My father was a self-made man. A successful businessman on two continents. A community leader. A private man.
My siblings and I can fill in lots of Kopel Forseter’s history for those first three attributes. But too much of his personal history from the first 28 years of his life in Europe remains cloaked in his privacy.
What we know of his youth until age 16 in his birth town of Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, is sketchy. Depending on the consequences of war, Ottynia changed hands. When he was born in 1911 or 1912 (records of his birth year are obscure), Kopel Fuersetzer entered the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I, the Ukrainian National Republic and subsequently Poland acquired Ottynia. At the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union seized the town, only to be supplanted by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the Soviets regained control by war’s end, Ottynia became part of present day Ukraine.
Before 1939, the Dniester River town of Ottynia counted some 1,000 Jews among its 4,000 inhabitants. Few remained alive after the war. Of Kopel’s immediate family, only a younger brother, Willy, survived.
(Circa 1936, l to r, Kopel, mother Lina, brother Max, father Moses, brother Willy)
We assume Kopel grew up in a middle class household. His father, Moses, after whom I am named, sold livestock. Kopel often said he received just a sixth grade education in Ottynia, often slogging the apocryphal uphill path (both ways!) to school and back. Yet, he had an agile mind, excelled in math and history, and, had he been born here, could have become a successful lawyer.
My brother, sister and I know little about his life in Ottynia, about relations between Jews and gentiles, about family holiday traditions. He never talked about such matters, even when Bernie and I interviewed him and Willy when they were in their 70’s.
Kopel left Ottynia when he was 16. From southeastern Poland he went northwest, to Danzig (now Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea. He became a traveling salesman at various times selling dry goods and stationery on the installment plan to keep him in constant contact with customers.
He related few details about his 12 years in Danzig, his address, about how he and his friends socialized, how he met Dora, his first love who emigrated to Australia with her parents when he went to America in early 1939, descriptions of his voyage that entailed disembarking near London and traveling to Liverpool to board a ship to New York, and, most tellingly, nothing about antisemitism in the so-called Free City of Danzig which from 1933 on was governed by Nazis. As related by Wikipedia, “In 1938 … an official policy of repression against Jews; Jewish businesses were seized and handed over to Gentile Danzigers, Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, cinemas, public baths and swimming pools, or stay in hotels within the city, and, with the approval of the city’s senate, barred from the medical, legal and notary professions.”
Kopel left Danzig barely two months after the city experienced its version of Kristallnacht on November 12-14, 1938.
Kopel never expressed any interest in returning to Danzig or Ottynia, nor was he interested in applying for reparations.
His reticence to talk about life in Ottynia and Danzig was paradoxical considering he was a great story-teller, captivating business associates and family with life-lessons culled from his Old World experiences. Among the only stories I recall is his years’-long disdain while in Danzig for potatoes, given that spuds were often the only food his mother served during winter. It was only after a waitress in Danzig implored him to try the house specialty potatoes that he resumed their consumption. Meat, chicken, or fish with potatoes. With bread. That was his diet. No vegetables.
I inhabit many of his traits, some good, some not so. I snore loudly. I dream a lot. I love watching Westerns. I don’t like it when people tell me what to do. I like to be in charge. Like my father, I enjoyed minimal staff turnover.
Like members of the Greatest Generation who kept silent about their military service during World War II (Kopel served for eight months in the army before receiving a medical discharge in August 1943), my father kept to himself so many details of the life his children would have loved to know.
Father’s Day is just not as complete as I, we, would have liked.
