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 …
Category: Explorations: family history
Explorations into the history of my Zambrow family, their journeys from Poland to Palestine, America and Auschwitz.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Sketching a lost life: my great aunt Paiche
Everyone deserves to be remembered, to have their story told. But how to tell the story of someone I never met, who lived so far away, left no survivors, and for whom not a scrap of genealogical information exists? No birth document. No marriage record. No physical trace of a life lived. Not even a …
The List
People create lists for all kinds of reasons. Projects to complete. Things to do. Shopping. As the owner of a paper goods store on the Lower East Side, my grandfather, whom I knew as Zaide, must have created all kinds of lists. Inventory. Expenses. Receipts. These lists, like the store itself, no longer exist. All …
Peeling off layers of the past
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 …
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 …