Genealogy
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Dear Asher, Caleb, Luke, Lola, Ella, Oliver, Talia: These are pictures of your great-great-great-grandparents, Leib or Louis Hessel and Tsina Voloshen Hessel. They are the parents of Eta or Yetta Hessel, who married Isaiah Pearlman, your great-great grandfather, in StaryConstantine, Ukraine, sometime around 1895. I knew Eta, who died in 1962 when I was in…
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Dear grandchildren: I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya – an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more — and…
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What was it like in the 1940s when I was your age? Very different. Milk was delivered daily in bottles: a milk-wagon, drawn by a tired, plodding old horse, appeared on East 9th Street three times a week before we sat down to breakfast. There were also daily visits from a horse-drawn vegetable truck. An…
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Althea Goss Pearlman, 76, of Boulder, died February 10, 2016 at AltaVita Memory Care Centre in Longmont where she had resided for the last two and a half years. Althea was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1939 to Daniel Goss and Anne Krull Goss, both teachers of mathematics. She was raised in Utica, New York and graduated as valedictorian…
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I published this reminiscence some years ago: My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change,…
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In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result my conversations with her were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia,…
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Who knows what crimes or dark deeds my black-sheep Uncle Max had committed that made made him such a pariah in our o-so-respectable family, but they must have been something awful. Although he was my father's older brother, his name was never mentioned except with embarrassment or distaste. Inasmuch as I'm now the "patriarch," it's…
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In 1895, my grandparents wisely left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with…
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We've had two major snowfalls in the last week and the road crews haven't yet found their way to our street. It's a knee-deep icy mess out there. Yesterday one of my neighbors spun himself into quite a hole. He needed a push, so I went outside to help. Even with my professional-grade ice-chopper, I…
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My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change, Sonia Green. She was born in 1884…