me, at what used to be 202 West End Avenue

 When I was in New York a few weeks ago, eating some amazingly good gelato on the Upper West Side, I realized we were only blocks away from where my great-grandmother Charlotte grew up at 202 West End Avenue.

Her building doesn’t exist anymore – this high rise has taken the place of 202 and the other smaller apartment buildings that made up the rest of the block.  I don’t really know how attached Grandma Charlotte was to this address but she was a modern lady given to self-reinvention, so I feel like she probably wouldn’t mind, understanding progress and change as she did.  Still, this was the place where her brother William was born, the home in which she probably learned quite a lot about what it was to be an American, a New Yorker.  She lived here from at least her 10th birthday until her 17th, and I’m sure those were years of great change for her, years in which she stopped being Sadie and started being Charlotte.

Really, that makes this new building on top of her old address is kind of appropriate.

charlotte, ca. 1918

A few months ago, I found two job wanted ads that my great-grandmother Charlotte placed in the New York Herald in 1910. I only found two ads for consecutive weeks in May, and so I assumed that she must have found an ideal situation and had no need to keep advertising.

It turns out I was right to assume this: in October 1912, her second anniversary of working for vaudeville manager Paul Durand gets a mention in Variety:

Mr. Paul Durand represented and managed vaudeville talent from his offices in the Palace Theater, the midtown Manhattan home of the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. A Belgian immigrant (he arrived in New York only 6 years after his future secretary did), it seems that Durand worked as a theatrical agent from at least 1909 through the 1920s, though I am unable to find any traces of him after about 1922.

My grandfather says that his mother Charlotte used to tell him stories of her time working in vaudeville, but that he’s never been sure if these stories aggrandized her actual job. She used to tell him about how she would actually make the bookings when certain acts were requested — if someone called and needed an elephant act, she would find the elephant act and book them. Similarly, she would tell stories about getting phone calls from performers stranded on the road and how she would get them back onto the performing circuit.

I would be inclined to agree with my grandfather that his mother was inflating the truth a bit, but for the fact that the other people mentioned on the short takes page along with the above notice are actors, managers and theaters, not stenographers. This does not seem like the place for a stenographer’s two year anniversary in an office to be commemorated, so perhaps she really was more than a simple stenographer and secretary — maybe she really did book the elephant acts just like she said she did.

It is also possible that she gained some prominence simply through the strength of her personality and sense of humor.

The above notice was printed in Variety in July 1912, several months earlier, and (apart from being an amazing piece of sass) it indicates that she must have already had friends on the Variety staff, or that she was in the process of making them by submitting things like this.

I wish I had known this Charlotte, who had no qualms about cracking wise in a major trade periodical.

Charlotte Hurdus Fenning (1893-1989)

* notices from Variety, October 12, 1912 (Vol. XXVIII, No. 5), p. 9; and July 12, 1912 (Vol. XXVII, No. 6), p. 7. Accessed at Old Fulton Postcards (specific URLs linked above), January 24, 2012.

* photograph of Paul Durand from his passport application, no. 405910 (1924), Passport Applications, 1795-1925, Roll 2497, National Archives and Records Administration; Ancestry.com, accessed January 24, 2012.

Charlotte, ca 1918

In 1910, my great-grandmother placed these job wanted ads in the New York Herald.  I could only find two of them — for consecutive weeks in May — and I am taking that as evidence she found the position she was looking for.  In both of the ads, she says that she is experienced, and this seems to be very true.  Just a month earlier, on April 18, she had given her occupation as “stenographer” in a “law office” to the census taker who visited the apartment at 202 West End Avenue where she lived with her parents and two younger siblings.  This census also says that she had attended school sometime in the interval between September 1909 and April 1910, which is intriguing. I don’t know if it was high school or secretarial school, but the fact that she attended some kind of school until she was 16 or 17 means that she received substantially more education than many of my other American-born great-grandparents.

I am also intrigued and would like to know more about why, in her May 15th ad, she says she has “excellent references,” but on May 22nd they are only “satisfactory.”

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about these ads, however, is that she specifies her Americanness as a job qualification.  Other ads on the same page give details about job seekers’ backgrounds (“refined North German Protestant,” “young lady of New Orleans,” “French nursery governess”), so it isn’t unusual at all for her to include “American” (lots of other job seekers did). Really, it makes sense that, in a city full of immigrants (and bigotry), you would specify your nativity, your language skills and your cultural background, but the fact that Charlotte was not actually born in America is what makes this so interesting.  As I have written about before, she arrived in New York from Belarus at the age of 5 or 6 and, until the 1910 census, she is listed in public records with the first name Sadie. Even in 1910, her place of birth is listed as Russia — she has not yet started spreading around that she was born in New York or South Carolina (that wouldn’t change in the public record until she married and moved out of her parents’ home).

I have thought about Charlotte’s invented origin story many times over the years and where I once found it disturbing, I now feel empathy for my great-grandmother and her reasons for telling the lies that she told.  After all, even though she wasn’t actually a natural-born American, she was still young enough when she arrived in New York City that she was able to blend in and learn Americanness, differing from her two older sisters who (as the family story goes) retained more of the old country about them.  In later life, she would not keep up her relationship with these two sisters, perhaps mentally relegating them to the country she had left behind as a little kid (or maybe she just didn’t get along with them very well). They perhaps would not have been able to advertise themselves as Americans, but Charlotte could.  Unlike them — unlike many other immigrants — she didn’t just pick up the language, adopt the customs, and learn to integrate these things with her immigrant identity.  These things became her new, American identity — the world of the immigrant was for her parents, her grandmother, her older sisters.

Unlike them, she didn’t just learn to be an American — she really became one.

Charlotte Hurdus Fenning (1893-1989)

* newspaper advertisements from the New York Herald, May 15, 1910 (Section 6, page 2) and May 22, 1910 (Section 1, page 19).  Accessed at Old Fulton Postcards (specific URLs linked above), October 28, 2011.

* Samuel Hurdus household, 1910 U.S. Federal Census for Manhattan (Ward 22), New York County, New York, ED 1381, dwelling 18, household 113, sheets 3B-4A.  Ancestry.com, accessed October 28, 2011.

Charlotte is in the black bathing suit, third from the left

In honor of the unseasonably hot weather currently hovering over Southern California, here is a summer-time picture of my great-grandmother Charlotte and some other ladies at Cobbosseecontee Lake near Winthrop, Maine in the 1930s. Charlotte and her husband Harry would stay at the lodge at the lake for part of the summer while their son Billy was a camper at Camp Cobbossee nearby. According to Billy, there was a part of the lake that was fenced off under water with netting, to form a fishless swimming pool of sorts within the fishy lake. Here, Charlotte would practice her head-above-water breast-stroke and presumably put these other mothers to shame with her athletic prowess and comparatively much better fitting bathing costume.

Charlotte Hurdus Fenning (1893-1989) and unknown ladies

My great-grandmother Charlotte was a liar. I didn’t know this when I was small – in those 8 years we spent in the same world – and I’m not sure anyone else alive during those 8 years knew it either. If I weren’t a snoop, no one would know she had lied about anything, and I used to think that my revealing the truth would be some kind of betrayal.

Grandma told everyone that she was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and that is the place my grandfather filled in on her death certificate when she died, the place she herself gives on her marriage license and passport applications. I thought this was pretty exciting – no, fascinating – because it simply reeked of something exotic and exciting, of mint juleps and azalea bowers and evenings on verandas with Rhett Butler.

The thing was, though, that South Carolina disagreed with Charlotte: they couldn’t find her birth certificate anywhere. Strange, I thought. At the same time, I had found other documents where Charlotte gave her birthplace as New York City, the place where I knew she spent most, if not all, of her childhood and young adulthood. At first I didn’t think it was strange that New York City couldn’t find any sign of her birth certificate either – I had other relations who were born in New York City, whose names were so mangled in the writing down that they were almost impossible to find.

That wasn’t the problem with Charlotte, though. Nope. The problem was that she wasn’t born in New York City, or New York State, or even in North America.

Instead, she was born in what is now the Minsk region of Belarus and came to the United States in 1899 as a 5 year old named Chaje (later Americanized to Sadie) with her mother and her sisters.

I found this out because I one day, by fluke, found an entry for Charlotte’s father, the adorable Sam, in an online index that led me to his naturalization papers. These papers listed his particulars and those of his wife, Minnie, and those of his five children – Rose, Ida, Sadie and Jennie – all born in Belarus – and William, born in Manhattan. This was quite perplexing indeed, because, um, where was Charlotte? And who in the hell were Rose and Ida and Sadie? I had been told that Charlotte’s siblings were Jennie and William – no mention of anyone else. But this had to be my family, I thought. How many other Sam & Minnie Hurduses could live in New York City, let alone the world?

Then I took a closer look at the papers in front of me and realized that Sadie had the same birthdate as Charlotte: August 18, 1893. And then I said, “wait, what?”

Belarus is a long way from Charleston or New York City, Sadie is quite different than Charlotte, and this all meant that Grandma was lying.

My grandfather couldn’t believe it either. He and his sister had always been told their mother was born in Charleston and that her name was Charlotte, but those were certainly her parents, most definitely her younger brother and sister, most assuredly her birthday… but what about Rose and Ida, I wanted to know. Oh yes, my grandfather and his sister recalled, now that I mentioned it, there were some older sisters named Rose and Ida, but Charlotte didn’t really get along with them that well – they were older, more Jewy, less assimilated. Plus they lived in FlorIda and one of them died young. Jennie talked to Rose and Ida because she was “soft,” for which Charlotte used to reprimand her. But really, no one remembers all of it, and I still have never been able to discover anything substantive of these sisters on my own.

All of this information has been percolating in my head for several years, giving me a chance to figure out what it all means and why she did it. I am still not completely sure. It would have been easier, in a way, to fully comprehend if Charlotte had denied any ties to her old world family at all, but she didn’t. She and her husband, my great-grandfather, spoke Yiddish in front of their kids when they wanted to tell secrets and she was close to her parents and her younger siblings – even if she was distant enough from Rose and Ida that her kids forgot they existed until prompted. It wasn’t a desire to efface her entire background, to deny family – but a desire, perhaps, to be more fully the person she thought she was: Charlotte, not Chaje. A “real” American, not an immigrant. I still struggle with this, and with trying to understand how the mere appearance of something so relatively unimportant in this melting pot of a country could become so important that you’d keep it from your children their entire lives. And I think I will probably always struggle with it, because I will never know for sure exactly what she was thinking.

Charlotte Hurdus Fenning (1893-1989) 

I am in Tucson, Arizona this week for a workshop on cataloging and archiving photographs, which somewhat ironically leaves me with very little time to muse on my own photographic family history. So instead, I leave you with a picture of my grandfather, his sister and their parents — in Tucson, Arizona in 1935.

A. Harry (1893-1955), Billy, Selma and Charlotte Fenning (1893-1989)

My great-grandparents Charlotte and Harry got married twice.  Once, in March 1918, they were married by a Staten Island justice of the peace before Harry shipped out to France as a corporal in the radio detachment of Signal Brigade Company A.  After he came home, they were married by a rabbi in August 1919, presumably in front of friends and family.  It’s a love story out of a silent film.

After this second wedding, they shipped off next to South America, to honeymoon from August through January.  This was only the beginning of their travels: they took their firstborn Billy to South America as a little boy, spent winters in Florida, visited the southwest, went to Maine in the summers.  I’m not sure if my own passion for going new places comes from them – it would be nice to think it did.

As I write this, sitting in a hotel room in Santa Fe, on an adventure somewhat less exotic than South America in 1919, I have a hard time thinking of anything else to say.  But this photograph fills me with a kind of wonder – because of how young and cute they look, how informally they’re standing in front of those mountains, how immediate this scene almost becomes to seem, until you realize it was taken 88 years ago.

Charlotte Hurdus Fenning (1893-1989) and A. Harry Fenning (1893-1955)