By Joel H. Cohen
NEW YORK — If your experience is like mine, you frequently have questions about your family history, but, alas, there’s no one left to answer them.
So it’s become one of my crusades (if you’ll pardon the expression) to urge adults to encourage their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, no matter how young, to interview them and other family elders about their family’s characters and meaningful events. The process is likely to be most enjoyable for both the interviewers and interviewees. And the result might well be a family treasure.
Among the tidbits I’ve learned: My four grandparents emigrated from Russia around the turn of the previous century. My father’s family name was Kazdan, but apparently the Ellis Island intake officer just wrote down a common Jewish name, and Cohen it’s stayed for ages and the foreseeable future.
My mother’s father was one of four brothers, ala “Avalon.” One whom I never met was remembered as saintly; another as very, very observant. My grandfather was tough toward his four kids, but my favorite relative, the fourth brother was something of a hippy, before the adjective was in use. He not only encouraged his older daughter to learn to drive, but to buy a car!
What kind of work did my forebears do? My grandfathers were both carpenters (but I can’t drive a nail straight, so so much for heredity). What attracted each grandma and grandpa to each other? I never learned.
And while we’re at it, who’s the young guy who appeared in a rowboat with my then-single mom, in a photo found among a batch after she passed away? Again, no one left to ask.
In my grandparents’ generation, the boys surely went to Hebrew school (cheder), as did my contemporaries. At the “college” attended by the latter group, the class was taught by a good but strict teacher who wasn’t opposed to using a stick to drive home a point. The boys got even in several ways. One was to set the classroom clock ahead, so class sessions were shorter. The crowning blow came at Bar Mitzvah time. The teacher’s son, a journalist, would usually write the Bar Mitzvah speech, which usually ended with a prayer for the boy’s parents, siblings and teacher. My contemporaries often would “forget” to include the blessing for the teacher.
For some reason, I had the same teacher, but in the privacy — and safety — of my home, so there was no caning. An “extra” he provided was some lessons in Yiddish, and I still have an assigned Yiddish letter I wrote: “Dear Friend, Today my father took me to a baseball game.” (In Yiddish Mein Tiere Fraint, Haint, hawt mein tateth meir genemene tzoo a bazeball game.”)
Joel H. Cohen is a New York City-based columnist.