Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

I have been slacking off from my blogging duties lately. Mostly because of vacation and work, but also because of a general malaise I think. Here's what's been going on lately:

I watched the latest WDYTYA? episode about Lisa Kudrow as it aired on Friday night. I have a lot to say about this from many different aspects. As usual, my thought may be a bit scattered but I hope you can follow along.

1. I watched the show with my wife, who I have to say has been a trooper and has willingly watched the first two episodes with me. But I think this may be the last one she watches. I think it was just the expectation that this was going to be a family history and discovery show and not a grueling reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I think the graphic descriptions of what happened to Lisa's family and the Jews of Ilya were a bit too much and may have missed the target audience. I can see this kind of discussion coming up in a Holocaust documentary, as it should. But on an 8pm, Friday night, national TV show? A bit much.

2. My first point does not in any way mean that reminding people what happened during the Holocaust is not important. It certainly is. And the best example of why it is important is Lisa herself. How can a descendant of Holocaust victims have absolutely no idea what went on? It could be the suburban, southern California upbringing. But in a Jewish family? I find that hard to believe. I hope for her sake her discussion with her father was staged for the show because otherwise she should be ashamed.

3. 6 of my 8 great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust. My father grew up without ever meeting or knowing his grandparents. My mother only knew her maternal grandparents because they fled from Beltsy, Romania (now Moldova) to Tashkent, Russia. You grow up knowing these things, even though none of my grandparents ever talked about their parents. Not once that I can recall. You could see how painful it was for Lisa's father to bring up these memories and he had never met his grandparents either. But my grandparents said where they were from and did discuss a little about their families. I remember that my grandmother had an Yizkor book about her town, Dolhinov (Dolginovo). I remember reading it as a teenager. I guess growing up in Israel makes the Holocaust a lot more real than it does anywhere else.

4. Speaking of Yizkor books, the New York Public Library has the Ilya book. If you go to image 316 which is page 312 you can find the names of Lisa's Mordechevitz family:

Mordechovitz Mera
____"____ Liba
____"____ Avraham

If you go a few pages further to image 321 which is page 317 you can read the article that Lisa read in the market square. It's the testimony of David Rubin and it's in Hebrew (it was translated on the screen by Eilat Gordin Levitan who is a very active member of JewishGen, managed several of the shtetl pages and has many websites with wonderful photographs and other information). I couldn't find this specific translation on the Yizkor pages on JewishGen, but there are several others.

UPDATE: Miriam Robbins Midkiff, from the excellent Ancestories blog, left a comment with the link to the translated page that Lisa read. It's after the list of martyrs (which also lists the Mordechovitz family). Thanks Miriam!

4a. I am going to email Eilat and see if I can get a copy of the article she translated so I can share it with my readers or at least point you to a link.

4b. I am in touch with another Rubin from Dolhinov and I sent him an email to see if he is related to the David Rubin who wrote the chapter in the Ilya Yizkor book.

5. I wonder why Ancestry did not play up it's relationship with JewishGen for this episode. Strange. I think that would have been a huge win for all involved.

6. Now just to show how much this episode hit home for me, if you look at Eilat's website and check out the map, you will see that my grandmother's shtetl, Dolhinov (number 1 on the map), is right next to Ilya (number 19 on the map):



7. Doing the kind of research that Lisa did during this show in the Polish and other state archives is not as easy as it seems. From what I know, nothing is online and most records of anything less than 100 years old is not accessible to the general public. You would either need to go there in person and hire someone who's got the right connections or you may be able to do it remotely by hiring a local person, which is probably not something regular family historians can do.

8. I loved how the Polish archivist just plopped down a phone book in front of Lisa. There's no easier way to look for living relatives right?

9. I would have liked to see how Yuri/Boleslaw was related to Kudrow. They kept referring to him as a cousin, but only at the end did they say that Lisa's grandmother was his Aunt.

10. Another important part of the show was when Boleslaw said he wasn't there in Ilya to see the massacre. He only heard about it. But the family had lived for 60 years thinking that he witnessed it. This is a recurring theme with oral histories that are handed down through generations.

11. So how did Boleslaw escape the fate of the rest of his family in Ilya? He escaped to Russia and joined the army. This is pretty much what my own grandfather did. But my grandfather lived in Warsaw, not Belarus. So "escaping" from Warsaw was not going to be as easy. I will need to get to the bottom of this story on my next visit to Israel. I am not sure how much my grandmother will be able to tell me, but I have to ask.

12. I had more thoughts during the show, but I can't remember them now. Overall, I thought that while the subject matter was extremely dark (yet extremely important), the show itself was fairly lacking when it came to actual research. Why had they not talked more about Ilya's history? What about the generation of Jews who lived there for centuries before the Nazis ended it all? I also felt that the constant recaps and previews were too much. There was very little actual footage that wasn't reused several times.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the season of WDYTYA? but I have to admit that this format is starting to get a little tiresome. Maybe they can tweak the format if they get a second season going.

I just finished reading the latest Dan Brown novel "The Lost Symbol" and wanted to share my thoughts. I've read all of Dan Brown's novels so far and I have to say this one is pretty good. There were definitely some twist and turns that I kind of expected as well as some that were a little surprising. I won't give anything away, but I think intelligent readers will figure most of it out pretty easily.

What was interesting to me was that the whole plot takes place in a limited geographical location and over a very short time period. This is a testament to Brown's writing ability because the characters are very well developed and you still get sucked into the plot easily. I also had a feeling that he wrote the book almost like a screenplay, I guess that would make it easy to eventually make this into a movie at some point in the near future.

I love how you never know what's real and what's fiction in Brown's books. Although he mentions that all locations are real, you still have a strange feeling that some of it has to be fiction. Could these images and places actually exist and be out there in plain sight for all to see? I guess so.

This novel revolves around the Masonry and Freemasons. I've somehow always been aware of this fraternal group, but never gave them a lot of thought. Just a bunch of guys in aprons sitting around and talking about religion, right? Well, not according to this book or any of the numerous conspiracy theories out there. You can find a lot of information (and mis-information) out there these days. You just have to Google it.

While scanning some cemetery photos a couple of weeks ago I noticed that my wife's 2nd-great grandfather's headstone had a Masonic symbol on it:

I then went to check out his obituary:

Atlanta Constitution - 1/12/1910 - Rev. Milton B. Tuggle died at a private sanitarium yesterday afternoon. He lived at 17 Ashland Avenue. He is survived by his wife and five children, Mrs. Mary King, Mrs. Vining, Dave G. Vining, Mrs. Princey Mines and Paul L. Tuggle. The funeral will be at 2:30 pm from Barclay & Brandon's chapel, the Gate City lodge, No 2, Masons, being in charge. Interment will be in Oakland Cemetery.

So I did a quick Google search for Gate City Lodge, No 2 and found out they actually have a website and a blog. You can navigate those pages and see who the current members are as well as the history of the lodge and more. Apparently they have been in the news lately for filing a civil suit against the Grand Lodge of Georgia:

The Grand Lodge of Georgia Free and Accepted Masons, a fraternal organization, is being sued by an Atlanta chapter and its senior officer who say the group’s state leaders are trying to disband the local affiliate because it accepted a black man as a member.

You can read more about that here. Anyway, they withdrew their suit and all is well I guess.

I also found a contact email and sent them an email to see if they have any information about Milton Tuggle that they could share. I have never gone down this path before and not sure where it will lead just yet, but I hope I can get some more information this way.

Do you have any Masons in your tree? Any interesting stories or experiences? Let me know in the comments.

I just finished reading a great fiction book called "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks, who won a Pulitzer prize in 2006 for a previous book, her second novel, "March", a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s classic "Little Women" from the point of view of Mr. March, the absent father.

Ms. Brooks likes to write historical fiction and I have to say she did a great job with "People of the Book" which deals with the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. This piece of history is truly amazing and I have to admit I had never heard of it before. Here's what Wikipedia says about this amazing codex:

The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the illustrated traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world, originating in Barcelona around 1350. The Haggadah is presently owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where it is on permanent display.

If you want to see some of these fantastic images, whose history is shrouded in mystery, click here.

So what did I like about this book? It's based on some facts that have already been discovered about the history of the Haggadah, but it takes the reader through a journey of all the (fictional) characters that may have been associated with its creation and survival. These characters are very well written and intrigue the reader to keep going to find out what all the clues mean.

The story is about an Australian manuscript restorer who goes to Bosnia after the war to restore the Haggadah in order to get it ready for permanent display at the museum. During the restoration she finds several items that then get their own story through history to explain how they eventually got there in the first place.

In order for a Jewish Haggadah to survive for over 650 years, it had to go through a lot. And the story follows many account of Jewish suffering and weaves the story of the Haggadah and the characters surrounding it. As I said, the characters are amazing: A Partisan girl, an African slave, a drunk Inquisitor, a Gambling Rabbi, the deaf-mute son of a wealthy Jewish doctor living in medieval Spain and many others comprise "the people" of the book.

One thing that this book made me think about is the history of the Jewish people, also known as the people of the book. It made me think about how fortunate we are to actually still be around and exist today. Throughout history, Jews have been persecuted, tortured, converted and mercilessly murdered. Just because they were Jews. No other reason. It's just absolutely mind-boggling to me, every time I think about it.

Anyway, I encourage everyone to read this book. It's a fairly easy read and has a lot of twists and surprises that will keep you guessing.

I have not read this book yet (although I hear it's terrific), but the sale price cracked me up anyway:

I wanted to share what I've been reading lately. You may remember that I got on a Holocaust theme a while back and I am pretty much still there:

Right now I am reading "History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier" by Deborah E. Lipstadt, about a huge libel suit filed in England against Prof. Lipstadt by David Irving, the uber-douche Holocaust denier. It's an interesting legal battle for those who might enjoy that aspect too. Very good book so far. I am even thinking about going to hear Prof. Lipstadt's course at Emory this fall: REL 324-000: The Holocaust.

I would skip "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans" by Nechama Tec, because unfortunately it is just not written well. I am sure there is an amazing story there and I have not seen the movie yet, but I just couldn't get through this book.

Another one I am reading which is very interesting is "Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto" by Samuel D. Kassow, which not only touches on the actual Warsaw Ghetto life but gives a very interesting background on the political and social life of pre-war Jews in Poland. If you've ever heard of the Oyneg Shabes Archive - this is the book about it and Emanuel Ringelblum who created it. I never knew that Jews had such a complex political landscape with several parties battling it out in East Europe between the two world wars. Very interesting stuff indeed.

I've already written about "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" by Daniel Mendelsohn. This book is interesting in some ways and annoying in others. The inclusion of old testament comparisons to the authors life and experiences were too simplistic in my opinion and there is a lot of repetition. Mendelsohn is a true New Yorker and was even the book critic for New York magazine for a few years. Some people will enjoy his writing style where some sentences go on forever with a thousand commas and by the time you finish one you don't even remember where it started. It's a good book, but probably not at the top of my list.

And to round up this book review, one book that has nothing to do with Judaism or the Holocaust. I'm a couple of chapters into "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson and so far I'm loving it. It's an interesting autobiography about an amazing character combined with a lot of history and great story telling. I look forward to reading more of it.

Have any of you read any of these books and have an opinion to share? Any other recommendations? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

I finally finished reading "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" by Daniel Mendelsohn about a week ago. I've been kind of busy since then, so I haven't been able to post my thoughts about it yet. I have to say right away that it was a little hard getting started with the book. Mendelsohn has a very unique writing style and has taken the art of using commas to the extreme. Some of the sentences are so long that by the time you're done reading them, you may not remember where you started. But this is not a literary style review so I'll just leave it at that.

The other point I need to make is that the author goes through the first few stories in the bible and draws comparisons and contrasts from them to his stories about total annihilation, siblings rivalry and so on. He also analyzes the works of two famous biblical scholars and comes to his own conclusions. I found this part pretty annoying since, by his own admission, he has not studied the bible past these first few stories and I wasn't always sure I understand the repetitive nature of his analysis.

Speaking of repetition, there's a lot of that in the 500+ pages of this book. I could have done with less, but I guess it's one way of getting the reader to remember the characters and events.

All right, let's get to the actual story and why I found it so appealing. The book is focused on the authors quest to find information about his grand-uncle and his family who lived in Bolechow, Poland before the holocaust. He does this by detailing his early childhood memories and then his recent travels around the world to interview the few living Bolechowers who may or may not have known Uncle Shmiel Jager, his wife and 4 daughters.

Through this journey he goes into a lot of detail (some of it shockingly gory) of the fate of the Jewish community in Bolechow. I've heard similar stories before during history lessons in high-school and through reading holocaust survivor testimonies and interviews. Still, reading it again and getting the vivid descriptions made me think about a lot of things and try to draw similarities/contrasts to my own family's history:

1. For instance, whereas almost all of the author's family had immigrated to the US prior to the war and only one brother stayed behind with his family, my maternal grandfather was the sole survivor from his family.
2. Where Bolechow is a small village with several living survivors, my grandfather's family lived in Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Poland and finding information about them is going to be next to impossible.
3. Mendelsohn started his research about 20 years ago and I am just getting started now.
4. The author's grandfather was a great story-teller and while he hid most of the family history from his grandson, at least he had a basis for his research as well as additional family members who remembered details. My grandfather never spoke about his family or the war. I was probably too young to ask and the holocaust seemed to be a taboo subject that was never really discussed.

Another recurring theme in the book is how lucky the author was in finding the right people at the right time. Several unlikely coincidences turned complete roadblocks into a wealth of information. This is very disheartening to someone like me who not only has no path to start with but nobody to really talk to. My only real link is my elderly grandmother who also claims that my grandfather didn't talk about his family.

The book's ending left me a little disappointed, but I won't spoil it for those who have not read it yet. It's not the research result, but more the methodology and reaction of the author. If you would like, we can discuss it in the comments.

So while reading a holocaust story about a now-not-so-anonymous family wasn't an uplifting endeavor to say the least, it did spark my interest in trying to research my grandfather's family again. I will have to figure out if there are any related Dombek family members who are somehow related. I will try to dig again in the archives for all the awkward spellings of this not-so-common Polish surname that is not necessarily Jewish. I will try to uncover whatever I can, but I won't keep my hopes up just yet.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to re-live what it's like methodically going through a research project that involves a lot of travel and face to face interviews. I have started reading another holocaust memoir called "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans" about the Bielski Brothers that was recently made into a movie with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. I'll have a review about that when I'm done.

I have been trying to write more, but it seems time is the most scarce and valuable commodity right now. So here are a few short notes (that hopefully I will turn into full posts in the near future):

1) Fulton County Court Records: My first trip in search of some real records was extremely fruitful. I found wills of my wife's grandfather, Lawrence William Brannon, and grand-aunt, Leila Elizabeth Brannon Pendergrass, as well as lots of supporting documents including a copy of a death certificate and names of several descendants. And this is just from looking into two estate records. There were several others that have been archived that I would need to order. And I haven't even touched the marriage records yet.

2) Fundraiser: My daughter's school held it's annual fundraiser, with my wife being one of the co-chairs for the second year in a row. It was a huge success and a lot of fun. Since the theme was the 'Tree of Life' I was able to get some very generous donations from a couple of 'Family Tree' companies. I will definitely write more about this.

3) Cousins, cousins, everywhere: People are popping up everywhere and joining our huge Geni tree. Distant Auth and Brannon family members have made contact and started updating their side of the family. One Brannon that went to school with Cynthia turned out to be a 5th cousin. While at school they were sure they were not related but I was quickly able to prove otherwise.

4) Newspaper clippings: I was able to find an obituary for my wife's grandmother, Emily Anne Brannon, from 2002 as well as an article detailing her wedding in 1931 to Lawrence J. Brannon. The wedding has a lot of details about guests and is full of useful information.

5) The Battle Book: While looking through HeritageQuest Online through my Cobb County Library subscription I ran across a 780-page book detailing the Battle family history. It was printed in 1930 and has hundreds of pages of information about the family. Here's a quick nugget:



It reads:

6. Jesse Battle — b. Hertford Co., N. C., July 8, 1738; d. Hancock Co., Ga., Aug. 25, 1805 (See will, Chap. V); reared by grandfather, William Battle, in Nansemond Co., Va.; Revolutionary soldier (See Chap. XII); removed 1777 to Swift Creek, Edgecombe Co., N. C., and thence, Feb. 20, 1787, to Greene (now Hancock) Co., Ga.; Baptist; m. Nansemond Co., Va., 1756, Susanna Faucette (b. France, Oct. 7, 17381; d. Hancock C0., Ga., May 8, 1819, a French Huguenot who escaped from France hidden in bales of silk). Children:

Jesse Battle and Susanna Faucette were my wife's 6th-great-grandparents. I love the part about the escape "from France hidden in bales of silk." With this book I have now been able to trace one of my daughter's lines back 13 generations, to her 10th-great-grandparents. Pretty incredible.

I really hope to post about all these topics in more detail. This is truly fascinating stuff!