Some years ago, shortly after my 90th birthday, I wrote an autobiography. The exercise helped me recall many episodes from my more than eight decades in Toronto since coming here with my family from England at the beginning of the First World War. As I described in the book, I had a multifaceted career. I…
Tag: history
The Jews of Curacao
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Jewish passengers on Caribbean cruises often become excited after their ship docks at Curacao, the little stringbean-shaped isle 63 km off the coast of Venezuela, when they discover that the island is home to a Jewish community with roots that go back nearly 400 years. A rugged and hilly outcropping, Curacao is part of the…
David Eisen, the doctor who loved history
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Dr. David Eisen, Toronto’s first Jewish radiologist, was always intrigued with Jewish history. The youngest son of a Galician peddler who came to Toronto about 1902, David Eisen attended the University of Toronto’s medical school from 1917 to 1922, and joined the Mount Sinai Hospital after graduating. A quarter of a century ago, Eisen published…
A daughter tells her mother’s story
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Shortly after her mother Frances died in 1989, writer Helen Epstein began visiting the university library near her Boston-area home, browsing through books on death, on Jews and on Central Europe. “I was mourning my mother,” she explains in her latest book Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, “and if…
Descendants of Michigan’s first Jewish settler ‘reunite’
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About 60 descendants of Ezekiel Solomons, an 18th-century Jewish fur trader who operated a trading post in what is now Michigan, gathered recently for a first family reunion at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, Michigan, about 50 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, a husband-and-wife-team of historians from Toronto, were…
In Poland, a modern blood libel
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Tarnobrzeg, Poland, formerly known as Dzikow, cannot be accused of being a pretty town. With a population of 40,000, it is perched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, in a region known for the production of sulphur. One pictures a dreary, blighted place, surrounded by dark denuded hills. In 1757, a 15-year-old Christian boy…
Postcards from the past
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A picture, according to proverb, is worth a thousand words, but sometimes the power of a photograph to illuminate a setting seems to go well beyond the descriptive abilities of language. Genealogists are often keen, therefore, to find good generic photographs, illustrations and other visual materials to enhance their family tree research. As defined by…
Rabbinic ancestry? Prove it first
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Arthur Kurzweil, the pioneering American Jewish genealogist, tells a remarkable story about how a passing remark from his mother’s cousin, Maurice, led him to a significant family discovery. Maurice recalled being told after playing a childhood prank, “That’s no way to behave, especially since you are an ‘ainicle’ of the Stropkover Rebbe.” Learning that the…
Kishinev, 100 years later
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One hundred years ago this week (April 2003), reports reached the West from St. Petersburg of severe anti-Jewish riots that had occurred in Kishinev, capital of the Russian province of Bessarabia. The first news was sparse. Twenty-five Jews had been killed and 275 wounded in the attacks, newspapers reported, but eventually the death toll would…
Of Berliners, Oppenheimers and Rothschilds
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From about 1840 to roughly 1900, one sort of Jewish immigrant was so familiar in North American cities that he was caricatured in novels, newspapers articles and comic strips. According to the stereotype, he was a prosperous merchant, garbed in bowler hat, business suit, and thick moustache. He manufactured or traded in pianos, fine watches,…
