Historic Moments in Berlin, a Personal Perspective

Thirty years ago today, the first cracks in the Berlin Wall appeared. Not cracks in the wall itself, but rather in the restrictions East Germans had in traveling to West Germany. Through a fortuitous, confusing and seemingly uncharacteristically incompetent set of actions by East German officials, unfettered access to and from East Berlin began 30 years ago on November 9 (for an hour by hour playback click on this link: https://mol.im/a/7666435).

Hanging on a wall in my home office is large chunk of the Berlin Wall. Another sizable portion, next to a picture of me chipping away at history, rests on the built-in wall unit of our living room. I wasn’t in Berlin November 9. I didn’t get there until February 16, 1990, a few days before the wall near the Brandenburg Gate was knocked down.

I flew in from Dusseldorf from where I had been attending EuroShop, a once every three year trade exposition devoted to store design and construction. I headed to a Woolworth store (btw, Germans for years thought Woolworth was a home grown company, not an America import), to buy a small chisel and standard-sized hammer. When I arrived at the Wall that rainy and snowy day, I discovered how pitiful my purchases were to the task at hand. I barely made a dent in the reinforced concrete.

Standing next to me was a man with a huge sledgehammer and 30-inch chisel. He was breaking off softball-size or larger chunks. He took pity on me and offered his tools. I still failed to break off pieces larger than a pebble. He pitied me once more. He gave the Wall a few choice whacks for me. I left Berlin with a bagful of souvenirs, most of which I gave away to family, friends and colleagues at work.

My memories of the Berlin Wall are tinged with personal links. November 9 is more than just the date unification of Berlin began. On that date in 1938 the Nazis began a massive pogrom against Jews under their control in Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig. Known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the assaults continued into Danzig on November 12-13. My father lived in Danzig (now known as Gdansk). He would leave for America within two months. 

February 16, when I visited Berlin in 1990, marked four years since my mother died on that very same date.

Father's Day Edition: Army Eggs and French Toast

Father’s day. Contemporary wisdom suggests a day of leisure for the male head of the family, interrupted by his donning an apron and cooking mitts as he tends to the barbecuing of hot dogs, hamburgers and possibly steaks on a gas or charcoal briquette grill. 

Perhaps my father knew how to cook.  If he did, Kopel Forseter successfully camouflaged that ability. For sure he knew nothing of outdoor barbecuing. Once, when my siblings and I were already adults with children of our own, we complained to our mother that we never barbecued in our back yard. She vehemently defended their parenting, asserting we in fact did have cookouts—she would prepare sandwiches which we would eat in the back yard!

Gilda and I have a longstanding division of kitchen labor. She cooks. We both eat. I clean. 

I cannot recall my father doing any KP chores (for those unfamiliar with military terms, KP stands for kitchen patrol), except the occasional repair of the dishwasher, a task that required him to lie on the floor to get to the motor. Those repair sessions were the only times I recall seeing him wear jeans. 

To be fair, my dad did make the occasional Sunday breakfast, either French toast from leftover challah or what he called “army eggs,” an omelet with round slices of fried salami. He also skillfully handled a paring knife, cutting the skin off apples or pears. By contrast, our son and son-in-law are enthusiastic cooks. Often they consult with Gilda on specific recipes. 

Mostly, my father’s presence in the kitchen was his influence on what was served on the dinette table. Every dinner began with either a slice of cantaloupe or honeydew. Or half a grapefruit. If we had grapefruit on Friday night he would pour some of his Manischewitz kiddush wine onto the citrus to sweeten its taste. 

Every meal had to be accompanied by bread, preferably a seeded rye. He believed everything tasted better with bread. 

He did not care for vegetables. An otherwise good cook, my mother boiled the life out of any vegetable, so it was prudent he didn’t require anything but a potato with his meat, chicken or fish. 

He would drink one beer with dinner, usually leaving the dregs at the bottom of the bottle for any of his three children who wanted a taste of his Schlitz. 

He always finished dinner with dessert, some canned Del Monte fruit cocktail or Bartlett pears or peaches. He was never overweight but by meal’s-end his belt would be loosened and his waist button opened. 

After dinner he would take a nap. It was not the healthiest thing to do, but he never seemed to suffer from it. Nor was he affected by the coffee and cake he would enjoy when he awoke an hour later. Sometimes, he would treat himself to some My-T-Fine chocolate pudding or Jello or ice cream. With a dab of Reddi Whip whipped cream.

My brother, sister and I had household chores which led to my being comfortable doing dishes, laundry and vacuuming, though I will admit I prefer to do those tasks on my schedule, not Gilda’s. I would credit a dishwasher in our second apartment with saving our marriage.  

Though he grew up in a shtetl in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Ukraine (Austria-Hungary before World War I, Poland after it), my father had a courtly presence. He had a confident stride and always encouraged his children to walk as he did, with shoulders back and head held high. Perhaps it was his way of keeping us from developing a hunchback, a common condition among many Eastern European Jews, especially among Hasidim who suffer from scoliosis. 

At 16, he realized life in Ottynia was too limiting. How courageous it must have been to travel more than 645 miles to Danzig (modern day Gdansk) where he became a traveling salesman. Eleven years later, in January 1939, with Danzig increasingly influenced by Nazi Germany, he embarked on an even greater separation from family and country. He sailed to America.

Father's Birth Year Is a Mystery

Had several interesting conversations with my sister Lee and brother Bernie Friday on the occasion of our father’s birthday. I’d tell you how old he would have been but that was what we were trying to agree on.

Family lore has it that Kopel Fuersetzer (through several iterations Fuersetzer evolved into Forseter) was born in Ottynia on January 5, 1911. Or was it 1912? My recollection is the date disparity centered on Austria-Hungary’s military draft rules. Ottynia, a small shtetl in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Galicia, was part of Austria prior to the Great War, World War I. 

Young men could be drafted when they turned 18 so there was reason behind the fluidity of actual birthdates in the Hapsburg Empire. At least that’s the story I grew up with. And my brother did as well. (After the war Ottynia became part of Poland. After World War II Ukraine absorbed Ottynia within its borders.)

Lee, on the other hand, remembers Dad telling her he was 35 when she was born in 1947. That would put his birth year as 1912. That’s what we had engraved on his tombstone.

But ... several official papers I reviewed Friday—his Polish good citizenship document, his U.S. military enlistment record and his death certificate—all list his birth year as 1911!

Out the window went the theory of military draft evasion. Enter the realm of supposition. 

Bernie posited he claimed being a year older because he needed that earlier date to obtain government permission, perhaps a peddler’s license, after he moved to Danzig when he was 16 or slightly older. As official records from a small shtetl would be rare to come by, it would have been easy to prop up his age in Danzig (present day Gdansk).

Sounds plausible. With Polish document in hand he would be forever recorded as having been born in 1911, though in his mind he was a year younger.

Mom and Dad always said he was six years older than she. Sylvia Gerson was born November 11, 1917, in Lodz, Poland. But was their age difference a rounded up six years from five years, 10 months, from a 1912 birth year, or a rounded down six years from 1911?

My siblings and I will never know.

Chaos-Creator-in-Chief Inflames Passions over Immigration, Leaks, and, Naturally, Chaos

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Celebrating a Father's Birthday With Memories

Today is my father’s 106th birthday. Or maybe his 105th. My brother, sister and I were never sure. He died 18 years ago.

His death certificate records his birthday as January 5, 1911. Dad usually said he was a year younger, one annum subtracted as was the custom for boys in Ottynia, a shtetl in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so he would not be drafted into the army when he turned 18. Back then recruits remained in the military for some two decades, making avoiding the draft by any means no small accomplishment. On his tombstone we inscribed his birth year as 1912.

Of course, by the time our father, Kopel Fuersetzer, turned 18 the empire had been long dissolved after its defeat in what we now call World War I. Ottynia became part of southeastern Poland (today it is part of Ukraine). When he was 16 Kopel ventured far away from Ottynia to the northwest “Free City of Danzig,” now called Gdansk, on the edge of the Baltic Sea. There he lived the life of a traveling salesman until he left Europe for good, arriving in New York in January 1939.

He married our mother three years later. Working together in their lingerie factory in lower Manhattan while living in Brooklyn they raised three children, of which I am the youngest. By any standard they were successful.

He was not a perfect man or father. He was no Alan Thicke of Growing Pains, no Robert Young of Father Knows Best. Nor was he a Carroll O’Connor/Archie Bunker of All in the Family. He was human, which means he made mistakes. He screamed. He got angry. He was, like my brother’s nickname for him, the “Boss,” at work and at home.

But I learned from him the value of tzedakah, charity. Of communal responsibility and service. Of treating workers fairly and with dignity. Of being a good story teller. 

He liked to tell of the time in the 1950s when he accompanied one of his salesmen to the headquarters of C. R. Anthony, a junior department store chain based in Oklahoma City. They met with Mr. Anthony himself. By the end of the visit Mr. Anthony playfully admonished the salesman that if he wanted any repeat business he would have to bring along the storyteller again to close the deal. I think that pleased our father almost, if not more, than getting the order.

As much as some people romanticize life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, Ottynia, near the Carpathian Mountains on the train line between Kolomaya and Stanislav, was not a place our father longed to be in. His ambitions, his drive, his quest for independence led him to seek a more fulfilling way of life, first in Danzig, then in New York. 

From Danzig he would return now and then to his parents’ home—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the oversized fender of a large car in Ottynia. Yet, neither he nor his brother Willy, sole immediate family survivor of the Holocaust, talked much about Ottynia, or Danzig, where Willy lived as well for a short time. They preferred to look forward, not backward. 

Much of what I know about Ottynia comes from a video tape of the two my brother and I conducted some 25 years ago and from writings from some of his landtsmen, fellow immigrants and their descendants from Ottynia. We always were skeptical of our father’s claim to have walked miles to school and back. But our cousin, Norman Latner, in a monograph on life in Ottynia some years back, confirmed that children had to walk several miles to get to school. Instruction lasted through sixth grade. 

Norman also provided an explanation why Dad said they’d have to walk through deep snow. Ottynia, he noted, is “located at 49 degree latitude, which puts it about as far north as Winnipeg, Canada. Winters were quite cold and the summer were hot.”

Our father was active in the Young Men’s Benevolent Association of Ottynia, becoming president of the “society” for many years. He also became president of our synagogue in Brooklyn. When New York University moved to evict small apparel manufacturers from their leased lofts along Broadway, my father led an ultimately unsuccessful city hall protest.

Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, to me, the Ottynia society often meant keeping track of phone calls. My father never liked to see anyone on the phone in our house. But he had no qualms using it to talk to his society brethren.

To my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me, Ottynia meant a tight knit group of couples that formed a monthly floating poker game, men in one room, women in another. The stakes were nickel, dime, quarter. I don’t know many Yiddish words, I am not even sure it is Yiddish—it could be Polish or Ukrainian—but one of the first foreign words I learned was from Harry Brooks. Whenever he’d need a special card to fill, say, an inside straight, before he was dealt a card, he’d call out, “Chei-cha.” I think it means, give me good luck.

During these card games I learned how to mix highballs for the players. When I was around 10, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously. The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. 

To Bernie, Lee and me it also meant an impossible to follow melody when reading the Passover Haggadah as Willy and Dad droned on and on. 

For all its simple, peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that have served them well.  

“Today in Ukraine,” my cousin ended his monograph, “there is still a town called Ottynia, but it is not the Ottynia of the Kletters (or Forseters). All traces of a Jewish presence are gone. There are no shuls, no cheder (Hebrew school), no Hebrew texts and no chulent warming on the stove … All that remains of the Ottynia of the past, a place of hardship and a place of joy, lives on in the hearts and the memory of the few survivors, and in us, and our children if we too try to preserve these memories of the past.”

From Ottynia to Perth

I had fully intended to finish up my tax returns today but two early morning emails derailed that plan. By “early morning” I mean shortly after midnight, not that I was awake to read them when they descended from the cloud into my mailbox.

I got up at a reasonable hour this morning, slightly before 8. That is, my eyes opened for good, though I did not get out of bed for good for nearly another two hours. I blame email. As most of you probably do, I check email first thing in the A.M. Never know when Linda the Realtor might have an ASAP project for me to complete (which she did just past noon which deferred my writing this post until evening). 

In quick succession I read two emails that opened up links with my past. The first was from Lisa, a Denver resident searching for family roots in Ottynia, the hometown village of my father in what is now western Ukraine. She had found me several days earlier after googling Ottynia. My blog came up at the top of her Google search. As she wrote, “Now that’s optimization.”

After reading and responding to her second email this morning, we communicated the old fashioned way, by phone for half an hour. Just prior to that call I answered the other email that jolted me this morning, from a distant cousin in Minneapolis who I had last seen about 20 to 25 years ago when I was making annual visits to the Twin Cities. A year ago I wrote about his father’s surreptitious entry into the United States in the early 1920s and his subsequent flight to Minnesota to evade being picked up as an illegal alien. Like Lisa, David had read about Ottynia in my blog.

So I began reading old posts about Ottynia, thrust forward also by reports of wreckage from Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 possibly being spotted some 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia. There in one of the blogs from October 2009 was a promise to relate a story about my father and mother’s visit to Perth.

One of the hallmarks of my parents’ 53-year marriage was their open expression. In other words, they argued, sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest. My father never let my mother forget that his first love was Dora, a woman he met in Danzig prior to World War II. Though he asked her to come with him to America in 1939, as an only child she chose to go with her parents to Australia. Sadly, within six months of arriving Down Under, her parents died. She tried to reconnect with my father, but could not. 

My father married my mother in 1942. Whenever my father would tease her about his first love, she would respond she was ready to buy him a one-way ticket to Australia. 

My father had many friends who left Poland in 1939. They were spread around the world. They agreed to meet in Israel in 1989, but one of them, a doctor in Sydney, Australia, had cataract surgery and could not travel. So my parents decided to visit him. As could be expected, before the trip they argued about something, my father mentioned Dora and my mother decided to call his bluff. Why don’t you put an ad in the Australian version of The Jewish Week and see if she responds, she suggested.

He had his doctor friend place an ad, asking anyone who knows a Dora who came to Australia in 1939 to contact him. A few days later, a friend sitting in Dora’s kitchen in Perth saw the ad. When Dora’s letter reached our home, it was hard to say who was more startled. Dora had married, had two sons, but was widowed in 1955. Hardly a day goes by, she wrote, that she did not think of my father.

Suddenly, a “simple” trip to Sydney was transformed into a romantic adventure. Her bluff called, my mother had no choice but to accompany her husband on his transcontinental trip back down lover’s lane in Perth. Indeed, whenever Dora was alone with him, she wrapped her arms around my father and said she would be there for him if he ever were single again. 

Ah, but my dad’s innate conservative morals thwarted any thoughts of seduction. Dora had told him she had boyfriends after her husband’s death. His ardor cooled, he returned to America never again threatening to run off to Australia. 

Present and Past Stories of Tragedy and War

The present has a way of intruding into my past. 

The Associated Press ran a story Monday about the discovery in the Everglades of a piece of jewelry thought to be from a passenger on one of two planes that crashed in the swampy muck. The crashes occurred 17 and 40 years ago. All 109 people aboard ValuJet Flight 592 perished in the 1996 crash; 99 of 176 aboard Eastern Airlines Flight 401 died (http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=ueMPa6OF).

I’m not sure what attracted me to read the article as the headline gave no clue to the tragedies. The headline: “Man hunting for pythons finds mysterious jewelry.” But as I read the story it struck a chord. My first year as a reporter for The New Haven Register, in Seymour, Conn., I interviewed a man who survived Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from New York to Miami when it went down in the Everglades December 29, 1972. I didn’t remember his name but I did recall he was a big man, that his legs were broken and deeply lacerated, the latter injury causing lingering pain for months as the guck from the Everglades infected his body. 

This being the age of the Internet, I trolled the Web deep into the night looking for a report on the crash. Here’s what I found, an excerpt from Crash by Rob and Sarah Elder:

“Quietly, during the flight, Edward Ulrich proposed to Sandra Burt; she accepted. He was forty-four, fair haired and balding, a big man who used to play college football. She was thirty-two and as slight as he was large. They both lived in Seymour, Connecticut, where he was a salesman for a copper company and she was a secretary in a bank. ‘I thought you'd like to see this,’ he said reaching into his pocket and producing a diamond ring. She looked at the ring, smiled and said ‘Thank you.’ They laughed and drank a champagne cocktail. It was ironic that the flight had more than five dozen empty seats, for when they booked, they were told the only seats available were in first class. Burt bought the tickets anyway. He and Sandra boarded the plane early and sat near the front in seats 4A and 4B. Directly ahead of them were a row of seats and the first class lounge, where there were several additional empty seats and a buffet of cheese and crackers. To their right were more empty seats. And behind them, an airplane carrying 176 people. Yet, Ed and Sandra were very much alone.”

I interviewed Ulrich several weeks after the crash in his home in Seymour. I can’t tell you if he and Sandra married, though I believe they did. Several months later I was transferred to another beat. I haven’t thought about that crash or my interview with Ulrich for decades, even though one of the retail industry leaders I covered, the head of Target, Robert Ulrich, shared the same last name. Why I chose to read the story about a python hunt is beyond my ken. Just another example of my life intersecting with events beyond my sphere of daily influence.

On the other hand, I do know why I was attracted to the following article about Jewish veterans of the Red Army in World War II (http://nyti.ms/18zNEUY). 

My Uncle Willy’s wartime experience had all the suspense and plot twists of a Hollywood movie. Unlike my father who moved from Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia, the southeastern part of Poland, to Danzig, and from there to New York, in January 1939, his brother Willy returned from Danzig to their small town where he married and had a son. At the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union took control of the area as part of the Polish Partition agreement it secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany. 

In June 1941 Germany invaded Russian territory, quickly occupying the Galicia region. Mass executions of Jews began. Willy survived the first mass killings because he happened to be away from the village that day. He would sneak back into town to see his mother until it was no longer possible to do so before she too was murdered with the rest of the known Jewish residents in October. For the next two years he hid out in barns and fields as German soldiers and their Ukrainian sympathizers searched for the few who had managed to escape. His existence depended on an ability to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and to find Polish peasants willing to risk their lives to shield Jews. Moving from one hiding place to another. Staying stone silent inside a hidden chamber of a potato bin as a soldier banged his rifle butt on the side listening for a hollow sound. Jumping into an open cesspool when German troops came to the barn he was hiding in. Finally, joining up with partisans to fight, eventually being liberated by the advancing Russian army which conscripted him and sent him to Siberia for basic training where he ate grass to survive for lack of food. 

When it was time to go to the front Willy was saved by a peculiar Russian military custom. When his unit was ready to be sent to the Western Front to fight the Germans, they mustered at the base. The commandant asked if any soldier had reason not to be sent to the battle lines. Willy and several other Jewish soldiers stepped forward. They told the officer they did not fear the Germans. What they feared was getting shot in the back by their fellow soldiers, many of whom were anti-Semitic Ukraines. The commandant kept them in Siberia. Willy always suspected he was sympathetic because secretly he might have been Jewish.

Could be. Some 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army during the war. Here’s a link from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that details the participation of Jews in the armed forces of the Allies who fought Nazi Germany: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/07/jewish_soldiers.asp.

Whose History Is This, Anyway?

One of the reasons I write this blog is to provide a written record of my family’s history for my children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Of course, these are my memories. It’s been said, history is written by the victors. In today’s world, history, at least family history, is written by the blogger.

But that doesn’t mean my family always agrees with my recall. My sister Lee insists our father disdained tomatoes for many years until he was offered one by a kindly customer on his stationery sales route outside Danzig, Poland. He had resisted tomatoes, she said, because that’s what he ate almost daily in his small hometown of Ottynia. 

Rubbish, say my brother Bernie and I. How credible would it have been to have caches of tomatoes to eat in the dead of winter in a shtetl in Galicia where indoor plumbing was scarce and paved roads were an anomaly? We think she confused tomatoes with potatoes, a staple of the peasants and townfolk who lived through brutal winters and hot summers. 

Lee also maintains our father liked ham during his years in Danzig. News to Bernie and me. In the 50 years I knew him, Dad never ate any meat or fish that was not from a kosher animal (though it might not have been slaughtered according to Jewish custom). Never did I hear him ever talk about eating ham. Bernie agrees.

Bernie believes our Hebrew elementary school Lag Ba’Omer trips were to a park on Staten Island. He forgets the Verrazano Bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island opened in 1964, six years after he graduated Yeshiva Rambam, four years after Lee did and two years after I. There’s no way the school bus trip of several hundred students and parents took the ferry across the Narrows. No, we went to Cunningham Park in Queens.

Lee is of the opinion we all attended Rambam because Bernie was encouraged to do so by a teacher he had at the Talmud Torah affiliated with our parents’ synagogue. That teacher, she says, also taught at Rambam. Bernie agrees he was influenced by the teacher but he was not affiliated with Rambam. Eight-year-old Bernie wanted to attend the yeshiva but his Hebrew skills were not up to snuff. Indeed, the school’s Hebrew principal, Isadore Lefkowitz, tried to talk him out of it, telling him he’d have to give up most of his summer vacation in exchange for intensive tutoring. Bernie enthusiastically agreed. I just heard this story a week or so ago. I am still stunned by his response.

I’ve written several times about Mel Brooks’ penchant for making fun of my given name during his 2,000-year-old-man routines with Carl Reiner. Turns out, my brother was singled out, as well. Here’s dialogue from a 1966 appearance on The Andy Williams Show:

Reiner: Of all the discoveries of all time, what was the greatest—the wheel, the lever, fire?

Brooks: Fire. Far and away, fire. It was the hottest thing going. You can’t beat fire. It used to warm us, it used to light up our caves so you wouldn’t walk into the wall, so we wouldn’t marry our brother Bernie.

Yeah. For once he didn’t say “marry our brother, Murray.” Brooks actually had a brother Bernie, as well as a brother Irving and Lenny. Why he couldn’t stick with those names instead of introducing Murray into many of his routines is a burden I’ll have to bear all my life. 

Speaking of exercise, it’s one of Gilda’s and my recurring disagreements, my lack of interest in physical activity other than team sports. Now, a new study suggests I can blame my parents. Here’s how The NY Times positioned the findings: “A study on rats suggests that portions of the brain that control reward behavior may play a role in the decision to work out or to remain on the couch. If you give a rat a running wheel and it decides not to use it, are genes to blame? And if so, what does that tell us about why many people skip exercise?” (http://nyti.ms/XFqSVO)

Gilda and I recently visited my sister in Los Angeles. A problem with visiting relatives is it feeds my hypochondria. Lee wears a night guard because she grinds her teeth. So do I, meaning, I grind my teeth and wear a night guard, as well. Over dinner one night I found out one of our cousins on our mother’s side suffers from gout, as does one of Lee’s children. When I said my toes sometimes hurt, Gilda chided me for thinking I, too, had gout. 

One of Gilda’s missions in life is to cure my hypochondria, or at least puncture some of my more outrageous self-diagnoses. She also is there to expose my indiscretions and correct my mistakes. She’s pretty good at those last two, still has lots of work to do on the first. 

I guess that’s enough Forseter family history for one day. I’ll close with a short comment from the opening of a eulogy our friend Barbara delivered last week for her father who died at the age of 87. The last few years of his life he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. 

Barbara related how at the recent graduation of her daughter Alexandra from Brandeis University, one of the speakers from the Sociology department asked how well the students knew their parents’ life stories. Her father, Barbara said, rarely talked about his early life. My parents, as well, left many of their early years blank in my mind. Through this blog I hope to leave the next generation a more complete picture of our history, even if it is filtered through my imperfect memory. 

Memories From the Mail

Oliver Munday had no way of knowing, no way of knowing his illustration accompanying a NY Times Op-Ed piece Tuesday on the meaning behind Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would evoke memories of the Nazi extermination of my father’s family in the shtetl of Ottynia, a small town in what is now the Ukraine, but back during World War II was part of occupied Poland.

Munday’s illustration portrays air mail delivery of a letter. It depicts a bird with outstretched wings, wings made to look like jail cell doors, a letter carried in its bill (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/opinion/dr-kings-righteous-fury.html?ref=opinion&_r=0). Among the treasures my father left are four postcards from his family that trace Ottynia’s fate during the war. The first three bear stamps from CCCP, the Soviet Union. The intertwined sickle and hammer symbol of the proletariat  is at the top left corner of each postcard. At the start of the war, Ottynia fell into Stalin’s hands as part of his Polish partition pact with Hitler. 

Soviet stamps and symbol are on the fourth and final postcard. Though the black ink is fading, the postmark is from September 21, 1941. In red ink, just below the middle of the front of the postcard, is the imprint of another official insignia, a bird with outstretched wings, a swastika inside a circle in its talons. Fourteen days later, perhaps even before the postcard arrived at my father’s residence at 148 Van Sicklen Street in Brooklyn, the Nazis killed most of the Jews who lived in Ottynia, trucking them to a mass grave before shooting them. Only his brother, Willy, survived from his immediate family. Their parents, their sisters and brother, and Willy’s first wife and son were killed. The Jewish presence in Ottynia, initially recorded in 1635 but perhaps from many years earlier, ended after more than three centuries.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16 to live and work in Danzig (now Gdansk). He emigrated to the United States in January 1939. As many from his village who came before (and after) him did, he joined the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association, eventually becoming its president for many years. Two Sundays ago, the association held its 113th annual gathering. About 30 of us met in Mendy’s delicatessen in Manhattan for a luncheon, less than one-twentieth the number that assembled in the Hotel Commodore in 1950 for the jubilee celebration of the society. 

My father and Uncle Willy (who came to the States after the war) rarely talked about Ottynia. Indeed, nostalgia for Ottynia was not an emotion I would associate with any of the men and women I knew growing up who came from the town. That’s not to say they didn’t have memories of life there. It’s just that, like my father, they preferred to look forward, not backward. They lived in the company of their surviving friends, not the ghosts of the departed.

In Ottynia, my father said he ate potatoes every day. He became so fed up with eating spuds that upon arriving in Danzig he vowed never to eat a potato again. He kept that promise to himself for about a decade until one day a waitress coaxed him into trying some potatoes with his meal. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. He was a meat and potatoes man for the rest of his life. He rarely ate any other vegetable. Just potatoes. Hardly anything green ever graced our dinette table in Brooklyn. 

Though he would return now and then to Ottynia—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the fender of a large car in Ottynia—he'd always go back to the city life of Danzig. 

In my father’s house in the 1950s and early 1960s, the telephone was a necessary evil not to be used for prolonged conversation unless it was being used to communicate with his society brethren.

Ottynia had a very personal meaning to my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me. It meant a tight knit group of eight couples that formed monthly floating poker games, men in one room, women in another. Nickel, dime, quarter stakes. I learned how to mix highballs for them. When I was around ten, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously.  The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. For all its simple peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that served them well throughout the four corners of the earth. What my father learned in cheder (Hebrew school) and in the public school he attended through sixth grade in Ottynia laid the foundation for a successful business and personal life that has extended into his children and grandchildren and hopefully will continue for generations.

  

Flying High on Potatoes, God's Will and The View

Just back from a quick weekend trip to Tucson for the wedding of our nephew Gabe to Laura. Was colder in Arizona than back home in New York, but the real eye-opener of the trip was reaffirmation of my antipathy toward flying. I am soooo glad I no longer have to fly several times a month. Especially when our connecting flight from Houston to LaGuardia was delayed, the heaviness of sitting around the airport, eating airport food, was overwhelming. 

Eat Your Veggies: Last week WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show aired an interview on the origin of potatoes as a staple of Western cuisine. Originally from the Andes in South America, most of the spuds we eat today are cloned varieties of Chilean potatoes. Central to the diet of South American natives, the potato was introduced to Europe in 1530 by the Spanish. 

In the small southeastern Polish town of Ottynia where my father was born, potatoes dominated mealtime, so much so that by the time he left the village at 16 and made his way to the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea, he vowed never to eat another potato. He managed to maintain that self-imposed prohibition for some 10 years until sitting in a restaurant one day a waitress prevailed upon him to try a potato with his meat. 

The rest, as they say, is history. From that time forward rare was the day a potato did not take up space on his dinner plate. Boiled potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Baked potatoes. French fried potatoes at the delicatessen. Potato latkes. The man loved potatoes. His palate hardly ever entertained a vegetable. Nothing green made it onto our dinner table. On the rare occasion my mother tried to introduce a vegetable, say asparagus or Brussell sprouts, she failed miserably. Ordinarily a good cook, she grossly overcooked vegetables until all their nutrients and taste were eliminated. Her asparagus resembled a limp question mark with no hint it was once a spear. Naturally, I grew up disdaining vegetables.

As an early member of Trans World Airlines’ frequent flyer program some 30 years ago, I often upgraded to first class (back then you could do so without having to redeem miles; you qualified for an upgrade simply by flashing your frequent flyer card). During one first class romp to California, I accepted the stewardess’ invitation for cold asparagus under Hollandaise sauce. My taste buds exploded. To Gilda’s everlasting joy, I came home eager to eat vegetables. To my everlasting joy, Gilda knows how to prepare them properly and tastefully.

God’s Will: Last posting I opined that by sending Superstorm Sandy a week before the election God must have been on Obama’s side since it stymied Romney’s momentum in the crucial last week of the campaign. I failed to remember God previously intervened to thwart Romney’s initial push by hurling Hurricane Isaac at Tampa just before the city hosted the Republican National Convention. Coupled with losses by Republican candidates who believe rape is God’s will, I’d say there’s significant evidence God is definitely not a registered Republican.

For a moment, it looked like God would be neutral. A storm did, after all, prompt the Democratic Party Convention to shift Obama’s acceptance speech from an outdoor stadium to an indoor arena. But the threatened downpour never happened and Obama’s rhetoric, not as lofty as four years ago, probably played better inside than it would have outside.

Barbara Bests Bibi: Most of the pundits have analyzed the election far beyond my meager efforts, but it’s worth noting Obama was criticized in October when the United Nations General Assembly met for making a guest appearance on The View instead of meeting with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu. In light of the overwhelming support women provided his re-election effort, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge sharing yucks with Barbara Walters and her crew was more beneficial than making nice to the head of a foreign state who clearly favored his opponent and, like so many caught up in distaste for the current occupant of the White House, came out on the wrong side of history. 

Orchard Street Connection

Was down on Orchard Street in Manhattan last evening observing Ellie getting fitted at Adriennes for her wedding gown for next month’s nuptials.

To those not familiar with Orchard Street, a little history. Located in the heart of the Lower East Side populated by waves of immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, the narrow-laned Orchard Street has always been a mecca for savvy shoppers and sharp retailers. Above the shops, immigrants lived in squalid, cramped quarters of walk-up apartments. Today hip, young people share the confines with newer immigrants. The neighborhood is gentrifying with trendy stores and restaurants.

As a child I would tag along with my father and my mother as they plied the small, merchandise-stuffed storefronts looking for bargains in apparel, textiles and electronics, all the way kibitzing with the merchants along the busy street.

Orchard Street has a long history with our family. After my father came to New York from Danzig, Poland, in 1939, he worked for his cousin Morris in a shirt store on Orchard Street. It was there one day, when he was several steps up on a ladder, that he met my mother for the first time. It was sort of a prearranged meeting, but my mother’s hair was not very cooperative that day. As family lore tells it, her hair was downright scary, so much so that when dad gazed upon her for the first time, he fell off the ladder. Nevertheless, they agreed to go out on a date that Friday night, to see an operetta, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus. 

When he arrived at her parents’ door Friday evening he was met by an attractive young woman whom he assumed was one of her three sisters. He was only slightly embarrassed but quite relieved and happy to discover his date stood before him. They married six weeks later.

Ever the businessman my father opened his own shirt shop on Orchard Street after returning from military service in World War II. His store was at 99 Orchard Street, in the shadow of what today is the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street. Indeed, a year or so ago the museum contacted me for information on his store as part of its research on an exhibit of businesses of the Lower East Side. I never knew of that store as I wasn't yet born when he ran it, but an older cousin who worked there provided details. As Herb explained to me, it was common back in the 1940s for my father to give a helping hand to relatives and friends who needed a first job. 

As a child, I was aware of and intrigued by my father’s familiarity with the merchants along Orchard Street. I now understand from where his knowledge derived. It seemed only fitting then that his granddaughter came full circle back to Orchard Street to choose her dress for her wedding which will take place 11 days shy of what would have been my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary.

Marking a Birthday

The yahrzeit memorial candle commemorating the 13th Jewish calendar anniversary of my father’s death burned longer than 24 hours. It flickered Wednesday night, the eve, by coincidence, of my father’s secular calendar birthday, January 5. He would have been 101 today. Or maybe 100. My brother, sister and I simply don’t know.

Several Polish documents—a “morality testimony” and a “certificate of belonging”— list his birthday in 1911. But he often said records were not very exact in Ottynia, the little town, a shtetl, in Galicia where he was born. He would say he was born in 1912. So that’s what we put on his tombstone.

Now part of Ukraine, Ottynia passed through many hands over the centuries. When my dad was born, Ottynia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I it reverted to Poland. During World War II, Ottynia fell under Soviet Union control as part of the partition of Poland pact Stalin forged with Hitler. Nazi Germany overwhelmed Ottynia after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. At the end of the war, Ottynia became a military-restricted area in Ukraine.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16, venturing first to the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea before coming to America via England in January 1939, months before the second world war broke out. All of his immediate family, except his younger brother, Willy, were killed. Though he would tell his children folklore stories, really parables, about life in the Old Country while we were growing up in Brooklyn, he rarely talked about conditions in Ottynia or Danzig.

Perhaps they were too painful to relate. Trying to raise funds to bring other members of his family here, he was powerless to relieve the pressure on their lives. Among his possessions when he died were three postcards from his parents we’d never previously seen. In painstakingly small Yiddish handwriting, they convey the sorrow of parents who haven’t seen their eldest child in two years, the agony of life in a weakened state. The first two were postmarked by Russian authorities. Stamped on the front of the third and final postcard, just under his name, is a symbol of the Nazi flying eagle holding a swastika.

Days to Remember

In a rare convergence of the Gregorian and Jewish calendars, today marks the 29th birthday of our daughter Ellie and the 12th anniversary of my father’s passing. I don’t expect to be around the next time December 16 coincides with the 9th of Tevet. That will be in 2056, when I would be 107 years old.

After dropping Gilda off at the train station, I went to our temple for the morning service (how interesting that when spoken it could easily be misconstrued to be the “mourning” service). This being a Thursday, a brief segment of Saturday’s upcoming Torah portion was read. It described the pending death of the patriarch Yakov (Jacob) in the land of Egypt where he had traveled from Canaan because of famine. My father’s Hebrew name was Yakov, as well. He, too, left his native land, Poland in his case, because of adversity, Nazi oppression.

Like the biblical Yakov, my father twice moved from his original home and country to prosper in new surroundings. Yakov fled Canaan after deceiving his father Isaac into blessing him. He went to his uncle Laban’s home where he worked and reared a family before life there became unbearable. He returned to Canaan and eventually emigrated to Egypt. My father left Ottynia, a small town in Galicia, now part of Ukraine, when he was 16 to become a businessman in the Free City of Danzig (now called Gdansk) before emigrating in 1939, roughly half a year before Hitler invaded Poland.

The Torah reading begins by stating, “The days of Yakov, the years of his life, were a hundred forty and seven years.” But the Hebrew phrase “the years of his life” (“shenai chayav”) can be read to have another meaning, much the way “the morning/mourning service” could be heard in different contexts. The second interpretation of the sentence could be, “the days of Yakov, his two lives, were a hundred forty and seven years.”

It could be said Yakov lived two lives, one in Canaan, one in other lands; one before his beloved wife Rachel died and her first son Joseph is seemingly lost to him, one after he is reunited with Joseph; one before the famine, one life after, in Egypt.

My father lived two lives, one in Poland, one in the United States; one before his family was killed in the Holocaust, one after he was reunited with the only member of his immediate family to survive, his brother, Willy; one in business and another in social action for charitable and civic associations; one in full embrace of family and life’s graces and benefits, the other mired in the darkness of dementia that dimmed the last few of his near 88 years.

Like so many of his contemporaries, my father did not dwell on the past. He rarely spoke about conditions in Ottynia and Danzig. He focused on the present and future.

I had intended to write more about my father and his granddaughter, Ellie, but in the middle of this exercise stopped to read an email from a friend serendipitously about this week’s Torah reading. It contained the following message from a rabbinic commentary:

“What is the connection between grandchildren and peace? Surely this, that those who think about grandchildren care about the future, and those who think about the future make peace. It is those who constantly think of the past, of slights and humiliations and revenge, (who) make war.”

My father started off as a great grandfather. But age, infirmity and distance stripped him of his inclination and ability to interact meaningfully with his seven grandchildren. For now, Gilda and I have one grandchild. Finley will be visiting this weekend with his parents. Ellie will join us. It will be a most wonderful, cherished time.