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.

Yiddish "Fiddler": A Reality Check on Survival

One of the eternal laugh lines of any staging of Fiddler on the Roof, including the production in Yiddish currently playing at the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene inside the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, comes in the opening song, “Tradition.” 

As Tevya the milkman introduces the audience to the varied characters that populate his shtetl hometown of Anatevke, a pious resident asks the rabbi if there is a proper blessing for the Tsar. 

Of course, responds the rabbi. He chants, “May God keep the Tsar … far away from us!” 

Like Jesse Green of The New York Times who reviewed the play (https://nyti.ms/2JtZnJW), Gilda and I shed more than a tear or two as we sat through a preview last Thursday. We know but a handful of Yiddish words, but as veterans of prior Fiddler productions (including, for me, the original Broadway cast starring Zero Mostel), the story line and songs required little translation, though the theater provided both English and Russian supertitles on both sides of the stage. 

Through the decades since its debut in 1964 Fiddler has conjured up a fantasy world of the hardscrabble peasant life—make no mistake about it, most Jews were peasants in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, the restricted zone to which Jews were confined by the tsars. Nevertheless, they no doubt loved Mother Russia and were truly saddened when uprooted from their homes. Even those who came to America shared fond memories with their descendants.

Jesse Green wrote the Yiddish version of Fiddler evoked the “sound of my own grandparents and all they lost in leaving their Anatevkes.

“Fiddler on the Roof always makes you cry for that loss.”

Yes, tears do flow, but a reality check is in order. Had they stayed in the Pale, Gilda likes to point out, they likely would have perished, if not during World War I, surely during the second world war. 

So, I’m going to give the tsar a pass. Not a blessing, and surely not the kiss of friendship, or is it fealty, proffered by Donald Trump to Russia’s current nominal tsar, Vladimir Putin. 

Jesse Green and millions of other Jews in America, Israel and numerous countries around the globe are alive today because the rabbi’s blessing to keep the tsar far away fell on deaf ears. Or, perhaps, God took the request literally and arranged the mass emigration of his chosen people to safer lands not ruled by a tsar. 

Far-fetched? Could be. But as The Times headline observed, “Fiddler in Yiddish? Sounds Crazy, Nu?”

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.

Facebook Posting Saddens Two Dates

I go on Facebook sporadically, mostly to inform when I’ve posted a new blog entry. On those occasions I scroll down to see if any friends or relatives have anything interesting to say or show. A cousin in France, Laura, writes in French, naturally;  sometimes Facebook offers translation services. One of those times was Thursday, and though I am intrigued by what she wrote, it no doubt will sadden me for years to come.

Laura has been on a mission of more than 20 years to research her family history. Her maternal grandparents and some of her extended family emigrated to France in the 1930s from Dora, a shtetl in the Galicia region of Poland, not too far from my father’s home town of Ottynia. They settled in Lens, in northern France. Before Nazi Germany’s invasion, Laura’s grandfather urged his relatives to move south. Only his immediate family went with him to Lyons. But they weren’t safe there, either. 

Warned they might be picked up in a roundup of Jews, Laura’s grandparents and their two daughters fled to the border with Switzerland. (The younger girl, Bonnie, is Laura’s mother.) Because Bonnie was a baby, the Swiss allowed the family to enter, but they were placed in three separate refugee camps, one for the father, one for seven-year-old Miriam, and the third for Bonnie and her mother. 

Miriam was able to see her mother from time to time during their three years of internment. An enduring memory was receiving food thrown by Swiss children over the camp fence. One of those children grew up to become her husband. Yes, it’s a story that sounds stranger than fiction, but it’s true, so real life, in fact, that like so many couples, Miriam and her husband couldn’t sustain their marriage. 

After the war ended the family re-united. They returned to Lyons. But their family in Lens were gone. Their fate was the subject of Laura’s Facebook post.

The Nazis rounded up the Jews from Lens on September 11th, 1942. It was Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Among them were Laura’s grandmother’s elder sister, Rosalie, and her daughter Betty. They were sent to Belgium, to a place called Kazerne Dossin (now a memorial, museum and documentation center on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Flanders) where they waited two days before being shipped out on Transport 10, arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 17. 

There is no archival record of how or when Rosalie died, but official papers show Betty was selected as a forced worker. She died of unknown circumstances on October 20, 1942. Portraits of Rosalie Fursetzer and her daughter Betty Mohr are part of the memorial and the Memorial Wall at the barracks of Kazerne Dossin.

According to Kazerne Dossin, “X Transport included 1,048 deportees, including 229 children less than 15 years … The youngest was Josef Jozefowicz, aged one month and a half.”  Only 17 survived the war. 

A remarkable but not that unique story, given the annals of Holocaust experiences. So why will I be sad? Because of two dates: September 11, already a date forever scarred, and October 20. October 20 has been one of the happiest days for our family. Dan was born that day in1978. Going forward, however, I will always also remember October 20 as the day my cousin Betty died during the Holocaust.

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.

Images of the Past

Every now and then Gilda and I engage in an intellectual discussion on the merits of ending our print subscription to the NY Times, retaining just the online version. We always wind up keeping both, not the least because of my devotion as an ex-newspaper reporter to the tactile experience of holding newsprint in my hands but also because of the serendipity of finding stories in print I most probably would not have engaged had I been surfing the Web site.

Last Sunday’s Style section provides a compelling, and for me, personal, example. I didn’t get a chance to read the section on Sunday. It lay untouched until Tuesday night as I prepared the weekly recycling pile. Before I chucked it, I checked the wedding announcements. You never can tell when you’ll see someone you know; one time I discovered the marriage of a young man who was a camper in my bunk when he was 12 years old and I was his counselor. All the other kids hated him. He must have done something right, however, to have won The Times’ wedding pic lottery. But I digress...

Back on page 19 of the 20-page section, The Times ran a story on “the lost art of the group portrait at events,” highlighted by a 10.5-by-5.5 inch photo of the guests at the recent wedding reception of Brenda Malloy and Hal Reiter (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/fashion/weddings/banquet-photos-put-everyone-in-the-picture-field-notes.html?scp=1&sq=hal%20reiter&st=cse).

Two things about that photo. First, I believe I know the aforementioned Hal Reiter. If he’s the guy I think he is, he’s the chairman and CEO of a major retail industry executive search firm, Herbert Mines Associates. (For those searching for the happy couple amid the group, Hal and Brenda are in the middle. He’s in shirtsleeves, she’s wearing an off the shoulder white dress.)

But more importantly, the group photo is similar to a picture that hangs on the wall of my den. It’s of the 50th Golden Jubilee dinner of the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association at the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan on December 24, 1950. There must have been at least 500 people in this group photo, with my parents easily visible sitting two tables to the left of the dais.

Ottynier (sometimes spelled Ottynia) is a small village, a shtetl, part of an area known as Galicia, controlled over the centuries by different countries. When my father was born there 100 years ago, Ottynier was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I it became part of Poland. The Soviet Union took over after Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland in 1939. Germany conquered the area in 1941. Today it is in the southwest corner of Ukraine.

In 1931, Jews totaled 1,116 of the town’s 4,059 residents. Historically, Jews comprised about 25% to 40% of the population. That is, until they were eliminated by the Nazis and their Ukrainian sympathizers.

Jews began emigrating to America from Ottynier in the 19th century. Like most of their cohorts from Eastern Europe, they formed fraternal organizations, societies to help acclimate newcomers to America and to send funds to those back in the Old Country. After my father came to the United States in January 1939, he became active in the FOYMBA, eventually serving many years as its president.

In keeping with one of the founding principles of the group, to have social and cultural events, much of my parents’ entertainment activities revolved around the society. Aside from the annual dinner dance and smaller, more casual affairs, my parents had a floating monthly poker game with seven couples of their closest friends. They played penny-nickel stakes, husbands in one room, wives in the other. When I was around 10 years old they’d let me play one or two hands for either parent, in between my chore of making highballs for all who asked.

I look at that group photo almost every day. Though they don’t appear so, most of those in the picture were younger than I am today. My father was approaching his 40th birthday, my mother a mere 33 years old. Today, there are fewer than 50 members of the society who meet once a year for a deli luncheon. Most of those who attend are distant cousins of mine. It’s hard to get younger generations involved. I’m as guilty of indifference as the rest.

A young cousin from France recently visited Ottynier. Laura’s trip might be included in a French documentary about families who trace their roots back to Poland. She wrote me:

“We met an old man name Greenberg who lives in the suburbs of Kolomya now; he's more than 90 years old. He is the last living Jew from Ottynier apparently. Born there, he was hiding when the mass murders took place.

“I showed him pictures and he recognized Wolf (my uncle Willy) immediately. When I said "Fursetzer" (the original version of our name), he remembered: ‘Yes, two sons went to the USA, one before the war, the other after’.

“We went to Ottynier and met with old people. They do recall the name Fursetzer. We did not find much more. We went to the Jewish cemetery, there are almost no tombstones left. Most of the Jews of Ottynier were shot and buried there, it's a mass grave.”