Late last year, I was flying from Los Angeles to San Jose — a trip I have made many times in the course of my professional career. Over the years, I have watched the San Jose airport transform itself from a one-building terminal to an international airport whose rental car facilities are larger than the entire airport I first visited many years ago.
On this particular trip, I was traveling not on business, but because – unbeknownst to me – a member of my family had been living just a few miles from the airport all that time. I had learned about him from Begats, a new genealogical service operated by the remarkable Anne Lieberman.
And thereby hangs a tale. I am telling it here not only because it may be interesting in itself, but because it may also hold some lessons, and perhaps some opportunities, for others as well. I am pretty sure it will.
* * *
My mother passed away many years ago, at age 44, from breast cancer, a month before my Bar Mitzvah. I never had the chance to speak to her about her family. I knew only that it was not very large. She was, like my father, an only child.
I had known her parents (my maternal grandparents) only slightly, since they lived in Philadelphia and passed away before I could have a serious conversation with them. My father had moved his own parents (my paternal grandparents) from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to live in a convalescent home in the 1950s; I saw them when he visited them and took me with him, but they died before I was ten.
I remember my paternal grandparents mostly through the few pictures I have – my grandfather a portly man with ill-fitting clothes, standing next to a rotund wife who looked like a female version of him. Neither in my memory nor in their pictures did they look like very impressive people.
All I knew about my grandparents were their names and where they had come from – Russia and Rumania in the case of my paternal grandparents, around the beginning of the 20th century; and from Eastern Europe in the case of the ancestors of my maternal grandparents, who were children born in America to Jews who had arrived in the latter part of the 19th century, and who thus were relatively well-established by the beginning of the 20th century.
* * *
Begats is a service that does genealogical searches, which (I now know) is an art, not a science, and hardly the clerical function I had considered it before becoming the beneficiary of the story that follows. The job requires an indefatigable researcher — someone willing to spend long hours sifting through clues and paper trails in old immigration records, census compilations, naturalization papers, draft registrations, phone books, and data bases of other organizations – someone with a “feel” for the lives of Jews who crossed continents and oceans to come to this country in the 19th and 20th centuries, often alone or impoverished, frequently without much family; someone who can see in dry documents the dots to be connected from names and dates and addresses, and who can follow them toward surprising results, and then keep going. Anne Lieberman is such a person.
I gave her the information I had about my paternal grandfather: his name (Abraham Richman), the country he came from (Russia), and the approximate year he immigrated to America (sometime around 1903-1906). That was all I had. About my maternal grandmother I had even less – just her name (Kate Richman) and her country of origin (Romania).
Anne was back to me within a couple weeks. What follows is what she found.
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Abraham Richman’s name when he came to this country was not Abraham Richman. It was Awrum Reichman. He arrived at Ellis Island on July 21, 1906, alone, at the age of 22, on a ship called the Etruria, traveling from Liverpool, England. The records showed that his last residence was “Kischenoff.” Here is his record from Ellis Island:
Kischenoff . . . Kischenoff. Anne knew what that meant; I did not. The name is more frequently spelled “Kishinev,” and there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the Kishinev Pogroms in 1903 and 1905. On April 18, 1903. the New York Times carried this story about the first one:
The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.
The second pogrom occurred on October 19-20, 1905, and is described as follows in the Wikipedia entry:
This time the riots began as political protests against the Tsar, but turned into an attack on Jews wherever they could be found. By the time the riots were over, 19 Jews were killed and 56 were injured. Jewish self-defense leagues, organized after the first pogrom, stopped some of the violence, but were not wholly successful. . . . This pogrom was instrumental in convincing tens of thousands of Russian Jews to leave to the West . . .
Somehow, my grandfather – age 21 — traveled alone after the second pogrom, from Kishinev to Liverpool, got on a ship, and made his way to America. Nine months after the pogrom, he found himself at Ellis Island, and shortly thereafter he made his way to Philadelphia, where some other Richmans had preceded him.
Ahead of him would be not only assimilation into a new country without a job and without speaking the language, but World War I, the Depression, and World War II.
On October 26, 1908, Abraham Richman – now 25 years old – signed a “Declaration of Intention” to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, and particularly to Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia.” It was the first step to becoming a citizen of the United States. Here is the entire text of the oath that the Declaration required him to swear:
I am not an anarchist; I am not a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy; and it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein. SO HELP ME GOD.
Abraham needed to list his occupation on the Declaration. He wrote in “huckster.” His height was 5’ 2” and his weight was 148 pounds. Here is the document, together with the Petition for Naturalization he subsequently filed in 1915:
By the time of the second document, my grandfather had married Katie Weinstein and they had a son – my father – who was then five years old. My grandfather’s occupation was still “huckster.”
My grandfather Abraham registered for the army in 1917 or 1918 (the document is undated, but he lists himself as age 36). His employer was “myself” – his present occupation, a decade after he arrived: huckster.” Here is the document:
He registered for the draft in World War II, in 1942, at age 59. His registration card lists himself at that time as “unemployed.”
There is a world of experience behind all these documents, a reminder that my grandfather traveled half way across the world to come to this country, the survivor of a major cataclysm of Jewish history, struggled as a fruit dealer, registered to fight in two world wars, living through a Depression in between. That was his life between age 21 and 59 and for several years thereafter.
Several weeks after I received all these documents from Anne, I called my brother Jim, who is a successful real estate lawyer with a major law firm in Los Angeles. I told him I wanted to show him some documents that would interest him and suggested we have lunch at the Water Grille, one of the nicest restaurants in the city. As we sat waiting for our meal, I showed him the documents, one after another, along with others Anne had provided. When I gave him the Ellis Island record, the one showing Abraham had left Russia alone at age 21 to come to America, traveling on the last leg of the journey from Liverpool, Jim looked at it silently and finally said (almost to himself) “It is a long way from Liverpool to the Water Grille.”
* * *
That was one set of grandparents. The story that Anne found for me for my other set of grandparents – Morris and Alice Beckman — was in a way even more surprising.
The Beckmans, she discovered, go back to Sandor Beckman, born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 13, 1847. He came to the United States on
Sandor had 10 children. One of them was my grandfather Morris. Another son was Joseph. And Joseph eventually had a son by the name of Ed, who was thus a cousin to Morris’s daughter (and my mother) Ruth. My mom was born in 1914; Ed was born in 1923; and both of them lived in Philadelphia, along with a lot of other Beckmans.
I had never heard of Ed Beckman, never knew my mom had a lot of cousins. But Ed Beckman, as part of the dislocations of World War II, found himself in California during the war and decided to stay there afterwards, having married his sweetheart in 1944. He settled in San Jose, California in 1950 and had been living there ever since. His name was in the San Jose phone book. Anne had located him.
It was Ed that I was flying to see on that flight late last year.
* * *
Ed and his wife have been married for more than 65 years. I asked if I could take them to a nice restaurant for lunch, and they picked a small Mexican restaurant in a little mini-mall. There they showed me pictures of their wedding, and I showed them pictures of my mom. And I learned a little of how difficult it was for families to keep track of each other during all the moves of the war years. My mom had been nine years older than Ed – dog years when you are in your teens, so Ed had never gotten to know her, and did not know she had been in Southern California back in the 50s.
But Ed knew my grandfather – his uncle – Morris. It turned out that Ed’s father and my grandfather Morris and a third Beckman brother had gone into the real estate business together in Philadelphia. They were second generation Americans, part of the dynasty that Sandor had built with his ten-children family. I heard a lot of stories that day, ones that gave me a sense of my grandfather and his family that I had not had before.
* * *
Ed was not the only Beckman that Anne had located. She found a reference in the documents to Betty Beckman, another of the ten Beckman children, and traced her to a city in New Jersey. With that information, and a few phone calls, I found her, and gave her a call.
It turned out it was not the right Betty Beckman, but it was close. She was a Betty who had married into the Beckman family. When I talked to her, she knew exactly who I was trying to find – the “original” Betty Beckman, the one who had been Betty Beckman all her life. And Betty-by-Marriage had the phone number for Betty-by-Birth. She told me the original Betty had recently moved to Connecticut, that she spoke to her all the time, that she was 93 years old, and that she had a remarkable memory, and would probably have a lot to tell me.
A couple days later, I reached her. She could not have been more surprised to get my call, and we spoke for a long time. She was another person whom I had not known existed, but it turned out she knew me.
She had known my mom, had had a weekly lunch date with her when they were growing up in Philadelphia, was one of her best friends, and was sad when my mother had left Philadelphia to go to California with my dad (who was stationed there during World War II).
It turned out she had come to Los Angeles to visit my mom shortly before she died. No one in the family, she said, had known how sick she was. When she arrived at our house to visit, she said, my dad had escorted them into the living room, and then had left them alone to go bring my mom in from the other room. It was then, Betty said, when they saw her, that they realized.
Betty told me how my dad had cared for my mom during her last painful months, how obviously in love they had been through all those years after they had left Philadelphia. She remembered meeting me that day: I was age 12, preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. It was only a few months away.
* * *
When Jewish immigrants came to the United States at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, they largely left their past behind. Many, like my grandfather Abraham, came without family, with the memory of a pogrom seared into them, eager to assimilate into a new country. A large number of them were anxious to leave their religion behind as well; someone once said the biggest graveyard of old tallit and tefillin is the New York harbor. They worked long hours as hucksters, peddlers, shmata salesmen, trying to feed themselves and their families. They had no family albums from the Old Country. They were in a new land, trying to become a new people. History was something they were trying to avoid, not remember.
A century later, many of their descendants enjoy a prosperity of which their ancestors could not have dreamed; they enjoy a political freedom unparalleled in Jewish history. Many of them are probably in the same situation as I was – not knowing much about their grandparents’ history other than their names and some basic facts, perhaps with some pictures that captured what they were like as grandparents, but not the stories of their early lives, back when they were not “grandparents,” but people.
Remembrance is one of the commandments of Jewish life; it is what has helped preserve the Jews as a people. The stories of our grandparents are ones we can probably only appreciate as we get older, as we appreciate the life we have and the sacrifices of those who made it possible. If there is a way to recapture some of their personal history – which is some of our own personal history – it is a mitzvah to try. You never know what you might find. If you have read this far, you might want to contact Anne Lieberman, the proprietor of Begats, at AnneLieberman@yahoo.com.