I am drawn like a magnet into my family’s past. Not out of nostalgia, but as a way of projecting my own future, a future rooted in deep history. Yet much of that history is clouded and, to my sorrow, mostly unrecoverable. My grandfather’s generation is gone, having died in America or been killed by …
Author: Chanan Kessler
The organizations that mattered (part 1): HIAS
It’s difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of my Zaide’s (grandfather’s) generation. Their lives were uncertain, preoccupied with the issue of migration. For one central feature characterized the lives of so many Jews before World War II: dislocation, and the attendant struggles to leave Europe and redefine themselves in a new land. Having experienced …
Immigration strategies: the New World option
Half of my grandfather’s family made it out of Poland before World War II. The other half didn’t and were killed. My grandfather’s brother was one who did leave Poland. He was known as Shmulke (Shmuel or Sam) Wierzbowicz, and in this post I explore his journey from Poland to America. As with most Eastern …
Poland-Palestine-America: A journey to U.S. citizenship
My relatives didn’t arrive in the U.S. during the period of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1880-1920, when over 20 million people, including two and a half million Eastern European Jews, arrived on these shores. As the doors of immigration to the U.S. began closing after 1920, my grandfather’s entire family–his parents, …
From Germany to Palestine: 1920-1922
I begin with a photograph. It’s the first photo I have of my grandfather, Yosef Weirzbowicz (Waxman). It was taken in 1922, in Berlin. Next to him sits his mother, Sheindl. Standing alone, a photograph is lifeless, unreal, imprisoned, as Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. To bring it to life, a story needs to be told, …
From Poland to Germany
Sometime in 1920, about a year after being drafted into the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet war, my Zaide (grandfather) absconded and made his way to Germany. In this post I explore why and how he made this fateful decision to leave his family and native land and to enter, illegally, into Germany. When he …