franzl, ca 1928

My grandfather died 22 years ago today.

This summer, I visited Vienna, his hometown.  I thought a lot about him and about whether he had walked the same routes, seen the same buildings, gone to the same cafes.  I stood outside his childhood home, wandered around his neighborhood, loitered in front of his father’s store and wondered if I were literally standing in the ghosts of his footsteps.  I hope so.

There is so much I wish we could say to each other.

Frank Markus Hoffer (1909-1991)

Frank, his older brother Hans, and me at Blindengasse 29, August 2012

from the collection of Frank Hoffer

More than any other ancestral hometown, Rybky, Slovakia has always had the strongest pull on my heart.  Maybe that’s because it was the first ancestral hometown that I learned about when I was young, or maybe because it seemed to be a place that others were committed to remembering — or perhaps both.  My grandfather brought a snapshot of his mother’s childhood house in Rybky with him when he came to America in 1939 and when I inherited my grandparents’ photographs, I inherited that one, too.  It isn’t a great photograph and there are no people in it, but it must have been important in some way if he brought it with him.  But it wasn’t just my grandfather Frank, who never lived in Rybky, who had memories of it.  His cousin Frances once wrote to me that she had vivid memories of visiting Rybky with their mutual grandfather, and another cousin, Egon, has a similar photograph of Rybky from when he was taken on a visit as a young child.  More than any other familial hometown, this one seems to have a stronger gravitational pull than others.  I have never seen any other decades-old photographs of any other ancestral birthplaces or houses and I feel like that means something.

Rybky exists in the satellite dish present

Driving to Rybky from Vienna — the Bass family migration in reverse — takes you though farmland, wind plants and small towns whose occupants seem to have fled for work in other, bigger places.  When you cross the border, the contrast between the Austrian countryside and the Slovakian is striking — the communist past is tangible in the post-1940s architecture, the lack of readable road signage, the level of prosperity.  The natural beauty is striking too — rolling hills, fertile soil, roads lined with fruit trees.  When you make a left after passing through the city of Senica, the road to Rybky, too, is bordered by apple and plum trees and climbs uphill a little bit before reaching the town.  Signs bearing the town crest mark your arrival and I realized, as soon as we started driving down the road, that it was nothing like I had imagined.  Rybky, in my head, was nothing more than a pinpoint on the map, a teeny hamlet of dilapidated (yet of course picturesque) houses, old ladies in babushkas and old men smoking pipes on their porches, a sleepy place where only old people and memories remained.  But in reality, it is nothing like that.  It is a real town, with well-kept up homes hugging the main road, modern cars and people in modern clothes, large backyard garden plots, and a new soccer pitch.  I thought it would be easy to determine which of the houses was the Bass home, but I wasn’t expecting to see so many homes, nor that they would all be such a similar style.  What I expected was a place that time had forgotten, an imaginary place that my dead Basses might inhabit — but Rybky is a real place, a place so in our own time that the GPS chip in my camera recognizes it.

up the road from Rybky

Though I tried to tell myself we were only making the trip to Rybky so that I would know what it was like, I hoped that I would be able to find something of my dead Basses in it.  There was the house, after all, and there were the remaining graves of a Jewish cemetery.  I knew that my ancestors had been buried in that cemetery once, but I tried not to believe that I would actually find them.

Passing out of the town and climbing slowly uphill, we scanned the surrounding fields and orchards for any sign of a Jewish cemetery, which the internet had told me was only three remaining stones in someone’s field.  We didn’t expect to actually find it because we didn’t know where it was supposed to be — there are no directions and no coordinates for it on the internet (the only place apart from my family photos and stories that I had ever learned anything about Rybky).  Suddenly though, on the right side of the road, we caught a glimpse of three crooked gravestones standing quite clearly in plum orchard and a man bending over near them picking fallen fruit.  In shock, we drove for a while, passing through some more small towns along the hilly road that was still sporadically lined with trees.  I kept hoping that when we turned around and headed back, the man would be gone and I wouldn’t have to use the cobbled together Slovak phrases I assembling from the vocabulary words in the back of our guidebook.  When we parked down the road and walked back uphill to the orchard, the man was there, still picking plums, and looked up at us as we approached.  I smiled, raised my hand and said, “dobry den,” then “prosim,” pointing at myself then over at the three gravestones.  He sort of shrugged, seeming to say, “okay whatever, sure, I don’t care,” so I said thank you in Slovak and we walked up the small embankment into the orchard and over to the stones.

the cemetery

At first, I couldn’t see anything legible on any of them — two seemed to be almost bare on the side facing the road, the middle one covered in lichen and moss.  The double stone on the right was leaning backwards, as if a few more winters would likely topple it over for good, and when I walked around behind it, I saw that it was perfectly legible.  The Mandlers.

E. Mandler, d. 1913 (at 92!) and F. Mandler geb. Preiss

The stone the furthest to the left was still standing relatively straight, some Hebrew on the back relatively clear, but the German (I assume it was German once) on the front turned into nothing more than shallow divots.

the illegible gravestone

Then I went back to the pink stone in the middle, which was only half above ground, the right side of it sunken completely into the dirt and grass.  I scraped some lichen away with my hand and after a few moments of disbelief, I realized it said “Hanni Bass,” that I had my hands on the grave of my great-great-great-grandmother. I scraped away more lichen with my fingers, dug a little bit into the grass at the base of the stone and her maiden name, Mittler, and the 1885 of her death emerged very clearly.  We cleaned and cleaned with our fingers, then finally with a sock and a bottle of water retrieved from the car.  The name of David Bass (the great-great-great-grandfather who had died just weeks after Hanni) was lost underground, but the pink marble on Hanni’s half of the stone was still very pink as we cleaned, the willow tree at the top of the inscription still clear and oddly appropriate since a tree laden with plums was in fact literally growing out of their bones.

cleaning

The man in the orchard had largely ignored us when we first began poking around, but as our excitement became more obvious and our cleaning a gravestone with a bottle of water and a white cotton sock made us seem more and more crazy, he started coming closer, probably trying to figure out what we were doing.  Paul asked him, finally, to take a picture of us, which he did after some confusion with the camera, and with that as an ice-breaker, he started talking to us in Slovak, I think about plums.  His name was Josef and he picked a few plums off the trees for us and cracked them in his hand, splitting them open around the pit, offering us a taste.  We told him we were from California and Paul tried to explain that I was the fruit borne of Hanni and David, just like the plums we were eating.  After a little more talking he indicated that we could take as many plums as we wanted but that he was going home. He headed down the road with his big white bucket of plums on a little cart and we stayed for a little while longer, taking more photos and scraping off more lichen, while I tried to sear each and every memory of the place into my brain.

clean

Nothing about Rybky was anything like what I had pictured.  It wasn’t an imaginary storybook shtetl, but a place inhabited by real people, both dead and alive — a place where my ancestors lived and worked and where Josef is hopefully telling people about the weird Californians he met while picking the ground-fall he made into slivovitz.  Hanni and David were just as real as Josef, not storybook people living in a Slovakian version of Fiddler on the Roof.  They were hardworking tavern-keepers who owned a cow, 2 goats and didn’t know how to read or write (according to the 1869 census).  They lived in a small house (with a kitchen) where they raised a fine family of 9, children who could read and write and who became successful enough in Vienna and Budapest that they could buy their parents a fancy pink gravestone.  Their oldest son, my great-great-grandfather Nathan, raised his family there as well and named his last two children (who were born after their grandparents’ deaths) Hanni and David.  When they were all older, they moved away, making the same journey I made from Slovakia to Vienna but in a time when that distance was much greater.  Nathan’s children, who kept pictures of their home and took their children to visit, remembered their birthplace with affection, passing that sense of place down to their children. When my grandfather and his cousins left Europe for California, for New York, for Israel, they took this sense of being from a place with them, and they somehow gave it to me.

Hanni & David

Yesterday, I found my great-great-great-grandparents’ grave in a plum orchard in Slovakia.

Frank Fenning, ca 1925

My great-great-grandfather Frank was a dapper little man who was thrifty, hard-working and good at suing people, and  the more I learn about him the more colorful he becomes.  Reconstituting the facts of someone’s life — the dates, names, and places — is one thing, but rediscovering and reconstituting the stories that fill out that life is quite another.  It’s one thing to know that my great-great-grandfather was a tailor, but it’s quite another to know that he lived just around the corner from his shop and that he was the boss, employing six men in making clothing for the larger retail trade.  And it’s quite another thing from there to know that in 1897 — before he changed his last name from Fenig to Fenning — Frank lost the $60 with which he was going to pay his tailors, which caused a minor riot and the intervention of Newark’s boys in blue.

Of course I believe that Frank must have really lost that money, because I am very loyal.  But I am glad that the tailors thought he was lying, that the Newark Evening News ran this story, and that the New York Herald picked it up because they thought it was funny.

 I will never know Frank Fenning, but these small pieces of his life make him just a bit more real as a person who lived in a complex world.  Every story that I hear or gather about him (about anyone) is a gift, giving me back something that our family once must have known but have now forgotten.

My cousins often wonder how it is that I know so many of the stories that my grandfather tells, how I know so many stories that no one tells anymore.  The answer really isn’t very difficult at all: these stories are everywhere.  Sometimes it takes a little bit of legwork to find them (or a lot), but sometimes all you have to do is listen.

Frank Fenning (ca 1865-1936)

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.

In February, all I knew was that my great-great-great grandfather had come to the United States in 1889, but not what became of him after his arrival.  I didn’t know if he stayed in America, if he went home, how long he lived, when he died.  Now, in May, I know that he stayed here, lived here and died here — and he is buried here in a grave I have seen.

He went by several different names, but I think the truest to his real name (by which I mean original birth name) is likely Mechel Fenig, which is what appears on his tombstone.  Mechel lived in New York City for 11 years after his arrival in on the Hammonia and when he died of cancer on April 24, 1900 in his son Jacob‘s apartment at 211 Stanton Street, he missed being enumerated in the 1900 federal census by mere days.  A day later, on April 25th, Mechel was buried in Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery and I visited him there 112 years (and 4 days) after he was laid to rest.

He was buried with the First Gorlitzer Rudnicker Chevra Mach Emes, the burial society of a landsmanshaft (or Jewish mutual aid society) of immigrants from Gorlice, Poland, a town not far from Nowy Zmigrod – the spot his son (my great-great-grandfather) Frank listed as his birthplace when he became a US citizen.  The Gorlitzers were easy enough to find, but Mechel’s place in row 4, grave 3 was not.  Not wanting to admit I’d come for nothing, I walked to the very back of the plot where the graves were the oldest, still finding nothing.  Then, finally, serendipitously, I looked down at the gravestone near my husband’s feet and realized we had found Mechel.

 Time seems thinner in New York than it does here at home in California.  There, it is impossible for me to forget that my ancestors walked the same exact streets that I am walking, lived in the same exact buildings that I pass by.  Sitting in the cemetery with Mechel as the F train whizzed by on its elevated tracks over us, I felt time compress a little, too.  His gravestone is old, toppled over on its back, but I was there remembering him in the same place that my great-great-grandfather might have visited, placing a stone in the same place that Tante Czippe might have.  It is likely that I am the only Fenning (or Fenig, I guess) to have visited Mechel since his last surviving child died in 1940, but it made me feel closer to all of them being there.

Mechel Fenig (Yechial Mechel ben Zvi) (ca 1839-1900)

The Bold: Ella Holzmann Brown (1882-1971) with daughter Rona and granddaughter Dione

  My great-great grandmother Ella was a very fashionable lady and a very strong-willed one.  It’s likely she didn’t need glasses until she was middle-aged (her side of the family is not generally a near-sighted one), which is when these very classy rimless frames start showing up in photographs.

The Desperate: Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (seated, 2nd from right) with the rest of the Temple Beth Israel (York, Pennsylvania) confirmation class of 1932

Unlike Ella, my grandmother Ethel needed to wear glasses nearly all her life (her side of the family is, unfortunately, a sometimes very near-sighted one) and made the move to contact lenses as soon as she could get them. Clearly, her confirmation in 1932 was before that date and she just really needed to be able to see.  In all of her high school yearbook photos that I’ve seen, she managed to sneak her glasses off before the shutter fired, but obviously not this time.

I wouldn’t have noticed about either of these foremothers wearing or not wearing glasses if it hadn’t been for another excellent lady who wears glasses: the footnoteMaven.  fM, as she is known to her friends, is the founder of Shades of the Departed, one of the most well-written, researched and loved genealogy blogs out there, and she is also the publisher of Shades of the Departed Magazine, where I was fortunate to be a regular columnist.  fM’s skill with words, research chops and passion for photographs are obvious to anyone who has ever read her work, and her generosity, supportiveness and general awesomeness are readily apparent to all who’ve been lucky enough to meet her.

Happy birthday, footnoteMaven!  I hope the coming year brings happiness, health and lots of ladies wearing glasses!

CreativeGene, by Jasia

The Educated Genealogist, by Sheri Fenley

For Your Family Story, by Caroline Pointer

Geneablogie, by Craig Manson

Healing Brush, by Janine Smith

Shades: Birthday Edition — A Teacup Throne at Moultrie Creek, by Denise Olson

What’s Past is Prologue, by Donna Pointkouski

The Family Curator, by Denise Levenick

Cleveland Leader, November 27, 1900

I never realized how colorful my family was – or how colorful the times they lived in were – until I made a survey of the Goldman family in the Cleveland, Ohio newspapers digitized by various commercial entities. I knew that some of my relatives were litigious and I knew that others were maybe a little scandalous, but I never really thought overly much about the day-to-day crime and general seediness that was so close to their everyday lives.

The family of my great-great-great-great-aunt Rebecca Goldie Gottlieb and her husband Jacob Nissl Gottlieb (my 1st cousin 5th removed; they were first cousins) seems somewhat exceptional in its bad luck in that department.  Like my great-great-great grandparents David & Bella Rosenstein (Bella was Rebecca’s older sister), Rebecca & Jacob came to Cleveland from Rajgrod, Poland in the early 1870s.  I haven’t been able to find their arrival records, but they married in 1872 in Cleveland and at that time, they’d already changed their last names from Gottlieb to Goldman, as did many of my other Gottlieb cousins.  They had at least 9 children (5 of them made it to adulthood) and they lived and worked in close proximity to their relatives, sometimes occupying different floors or apartments within the same houses.  For example, Berg Street was, in those days, apparently crawling with my relatives: at least 7 households worth of family members lived in the 20-40 blocks in the 1880s and 1890s.  Despite the fact that they lived so close to other cousins, somehow Jacob and Rebecca’s family is the one who shows up in the papers the most — and not for good things.  Maybe they were a little combative

but they also seem to have had some really strange luck — sometimes weird and sometimes just plain bad.

Two of the strangest and most serious pieces of bad luck occurred just 15 months apart in August 1899 and in November 1900.  The second story was widely reported and followed-up by multiple Cleveland news outlets; the August 1899 story, by contrast, was only mentioned twice in Cleveland papers, which tended to paint it as a relatively innocuous occurance. However, somehow the story was picked up by two different New York newspapers (the Oswego Palladium and the New York Sun), who seemed to treat it as a much more serious story.

The story as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer excludes several details of the story reported in New York, leading me to believe that the New York version is the correct one (which is why I am reproducing it here).  In Cleveland, there was no mention of the upcoming nuptials or that Sarah was in the bedroom with Fanny and Tillie (the daughter of a David S. Gottlieb, who I suspect is a cousin) — even though the wedding, at least, was definitely fact.  Sarah married Isaac Hurwitz on August 8, just a few days later (and incidentally, her sister Fanny would marry Isaac’s brother Harry in August 1908).  I don’t know why the Cleveland newspapers I found would leave this fact out — it certainly makes the story more exciting.  But on the whole, it seems to me that they didn’t take this story as seriously as the New York papers did.  There’s also no mention of the spurned suitor hypothesis; in The Plain Dealer the erstwhile kidnapper/sex offender is suspected to be “Jack the Hugger,” a man “who a few weeks ago terrorized the women living in the third district by his bold actions.  Many instances were reported where he had ‘hugged’ ladies on the street.”  The opening paragraph of the story also calls the girls’ experience “exciting,” which I guess it was, but not in the good sense of the word.  Interestingly, I couldn’t find any other stories in the digitized Cleveland newspapers about Jack the Hugger, though I did discover that that moniker and its associated crimes (hugging ladies on the street, that is) was a relatively common turn-of-the-century phenomenon.

A year later, in November 1900, the Goldmans had even more bad luck, and this incident was violent enough for everyone to take seriously.

The facts were these: a burglar broke into Jacob & Rebecca’s bedroom at 3am on a Sunday night, apparently with the aim of stealing Jacob’s gold pocket watch.  He woke Jacob up in the process (though not before taking the watch) and ran back through the other rooms of the house towards the kitchen, while Jacob began yelling.  In the kitchen, he was met by the Goldman’s oldest son, Aaron, who engaged him in a fight.

The Goldmans were all unarmed, but the burglar had a gun and fired it at Aaron, hitting him in the chin and jaw.  This of course knocked Aaron to the ground, which gave the burglar time to turn towards the rest of the family (Jacob, Rebecca, Fanny and the two little kids, Libby & Benny) who were standing in the doorway leading to the bedrooms.  He fired twice, hitting Rebecca in the chest and in the hand.  After taking these shots, he climbed back out the kitchen window and instead of running away, thrust his body through the window and aimed at Rebecca again.  Aaron had gotten up by this time and struggled to wrest the gun from the burglar’s hand.  When the burglar finally dropped the gun and ran, Aaron passed out in a pool of blood and I’m sure his mother probably had done the same.

They were both taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital where they were in critical condition, but both survived.  This was quite a sensational crime, reported extensively and updated from day to day.  Fanny served as an important witness in identifying the suspect, which was a bit of a rocky road: others were arrested before Fred Hall, who was finally found guilty of the attack, was properly identified.

I had never imagined my relatives in such a rough world, but I suppose I am glad to know that even though they may have been the victims of strange crimes and bad luck, they were also strong and gutsy enough to fight back.  Rebecca in particular seems like quite a formidable woman and I hope that her older sister Bella had some of those same genes.  I would say that I hope she passed them down to me, but I hope never to be tested in the same way that Rebecca Goldman was.

Jacob N. Goldman (ca. 1852-1931), Rebecca Goldie Goldman (1853-1920), Sarah Goldman Hurwitz (b. 1878), Aaron A. Goldman (1880-1963) and Fanny Goldman Hurwitz (1884-1867)

Anna/Chaje Fenning Blaustein, unknown baby Blaustein and Celia/Czippe Fenning Buxbaum, ca 1890s

In late summer 1889, my great-great-great grandfather Michael Pfenig and his youngest daughter Chaje made the trip from their small shtetl of Zmigrod (in what is now Poland) to New York City. They sailed via Hamburg on a ship called the SS Hammonia and arrived at Castle Garden (in what is now Battery Park) on September 1st. Michael was 50 years old; Chaje was 22.

The first time I found the ship records of their journey — there is a German ship manifest written upon departure from Hamburg, and an American one written upon arrival at Castle Garden — it gave me the chills. I had never suspected that Michael had come to the United States; I thought my great-great-grandfather and his siblings were the first generation of Fennings (then Pfenigs or Fenigs) to live and die on the North American continent. It perhaps seems like a silly thing to get so excited about, but knowing this fact somehow made history feel shorter. It made me feel like my roots were closer than I had thought.

I don’t know anything about Michael, apart from the fact that he was born around 1840 and is listed as a “dealer” in the ship manifests. He and his wife Esther Rassler (or Raphel – it isn’t clear what her maiden name was) had at least 5 children who came to the United States as young adults. My great-great-grandfather Frank Fenning — who went on to be dapper, adorable and somewhat litigious — was one of them. Michael’s legacy lived on in the “M” names and middle names given to his children and grandchildren, but I have never heard any stories about him, which is a little bit strange for the erstwhile Pfenigs who are big tellers of stories.

I have been unable to find a death record or any other mention of Michael after September 1, 1889. It’s possible his life in America took more turns than I can even imagine — after all, I never would have imagined him in New York in the first place — and I hope one day I can find the documentation that marks his path.

Michael Pfenig (ca. 1840-)
and Anna Fenning (ca. 1867-1932)

* Pfenig entries, lines 56-57, SS. Hammonia, passenger manifest, 1 September 1889; Ancestry.com, accessed 3 February 2012.

* Pfenig entries, lines 45-46, SS Hammonia, passenger manifest, arriving in New York 12 September 1889; Ancestry.com, accessed 3 February 2012.

Thanksgiving 1990?

Sometime right around when this photo was taken (I think this must have been Thanksgiving or sometime around then), my grandparents gave me an aquamarine ring as a Christmas/Hanukkah present.  They died not that long after and for the last 21 years, I have spent almost every minute wearing that ring. It has become almost like a superstition — what if something happened to me and I wasn’t wearing it?  What if I left it at home and my house burned down?  It is a way I can carry them around with me, a mechanism for remembering them, though I don’t really need one.  It is also, I think, a way to remember myself because when they died, I sometimes think my childhood did, too.  I learned what pain was, what loss was, and I have never been the same.

Sometimes I am not even sure what it is that I miss, except that it seems like something essential I once had.

Frank Markus Hoffer (1909-1991) and Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (1918-1991), center,
me, age 9 1/2, top left