A few years ago, my daughter, in her late 20s, bought an apartment in Brooklyn that cost nearly a million dollars. How could a youngster, just six years out of college, afford such a place? The answer is, in part: generational wealth. While initially skeptical of her idea of buying an apartment, I figured it …
Author: Chanan Kessler
Childhood home revisited
Sometimes the connection between past and present is crystalized in a moment of space and time. You stand before a place where your ancestors lived. You contemplate its history and how the present resonates with the past. I experienced that connection during my recent visit to Israel. I stood before a place, the exact place, …
Immigration (legal/illegal) stories of my ancestors
In this time of vilification of undocumented immigrants, it’s worth examining, from a legal point of view, the immigration stories of my grandfather and great uncle. They were born in Zambrow, a town in the northeast section of present day Poland. My grandfather, his parents’ eldest child, was born in 1899. The area was ruled …
A visit to my Great Uncle
I never met my great uncle. His Hebrew name was Shmuel, his English name Sam, but everyone called him by his Yiddish name, Shmulke. My grandfather’s younger brother, he, along with my grandfather and one younger sister, left his home town of Zambrow, Poland, before the war. Those who remained, their mother, three siblings and …
A visit to the Vatican
The Vatican. Its incredible art collection. The Raphael rooms. His famous fresco, the School of Athens. Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. If you’re Catholic, the center of your faith, the home of your spiritual leader, the locus of papal history for over a millennium. Either way, a must do when in Rome. When a Jew …
Rome, through Jewish eyes
On my way back from Israel this summer, I spent three days in Rome. Little did I know how profoundly this part of my trip, designed for pleasure and diversion from the intensity of Israel these days, would affect me. That’s because, when in Rome, you confronted with some basic facts of history. Rome was …
Hinde: Child of Life, Child of Death
In their later years, my great grandparents, Chone and Sheindl Wierzbowicz, were blessed with a daughter. Her name was Hinde. She was born sometime in the mid 1920s. She spent her short life with her parents and family in Zambrow, Poland, and shared the fate of Zambrow’s Jews. I don’t know with certainty Hinde’s birth …
The Search for Roots: Graves in Israel
In these days of war and terror, I’ve been thinking a lot about graves. In particular, graves in Israel. And of Jews dying in and for their country, their land. Too many. The grieving. The gut-wrenching burials of the young who paid for fulfilling their duty to the nation with their lives. I am reminded …
Introduction: Roots to Routes: A Family Saga
This blog focuses on my personal history. The saga begin with my grandparents, first generation traditionally minded Jewish immigrants to New York from Eastern Europe. It continues with my parents, born in New York just before (my father) and during (my mother) the Great Depression, their childhoods shaped by the Holocaust and post-war America. The …
My Great Uncle Shmulke: Mysteries Revealed and Remaining
Everyone it seems has an ancestor whose life is a mystery. Someone who lived on the margins of family, whose behavior was both excused and inexplicable. The black sheep, part of the family yet seldom spoken of. Perhaps a loner. Perhaps inflicted with a disability about which no one dared speak. These qualities describe my …