Mom, Baseball, and the Fourth of July

 Since today is the Fourth of July, I want to share a funny story about my mom and baseball.

 

Growing up, one of my dad’s customers had season tickets to Dodgers games and he would ask my dad if he wanted any of the tickets. So if there was a home game available around then (which usually there was) Dad would ask for a Fourth of July game so we could watch the fireworks afterwards. Now Mom was never a baseball fan so she always stayed home while Dad and I went out. However, this changed one year when I was about 12.

 

After many years of staying home during or around the Fourth of July, Mom got fed up at being left behind. So one year when I was about 12 she decided to come with us. Now because Mom wasn’t a baseball fan, Mom brought a book with her. And I remember she asked enough times while we were there when the game was going to be over or when we could leave that she ruined it for Dad and I and we left either halfway through or at the end of the third inning.

 

And that’s the first, last, and only time Mom joined Dad and I for a Fourth of July baseball game.

Mom's Obituary & An Important Song

 As you all know, my mom died on February 26^th. In honor of today being four months since she died* (How the heck has it been four months already?), I wanted to post her obituary taken verbatim from the LA Times for those of you who haven’t read it yet:

(* Since she died so late at night on February 26^th, I just mark the months by the 27^th of each month.)

 

Sima Rae Stanley 

February 2, 1947 – February 26, 2023

 

Sima was born on February 2, 1947 in Mt. Clemens, Michigan to Joseph Frank and Mildred (Savodnik) Juliar. After growing up in Michigan, she attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for her BA and MSW. However, she wasn’t able to find a job after graduation, so she moved to Israel for 7 years where she started her 40-year-long social work career.

 

Once she came back from Israel, she found work at Ventura County Behavioral Health, where she worked with foster youth for over 30 years. She was offered promotions, but never took them because she wanted to continue working with kids.

 

Sima did not like sitting still. She retired on a Friday (the day after her 65^th birthday) and that Monday she started training to be a docent at the Museum of Tolerance. Three years later, she started training to be a docent at the Skirball Cultural Center. She continued with both of these positions until the advent of Covid in March 2020. As a docent at the Museum of Tolerance, Sima worked more hours per year than almost anyone else.

 

Sima was also a creative person. She sewed beautiful, individualized tote bags for family and friends. She and her husband, Bob, took art classes where they both learned to paint, but she went on to paint extraordinary copies of the masters that would be almost indistinguishable from the originals.

 

Sima also loved kids. She and Bob married a little bit later in their lives, and she would have loved to have had a lot of kids. But as it turned out, nature only allowed her one.

 

Sima is survived by her husband of 37 years, Bob, her daughter Rebecca, her brothers Michael and Paul, and numerous nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Alzheimer’s Association.

 

And here is the important song: “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles. This was my parents’ song; the printout of the lyrics are still on our fridge and have been there for years.

The Vienna Boy Scout Group

Wednesday was the 84^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, I wanted to bring a bit of light to that dark day. Therefore, I present:

The Vienna Boy Scout Group.

The Vienna Boy Scout Group is what I call the group of Grandpa John’s closest friends whom – as the name implies – became his friends during his time in the Boy Scouts (whether as a kid or a leader, I don’t know) while he was growing up and living in Vienna. At the latest, by March 1938 they were all friends. And they were all Jewish.

And they all survived.

1. Hans Steinhaus/John Howard Stanley (aka Grandpa John)

Hans was born on 21 January 1913 to Jonas Steinhaus and Eleonore Rothenstein in Vienna. He escaped Vienna on 04 August 1938 and lived in Schauffhausen, Switzerland for two years. In August 1940, he booked passage on a ship from Lisbon to New York and from there he made his way to Chicago where his sponsor family lived. On 04 August 1944, he married Margaret “Margie” Weiner and later had four kids. Just under a year after the wedding, he officially changed his name to John Stanley. Over the course of his life, he started off working at the Chicago Printed String Company before moving on to be a chemist and then later on to own and manage a few small businesses. He died in Los Angeles on 28 January 1987 at the age of 74.

2. Hermann/Herman Medak

Hermann was born on 26 April 1914 to Ignatz and Ella Medak in Vienna. From 1932 to 1938, he studied at the University of Vienna School of Medicine. However, the Anschluss came in March 1938, and in 1939 he escaped to England and from there made his way to the U.S. Once he came here, he briefly lived in Toledo, Ohio for a few years before settling down in Chicago. Unfortunately, the U.S. didn’t take his medical school credits so instead he decided to become a dentist (and later on obtained his PhD). He married Vivian Fried (I’m going to talk about him and Vivian briefly in another post) and had four kids, two of whom Jeanne has been in contact with within the last decade. However, the fact that he couldn’t initially get his medical degree in Vienna didn’t stop him. He went back to Vienna in the ‘70s and got his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1979. He died in Evanston, Illinois on 29 May 1991 at the age of 77. According to Jeanne, Herman was humorous, lots of fun, and a great guy to be around.

3. Karl/Carlos Stein

Carlos was born around 1915 and escaped Vienna around 1938. He settled in Santiago, Chile and kept up a correspondence with Grandpa John until the day Grandpa John died. According to Jeanne, he was a serious kind of man.

4. Eddie Tennent

Eddie was born around 1913 and escaped around 1938. He settled down in Chicago where he married Shelby. Shelby was an artist; the giraffe engraving that hung on the wall in Grandmargie’s living room was by her. Eddie was an ophthalmologist.

5. Ernst/Ernest Sternfeld

Ernst was born 27 June 1913 in Vienna to Lajos Sternfeld and Sidonia Samek. He escaped around 1938. He settled down in Toledo, Ohio (I think he and Herman Medak worked at the same hospital in Toledo for a few years) with his wife Zilla and two kids. According to my grandparents in the ‘80s, Ernest was a “chest surgeon.” He died on 8 March 2004 in Toledo, Ohio when he was 90.

6. Ernst/Ernest Gross

Ernst was born around 1913 and escaped Vienna around 1938. According to my grandparents in the ‘80s, Ernst (now known as Ernest) and his wife Erica “live[d] in London.” According to Jeanne, like Herman, Ernest was a humorous, great guy, and fun to be around.

7. Harold Rosenbaum

He was born around 1913 and escaped around 1938. Unfortunately, I don’t know where he went in the world.

I want to acknowledge that while they all survived, I want to bet that all – or almost all – of them carried trauma probably for the rest of their lives. While I don’t know for any of Grandpa John’s friends, Grandpa John’s life was not without loss: Both of his parents and his sister were murdered in the Holocaust.

Odds and Ends: Embroidered Items

 The other day I went through the boxes a bit more and I found some embroidered items. They include:

 

1. A wallet:

2. A foundation container. When you open it, it still has the smell of makeup:

3. A makeup compact and wallet:

4. Another potential makeup compact:

(I’m not showing a picture of the inside because there is nothing left in it except residue.)

 

Where did these come from? And why does the inside of the wallet say Made in Austria in English? Did it come from the modern region of Austria or did it come from the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

In terms of the latter, I know neither why it says Made in Austria in English nor exactly which Austria it comes from. As for where they come from though…

 

According to Aunt Jeanne, all of these embroidered items reminded her of the piano bench cushion at Grandmargie’s house:

 

They look similar, right? As you can see, they both have a floral design. Jeanne says that she thinks that these embroidered items were inherited from her (Great-) Aunt Zdenka.

 

Who’s Aunt Zdenka? Aunt Zdenka was the wife of Adolph Pick. He was the half-brother of Grandmargie’s mother, Martha (Pick) Weiner. Zdenka immigrated to America in 1926.

 

Considering the fact that the two chairs and small table in the entrance hall as well as the loveseat in the living room of Grandmargie’s house were inherited from Adolph and Zdenka Pick’s house, it is plausible to believe that the above embroidered items were too. Unfortunately, I don’t have any conclusive evidence yet but hopefully I will find some in the near future.

The Suddenness of Life and Death

I posted this last year when the Jewish calendar and the Gregorian date lined up almost perfectly. This year, the High Holidays were earlier this month so I decided to keep this as close to it's Gregorian date instead. 

I’m taking a quick break from the boxes this week to talk about my mom’s side instead.

 

On her side, one of the stories that got passed down the generations was that Grandpa’s (my maternal grandfather’s) oldest sister died as a child. It was always told that she was the eldest child of her family and that she was either 7 or 9 when she died. Nobody ever knew what she died from. Her two brothers – both of whom grew up to be doctors – speculated decades later that she died from tuberculosis, like their father, but they weren’t sure.

 

A couple of times over the years I tried to find her death certificate. On the July 1912 immigration ship manifest with her mother and younger brother, it says her name was Rifka Zuljar. I tried searching for that. It didn’t work. I tried slight variations of her last name such as Zuliar and Zuler. Those didn’t work either.

 

Then I stumbled upon the Michiganology website. On a whim, I typed “Juliar” into the search bar of the Death Records 1897-1920 database thinking that the one death certificate I would find on there would be for Grandpa’s father. And there it was, above the name of Joseph Juliar (Grandpa’s father) (whom Mom and I call Joseph Zular to distinguish him from Grandpa).

 

Bekka Juliar. And a link to view the original certificate:

 

I was astounded. I couldn’t believe it! I had found her at last.

 

One of the first things I noticed was that the address was 426 Hastings St., Detroit, Michigan. This made perfect sense since her father died at the same address too. (It was where Grandpa’s father had a butcher shop.) Her age – 7 years, 5 months – threw me for a loop at the time. That didn’t make sense! She was listed as being 6 years old when she immigrated to America two years previously! How had she gained only 1.5 years in age over a 2+ year time span? However, I later realized that it could be because they didn’t know her exact age. This is because in those days, birthdays weren’t a big a big deal for Russian Jews. This also means – based on both the manifest and her death certificate – that she could’ve been born sometime between about the second half of July 1905 to April 1907. Which means that depending on when she was born, she could’ve been anywhere between age 7 and 9 when she died. And these are the two ages that are in the family lore. Which explains why nobody knew the exact age at her death.

 

Looking farther down the left-hand side of the death certificate, all of the birthplaces seemed correct – yes, as far as we know of, both Rifka and her parents were born in the Russian Empire, and her father’s name was correct too. However, her mother’s name made me pause. The death certificate says her name is Seiga Lingerman. It’s actually Feiga Singermanso something got lost in the translation or misheard or misunderstood somewhere. (By the way, I have never heard of the informant’s – H. Foreman’s – name before.)

 

On the right-hand side, it says that she died on September 28, 1914. That got me thinking. The High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)) always fall sometime between early September and mid-October depending on the year. Did she die around the High Holidays? Actually she did:

The 10 Tishrei is Yom Kippur day but like all Jewish holidays it starts the night before. Looking at the death certificate more closely, we see that she was buried the next day (29 September). This means that within hours of her funeral, her parents and siblings at least possibly, if not probably, had to go to synagogue for the Kol Nidre service (the first service of Yom Kippur) and her parents had to start a 25-hour fast if they were medically able to.

 

It’s just astounding to me to think of the suddenness of life. Rifka – Bekka – Juliar was alive and presumably healthy on Rosh Hashanah. By Yom Kippur, she was dead.

 

That’s only a ten day difference.

 

According to Mom – and this was in the 1950s! – she remembers attending Yom Kippur services with her paternal grandmother and during one of the confessionals, her grandma would cry as she beat her chest. For years I thought it was because her grandma was very religious so she was crying because she was thinking of all the bad things she had done wrong over that past year. Since finding that death certificate though, I’m now wondering if part of it had to do with grieving the death of her first-born child.

 

We will never know for certain.

 

If you observe Yom Kippur (which starts tonight), may you be written in the Book of Life and if not, have a great Sunday.

The Swiss Notebook

 The document for this week is this blue and white notebook.

As you can see, it’s in German. Initially I thought that Grandpa John (my paternal grandfather and Grandmargie’s husband) possibly bought it when he was in Vienna but it says that it was made in Zurich. While it’s still possible that he bought it in Vienna and used it before he escaped, it seems more likely that he bought it in Switzerland itself considering that Vienna was a much larger city than Zurich was. Secondly, another reason I think that Grandpa John wrote this while he was in Switzerland between 1938-1940 is because some of the dates are in the European style (as you’ll see in a moment). The first page looks like this:

 

My hypothesis is that these are all birth dates next to these names. The reason? Here is a picture of part of Margarethe “Grete” (Steinhaus) Kaiser’s (Grandpa John’s sister’s) birth record:

However, underneath Siegfried’s name, it says in German “Registr[ieren] alle 25. Nov. 1938” which means “all registered [on] 25 November 1938.” But why were they registered?

 

According to the Leo Beck Institute’s 1938 Project’s chronology webpage, on 12 November 1938, the Nazis instituted the “Order of Elimination of Jews from Economic Life” decree that declared that all Jews had to register their retail businesses so that they could be “Aryanized.” On 3 December of that same year, they had to register all of their real estate. There are two other potential registrations it could be: 

1. The registration of their financial assets; however, that was instituted back on 26 April 1938.

2. There was an order on 23 July 1938 stating that German Jews were required to register with the police by 31 December 1938 in order to receive special ID cards that would be used in dealing with government officials. I wasn't able to find out if this was true for Austrian Jews. However, since the Anschluss (mid-March 1938) meant they were subject to Nazi rule, there is at least a distinct possibility that this was also true for them.

2. 

In essence, due to the registration date listed on the document above, the two most probable registrations that it refers to is either the registration with the police or the registration of retail businesses.

 

Farther down the page are the names of Rebecca and Rosalia Rothenstein and Adolph Neumann. According to the English translation of Dear Federico: The story of a Jewish family by Lotti Goliger-Steinhaus (the wife of one of Grandpa John’s first cousins) (known as Caro Federico in Italian and Mein lieber Federico in German), it says:

 

We also learned from Hans [Grandpa John] that the Nazis had forced their way into his relatives’ house, ripped the diamond earrings from his aunt’s ears and then, after brutally beaten her and his uncle, they had dragged them off. Prior to the occupation of Austria, this uncle had been editor-in-chief of the ‘Wiener Tagblatt’.

        - Lotti Goliger-Steinhaus

 

Could this aunt and uncle that Lotti mentioned be Rebecca or Rosalia Rothenstein and/or Adolph Neumann? Could it be a couple from Grandpa John’s father’s side? I don’t know yet. More research will have to be done first.

 

Lastly, here are the two other pages in the notebook (plus an insert) that has writing on them. I have not been able to correctly identify any of these people:

Genealogy Boxes

Back in 2007 when we were clearing out Grandmargie’s house to get it ready to sell, Aunt Jeanne gathered up every document and photo that could potentially be of genealogical interest and put them into these cardboard boxes.

 

About a year-and-a-half later, I came home from my first semester of college. I was ready to spend a month relaxing, sleeping in, and hanging out with friends.

 

Then I got a call from Aunt Jeanne.

 

Essentially she said, “Hey Rebecca. I have three big cardboard boxes from Grandmargie’s house full of genealogical information. I don’t want them anymore; they’re taking up too much space. Do you want them?” Most people would’ve said no. I, on the other hand, enthusiastically said yes. Within days (if not sooner than that) Dad and I drove over and picked them up. As you can see, they’re massive.

 

 

 

I’ll be fully honest: I have never actually fully, completely gone through the boxes. They’ve defeated me before. But this time, I’ll defeat them. I hope you’ll join me for the first item next week.