Carrying On the Family Name

At the age of sixteen, my paternal grandfather, Sydney, sailed the Atlantic to make a new life in America and entered the U.S. through Ellis Island in 1915 with his brother Izzie. Sydney was the youngest of eleven children and came from a Jewish family in the Galicia region of Poland. He made a modest life for himself in New York City, marrying my grandmother and raising two sons. Sydney put both of his sons through college on a working man’s income. He died young of lung cancer without seeing his family in Poland again, even though he returned to Europe briefly to fight for the U.S. in World War I. Sydney’s father, Melech, was one of three sons, all of whom perished in the Holocaust along with the families of Melech’s siblings and much of Melech’s family. At the time that I was growing up, very few people in the world had my last name. We have multiplied since then. But I still tell strangers who comment on my name, “If you meet another one, they’re related.” The Nazis annihilated most of our family along with the rest of Polish Jewry.

My father had the opportunity to meet some of his European relatives in 1960. My father is a mathematician and at a young age he published a book that founded a branch of mathematics. If you know anything about mathematicians (and many physicists as well), you will know that they peak out young. Most mathematicians make their most substantial contribution before they turn thirty. My father was invited to present at an international mathematics conference in Paris.

While in Paris, Dad took the opportunity to meet with his first cousin Joseph. Although Joseph spoke several languages (French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish), he did not speak English. His wife, Yael, also spoke many languages and fortunately English was among them. Joseph explained to my father through his wife, who translated, that he had not seen more than a couple of his relatives since the end of the war. He was more than delighted to meet my father, his first cousin. Joseph’s father, Baruch, had been the oldest brother of the eleven children and my Grandpa Sydney had been the youngest. Joseph told my father that when he was a young man, he emigrated to the land then called Palestine. The British ruled Palestine at that time. Joseph became an active communist in Palestine and for this the British arrested him and attempted to deport him to his homeland of Poland. Joseph slipped into France during the deportation process (by train) and remained there, eventually fighting in the Resistance during World War II and spending eighteen months in Auschwitz before the Liberation. After the war, he returned to Paris where he was reunited with his wife and an orphaned teenaged nephew, whom he adopted. Joseph and Yael had one son of their own.

Dad told Joseph and Yael everything he knew about the living relatives in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and Australia who still bore the family name. Joseph told my father that when he was in Auschwitz, he wondered if any of his family would survive the war and he often thought of his cousins Sydney and Izzie in America, hoping they were well and would continue the family. Many years later, Dad would make it possible for Joseph to reunite with his cousin Dave (then living in Michigan), whom he had grown up with in Poland. I met Joseph and Yael in 1970 and subsequently visited them several times in Paris during the travels of my youth. There is much more to their story, more than will fit in these brief paragraphs. The fact that I know that story, that they lived to tell the tale and meet my father and me, their American cousins, is a miracle.

Needless to say, I didn’t change my name when I married. Who could relinquish a name with a history like this attached to it? Before the birth of my first child, my husband magnanimously agreed to allow our children to keep my surname. Thus, my children bear my family name, which survived the Holocaust. They have met many cousins with their name, and there are more of us in the world these days. Still, I have overheard my children say, “If you meet another one, they’re related.”