Even though my grandmother’s cousin Henry once proposed marriage, she only ever had eyes for his older brother Dorian.

Dorian was more than 20 years older than Ethel and arrived into her life in 1926 when he was 31, she was 8, and he stepped off a boat from Europe.  Dorian had been born Izydor in what was then Lemberg, Austria (now, L’viv, Ukraine), a quite sophisticated and cultured city where he had been part of a large family of sophisticated and cultured people.  Sometime before he came to the States, he had lived in Vienna, since he listed his uncle Izak who lived there, as his closest relative in his city of origin.  Though he was enumerated as “Izydor” on board the ship that brought him to the port of New York, it’s possible that Dorian was always a nickname of sorts that he used  -- or maybe he selected it after his arrival in America.  It was a name born just a few years before he was, when Oscar Wilde chose it as the moniker for his Dorian Gray in 1891, and though Dorian Kalisch surely wouldn’t have wanted to draw too many similarities between himself and Mr. Gray, there is a certain European worldliness to the name that I think is fitting.

I don’t actually know anything about Dorian as a person.  I don’t even know any actual stories about him.  I just know that my grandmother loved him and when he got married to a lady named Sylvia in 1935, she was sort of sad, even though she knew he was her cousin and she was being silly.

I am sure that she had a crush on Dorian because he was probably very kind to her, solicitous and warm  to her 8 year old self in a way that her 20 year old brother Arthur was not.  He also kind of reminds me of Leslie Howard (that’s him to the right), Ethel’s (and my) favorite actor as a teenager.  Maybe it’s just the wavy hair and the somewhat wistful expression, but Dorian seems to project the same sort of romantic idealism and sophisticated refinement that Howard and his characters did, which is something teenage girls find perennially attractive.

I wish I knew more concrete stories about Dorian, but I really don’t, nor do I have much hope that I will ever learn any, as I’m not sure there are any people still living who he and I had in common.  But I will love him for my grandmother’s sake, because I know he must have been worth caring about if he deserved to be her favorite cousin.

Dorian (Izydor) Kalisch (1895-1954)