I sort of can’t believe that I have never written my great-great-great aunt Margaret’s story before, though I have hinted at it.  Margaret was the pretty little girl who arrived in the U.S. with her elderly father in 1908, brought here by two of her older sisters who had been established in Chicago for a couple of decades.  She probably didn’t remember her oldest half-sisters, Rose and Fanny, who had left their small village in Hungary in 1893, when she was just a toddler.  She probably also had foggy memories of her only full sister, my great-great-grandmother Ella, who left for Chicago in 1895.  But now, she was in Chicago, with her 80 year old dad and these sisters she only really knew (most likely) through letters, stories and the occasional photograph.  Despite this, though, Margaret grew particularly close to her half-sister, Rose, and my grandmother says that it was as if Rose were her surrogate mother.  Of course, the age difference -- 23 years -- reinforced this mother-daughter type bond, and as a girl who grew up without a mother, Margaret probably relished having a new surrogate mother in her teens.

In 1912, their father Jacob died, and around 1913, the two ladies migrated west to San Diego, apparently for their health.  There, in September 1916, Margaret married a man named Hermann Joseph Wilms. 

Hermann had come to the U.S. from Germany in 1906, and though I know for a fact that he owned a ranch in San Ysidro, California (where my grandmother was appalled to learn that vegetables grew in the company of insects), his profession is given variously on records as rancher, tanner, farmer, poultry man, baker and brewer.  He was also a member of the German-American Bund, as I have been told, which is quite an interesting thing for a man with a Jewish wife to be.

Though, of course, Hermann didn’t know his wife was Jewish.

See, in another of those strange identity-disowning moves members of my family seem to enjoy, Margaret had elided her Jewishness right out of her life.  Granted, she was probably not raised in a very religious home -- her niece Rona attended Christian Science seminary because her home in Chicago was so lacking in religion -- but being married to an active disliker of Jews seems, well, odd.  I don’t know anything about Herman, so maybe he was actually very nice apart from the anti-Semitism, or maybe he was really good-looking or something...  I don’t know.  But I do know that he never knew that Margaret was born a Jew, and neither did their son, even though they met and kept in touch with plenty of Margaret’s relatives who were still Jewish. These relatives with surnames like Rose, Brown, Holzman and Wagner, which could be just as easily Gentile names as they could be Jewish ones, kept Margaret’s secret for her (though I do wonder what would have happened if they had been Goldsteins, Pearlguts and Rosenbaums).  It is possible some of them felt the same way as my great-grandfather Charlie (Margaret’s nephew-in-law), who was disgusted with this sin of omission and, when driving down to San Ysidro to visit, used to half-joke, half-threaten that he was going to tell Hermann, even though of course he never did.

Hermann died in 1942, leaving Margaret and their grown son Joseph, who apparently carried on in the same anti-semitic paths as his father, even though he was also apparently a nice enough guy who kept in touch with his (Jewish) cousins.  It wasn’t until Margaret’s death in 1969, when he was attending the funeral of one of his first cousins (one of the Wagner brothers, that he found out about his Jewish family.  The story goes that upon the arrival of the rabbi at the funeral service, he turned to his first cousin Stanley (my great-great uncle) and asked what was going on.  Stanley replied something along the lines of, “yeah.  We’re Jewish,” and that’s how Joe Wilms found out that his mother had lied to him his entire life. 

I know that Joe lost touch with my part of the family, though I’m not sure if he still talked to the rest.  I just know that he died intestate in San Diego County in 1992, and my grandmother and her sister got letters from the probate court, which was trying to determine his nearest relatives, for the purpose of settling his estate.  They never received any proceeds, so other, closer, relatives must have been found.

Though there are a lot of ways to see this story, I see it as mostly just very very sad.  Sad because Margaret had such problems with her born identity, sad because her husband was intolerant, but mostly sad because Joseph lived his whole life being deceived about his own identity and about his family’s, sad that he had to find out about this by accident.

Margaret Holzmann Wilms (1892-1969)