In two previous posts, I explored the efforts of my great grandfather, Chone (pronounced Kho-ne) Wierzbowicz (pronounced Verzbovitch), to immigrate from his native Zambrow, Poland, to the United States. With a guarantee of support filed by his son, my grandfather, Chone applied for a visa in 1934, and, through a combination of luck and perseverance, …
Category: Explorations: family history
Explorations into the history of my Zambrow family, their journeys from Poland to Palestine, America and Auschwitz.
Likely to become a public charge
In a previous post, I explored the efforts of my great grandfather, Chone Weirzbowicz, to get a visa to immigrate to the United States. He tried for more than four years, from mid-1934 to late 1938. His task was not easy, because he was from Poland, and the law at that time—the Immigration Act of …
Narrow escape: my Great Grandfather’s immigration story
It wasn’t easy to immigrate from Poland to the United States in the 1930s. My maternal great grandfather, after whom I am named, was one of the lucky few. He made it out less than a year before the Nazis invaded Poland and exterminated most of Polish Jewry, including his own family. He was born …
Generational wealth: a family story
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 …
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 …