery. But, just as everybody began to feel safer, Germany followed the USA into a terrible depression.
That is the period in which I grew up. By 1929, just as I entered the university to study for my later profession of chemist, money was tight, and a new threat developed: the Nazi party - first considered to be a joke by many - became stronger and stronger. By 1933, they took power. It was the end of our world. We had grown up and lived surrounded by German culture - and considered it our own. As Jews, we were aware - more and more as the Nazis became stronger - that we had never been fully accepted; that our assumption of being rewarded for our contribution to culture, wealth, and defense of the country (my father was a soldier for all four years of the 1914-1918 war) would never come true. Jews had tried various ways of being acceptable: good deeds, philanthropy, success in business or the professions, and even becoming Christians (or Atheists) voluntarily. Some of us - including me - thought Jews should recognize that they were a people, and should try to have their own country, learn and contribute to their own culture. As you know now, this resulted (with much help by the Nazis and anti-semites al over the world) in the formation of Israel. In those early years, the problems of having Arab neighbors who did not want Jews in power in their midst were not recognized, or at least were thought to be temporary.
But to go back to those earlier years. My father had come to Berlin from his little hometown of Bad Hersfeld, a very old city (dating back to the formation of a convent by Lullus, about 800 AD), after years of apprenticeship in tailor. His parents (my grandfather there was a cattle dealer) and their forebears, had lived and grown up in Hersfeld and in surrounding villages (and thanks to my father's brother Moritz I have quite a bit of data on these people; he was a traveling salesman and viewed records in these little towns whenever he could), as part of an apparently long-established Jewish community in Hesse. Like most Jews in small towns, they were observant, or orthodox, kept kosher and observed the Sabbath and the Holidays willingly. (I remember passover and Simkhat Thora there, Friday night meals, and eating Saturday meals out of a pre-cooked pot kept warm in a special insulator box.) It was not an idyllic existence. My father remembered the anti-jewish taunts and fights with the local bullies all too well! They certainly didn't like Jews. And the family was poor!
My mother's family had come to Berlin from Pressburg/Bratislava/Pocsony which was then Austria-Hungary but later became Czechoslovakia (after they left). (1993: It's now in Slovakia!) Jews lived there in a sizable community and spoke German, as a part of the Austrian/German cultural community. Don't know how well there were treated (this can change rapidly anytime for better or for worse) but they were obviously poor, so left for Cologne in Germany in search of better pay. Grandfather evidently did well, having suggested to his employers who specialized (seasonally) in carnival clothes - very big in Cologne to this day - to add a line of theater costumes. Result - he was moved to Berlin, with his family of five daughters and one son, who all ended up earning their livelihood making clothes. Through that business, grandfather met my father than a young up-ward striving master tailor, and by 1908, father married mother.
After the Nazis took power, all this changed. I was one of the early emigrants, being influenced by my expulsion from the University (at the (Botanical) Plant Physiology Institute in Dahlein where I had planned a thesis on plant metabolism) ("We aren't going to have this Jew around, if he values his life!"), and a general pessimism about our future there. But then, I was told I should try for a degree - "a chemist with a PhD can work anywhere!" - so, through help from a good friend who already worked in Genoa, Italy, I ended up at the University of Genoa to get that degree. That was from September 1933 to April 1935, when I (reluctantly) left for New York with a doctor title. (I loved living in Genoa, had shared an apartment with three other refugee students, had my first love affairs there.) As things got steadily worse in Germany, my parents left for the USA in December 1933 (we met in Paris - perhaps for the last time?), with the help of two of my father's brothers here. (One, Sigmund, had been in the USA since about 1905. The other got here in 1923. There also was a great-uncle, in Tucson, AZ, since about 1914, who may have helped.) Later, my parents helped all of my father's family (Moritz Goldsmith, Sally "Sidney" Goldsmith from Bamberg, Fritz and Ida Goodman from ?Redwortz?, and the Siegfried Freudenreichs from Frankfurt) who could come. Brother Julius Goldschmidt had been killed by the Nazis in 1939 (after the infamous "Kirstallnacht"), but his son Gunther was helped by his mother's family to get out, in 1941. He lives in St. Louis. Only one couple stayed on - along with Gunther's mother - and were deported to their deaths, later on, as part of the Holocaust.
My mother's family were all helped out by connections in South Africa. So the Kaminskys, Simons, and Pollaks ended up there. (The Pollaks had gone to Shanghai and didn't get out till World War II was over; both died within a few years after they got to South Africa. Their son ?Kurt? died in 1989 in Johannesburg, leaving no offspring.) My mother's sister Berta Kohrs, who had married a German Christian, stayed behind in Germany with her daughter Erna. When her husband died, the Nazis sent her to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) camp, and - miraculously - she survived. Erna went into hiding, and survived the twelve years of Nazi rule with the help of her German boyfriend. At the end of the war, they married, then set up business with the mother, Bertha. They soon found the life in Communist East Berlin impossible, and with the help of the family in South Africa, ended up in South Africa with their baby daughter, R*, who's still there. Only one of the Pollak sisters perished (Regina) because no one wanted to chance sponsoring her husband, who had never supported himself properly in Germany while things were still manageable. The Nazis murdered them both.
There were some strays. Cousins Ellie and Margot Simon had fled to India. Ellie (and her physician husband Fritz Donath) ended up divorced in Vienna after the war was over. Her sister Margot married a Catholic Indian from Goa, India, and later we helped her and her daughter Y* come to New York. Y* married an Israeli, Y*. and lives in Even Yehuda with her three children, all sabras. Her father just died in Israel.
Cousin Grete married a fellow from Poland (who died in 1989) and ended up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is still there, but one of her two sons ended up in Caracas, Venezuela, with a German wife. The other has since died, leaving a wife and daughter.
The years have had their toll. A visit to Germany in 1980, another to Israel in 1985, and another to Adelaide, Australia, has enabled me to meet many (but not all of their offspring) who emigrated from Germany (my mother's side). On the other hand, we've seen most of my father's family in New York, Saint Louis, and Oklahoma City. Only one cousin lives alone in Belmont, California, but we've seen her only twice, in 1941 and in 1985 though I've talked to her by phone.
As you can see, we're all over. The Klaus Kaminskys live in Germany again, but their sons live in Australia, Holland, and England. The Hans Kaminskys (who have become the "Stones" and are all Christians) live in South Africa and in England. I've mentioned the others, in Austria (now dead), Argentina, and Israel.
That's only my side of the family. Grandmother Emma's family also had its adventures, when they came from Russia. Emma' father was divorced by Emma's mother, Sophie, and ended up "somewhere in the USA, probably New York. He made his living as a photographer. As it worked out, I have never met him! He has died about 1977.
Sophie's brothers and sisters left Bessarabia (Moldavia) one by one, including the father (but not the mother). They went to Argentina, where Jews were encouraged to settle by the philanthropist Baron Hirsch, but soon drifted to live in the city, mostly Buenos Aires, but one sister married and ended up in Montevideo, Uruguay. Two brothers, Oscar and Ben, ended up in New York, and soon helped Sophie (and baby Emma) to come to the USA, in 1918, by boat.
Yet another sister married and ended up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and later in Mexico City. Finally, another sister and her husband ended up in Los Angeles, via New York. More than anybody, she was the inspiration for us to leave New York (and later Detroit) behind to come here to Los Angeles.)
Again, we have met many, but not all of Emma' family. Some have been here from Argentina and from Mexico. We went to Argentina. Emma was there alone, in 1969. Then, we went together, in 1979. And Emma and I went to Mexico in 1966. We met some of the Mexican cousins and Uruguayan cousins in Paris, in 1977.
Nobody could have foretold me, in 1932, that I would have family spread out around the world, or that I would travel to so many countries. As it works out, we correspond with some of these cousins and their children (the older generation is nearly all gone; only my father's sister Ida still hangs on, in an old-age home.)
Since grandmother Emma and I married relatively late (she was 28, and I was 30), and then had no children until World War II (and my likelihood to get drafted into the service) was over, the span from you to us, and to the older generation is rather long; so you and they will never meet. (By the time you read this, we will probably be gone.) But with us will go an adventurous life - look how far we have all travelled so you could end up in California! Your mother has shared a little of this, since we started in New York, lived in Detroit, then in Torrance, Southern California.
Next, there are the migrations of your father's ancestors - but, I hope, your father will record it all for you.
I must stop. My hand is very tired, but I should tell you just a little about my life as a chemist. When I got to New York, the Great Depression was not yet over. Jobs were scarce. After six months of looking for work, someone recommended me to a firm (Glyco Products) whose owner also published the Chemical Formulary and he was looking for someone to read German, Italian, and French. That's how I got a job! Later, I worked for other firms, a paint company, the well-known soap company Colgate, a tallow-renderer and detergent producer, and a war-goods supplier in Boston, a dye house in New Jersey, another paint maker in Baltimore. Then on to Detroit, where we stayed four years and owned our first house. Having learned to drive a car at age 41, in 1951, paved the way there for me. And from there a desire for a better climate, and adventure, brought us to California. even here, I worked for a manufacturer of cleaning specialties (as I had in Detroit), later for a mining company (US Borax), and briefly for a few smaller outfits. I wrote a book (two editions), several articles, and have a number of patents. I retired in 1981, almost the age of 71, and have enjoyed retirement - such as it is - with various interests and a number of travels. Grandmother Emma worked in a one-girl office when I met her (doing it all), later typed and stenoed in a few places, ended up in the Los Angeles School system (Banning High) as a clerk, to help your mother and sister through their college years. She retired in 1975, at 62.
There's more, but I kind of can't hold the pen any more.
Love -
"Grandpa" Henry
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September 1992 Draft
Now that I am approaching 82, time appears to be getting preciously short for writing down what I still remember of my 23 years in Germany, the 1 1/2 years of studying for a "doctor of chemistry" degree in Genoa, Italy, my early life in the USA, and married life after 1941. Though I've attempted brief reviews of the German period before, much has become hazy in my memory, except for the support of photos and other memory-prompters, such as a few diaries.
World War I started August 1, 1914, in Germany, when I was 3 1/2, the age of our little grandson S right now. My parents had been married since October 8, 1908. My father, Max, had come to Berlin from the small town of Bad Hersfeld, in Hesse-Kassel, where he had been apprenticed to learn tailoring, and near where he had done (in Fulda) his compulsory military training (1902-4) (still memorialized by a beer stein issued to him when he went home), in the Hesse Field Artillery. As a result, he was mobilized to serve on the first day of the war, leaving Mother with the problem of taking care of a baby. Her parents, my Pollak grandparents, who were then 69 (Jakob) and 63 (Lori), and retired after raising six children (out of nine born to them), came to the rescue. (I can only guess why they helped my mother, rather than the other daughters and one daughter-in-law, whose husbands all - or almost all - were drafted into the army.) My parents had built themselves a little house in the Berlin suburb of Frohnau, a "garden city" reached by a thirty-minute train ride from the city, and have moved in in 1912 (we had a photo of the event). (That may have been one reason, as all the other sisters and brother lived in the city.)
Father was at once sent to Russia, riding a horse-drawn cannon, and saw action from which he returned briefly to Königsberg, East Prussia, after the German army returned (retreated?) about September 1914? from the first invasion of Russia. My mother went to find Father in Konigsberg, with me, after she heard that he was back, and found him - how, I do not know. We had a picture taken to commemorate the meeting. I had a vivid demonstration of war, because the room in which we slept was rattled by gun fire and lighted by gun flashes all night long - and to this day I still remember the impressions and fear.
Mother, who had been a seamstress before she married, had to go to work in some clothing firm in Berlin, and had to leave me to the grandparents. I remember that she disliked the travel - which included a twenty minute walk from the railroad to the house. One night she was robbed by a man who followed her and grabbed her pocketbook, and she began to loathe the trips. When the war ended, the first thing she asked for was to move back to the city. The house was sold to a war profiteer in early 1919. Fortunately, my parents used the money to buy an orchard in Niederschönhausen, not very far from where we lived - or they would have lost it all in the severe runaway inflation that followed soon after. It was sold, at a loss, in 1933.
But to go back to the little house (and big garden) we lived in during the war years. It was located at the edge of the little garden city (which had only recently been started as a fancy suburb), in the middle of young fir forests and also older forests (all of the planted plus planned variety to improve the sandy surroundings of Berlin), with the nearest neighbors several blocks away. (It was located in Rauenthaler Strasse, 19 near its crossing with Oranienburger Chaussee.) It was a two-story house with an attic and a basement. There was a rock garden in which lizards came to live, and fruit trees were planted between surviving fir trees. A picture shows me with the grandparents, sitting in the white birch bower in the back of the garden. We had rabbits eating our vegetables, and squirrels to eat our fruit. (One very persistant squirrel was shot by grandfather, and he had it stuffed. We had it in the house until we left Germany.) Sometimes, we saw a deer, and there were foxes.
Father had a streak of luck, when he was selected to be a tailor to the officers of a battalion in Belgium, and no longer had to fight. He used his chance to send things, like food parcels and Belgian lace, home to us. Mother and Grandmother stood in line for rationed foods, and went to barter clothes for food (black market) from nearby farmers.
The house had only gas lights until sometime near the end of the war, when, I still remember, the house had electric lights installed, using the gas chandelier in the dining room to hold the first bulbs. The gas lamp provided the only heat in the bathroom, so it (the toilet) would not freeze up in winter. Coal stove and ovens were used to heat the house - usually only one or two rooms to save money. Somewhere around that time, a telephone appeared - then operated from a central office using a female operator who knew everybody's name and voice, and who made all the connections.
We owned a Doberman dog, "Tell", whose dog house was outside in the garden. On one memorable day, I crawled into the doghouse, and "Tell" would not let my mother near me. They finally got me to crawl back out! ("Tell" was shot after it bit the mailman.)
I have happy memories of Grandfather, who took me mushroom hunting (he had learned all he knew from a book!), taught me - with the book in hand - how to tell the edible ones from the poisonous toadstools, and also to collect berries when they were in season. (Later, we went berry-hunting in Hersfeld, with my Father's family). Grandfather, who must have been largely self-taught, had curiosity about the world and tried to learn what he could about science. Perhaps that's where I got the love of travel, and the choice of my chemist profession.
There were few children in the area, except for a day school a couple of blocks away, and I was sent there repeatedly (often?) to play. A photo shows me there, in front of a sandbox, with my fly open. I have few memories of this period, except being punished for playing ball in the dining room and breaking one of Mother's crystal goblets ("Römer").
In 1917, aged six, I was put into school, which was co-educational - not the usual thing then in Germany - because teachers were hard to find while the war was on.
The favorite kind of mushroom we picked was Reizker (Lactarius deliciosus), with a reddish sap, which Grandfather fried for us in butter. The commonest was Pfifforling (Cantharellus cibarius), occasionally available here in cans in German-style groceries. We had Champignons (usually available here since it can be grown commercially in horse manure in dark areas), along with more difficult ones - Skinpilze, Birkempilze, Taublinge, Schirmpilze . . . which had to be cautiously checked for color of sap, lamellae under the head, and sometimes tasted. Occasionally, we were rewarded by some delicious morels (Morcheln).
We got to see my mother's family at various occasions, mostly birthday parties of the aunts and their children. Only later, when we moved to the city of Berlin, did I get to know them better.
Life then did not resemble the life we all live now. There was no radio (the first time I heard and saw a "crystal" set radio was in 1923, when Father took me for a hiking trip to the Harz mountains, at a hotel), only the rich (like my uncle Walter Kaminsky) had a car (and he had a chauffeur to drive it!) Television was not even dreamed of until thirty years later. We got around on coal-fired trains, but soon electric trains and subways became available. There were still many horse-drawn vehicles and few autos, but electric streetcars were already in use. Streetlights were gas-lit. We heated and cooked with "briquets" of brown coal, very available in Germany then - and may be still. There was no such thing as air-conditioning or refrigerators until the thirties. When Father was an old man, and Mother had died, he told us, one day, that he had kept a diary of his war experiences. Mother came across this after the war, he said, and told him he should burn it, so no real record of his soldier days remains, only a few pictures which I still have (taken in Kilmy, Galizia; Gross Barbern, Galizia; Doliniany near Kovno (Kaunas)). (Later, near Metz and Rubaix in Belgium.) This means he spent time in what was now Lithuania, Byelorussia, and, later, in Belgium.
This brings me to the end of World War I. Father did not get home till the very end - soldiers then simply hopped a train, since the German Army had fallen apart. As I stated, Mother just wanted to get back to Berlin, so the house was sold soon after (I only saw it once again, when Father took me with him to collect money from the new owner, who proudly showed us a cellar full of black market canned goods which he had amassed there). So we moved to a temporary apartment on 29 Stahlheimer strasse, and I was sent briefly to a private school until they could enter me in a public school the next year. (All I remember of this school: getting the palm of my hands whipped with a cane for some misbehavior.) A bigger apartment became available soon after, in the same big apartment house block (typical of Berlin, built around an inner courtyard), but around the corner on 114 Carmen Sylva strasse (named after a Rumanian queen, Elizabeth). Nearly, there was a park (Humann Platz) with benches and a kids' play lot, where I spent much time. We lived at the edge of town, near a suburb called Pankow, and another, beyond it, called Niederschoenhausen, where my parents acquired a plot full of fruit trees, with a little wooden bungalow and a manual pump as our source of water. We spent many Sundays there in the summers, spading the dirt, planting, weeding, and harvesting strawberries, gooseberries, currants, cherries, pears, apples, plums, peaches, and rhubarb (much of which we stored, or it was canned by the Loecker jar method (placing the fruit in glass jars which were heated in a pot of water to produce steam, and the weighted covers were closed by the vacuum which resulted when it all cooled down overnight). Pears and apples were spread out on brown paper on the floor of the "good room" which was almost never heated in winter, only occasionally was used to have a party!
In the Carmen Sylva strasse apartment we lived for a number of years. My parents rented a store-front, on the floor below it, to conduct their dressmaking contractor business, had a cutting table and a half-dozen sewing machines, and hired help, including several women who took the work home to use their machines. Father did the cutting and designing, Mother picked up the work and delivered the finished woman's clothing to the wholesale clothing firms who jobbed out the work to them. Since most of the firms were Jewish-owned and Jewish-staffed, they were able to export their products to England, France, Netherlands, Sweden, etc, and received some of their pay in foreign currency - a life-saver during the severe inflation (till 1924) when a billion Mark bought only a postage stamp. When the pay was in German money, Mother brought it home in a big wash basket, everybody got their share and went off at once to buy food - because a few hours later it was worth much less. Everything - savings accounts, life or health insurances, mortgages, contracts - became worthless paper.
After someone broke into the shop, my percents took all the fabrics and finished goods upstairs to the apartment, into "my bedroom", every night. In the morning, they took it out again. Obviously, I had no privacy, but that was the way it had to be, so I shut up and put up with it.
By 1921, when I was ten, I started going to the "Luisen-Staedtisches Gymnasium" (Middle and High School), later named Heinrich Schliemann Schule (after the discoverer of Troy). In Germany, classes ran from Sexta, through Quinta, Quarta, Unter (lower) Tertia, Upper Tertia, Lower and Upper Sekunda, and Lower and Upper Prima, a course of nine years, after three years of elementary school. The school then required Latin for all the nine years; two years later one started in French. By the age of fourteen, one must decide whether to take Greek or English, depending upon what one plans to study at the university level. I took English. Somewhere around the age of sixteen I got interested enough in chemistry, though at first I wanted to go into architecture - as a result of becoming interest in art and related subjects.
Sometime during these years I learned to roller skate, and later they gave me a bicycle, with which I roamed all around Berlin. We all bicycled out to the orchard most summer Sundays (people then worked six days a week!). Later, as a teenager, I slept late and had to bicycle - or take a street car - by myself. I also learned to ice-skate (but had weak ankles and didn't do too well). (Also learned to swim - but not to jump in - from a monitor who let me jump in holding a rope - then I discovered in mid-pool no one was holding it!) In winter, we had little hills to use a sled. Only after I was in university (1929), I got my first skis (in Czechoslovakia) and learned to ski in Schreiborhan, Riesengebirge (which is now in Poland, but then was in Upper Silesia).
During the school years, a boy of Russian-Jewish parentage (from Odessa), Max Asrican, was a classmate and we became friends. He got me into the Jewish sports group "Bar Kochba" and kept egging me on to become proficient in sports, the kind they do in Europe, which involves the double bar, the single bar, short and long distance runs, jumps, pole vault, javelin, steel ball toss, etc, and I became fairly good in many of these. However, when I got into university, I started farm work for my summer vacations, which built muscles for me but made me so muscle-bound that in most of the sports in which I had become good, I was no longer good. Only a little of all this remained after I had grown up. I could still perform on the single bar after I came to New York, but soon lost even that. I did continue to ski, but even that came to a halt when World War II started and I worked six days a week again. I had loved it, but I never skied again.
The 1920-1933 period, my teenage and university years were difficult years in Germany, except for a brief prosperity (induced by financial help from America - Marshall Plan!) that ended in 1929 when America went into its depression. Before it, after Germany's defeat in 1918, there was the above-mentioned severe inflation, there were several attempts at overthrowing the government, such as by the Nazis. There were severe political battles between left-wing (Communist and Socialist) groups and right-wing (Nazi and Deutsch Nationale and Deutsch Voelkische). By the early thirties, with severe unemployment and discontent, the Nazis rose from a bunch of crazies to a big party - probably with financial help from conservative business - until they took over, the end of 1932. Since the Nazis' biggest enemy was the Jew (whom they considered to be the same as the Communists, and, at the same time, the international capitalists or bankers), that made a big change for Jews, with well-know results.
Back to family. During the few years in which inflation was controlled, my parents took me on vacations to several beaches, and to the mountains for several winter vacations. We travelled to Hersfeld, Bamberg, and Frankfurt to see my father's family. In 1922, I was sent (alone) to Bern, Switzerland, to stay with an acquaintance of Mother, because they had milk, butter, and wholesome food missing in Germany, and spent some enjoyable times on ?tops? to the Alps. In 1927, I had appendicitis, and - on the doctor's advice, was sent to a Jewish children's sanitorium in ?Wolfrasshausen? (near Munich; it later was used as a Nazi concentration camp!) for eight weeks. There I learned to eat! They woke us up at 6:30 every morning, sent us outside (in winter!) in a pair of gym shorts and shoes, to run in the snow, then sent us inside to get a hot shower, then a cold shower, and then to breakfast! That, every day, was chocolate milk and big trays of rye bread with marmalade, and we all fought to get them.
Our apartment was next to another, in which lived a family (Mayrah) with three daughters, ranging in age from two years older than I, to several years younger, and we often played in the street together. One night, their parents were out, and so were mine. One of the girls rang our bell and asked me to come to their apartment "to play". It ended by them asking me "if you show us yours, we show you ours" and they did. I was horribly embarrassed. Later on, my cousin Erna, out in our bungalow with me alone, asked me to "play doctor". So much for my early exposure to girls.
Father acquired - perhaps from someone who needed money - a pedal-operated roll pianola, with a stack of classical piano rolls. One day, after he played a concerto on a Sunday morning, Father was surprised by loud applause in the street below. He went to the window and took a bow! I don't believe we owned a photograph, but only a short-wave radio which Father loved to play with. It received programs from all over the world, mostly during the late hours of the night - in English, French, Spanish, Russian and other unfamiliar languages.
Until 1933, I had been in Switzerland (and briefly in Czechoslovakia), but nowhere outside Germany otherwise. 1933 changed my life.
School has left few memories. We had a few good teachers (for Math and Physics, a Jewish teacher named Dr. Jakes) (an anti-semite named Prof. Hartung, for French, and another, Dr. Strunz, for history). There were a few Jewish boys with whom I was never close. The non-Jewish classmates nearly all turned Nazi during the last year I lived in Germany. Max Asrican ended up in Israel. A decent kid named Rebhuhn (not Jewish) was forced to withdraw from contact when he and his folks were threatened. After going to the Sanatoriums, I fell behind in math, and had to be helped to catch up before graduating, and almost caused a lot of problems by telling that the math teacher had tutored me - but luckily it all blew over as a misunderstanding.
Eventually (1929), my parents moved further into the city, and we lived on 29 Schonhausen Allee, near Senefelder Platz. From there, I began to commute to the university (Friedrich Wilhelm University), and its Chemisches Institute on Hessische Strasse. I joined a Zionist Jewish fraternity, Hasmonaea, part of the KJV (Kartell Judischen Verbindungen). Here, I made many new friends; one, Bobby Brecher (now a doctor in Tel Aviv) took me under his wing to teach me how to pick up girls: Both of you walk behind a pair of girls which you like, and begin to crack jokes. After the girls laugh with you, you join them. Soon you can invite them for a treat or to go dancing. I soon refined the technique and always had a girl friend till I left Berlin.
Going to the University, and a chemical laboratory, changed my life after the summer of 1929. I met new people, and made friends through the fraternity; now I started to meet girls, had a little pocket money to take them out, and - since my parents thoughtfully had sent me to a dancing class a few years earlier - to take them dancing. I went through several girlfriends but didn't really know how to handle anything more than petting and kissing, so things never became serious.
Chemistry became a main interest, after nearly flunking in a first examination; after that I pulled myself together, and had no further problem. By 1932, I had completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree ("Verbandsexamen", so called because it's requirements were outlined by a chemist's association). Employment opportunities were said to have become rare, and the idea of becoming a toxicologist or criminologist or forensic chemist took shape. So I enrolled in the needed classes in plant physiology and botany to pave the way for the new career. But soon after Prof. Noack accepted me as a doctor thesis applicant, the Nazis arrived and by easter of 1933, I found myself out of the lab and out of the university. The professor had been threatened by the Nazi students - now all in uniforms - that he and I would not be safe if I remained.
The influence of an art teacher at the Gymnasium (Rudolf Ausleger, a practicing expressionist) had awakened an interest in the arts in the whole class, and encouraged some of us to improve our talents. I considered architecture for a while, gave it up because the main curriculum was "stress and strain calculations", which seemed a bore. By 1933, I still dabbled in pencil drawings but had given up serious thought about art as a profession.
After the Nazis got us kicked out (along with many Jewish professionals in medical sciences, chemistry, physics, teaching, engineering, and the law who were fired or threatened to leave), we students began to consider our chances for the future. Those who thought they could afford it began to look for a chance to study - and later work - abroad. However, the favorite places, like Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, and Scandinavia, were soon ruled out - too expensive, too restrictive. A Jewish friend from Bar Kochba, Bertold Rubinfeld, offered help to Max Asrican, and through him to me, to continue on in Genoa, Italy. It was much less expensive (they had favorable rates for foreign students, so that Mussolini could attract the Italian "irredenta" to come home) and there were few restrictions. Only, one had to learn Italian. I decided to accept the invitation (PhD chemists could find work anywhere!) with the intent to go to Palestine after graduation. After I told my parents what I planned, they got up after an apparently sleepless night to tell me they, too, would emigrate to Palestine. We went through the necessary motions, and to our surprise, were encouraged by the Nazi officials, even permitting us to export a few thousand marks.
The whole plan fell through, as the British did not allow more than a few farmworkers (khalutzim) into the country. By December 1933, my parents had been easily admitted to the USA, and I saw them off in Paris in December 1933. They had the needed papers from Uncle Ben in Tucson; Sigmund in Oklahoma, and Herrmann in New York.
When I got the degree in March 1935, foreigners could not take jobs in Italy unless they were members of the Fascist party; the Italians were in a war with Ethiopia and feared German intervention, until they allowed Nazi agents to start running things in Italy. Soon Jews were beaten up and otherwise harassed at Italian schools. Jews were into German consulates who demanded to see their passports, then refused to return them, as Jews abroad had become undesirables, on one or another flimsy reason (this happened to one of my friends, Lutz Markreich - who actually ended up in the USA after several years in Honduras, selling shoes, working on a radio station.)
So, I got to the USA, back with my parents in New York. I had been quite a bit changed after living in Italy, passing oral and written exams in Italian, visits to Paris and the Riviera, and living with several other exiled students. I chased after several women, and finally caught one, just before departure. I had travelled in Italy, gone skiing, experienced new foods - so I came to New York with a lot of new ideas. One was to get a job, and that - with the USA still in a depression - was not so easy. My parents, too, were struggling to make a living before their funds ran out. They hung a sign in their window "Dresses, $2," and soon attracted customers, and later were able to charge more and do better.
This, of course, is only the shortest outline. I kept a diary in Italy, and later in New York, until shortly before Emma and I got married. I didn't think of writing down anything but the barest outlines in Berlin. For instance, if it were not for a few pictures, my three summers on farms would not be remembered. The first, in 1930, lasted just a few weeks. Father caught me lying on my bed and reading, and he got angry: "Either study, or get a job! We can't afford to have you spend your summer loafing!" The next day, I went to the university employment office and enrolled in the only job available: work on a commercial farm along with a few dozen other students. It turned out they had brought us to this place, ?Marienborn? near Helmstedt, to be strike breakers. We picked bush beans for several days, landed sheaves of rye, and after a week or two they settled with the union and sent us home. Even thought this was not what I had hoped to do - work for most of the vacation - I came home with money in my pocket and physically intact - to spite my father.
Nothing more was said the next year when I enlisted to work on a Jewish-owned farm near Deutsch Krone in - then German - Pomerania. The owner, Hans Sternberg, was the son of a very wealthy shirt manufacturer, of an internationally-known brand xxx being sold (Van Heusen). He had been a soldier in World War I, and in Gallipoli, Turkey, caught malaria ("from an infected well"). So his parents bought him this farm. He was an ardent Zionist, and hired young Jews to train for khalutziut, becoming farmers in Palestine. I worked there for two summers, met some nice boys and girls - whom I've not heard from or of since then. Shabbat was observed with songs, guitar-playing, and hora dancing, and we did no work, while some few non-Jews looked after the cows and other animals. We slept on bunks with straw, were dirty, bathed in the local pond in the nude together (and then put on the same dirty clothes). I grew a beard. I caught my finger in a door during a tussle with one of the guys, which put me out of business. The nail is crooked to this day, sixty years later. I learned to load hay, use the threshing machine, pick potatoes, pick wheat sheaves for threshing, drive a one-horse buggy with milk pails every morning, rein and brush the horse and give it its food. Even rode a horse one day (without a saddle. It and the other horse pulled a xxx cart [the rest is cut off], but had to hold on to its neck to stay on top. It had no saddle. Hans Sternberg felt every Jewish pioneer should know how to shoot a revolver and a rifle, so we were taken to a sand quarry every week to practice. I was told I was a very good shot. Have not shot since except in the shooting galleries of Coney Island, with no measurable results. Sternberg got quite sick in the last summer. His parents came out by private plane to see him!
Vacations with my parents, and a few times with Mother only, got me to several beach resorts, on the Baltic and on the North Sea; once we took a steamer to visit Heligoland, which had once had a submarine base that had to be destroyed when World War I ended. It had a village on a tall abrupt rock outpost, that survived by selling "duty-free" goods from all over. We went to several resorts along the Czech border (?Krummbubel?, Hirschberg), and later I was sent there alone and learned to ski from my landlady's son, who was an accomplished jumper. In 1933, the last time went there, on an Easter vacation, her husband had become a Nazi, come home drunk, and went after me. She barred his way (fortunately, he was too drunk), locked me in a room, and at 5 am the next day shipped me home before he woke up. When I got home, I read about all the Nazi brutalities (the first after they took over) in which a lot of people were hurt and even killed. It really speeded my decision to get out of Germany.
Much earlier (1922?) I had been sent to Switzerland. In Bern, I was sent every morning to pick blueberries on a hillside, and I then got them, for lunch, in milk with a little sugar. There were several excursions, by train, into the Alps. One, to the valley of ?Kandersteg?, a village just below the foot of the Aletsch glacier. Another, into the mountains where cows were pastured in the summer. We (the host's son and I) slept on the straw above the cow barn. The alpinists ate from a big wood block with a basin carved out of its middle, and everybody (me, the kids, the parents) were given a wood ladle to scoop out the soup, gruel, or whatever, from it. No dishes! There was a large tile stove on which people slept, used to cook, bake, heat the rooms. Wildflowers were everywhere. I still see it when I think of it. We walked several miles from the train to get to the "Alp". There were snowy peaks all around it - breathtaking!
Father's military service in World War I have left us with two souvenirs: A wooden plate inscribed in Polish "Czem Chata Bogata Tem Rada" (what ever is the house's wealth, we're glad (of it)). And a painting of a woman's head, according to Father, from Bagaslawiskis, Lithuania, taken from a manor house there by a fellow soldier, who cut it out of its frame. It is 19th century, by an unknown painter. When they returned to Germany, apparently in haste, this soldier had stolen so much he couldn't keep it all, so he divided it among his comrades. Father had it mounted and framed after the war. It could be valuable. I still have it.
Other memorials of our life in Germany - besides a few photos of the living room furniture - are the contents of a cabinet housing Mother's collection ("Nipps") of porcelain cups and saucers, home silver containers and glass things, a few porcelain figures. Most of the furniture was sold when they emigrated at the end of 1933, and all they brought to the USA was in a wooden crate ("lift") that arrived by boat. They themselves had met me in Paris, around Christmas 1933, for a few days, then had to travel to England (their boat out of Le Havre had been cancelled) to take the S. S. ?Scyteris? out of Liverpool, together with a load of Scotch timed to arrive for unloading in Boston at midnight, December 31, 1933, as prohibition ended. It was a stormy, snowy crossing.
I came to the USA from Le Havre, on the SS Borangeria, and arrived in New York on April 16, 1935. I was seasick the first day, but then rented a deck chair and lived in it until we got to the other side. A Greek restaurant-owner from Chicago shared our tiny cabin with two bunks. The toilet was of the squat-down type we encountered in Japan years later. The trip was hardly memorable, and I remember being miserable - I had counted to go to Palestine, and really have never lived it down. All of us soon after applied for US citizenship. I got mine on March 3, 1941. (Emma, who had grown up in the USA, got hers on Sept 7, 1939, her 27th birthday.)
One other memory from our Berlin days. One day, perhaps 1927 or 1928, I found my mother sitting in tears. Apparently, Father and Mother were taking separate vacations, for business reasons. I usually was taken by Mother, like to Tossens, on the North Sea, in 1928. Father had gone off alone, and someone had called Mother that he had gone off with another - younger - woman, whose name I don't recall. There was talk of divorce, but he came home and asked to be forgiven, and they stayed together - though I think he remained in the doghouse for years, maybe even into the days in New York, because Father remained very sensitive to criticism, one day screamed at me for something I said, telling me I was a regular Hitler! This was, as Emma remembers, as late as 1955 after they had come to live in Detroit and were unhappy with the apartment we had found for them. (They soon left to return to New York, without saying goodbye; I didn't speak to them until a year later, when we visited New York and then Montauk, to patch things up).
This brings me to another subject - the relationship I had with my parents. In the years in Berlin, they both worked, and we spent little time together. They had a servant who cooked, cleaned, and presumably looked after me (an ugly Polish old maid, called Anna Mucha, is all I now remember). Times were hard, and though my parents paid for me and my studies, they never let me forget it, and that as soon as possible I should take care of myself. When we (Emma and I) got married, they didn't approve of my choice, and never got close to her (other than formal visits, mostly by us to them until after we had the children). They never got close to [our daughters]. When Emma had an operation for hemorrhoids after our first, stillborn baby (a boy) was delivered, in 1946, she had complications - pleurosy. Dr. Reich, Emma's Viennese refugee doctor, came in the middle of the night after she spat up blood and ordered her to stay strictly in bed, so that Em's Mother Sophie had to stay with her all day, I all night (while going to work in Staten Island), washing bed linens and nightgowns, and feeding her penicillin (which did not help) and later sulfa. After we requested help, my mother came one afternoon and cooked us a chicken soup. She took off before I came home, saying she had to go home to feed Father! We were all quite resentful of this token help from them. After we moved to Detroit (in 1954), they offered to come there, too, if we could find them an apartment for no more than $50 a month, a nearly impossible limit. They came after we found a second-story hole-in-the-wall, were very resentful, and fled back to New York. A similar situation arose after they moved in with us in Torrance (in 1969). Everybody was unhappy, and after a few weeks they moved out to Long Beach. Admittedly, the house was too small for two families. Mother and Father ate a big lunch by themselves and barely joined us at dinner. Em was working at the Los Angeles school system, Banning High School in Wilmington. The living room at night was tense, and I had to take Em outside at night so she and I could talk. As in Detroit, my parents moved out after I broached the subject and told them they would be better off in a home, even took Mother out to see one. Mother hired our cleaning lady to move them out secretly, but the woman told us first. So we dropped them off to a hotel in Long Beach, so they could make their own arrangements there. After that, I went to visit them every week or so, but they rarely came here. After Mother died, in 1971, we took in Father, but again it did not work out and after several months we found him a home, Beverly Hills Gardens, on Robertson Boulevard, where he lived for about six more years. They had the girls only once, but after we got them home both complained and asked never to leave them with my parents again. By comparison, Em's mother lived with us, on and off, for most of our early married years, helped in the house, took care of the girls many times. She died in our house in 1962, the day [our older daughter] graduated from elementary school.
Father, shortly before he died, told us that he was unhappy with his father, Samuel, who lived in Bad Hersfeld, and whose secret vice had been to gamble in card games. Seems back in the 1920s, if someone did not pay off his debts, in Germany, he went to jail. So, Father told us, one Sunday morning, he answered the door bell and found his father outside (a very rare event which I don't remember!) asking him to help him out to pay his debts. Father didn't have the money, the banks were closed, so he had to go around to friends to raise enough money for him before he could send him home from Berlin. No telling whether Grandfather had already exhausted help from his other children who lived nearer and were richer. "I told him never to do that again!" Father told us.
During my last years in Berlin, while I attended studies at the Plant Physiology Lab in Dahlem, my aunt Wally Kaminsky became a close friend. She offered me meals at her house, also in Dahlem, so I wouldn't have to travel home for them, at the other end of town. They had a beautiful two-story house (which her son Klaus says he visited after moving back to Germany from South Africa, and found it still in use, as a bookstore). After the Nazis took over, Uncle Walter lost his business. Eva with her new husband Alfred Futran, a Communist sympathizer, fled to Paris, but later to South Africa, where the two sons and the Kaminsky parents had gone; only Grete Kaminsky, married to a man named Sigl Granat (from Poland), ended up in Argentina (and still lives there, in a home). The Kaminskys, who were then fairly well-to-do, soon brought over most of the other Pollak descendants except Elli (who later went home to Vienna and got divorced) and Margot Simon who ended up in India; and Ludwig and Lydia Pollak who in desperation ended up in Shanghai, China, just before World War II started, and only after the war could be brought to South Africa by their son, Kurt. For a while, the Pollak family centered in South Africa, but by now all the uncles, aunts, and most of my cousins are gone. Hans Kaminsky, who was sent to Belgium by his father, to be hired by Jewish business friends, and preferred to be a playboy, came back to Berlin, where the Nazis worked him over to teach him not to come back; he was released on condition that he would leave the country at once. He ended up in South Africa, changed his name to Harry Stone, went to live in South Rhodesia and married a Christian (English) girl. Years later, having produced a family of two boys and a girl, he abandoned his wife and kids and went off to New Zealand, to die, in 1971. Only then did his family discover his Jewish ties. One son still lives in London, England; another in Johannesburg, South Africa. The daughter also lives in Johannesburg. Since all descendants who remain in South Africa are of mixed background, none consider themselves as Jews, including the Simon and Wollschlager offspring. Only Klaus Kaminsky, who has moved back to Frankfurt/M, Germany, still thinks of himself as Jewish, but P (in Australia) does not. I don't know enough of Klaus' other two sons - who have no children - how they think of themselves. Klaus and his son P have become German citizens (saying that their South African passport kept them out of a lot of places who were boycotting South Africa) again - and don't feel it matters (the way I would).
After my parents got to the USA, they helped to bring over the family on the Goldsmith side, and all that could get out arrived in the USA by the time I got married to Emma. The last one out was Guenter Goldschmidt, whose father got arrested and shot dead after the Kristallnacht (in 1938?). His mother got him out in a transport for orphans, via occupied France and Spain in 1941. He went on to an uncle on his mother's side, in St. Louis, where he still lives. [He now has a huge family of grandchildren there.] His mother and grandmother perished in a concentration camp. So did one of my father's sisters, Rosa, who was married to an unemployable asthmatic, for whom no one was willing to chance responsibility.
After Father returned from World War I, my Pollak grandparents moved to the Berlin suburb of SchoenEiche, where they lived until they died. Grandfather had a stroke, which left him unable to walk; another stroke did him in by November 1928. He was 83. Grandmother Lori lived till July 1930 (we all were taken to see her on her deathbed, at 79). My best memory of her is in the nearby woods, where she took us grandchildren for a walk. One day she stood while most of the kids ran on. I hung back and was startled to see a puddle appear under her long skirt where she stood with her legs apart. That's how women solved the problem of going to the bathroom then!
Grandfather, even in his wheelchair, enjoyed us kids; he got his German language newspaper from the Jewish community in Pressburg-Pocsony-Bratislava, where he had grown up. He enjoyed popular science monthlies (I don't remember their name) which he offered to me to read and study. He was a free-thinker and not too worried about observing Jewish rituals.
By comparison, Father's parents were quite orthodox, and I remember Sabbath, and several passover seders with them. However, Grandfather Samuel had little patience with the grandkids, and after dinner tended to disappear to play cards. My Father remembered him trying to beat up all the sons when Grandmother had a complaint, with a leather belt). [I heard he would line them all up and beat all, no matter which had done something, saying they probably were guilty too or something like that.] Hersfeld was already anti-semitic back at the turn of the century, and the Goldschmidt boys got into fights all the time, and occasionally ganged up on the bullies who bothered them. I spent several times in Hersfeld. It was a very old town, famous for the ruins of a nearly 1000 year old convent and church, the "Stiftes ruine". One time, as I roamed around by myself, I came across a pile of bones being dug up in this ruin. I grabbed a thighbone (no one was there) and brought it home to Grandmother - who promptly threw me and it out!
Occasionally, Father's brothers and sisters visited Hersfeld when we did (perhaps for weddings or anniversaries - as shown on pictures we have) and I got to meet the cousins from Bamberg, Redwitz and Rodach, Frankfurt a/M, and Hannover. They now live in New York (and except for Edith Goodman Kant) are not close. Alice Friedenreich lives in Belmont, California (we talk on the phone). (She has died, in December 1994.) In Oklahoma City (I write to Hermine who grew up in the States, but Lucille is "not all there" and in a Home; Fred Goldschmidt has become Fred Smith and wants no part of his family.) and in St. Louis (the whole Guenter Goldsmith family has become good friends in the last ten years.)
Though my reaction to Germans and Germany after 1933 became, that they could all go to hell, some of my heritage of my youth does cling and shows from time to time. I broke my decision never again to set foot there in the year 1980, when Berlin invited me (and other ex-Berliners who left as refugees) to visit at the city's expense. It is still an attractive city, and not every German is a former Nazi, though I can't say I trust anybody for certain. One family that I've met - they came here as our American Host guests in 1977 and invited us to their home - were nice to us, had us in their home in Neustadt, gave us a party with invited neighbors, and drove us to Switzerland to be their guests - so we feel they were friends. We've met at least two other couples who seemed ok to us. But the Hitler period will be impossible to forget or to forgive, completely, in my lifetime. My mother's family were immigrants from what is now Slovakia, then Hungary. But my Father's ancestry goes back several generations, to before 1800, and - if I could find documents - perhaps 200 years more before. [Perhaps back to Roman times, I would add.] It would have been my country, if they had accepted us. The Goldschmidt name goes back to 1593 in Germany, and the family was living in a lot of small towns in that part of Hesse. Of course, this nothing new in the history of the Jews who go through period of persecution and poverty, then leave to find better conditions somewhere else, perhaps prosper there until they again become unwelcome and either perish or leave.
Except that Jews have had to contend with this for 2000 years, they are not the only ones in this bind. Majority groups have always assumed it was their right to be superior to the minorities, and to be more prosperous, Even here, in "tolerant" America, the majority resents encroachment by minority groups on their political and economic dominance. In Europe, the gypsies are always beggared and not given equal education, then are hated as being dirty and thieves, the result of how they were treated. Blacks are in a similar position here. And, to go back to the Jews, it is resented when Jews succeed in business - which is the highest achievement in our type of culture - or become leaders in ventures that affect public opinion - editors, writers, movie-makers, comedians, newspaper editors - not to mention politics. The only saving grace is that groups greater in number and procreating successfully to multiply quickly, say the Chinese or the Latinos, become the target of such envy and therefore are disliked more openly, particularly if they do better in school and succeed in business.
Among my Berlin cousins - all Pollak descendants - I had a crush on Eva Kaminsky, who was petite and elegant. In the 1930s (shortly before we all left) she was dating a youngish sculptor who lived in a converted horse stable, in which he had erected a balcony, reached by ladder, on which he slept and lived. He had made a bust of the Pollak Grandmother (after Grandfather's death, I guess) - which in 1980 I discovered in the apartment of Klaus Kaminsky in Frankfurt. It was quite good! He asked to make a bust of me, of which I own a couple of photos, also done well. The bust itself has disappeared. Somewhere in my teens, Erna Kohrs, another cousin, and now gone, too, visited our orchard with me and suggested we play "doctor", which meant undressing and looking each other over. First time I had seen a naked girl! Nothing more happened - I wouldn't have know what to do.
Ellii was too old (eight years older than I); Heinz (born 1903) and Kurt (born 1907) also were older, but being boys were more accessible. Since Heinz's father and Kurt's mother were cousins they did everything together - all their lives, it turned out. Heinz, an art student, earned his keep by doing announcements and signs for cinemas, and he remained an amateur painter all his life. He and Kurt loved boats, camping, and sports - which I didn't. Hans Kaminsky was a playboy, and was rather a snob. He owned the first wind-up phonograph and brought back the first jazz I ever heard from a trip to Paris. Klaus Kaminsky, who was just a kid then, became a good penpal to me after we all dispersed. Märzi (pronounced Mary) Pollak, Kurt's sister, did not survive. She committed suicide by hanging, shortly after getting married in 1935 to a Simon cousin. Only years later, my cousin Y* (Margot's daughter) told me this was the result of sexual abuse by her father.
I had briefly heard about another Goldsmith relative, my grandfather's brother Wolf (Benjamin, born 1865), who had gone to America years earlier; in 1981 I learned about his xxxxx and life in Tucson (1914 to 1935) where he had been a partner in the theater business with a man named Emmanuel Drachman, through one of his sons, Ray Drachman (there is a book I received from him, "Xxxx Memories", which confirms this story). Benjamin had come from Mexico with enough money to buy into the venture (it will probably remain a mystery what he did in Mexico to earn it). Ben had a Mexican wife and an adopted Mexican stepson, but no children of his own. He died from a concussion after someone hit him with a bicycle and knocked him down. He and Manny had sold their theaters for $62,500 each (a lot of dough, then) and Ben had become a licensee to a beer company (before Prohibition had ended in 1933).
As can be seen, both my families and Emma's family were far-flung around the world. [Emma's family] had migrated from Kishinev in southern Russia (now Moldova) to Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and the USA, in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. The Goldschmidt family migrated to the US (with papers from my parents, and later from Uncle Moritz). Most stayed in New York, but Alice (Freudenreich) ?Pollard? ended up in Belmont, California, and Uncle Sally (Sidney) Goldschmidt in Oklahoma - next to Uncle Ben Goldschmidt and his family, who had been there since Oklahoma was opened up to settlers. The Pollak family were mainly helped out of Germany by Uncle Walter Kaminsky, and ended up in South Africa (except Margot, in Bombay; Elli, in India but later back in Austria, and Grete Kaminsky in Argentina), but by now, at least he Kaminsky family has dispersed further, to Australia, Holland, Britain, and even back to Germany. Margot's daughter Y* married an Israeli and now lives there with two sons and a daughter. As of this new writing (1993), Heinz, Kurt, and Erna have died. Elli died in Vienna in 1982; Margot, whose 80th birthday we had gathered to celebrate in Even Yehuda (Y*'s home), died in 1986.
Of the older generation (our parents), only Aunt Ida (Father's youngest sister) still lives in New York, and we just found out that Emma's Aunt Eda still survives at nearly 100, also in New York. (Note: She died in March, 1995, in New York City.) One of my youngest cousins, Guenter Goldsmith, is doing well in St. Louis, where he raised two sons and a daughter. Now there are three grandsons and a fourth is on the way in October 1993. One more grandchild will come next year.
Remaining Jewish has not done well in this generation. There were a considerable number of inter-marriages, as far back as 1908 (when Mother's sister Berta married a German protestant), and more followed in my own generation. There is barely a "Jewish" family now in which the children have not married non-Jews. As it was predicted over fifty years ago, the only Jewish survival will be in Israel, while in all the other countries, Jews will disappear, unless there is a recurrence of violent anti-semitism - the kind that brought us all back to being conscious of our links, in Germany between 1933 and 1945. One must wonder what this means, but different people have sharply different views on this subject. My views are strongly shaped by my own experiences. Though I am not a believer and not religious, I think it is a pity that Jews as a people with so many talents and achievements has so little pride to remain a people.
A few lines about being in California: When I arrived in the USA, my parents had already settled in New York, where I soon met Emma. By 1946, I ended up with a job in Boston, and when it ended, in early 1948, shortly after [our oldest daughter] was born, we moved back to New York City for another job, and when it ended, in 1954, we moved to Detroit after an interval in New York City. This ended in 1958, when I went job hunting in Los Angeles and found work almost immediately. We've been here ever since. Emma had worked in New York City, briefly in Detroit, and again, for about twelve years, in the Los Angeles school system. Among my papers, I have the list of all my jobs, what I did, what they paid me, and the people I met there.
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