Returning, p.3
Returning, page 3
The research library at Harvard Business School has a vast collection, made up of more than twenty-five hundred large white clothbound volumes that are as solid and heavy as building materials, of reports compiled by a firm initially called the Mercantile Agency, then R. G. Dun, then Dun & Bradstreet, which, beginning in the 1840s, sent agents all over the United States to inspect businesses and give an opinion of their creditworthiness. Clerks in New York entered the agents’ field reports into ledger books, in neat handwriting so tiny that the library staff lends you a magnifying glass so you can read it. There are reports on Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, and also, mainly, on innumerable small businesses scattered through the remote reaches of rural America. A whole volume is devoted to Ascension Parish, Louisiana, the home of my family, and there on the first page is a series of entries devoted to Jacob Lemann, my immigrant great-great-grandfather.
The first entry is from January 1848: “Jew, one of the best of his kind. In business 10 or 12 years. Deals fairly, pays promptly, has real estate and Negroes [‘has’ must mean ‘enslaves’], appears permanent and is considered a fair exception of what Jews generally are.” An agent who visited three years later wrote: “Came here in ’36 without ten cents, is an active, energetic money making fellow, looks sharp to #1, owns two houses and a store house. Real estate here worth $8000, in another parish worth $4000 and some in Cincinnati; he says he is worth $30,000. Considered good for ordinary purchases.”
Here is a report from another, less friendly agent, filed a few months later: “Can’t give him much of a character as he is a Jew. Believe he is not over honest in his dealings. Commenced as a butcher and was accused of killing old mules and selling them for meat. Traded in horses, then speculated a little in Western produce, married a Christian, and now keeps a plantation store. Makes a good deal by shaving notes. Is liberal to his family, but only gives to the poor when he knows the whole Parish will hear of it. Don’t think his credit stands high in Commercial Circles. He has some $5000 in real estate and perhaps some $25,000 in all (notes and mortgage). Is pretty shrewd in business, but owed his success greatly to good luck; never was known to lose in a transaction.”
Over the next few years the reports begin to take on a rising note of respect, showing perhaps that if you make some money and hold on to it, the circumstances of your arrival begin to fade out of memory. In December 1851 Jacob is a “keen shrewd business man.” In August 1852 he is a “man of good character.” In May 1853 “his name here would be very good.” In January 1854 Jacob tells the visiting agent that he has bought a house in New York City. In June 1856 the agent reports that Jacob, twenty years after he arrived in Louisiana without ten cents, has sold his store in Donaldsonville to a man named Bienvenue Mollere, and has begun making summer trips to Newport, Rhode Island.
I’m aware of only two photographs of Jacob Lemann, albumin prints made when he was an old man, whose stiffness was surely dictated by the limits of the equipment in those days, but that still leave the impression that people back then actually were stiff—human versions of ancient statuary. Anyway, Jacob, during the last decade of his life, was in fact ancient. He stared directly, even fiercely, at the camera through light clear steady eyes. He had a craggy face and a white beard. In one photograph he is wearing a formal, tightly buttoned black frock coat; the other shows just his face. Jacob left behind many progeny but not a lot of material that would give a sense of what was in his heart and mind. He never learned to write in the Roman alphabet, except for a stylized figure that stands for his signature; his documentary record is made up of numbers in ledger books, and scribblings in Hebrew characters. The only way available to understand him is through his actions, the choices he made.
Jacob was born the same year as Abraham Lincoln, 1809. Essenheim, his village, is an old, quiet town that sits up on a ridge, surrounded by vineyards that must have been there for centuries. Growing up, I had known that at the age of twenty-seven, alone, he somehow traveled 450 miles to the Atlantic port of Le Havre, France, at the mouth of the Seine, bustling from trade to and from the New World, and booked passage on a ship bound for New Orleans. But about his life in Germany I knew nothing until I started investigating, and neither did anybody else in my family. It was a blank, and not an object of great curiosity either. A few years ago, with Judith, my wife, I went to Essenheim and hired a guide, a local historian named Stefan Mossel, to help me learn what I could about my family before Jacob came to America.
Jacob Lemann in his midseventies, made by a photographer in Cincinnati.
Today an Ashkenazi Jew is someone whose origins are European outside of the Iberian Peninsula, but back in the Middle Ages the Ashkenazim—named after a minor biblical character—were Jews who lived in a tightly limited section of western Germany around the ancient towns of Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, which are arrayed in a line along the Rhine River. Jews turned up there as early as the year 300, having, at least according to legend, made their way from the Holy Land to Italy and then marched northward alongside the Roman legions. Essenheim is a short distance outside of Mainz. I have it in my head that I came from people, whom I picture as small, dark, strange, hunched under the weight of their backpacks, who arrived there by foot on some unimaginably long-ago date and then devised a way to get by and to pray and study and propagate. I’m not sure I’m so very different from them.
There’s an eight-hundred-page book published in 1927, the year after my parents were born, called A History of the Jewish People. It’s just the kind of one-volume summary of a vast theme that adorned the shelves of many middle-class American Jews who deeply respected scholarly knowledge but hadn’t had the means to achieve it themselves. A History of the Jewish People is a good example of what’s known as the Leidens-und-Gelehrtengeschichte school of Jewish history—suffering and learning. Under the heading of learning, Gershom ben Judah, a great Jewish scholar, established a school in Mainz in the late tenth century. Rashi, the most revered of all the Jewish medieval sages, was trained in Worms and Mainz. Under the heading of suffering, the corner of Germany where Jacob Lemann was born was the site of an endless procession of bloody persecutions of Jews.
In 1012 all Jews were expelled from Mainz; Gershom’s own son converted to Christianity so he could stay. The first mass killing of Jews in Europe took place in Mainz in 1096; more than a thousand Jews were murdered in a savage frenzy by Crusaders. In all, in this section of Germany, Crusaders murdered ten thousand Jews; perhaps because this kept them so busy, they never got to Jerusalem, their supposed destination. Even now some congregations remember these events in a special prayer on Yom Kippur. What was it about our tiny subcategory of humanity that generated this bloodlust? It was supposed to be that we were religious infidels and that we had money we had unfairly extracted from other people, but that doesn’t account for the great variety of circumstances in which so many people felt that the answer to their suffering was to inflict far greater suffering on Jews. There were further massacres in my family’s home ground in 1146, in 1221, in 1235. We were burned at the stake. We took our own lives, and sometimes our own children’s, to avoid being slaughtered. We were intermittently required to wear yellow hats when we went out in public, or to sew yellow badges on our clothing. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death, another in the series of disasters that were attributed to us, set off a wave of Jew killing. In Strasbourg, the stately queen city of this section of the Rhine, with a large cathedral and old narrow streets lined with substantial half-timbered houses, eighteen hundred Jews were rounded up on the Sabbath, brought to a cemetery, and burned alive. In 1650 the Jews, now blamed for the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War as we had been for the Black Death, were forced to remove themselves from wherever they lived within the city walls of Mainz and find new homes somewhere else.
Were Jacob Lemann’s forebears, my forebears, living in the Rhine River Valley then? If they were, how did they avoid being killed? Did they put out of their minds what seems now like a looming, ever-present possibility that the mob might come for them one day, or did they imagine, as we sometimes do now, that such things could never happen again? One legend of the origin of the Eastern European Jews, the people from whom, much later in America, we were so eager to differentiate ourselves, is that after the Crusades they fled from Germany to Poland and Russia, hoping that by resettling they would be out of danger. If the people I came from decided to stay in Germany, did that signal a confidence that they could operate safely, quietly, in a hostile environment? Did they calculate that the benefits of staying would outweigh the risks? Or were they simply accustomed to the lives they were living, as people usually are—unless they can’t be any longer?
Stefan Mossel took us to the town hall in a village called Nieder-Olm, just outside of Essenheim. We walked down a flight of steps to a basement. There, in a barren, linoleum-floored, fluorescent-lit room with a small metal Christmas tree sitting incongruously in the corner, he opened the arklike doors of a gray metal cabinet, pulled out a stack of ancient ledger books containing handwritten records of births, marriages, and deaths, and spread them out on a small table.
Napoleon’s army conquered this part of Germany in 1796. Because the French Revolution had given all people living in France the status of citizens, Jews became French citizens. This means the local civil officials began including Jews in record books—which is why much of what I learned about my family’s German origins was recorded in French. The first relative of mine whose name appears in the official records was a man whose name was listed as Feist Lamech. The next in my line, born in 1766, was listed as Beretz Lamech. Jacob Lemann was his son. In 1808 Napoleon required Jews to adopt last names, which they’d never had before: Beretz Lamech meant, simply, Beretz the son of Lamech. Beretz took the last name Lehmann; his siblings took the last name Mayer. Then, in 1812, when Jacob was three years old, Beretz died, at the age of forty-six. The house in Essenheim where the family lived is no longer standing. Stefan Mossel sent me an old picture, showing what he thinks was the Lehmanns’ house, a comfortably worn, thick-walled, tile-roofed building just off the main street. Evidently there weren’t enough Jews in Essenheim for them to have been restricted, or to have restricted themselves, to one street. Other houses in town where Jews lived—Mayers and Urnsteins—are still standing on the main street. They are solidly built two-story structures, indicating a measure of prosperity.
All up and down the Rhine Valley, whether they were officially subjects of France or of a German principality, Jews had always lived as a separate tribe—really a separate nation, an Israel in the form of an archipelago of small communities. They were legally barred from most occupations and from owning land. They followed the traditional dietary laws. They were educated by rabbis in Jewish schools, which made them among the few ordinary Germans with any education at all. They wrote in Hebrew characters, even when they were writing in German. They dressed in ways that would have distinguished them visually from non-Jews. They were self-governing, by communal authority, though ultimately answerable to the local prince.
This was the life that Jews had lived, generation after generation, in this corner of Europe. Before they came under French rule, German Jews had no formal rights as we understand them (and neither did most other people). Jews were usually not permitted to live in cities, only in villages, and there they usually lived in Judenstrassen, Jewish streets. The great Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg, once the tallest building in the world, had two carved figures on either side of one of its portals, Ecclesia (erect, proud, bearing a cross and a chalice), symbolizing Christianity, and Synagoga (blindfolded, head bowed, forlornly carrying a broken spear and a book), symbolizing Judaism. That the superiority of the mighty Catholic Church over a tiny non-Christian tribe was worth advertising so prominently is a sign of the peculiarly large space we occupied in the mind of the majority. Beginning in 1388, all Jews in Strasbourg were required to leave at sunset and the city gates were locked behind them.
Almost all Jews in the Rhine Valley, at least those who weren’t destitute, engaged in some combination of peddling, trading livestock and dry goods, shopkeeping, and moneylending, which for centuries had been the only paying endeavors that were open to them. As A History of the Jewish People puts it, “Jew and merchant were synonymous terms.” My own forebears are listed in the record books as, depending on whether Essenheim was under French or German control, Handelsman, marchant, or marchant des bestiaux. To judge by the way they lived, my family were probably Schutzjuden, Jews who lived under an annually granted letter of protection from the local prince, in return for which they had to pay special taxes that were higher than everyone else’s. Jews did not have the freedom to live where they wanted without this kind of special permission. Often their freedom to marry was also restricted, because of the authorities’ felt need for protection from a too-large local population of Jews—even though Jews did not have the means to protect themselves. And after the fall of Napoleon, in 1814, and the end of French control of our part of Germany, the long-familiar restrictions and outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence began again. It wasn’t until the unification of Germany as a modern nation, in 1871, that German Jews were fully emancipated. By that time Jacob Lemann was long gone.
As a wealthy old man living in faraway rural Louisiana, Jacob used to get importuning letters from people in Mainz. A niece, one of the Mayers, wanted a dowry so she could get married; a needy woman reminded Jacob that she had helped his widowed mother raise him and felt this merited repayment. But there isn’t any evidence to indicate what his life was like before he left for America—how he and his undoubtedly overburdened mother lived, how he was educated, what work he did, how wrenching the decision to emigrate all by himself was. It’s tempting to turn people in the past into mere actors, semiconscious, lacking the self-awareness that we have, moving forward toward their inevitable destinations without a lot of thought, as if pulled along by a towline. But that can’t possibly be right. How could it not be emotionally overwhelming for a young man to move halfway around the world alone with no definite prospects, not knowing as we do how his adventure would turn out? Among my family’s papers, I found a memoir of a departure from Alsace, in 1864, left by a relative of ours by marriage named Felix Kahn, one of seven children of a poor family who left for the New World one by one. Felix had only just turned fifteen when he immigrated to Brazil. Here is how he remembered his departure:
Finally the 18th of May arrived—I shall never forget this day. The most profound circumstances are engraved in my heart with characters of bronze. Well I remember this scene. My God! How I cannot forget it. All those who have left their well beloved parents, for a country far away, not knowing when they can return, will understand that which I felt, and that it will be impossible to write of it. When I said goodbye to my mother, she took me to her heart and covered me with kisses—and me, my God! I am not yet free of the pain. The coachman was in a hurry. I released myself from my mother’s embraces. I ran like a fool and took myself away from the paternal home where I was born and had grown up. The goodbyes of my grandmother were heart-rending, for she felt she would never see me again.
Jacob left behind nothing that shows him to have been capable of expressing himself so floridly. The record we have of his departure from Germany is a passport that he kept for the rest of his life and that his descendants preserved after he was gone. He was part of a distinct movement: thousands of Germans, including German Jews, made their way from the Rhine Valley to Le Havre in the 1830s, bound for America, with New Orleans a common destination. Great multiple-masted wooden sailing ships would come from New Orleans to Le Havre bearing cotton from the South’s slave plantations. Wagons would meet them and then take the cotton back to Strasbourg, the commercial center of Alsace’s growing textile industry. The wagons would return to Le Havre bearing people—emigrants like Jacob. There, hard by a port filled with ships and a shoreline jammed with four- and five-story buildings thrown up to accommodate the boom times, the emigrants would stay in cheap boardinghouses. By day they would reconnoiter on the quays, looking for a ship’s captain or an agent with whom they could strike a deal for passage to America. Jacob’s passport shows him turning up in Darmstadt, not far from Essenheim, on July 23, 1836, then in Strasbourg on August 2, in Paris on August 13, in Le Havre on October 7, and finally in New Orleans on November 26, seven weeks later. The officials who stamped his passport listed his occupation variously as merchant or butcher.
Go Forth
It took some effort to get to see these documents connecting me more than two hundred years back in Father’s family history. It would have been close to impossible for my mother’s family. She had grown up in, for someone in her generation, a much more conventional American Jewish household than Father’s, in the small blue-collar city of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her father was the town’s first pediatrician. Until Mother went off to college, the family lived in a modest house divided horizontally into two apartments. They lived downstairs and a collection of relatives, who had to be partly supported by my grandfather because of the effects of the Depression, lived upstairs. A Conservative synagogue stood two or three blocks away. Mother’s sister once told me that if I wanted to understand what their childhood was like, all I had to do was read the first chapter of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Fair enough: the time period was the same, Roth’s Newark was only twenty miles away, and Mother’s Perth Amboy was an immediate environment that was at once entirely Jewish and enthusiastically, self-consciously all-American, full of optimism, the furthest thing from the doomed and dreamy South.
