Author David Laskin shares the moving real-life saga of one Jewish family (his own) spread over three continents and two world wars in The Family: A Journey into the Heart of the Twentieth Century. The course of history brings incredible joy and heartbreaking pain to the immigrant, Zionist, entrepreneur, soldier and martyr ancestors that fill his family tree in the book, available in paperback beginning September 2. We talked to Laskin about genealogical research, history and culture in advance of his upcoming appearance at the Beachwood Branch of Cuyahoga County Library on Wednesday, September 3, 7:30pm.
The book is pretty detailed with descriptions of homes, correspondence among family members, information on profit margins on the businesses—there is a lot there. How long did that take to put together?
The research took about a year and half and then writing took another year and a half so the book was about a three-year commitment. One of the big surprises and big gifts that came my way were 280 family letters. Many had been written by family members who were killed in the Holocaust and all of them were in Yiddish. Sonia, my relative in Israel, passed them on to her son, Benny. He didn’t know Yiddish, but he kept them to honor his family. It was only when I was working on the book that Benny felt compelled—with a little pressure from me—to have the letters translated into Hebrew and English. That was a huge source of very detailed and intimate family history. It gave a real texture to what was going on in Europe from about 1931 to 1941. For me, some of the most spellbinding correspondence was written after the start of the war but before the Nazi takeover. You get a daily sense of what it was like to live in Poland then. The letters end when the Nazis took Vilna and Rakov.
There were two businesses profiled in the book. One was A. Cohen & Sons, which was founded by my grandfather and his brothers and named in honor of their father. There was some information available about that company from the accounting firm that did their numbers and that sort of thing. But the other one was Maidenform. Maidenform actually has an archive in Washington, DC. There are huge troves of papers there about the founding of the company, various patents, different advertising campaigns and corporate reports. It did take research, of course, but all that stuff pretty much was at my fingertips.
Do you think genealogy research was easier with all this information available to you? It has to be more of a challenge for people with relatives that didn’t start major companies or pen their own biographies, especially if they lost people in the Holocaust.
I’m a professional writer so I realize I have a bit of an advantage in this regard, but there is an amazing amount of stuff out there for anybody who wants to put together their family history. If you keep looking and apply just a little bit of imagination and knowledge of history you can really piece together a pretty detailed picture. You can sketch in your family story in the context of world history, which is, in essence, what I did with my book.
The biggest piece of advice I’d give anybody—Jewish or non-Jewish—ask for help. Don’t do this alone. Start with your relatives. When you start getting in touch with them you’ll be amazed by how much you’ll find. Then turn to other researchers. Holocaust research is a huge field and every venture is going to be different, so I can’t speak to every scenario, but I can use my own efforts as an example. First, I had to figure out dates. Then, I tapped into the vast resources of JewishGen. They have a discussion group. You can provide names, dates and everything you know and ask for a lead or some clarification. Sometimes, no one can help you, but I have had so many responses from posting information like that. People say, “Have you tried looking here?” or “That’s a familiar name.” Weird stuff turns up. Then, even if you think nobody out there knows anything, there’s still a chance that a distant relative sent a page of testimony to Yad Vashem. And the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has a library and archive. Even your public library can have an expert in genealogy.
There are many ways to get started. Will you find everything? No. Will you have disappointments? Yes. But I can pretty much guarantee you’ll uncover more than you thought you would. Honestly, genealogy research can become a bit of an obsession, and, like all obsessions, it’s time consuming and often frustrating. But there are always surprises and great things can turn up.
Do you really believe we all have a story to tell?
We don’t all have a story that would turn into a popular book but choose any family at random, and they’re going to have relatives who served in a war, who were involved in mass migration or who suffered in the Depression. I think we do all have incredible family stories that you can put into the larger historical framework to derive real meaning. I also think all of our lives are connected in strange and wonderful ways. Everyone is amazed when they start researching how much we’re all connected. I’m positive that you and I have family members in common. They may not all be very close, but I find that fascinating.
In this digital age when everyone texts and takes photos with cell phones, do you think it’s going to be harder or easier for us to track our family history going forward?
I’ve though a lot about this, and I don’t have a good answer. What we’re going to miss are the letters and the wonderful detail you get when someone sits down for half an hour to write one. On the other hand, now there is so much more out there. You might think that all your deleted emails are lost in the ether, but if someone was trying to track you down because you were a political refugee—you know, Edward Snowden type of stuff—it’s all there somewhere. It never really goes away. I think in the future researchers will be able sift through texts, tweets or Facebook posts and take it from there. So, while my Facebook page won’t tell someone who I really was as a person, it will certainly reveal who I knew, what I read and some aspects of my professional life.
Other challenges will remain. One challenge I faced with my research was that many letters are quite mundane. It’s not unlike routine phone conversations I’ve had with my mother, you know? “How are you? What’s going on? What happened with that exam? Did your dog ever come home?” Some of it seems so trivial. Looking back now you think, “Wait a minute. Hitler was enacting racial laws and this person was writing about what you they made for dinner?” But that’s how we live our lives. Part of what fascinates me is sifting through the stuff of daily life, putting things in perspective and seeing how people intersect with history. I think future historians will have lots and lots of data to work with.
Why do you think older generations were quiet or reluctant to share information on the past? Why do you think younger generations don’t think to ask the questions?
I just came from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Conference in St. Louis, and this question came up quite a bit. My story is a pretty typical one. I think the immigrants and children of immigrants—my grandparents and parents—were eager to put their European past behind them. They really wanted to fit into their new country. They didn’t put Judaism behind them; my grandparents were devout, and my parents, while not devout, were very respectful and identified with their roots and heritage. But overall, I think they really wanted to join the American mainstream. The Holocaust was so immediate. They had relatives trapped over there. They heard there were atrocities going on, but they didn’t know the true extent of the murders until after the war and when they did, it just became unspeakable. I think this holds for many different groups that have suffered genocides, not just Jews. The generations most closely involved really can’t talk about it. It’s too painful. It’s too horrifying. Growing up, I didn’t ask about it, and I wasn’t told anything. It wasn’t until I was heading into maybe my 50s that I began to wonder. I think that is fairly common. It’s pretty rare to find a 20-year-old family historian or genealogist. I also think the trajectory of 20th century Jewish history had a lot to do with who became interested and when. For my generation, the Holocaust is enough in the past that we can begin to research it.
The females in your family are central to this story. Why did you choose to focus on women so heavily?
Some of it was coincidental. They were these amazing female figures. Itel is just a gift from heaven both as a family member and as someone to write about. She was so colorful, so quotable and so powerful. Sonia was a very different kind of woman but still very compelling. She was warm and idealistic. So, some of it was just how the cards fell. In a more general sense—and this is sort of more obvious but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me—the Jewish women in the old country were amazing people. Think about it what they did. Study and prayer have certainly kept Judaism alive. I don’t want to denigrate those things in any way, but, for the most part, they don’t put bread on the table. The women took care of that. They often were small business leaders who also had a cow and had a garden and also prayed and taught their daughters. I don’t think it’s surprising that some pretty powerful leaders—from political figures like Golda Meir to captains of industry or strong feminists—came from Eastern European Jewish female backgrounds. I think these were women who had a tremendous amount of unofficial power and demands that they rose to. For me, it was really inspiring to write about them.
After doing the research, was there a relative you felt closer to?
I think I would pick Sonia. What really moved me about Sonia’s story, at least one of the things that made me feel a deep reverence or almost awe for her, was that late in life after her husband had died, her oldest son had been killed in war, both of her sisters and her mother had been murdered in the Holocaust, and she was radiant. Her kids said she was forgiving. She didn’t retreat into bitterness. She wasn’t someone who felt that history had stripped her of everyone she loved and been cruel to her personally. She felt proud that she had been able to go to Israel and start a family and be part of the founding of the country. Love was dominant in her.
This story is deeply personal. How did you ensure it would find a broader audience than your own family?
I realized while I was researching and writing the book that my family did archetypal things. Early 20th century migration by way of Ellis Island? Check. First place the family settled was lower East Side? Check. Start out peddling with a pushcart? Check. Move to Israel in the early 1920s and 1930s? Check. My family did many of the things that other Jews did. It wasn’t that they had an unusual story. I didn’t deliberately try to make this broadly applicable; I just wanted to tell the stories the best way I could. And yet I can’t tell you how many times people tell me, “I love the book. This could be my family. Let me tell you about them.” In many ways, by writing my particular story instead of intentionally writing a universal story, it became universal. Some people have even said, “I started your book thinking, ‘Why would I care about your family? Who are these people?’ But I ended up caring about them because they were interesting and because they could have been my family.” I think when you look deeply, even with all our differences there is a universal element in many family stories. Maybe I just dug deep enough to find the common ground that we share.
Talk a bit about the anti-Semitism that ran through every locale and every time period in the book. How did that make you feel?
First, I felt incredibly lucky to be born in a country and a time that has the least anti-Semitism of any place or any period in world history. I think we’re blessed here in America. I think this is a great place to be Jewish. But when you look at these historic events you can’t help but feel outrage at how vast and how prevalent it was. Just the other day I saw that story about a hamlet in France called Death to Jews (La Mort aux Juifs). That has been its name since the Middle Ages when everyone apparently thought, “Oh, that’s a great name for a town.” My responsibility as a historian is not to put out the common assumptions and clichés, but to really research it and to share the nuances. Anti-Semitism has had many different guises and manifestations. It’s discouraging to see how persistent it’s been and important to describe it accurately.
Did writing this book change the way you look at your family or the way you feel about being Jewish?
Perhaps my take on my family before the book would have been that they were really about business. While I recognize business is important, it’s not my thing. Now, I’ve realized that they also were scholars. They were poets. They were historians. Most of all, they were living for ideals, and that made me feel so much more connected to a community.
If you come from observant grandparents and you’re not observant yourself, you feel like you’ve fallen off or strayed a bit. Now I realize that while I’m not on my grandparents’ path, I am on some paths that they would have been hugely proud of. I think they’d be proud of this book and the fact that I know so much about parts of their heritage that they couldn’t or didn’t want to access for whatever reasons. I feel that there are many ways to be observant, and one of mine is through history and family history. I have become hugely involved with the work of JewishGen. It’s part of the community that I love and can relate to. I think I have found my niche—my “shul.” But I also went to Israel three times in the course of my research, and I was very deeply moved spiritually by being there. Seeing how my own family’s history has been so intertwined with that of the country was emotional.
I would say the bottom line is that it has made me proud. I’ve been able to share great stories that are a small part of a great culture.
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