Returning, p.6
Returning, page 6
These Louisiana Jews were people whose central animating myth was of their liberation from slavery, and whose organizing principle of daily life had been Jewish observance. And here they were seeking opportunity in an environment that required accepting slavery (of other people) as a given and living secular lives. If you take the trouble to look, the past, one’s own past, often doesn’t behave as one would like it to. How does one grapple with that? It’s possible that my descendants will learn about things I did that will trouble them, and may not have troubled me. I hope they will not dismiss me. I don’t want to dismiss my own ancestors, now that for me, because I investigated and learned things, they are no longer just names to be honored, opaque, stripped of the messiness of being human. Even so, truly understanding them is a difficult project. It’s hard to know from this distance what they thought and how they felt; all that’s possible is to find out what they did.
There’s Always Something
The first time Jacob Lemann’s name turns up in an official record after his arrival in New Orleans in 1836 is in the 1840 federal census. There he is the head of a household in Donaldsonville, with his last name spelled Lemann rather than Lehmann. Also in the household are four “free colored persons” and three white males. These must have been employees of the earliest version of the family store, run out of a home, as the Jews’ stores back in Essenheim were. And there is also a white woman, under the age of twenty, listed as a member of the household. That would have to be Jacob’s wife, my great-great-grandmother, who was born as Marie Estelle Berthelot in Thibodaux, Louisiana, some distance away on Bayou Lafourche, and baptized in a Catholic church there. Father, during his heraldry phase, entertained the hope that the Berthelots might have been descended from French nobility, but it seems more likely that they were French-Canadian fur trappers who had moved to Louisiana from somewhere in Missouri or Illinois. Family legend has it that Marie was working as an au pair in Donaldsonville when she met Jacob, and that her family was unhappy about the marriage. She would have been sixteen or seventeen years old. They were together until she died in the 1870s. In 1841 Jacob and Marie’s first child, my great-grandfather, Bernard Lemann, was born. (A second child, named Isaac, was born a year later. He died at the age of one.)
Not long after that, Jacob’s and Marie’s names begin appearing regularly in the elegantly handwritten (often in French) official records of property transactions kept in the Ascension Parish courthouse. Dozens of these, executed in a flowery and often impenetrable legal jargon, march across the pages of the parish clerk’s thick record books. In most cases both Jacob and Marie have signed the document, Jacob with the stylized signature that was the only thing he ever learned to write that wasn’t in the Hebrew alphabet, Marie with an X, because, as one recording clerk put it, “Mrs. Lemann, having declared not to know how to write or sign, made her ordinary mark in the presence of the same witnesses, after due lecture of this act.” The transactions begin in the early 1840s at amounts in the hundreds of dollars. They gradually escalate to sums in the tens of thousands by the late 1850s. Jacob was in two overlapping businesses: operating his store on the Donaldsonville town square, and buying and selling assets of all kinds—primarily land.
When Willie Stark sends Jack Burden off to investigate Judge Montague Irwin, of Burden’s Landing, looking for misdeeds, Jack can’t believe he’ll find anything. But Willie is right: there’s always something. What about for Jacob Lemann? Again, there’s always something—something a great deal more weighty than the minor professional lapse Jack turned up about Judge Irwin. The old Ascension Parish records reveal that among the assets Jacob bought and sold during the years of his rise were enslaved people. I found fourteen of these transactions of human beings in all, involving eighteen people. In the first record, from 1844, Jacob sold “Louisa a mulatto woman aged about twenty years and Lewis alias Steam Boat a negro man aged about forty years,” for $832. Just a few days later, for $2020, he bought Arianne, “trente trois ans,” and her four small children, Edouard, Maria, Alfred, and Virginie. In 1848 he sold Ned Henry, “aged about twenty-seven years acquired by the vendor as a runaway at a sheriff sale,” along with the same Arianne, with only three of her children, for $5000. In 1851 he bought Emma, age eighteen, for $200. In 1852 he bought and then immediately sold Alfred, a fourteen-year-old boy, for $800. A few months later he bought Judy Cole, age thirty-one, and her two children, Peyton and Henry, for $1210. Later that year he sold Emma, whom he had bought the previous year, for $628. In 1857 he sold King, age thirty-five, whom he had bought at a local auction, for $1300. I don’t know anything else about these people or their descendants. Some of those descendants must still be living in Donaldsonville, as some of Jacob’s descendants are.
Jacob was not operating plantations, so he evidently wasn’t looking for laborers he could compel to work in the cane fields. He was a middleman, as Jews so often have been. The 1850 census shows him owning no slaves. Usually he had bought the Black people whom he was selling at a public auction after somebody had defaulted on taxes, or from a widow whose husband had recently died, and their bodies were conveyed along with a piece of land. Jacob was looking for underpriced assets that he believed he could sell later at a profit. During this time the antislavery movement was well underway, though certainly not in Louisiana sugar country, but if its arguments ever made an impression on Jacob, there’s no evidence of it. His own records consist entirely of cryptic columns of figures, sometimes accompanied by a private shorthand made up of German words rendered in the Hebrew alphabet (perhaps he didn’t want any information about his business to be accessible to prying eyes). Black people were valuable not just as workers but also as property that could be bought, sold, or mortgaged, and Jacob obviously didn’t feel constrained from doing those things if the opportunity arose as he looked for investment. And in the larger sense, he was getting rich in an economy that was thriving because it was entirely based on slavery.
Ever since I sat in the Ascension Parish clerk’s office looking at these records, I can’t get them out of my mind. As late as the 1930s, when one of the New Deal agencies paid for a project to translate the old records out of French into English and to type them up so they would be easier to read, the project was limited to land transactions—no livestock or Black people. That’s a sign of the ambient level of moral awareness in Louisiana, back when it was casting nearly 90 percent of its votes for Franklin Roosevelt. And shouldn’t Jacob, as a Jew, have seen the wrong in slavery? Evidently he did not. The Torah is full of references to slavery, treating it as something far below, say, idol worship on the scale of immorality. At best one can say that the Torah tries to create rules for slaveholders, including Jewish ones, while exulting in the collective emancipation of the Jews as a people. Could Jacob have been obeying some inner compass that would be utterly foreign and offensive to us today? All I can do with these questions, given the opacity to me of Jacob’s inner life, is to say that there is a direct causal connection between his involvement with slavery, which I would consider evil even if he did not, and the life I’m able to live today. It’s my job, not his, to do what I can to make amends, if that is even possible. I cannot remove slavery from our family’s history—my history.
The Lemann store had established itself within ten years of Jacob’s arrival in the United States as the leading retailer in Donaldsonville. In 1846, the year he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, he took out an advertisement in a local newspaper, obviously written for him by somebody else, announcing that he had a wide array of goods acquired from “friends in Cincinnati and New York,” including carriages, carts, harnesses, “negro clothes,” whiskey, wine, tobacco, lard, salt, and sugar. He operated a saddler’s shop, “where various planters can have work of any kind made to satisfaction on the shortest notice.” He was willing to part with any item he carried for cash, credit, or barter.
In one of the old parish records, created in 1848, Jacob confers power of attorney over the store and his investment properties to a man named Joseph Cire for six months, because he is planning an extended visit to New York. It’s obvious from the store advertisement I just quoted that Jacob was operating within a network that went far beyond Louisiana. That was how he got the goods he sold in the store, and probably also the money he was using to buy land and enslaved people. The network was made up mainly of other German-Jewish immigrants. Just as, in Louisiana, Jacob extended credit to his customers and to the people he traded with, outside of Louisiana other German Jews extended credit to him. They trusted one another. They spoke the same language.
What becomes clear as you follow his trail forward in time through the records is that Jacob had more in mind in New York than merely making business connections. He was beginning to move his family there. The evidence I have would indicate that he was seeking not a hometown that wasn’t based on slavery, and not a richer cultural life, but a way to be more actively Jewish than Donaldsonville could provide. In 1852, in New York, Marie came before a court of three rabbis and informed them that she was married to a Jew, had given birth to a Jewish son who had been circumcised, and had herself just recently been immersed in a bath of ritual purification. She was officially converted to Judaism and renamed Miriam.
The presiding official at this ceremony was German-born Max Lilienthal, the most prominent German-Jewish rabbi in the United States, the first American rabbi who held a degree from a university. Lilienthal stood as a living emblem of the hope that German-born Jews could find a miraculous life in America, one previously unknown in the whole great sweep of Jewish history, which would combine all the freedoms accorded to non-Jews in enlightened societies with the full benefits of Jewish observance. In 1846, not long after he arrived in the United States, Lilienthal told his people back home that he was writing them from “New York, from the God-blessed country of freedom, the beautiful ground of civic equality! The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream.” Following Marie’s conversion, she and Jacob had a second wedding ceremony, at Congregation Ansche Chesed, then housed in an elegant newly constructed building on the Lower East Side, which still stands.
In 1854 Jacob and Miriam bought a small house in Newport, Rhode Island, not yet a resort with grand seaside mansions. This wasn’t a location they had chosen by accident or merely because of its climate advantage over New Orleans. The house was just a short distance from the Touro Synagogue, whose home, an austere, imposing painted brick structure built in 1763, is the oldest Jewish house of worship still standing in the United States. Judah Touro, the only son of the synagogue’s founding religious figure, had moved to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century and had become its most rich and prominent Jewish citizen. In 1790 George Washington visited the Touro Synagogue; in preparation he wrote a letter to the congregation promising, astonishingly, that the United States would always be a nation without official religious prejudices, and that every one of “the children of the stock of Abraham” shall “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Like Max Lilienthal, the Touro Synagogue partook of a powerful dream of what kind of Jewish life might be possible in America—though at that point it wasn’t possible in Donaldsonville.
The ketubah (marriage contract) for the religious remarriage of Jacob and Miriam (formerly Marie) Lemann in New York City, 1852.
In 1856, Jacob sold his store, with all its contents, to his chief clerk, Bienvenue Mollere, for just under $15,000, and signed a legal document promising never to engage in shopkeeping in Donaldsonville again. The next year he sold the land under the store to Mollere for $10,000. The year after that, 1858, Jacob and Miriam bought a house in New York City, on Twenty-Third Street, which was then filling up with substantial brownstones. Bernard’s much younger brother Myer—perhaps named for the family’s Mayer relatives back in Essenheim, as Bernard was probably named after Jacob’s father, Beretz—was born in New York not long after that.
When Judith and I went to Essenheim, our guide, Stefan Mossel, told us he had a couple of surprises for us, beyond the official records of births, marriages, and deaths that were stored in the basement of the town hall of Nieder-Olm. He took us to the Essenheim town hall. There, in the kitchen, sitting on a metal dolly, was a massive stone, eight inches thick, with a carved inscription in Hebrew. Stefan told us that it was one of two cornerstones that had flanked the front door of Essenheim’s synagogue, built in 1857, one inscribed in Hebrew, the other, now lost, in German. The Hebrew inscription said that the synagogue had been a gift from Jacob Lemann.
So, nearly twenty years after he had left, Jacob returned to Essenheim as a Jewish philanthropist. We walked around the corner and saw the empty, weedy lot where the small, solid synagogue had once stood. It had operated from 1857 until 1935, when the Nazis forced all the Jews in Essenheim to move to Mainz, a few miles away, which had a much larger Jewish community. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, both of the synagogues in Mainz were burned, and afterward a heavy tax was levied on the Jews to pay for the damage. In 1942 and 1943 all the Jews who remained in Mainz, 1336 people, were deported to concentration camps. In Essenheim, the synagogue was turned into a storehouse. There is a brief old film clip showing it during that period. The missing German-language cornerstone commemorating Jacob Lemann’s gift is clearly visible. Inside the holy spaces, ducks wander around among piles of junk. In the 1970s, the deteriorating building was finally demolished. On the main street of Essenheim, in front of one of the old half-timbered houses, there are small square brass plaques set in the pavement—Stolpersteines, which one sees all over Germany in front of murdered Jews’ homes—memorializing three of my Mayer relatives who were shipped off to the camps.
Stolpersteines, brass plaques memorializing victims of the Holocaust, set in the pavement in front of the former home of the Mayer family, our relatives, in Jacob Lemann’s home village of Essenheim, Germany.
From the Essenheim town hall, Stefan took us to a village called Jugenheim, which is the site of the cemetery where, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, all the Jews in the area were buried. A friend of Stefan who lives there walked with us out to the edge of the village and then down a rough dirt road that ran between cow pastures. There, a few hundred yards outside of town, was the Jewish cemetery, which isn’t marked on any map and would have been impossible for us to find on our own. On Kristallnacht, Jugenheim’s small synagogue had been burned down and the Jewish homes and businesses vandalized; soon after, the Hitler Youth desecrated the cemetery. It was easy for me to picture the scene—frenzied teenage boys given free license to have fun destroying the small monuments that were what was left of ordinary Jews’ lives. Why be confined solely to going after live Jews?
After the war the boys were identified and made to return to the cemetery and repair the damage they had inflicted, but evidently, if that was a rehabilitation program, it didn’t last long. Today the cemetery is a peaceful landscape of mostly toppled headstones resting under tall shade trees, surrounded by a low metal fence. Jacob, during the same period when he made the gift to build the synagogue in Essenheim, also commissioned a rather grand new headstone, considerably taller than me, for the grave of his father, who had died when he was three years old. Miraculously, it still stands untouched in the Jewish cemetery. One side is inscribed in Hebrew, the other in German. The German side says it is the grave of Peraz Lehmann, put up by Sohn Lehmann—who would be Jacob, the son.
The Jewish cemetery outside the village of Jugenheim, Germany, was never fully restored after its desecration by Nazi youth during Kristallnacht in 1938. Jacob Lemann’s parents are buried there.
Stefan had one last surprise to tell us about. In 1859, not long after the opening of the new synagogue Jacob had commissioned, his half brother, Joseph Lehmann, one of the children of Jacob’s father’s first marriage, was murdered in his home in Essenheim, evidently by a knife-bearing attacker who broke in and stabbed him to death. Stefan showed us the official police report describing the murder scene: “His dead body lay outstretched on the floor of the living room with his arms bent above his body, was dressed with jerkin, trousers, vest, shirt and slippers, the kerchief lay loose round the neck, on the side of his head lay the lost kippah.” From this you get a picture of a prosperous, and still religiously observant, businessman. The crime was never solved.
Later, Stefan sent us a slightly different account of the murder that he had found and translated from German into English, written by a man named Adam Probst, a Christian farmer who lived on the same street as Joseph Lehmann, a few houses away. Probst wrote: “About nine o’clock in the evening Joseph Lehmann was murdered in his own home. A strong hit shattered his skull, whereupon his death took place instantly. A golden clock, he still wore that day, was taken from him, his desk was opened and probably a lot of money stolen, because the desk was completely depleted.” From Probst’s point of view, Joseph had it coming. His account went on: “Lehmann was a big usurer and he probably was not completely without money. A suspicion actually rests on his own family, because he was an unjust father, an evil man. His children had to live in poverty although he possessed a fortune from which they all could have lived decently. However, proof cannot be delivered against them. By the way, the murdered had many more enemies than friends, and if the nefarious act remains covered, that will teach the future.”
It’s hard to read this and feel that the Essenheim to which Jacob returned was a place where Christians and Jews lived in prosperous harmony—but perhaps I say that because I know what happened three-quarters of a century later. Jacob had left Essenheim young, alone, much poorer, and willing to venture outside the confines of a Jewish life, including marrying a non-Jewish woman. Now he had come back as a successful middle-aged man, prosperous enough to erect these monuments, and observant enough to put his money and energy into specifically Jewish remembrance. Marie had become Miriam, their marriage had been religiously consecrated, they evidently belonged to two congregations, one in Newport and one in New York, and he was able and willing to invest in the future Jewish life of Essenheim—which, not so many years afterward, forced its long-established Jewish residents to leave, and then joined them into an undifferentiated mass of millions of other Jews and murdered them with industrial efficiency. No Jews live in Essenheim now.
There’s Always Something
The first time Jacob Lemann’s name turns up in an official record after his arrival in New Orleans in 1836 is in the 1840 federal census. There he is the head of a household in Donaldsonville, with his last name spelled Lemann rather than Lehmann. Also in the household are four “free colored persons” and three white males. These must have been employees of the earliest version of the family store, run out of a home, as the Jews’ stores back in Essenheim were. And there is also a white woman, under the age of twenty, listed as a member of the household. That would have to be Jacob’s wife, my great-great-grandmother, who was born as Marie Estelle Berthelot in Thibodaux, Louisiana, some distance away on Bayou Lafourche, and baptized in a Catholic church there. Father, during his heraldry phase, entertained the hope that the Berthelots might have been descended from French nobility, but it seems more likely that they were French-Canadian fur trappers who had moved to Louisiana from somewhere in Missouri or Illinois. Family legend has it that Marie was working as an au pair in Donaldsonville when she met Jacob, and that her family was unhappy about the marriage. She would have been sixteen or seventeen years old. They were together until she died in the 1870s. In 1841 Jacob and Marie’s first child, my great-grandfather, Bernard Lemann, was born. (A second child, named Isaac, was born a year later. He died at the age of one.)
Not long after that, Jacob’s and Marie’s names begin appearing regularly in the elegantly handwritten (often in French) official records of property transactions kept in the Ascension Parish courthouse. Dozens of these, executed in a flowery and often impenetrable legal jargon, march across the pages of the parish clerk’s thick record books. In most cases both Jacob and Marie have signed the document, Jacob with the stylized signature that was the only thing he ever learned to write that wasn’t in the Hebrew alphabet, Marie with an X, because, as one recording clerk put it, “Mrs. Lemann, having declared not to know how to write or sign, made her ordinary mark in the presence of the same witnesses, after due lecture of this act.” The transactions begin in the early 1840s at amounts in the hundreds of dollars. They gradually escalate to sums in the tens of thousands by the late 1850s. Jacob was in two overlapping businesses: operating his store on the Donaldsonville town square, and buying and selling assets of all kinds—primarily land.
When Willie Stark sends Jack Burden off to investigate Judge Montague Irwin, of Burden’s Landing, looking for misdeeds, Jack can’t believe he’ll find anything. But Willie is right: there’s always something. What about for Jacob Lemann? Again, there’s always something—something a great deal more weighty than the minor professional lapse Jack turned up about Judge Irwin. The old Ascension Parish records reveal that among the assets Jacob bought and sold during the years of his rise were enslaved people. I found fourteen of these transactions of human beings in all, involving eighteen people. In the first record, from 1844, Jacob sold “Louisa a mulatto woman aged about twenty years and Lewis alias Steam Boat a negro man aged about forty years,” for $832. Just a few days later, for $2020, he bought Arianne, “trente trois ans,” and her four small children, Edouard, Maria, Alfred, and Virginie. In 1848 he sold Ned Henry, “aged about twenty-seven years acquired by the vendor as a runaway at a sheriff sale,” along with the same Arianne, with only three of her children, for $5000. In 1851 he bought Emma, age eighteen, for $200. In 1852 he bought and then immediately sold Alfred, a fourteen-year-old boy, for $800. A few months later he bought Judy Cole, age thirty-one, and her two children, Peyton and Henry, for $1210. Later that year he sold Emma, whom he had bought the previous year, for $628. In 1857 he sold King, age thirty-five, whom he had bought at a local auction, for $1300. I don’t know anything else about these people or their descendants. Some of those descendants must still be living in Donaldsonville, as some of Jacob’s descendants are.
Jacob was not operating plantations, so he evidently wasn’t looking for laborers he could compel to work in the cane fields. He was a middleman, as Jews so often have been. The 1850 census shows him owning no slaves. Usually he had bought the Black people whom he was selling at a public auction after somebody had defaulted on taxes, or from a widow whose husband had recently died, and their bodies were conveyed along with a piece of land. Jacob was looking for underpriced assets that he believed he could sell later at a profit. During this time the antislavery movement was well underway, though certainly not in Louisiana sugar country, but if its arguments ever made an impression on Jacob, there’s no evidence of it. His own records consist entirely of cryptic columns of figures, sometimes accompanied by a private shorthand made up of German words rendered in the Hebrew alphabet (perhaps he didn’t want any information about his business to be accessible to prying eyes). Black people were valuable not just as workers but also as property that could be bought, sold, or mortgaged, and Jacob obviously didn’t feel constrained from doing those things if the opportunity arose as he looked for investment. And in the larger sense, he was getting rich in an economy that was thriving because it was entirely based on slavery.
Ever since I sat in the Ascension Parish clerk’s office looking at these records, I can’t get them out of my mind. As late as the 1930s, when one of the New Deal agencies paid for a project to translate the old records out of French into English and to type them up so they would be easier to read, the project was limited to land transactions—no livestock or Black people. That’s a sign of the ambient level of moral awareness in Louisiana, back when it was casting nearly 90 percent of its votes for Franklin Roosevelt. And shouldn’t Jacob, as a Jew, have seen the wrong in slavery? Evidently he did not. The Torah is full of references to slavery, treating it as something far below, say, idol worship on the scale of immorality. At best one can say that the Torah tries to create rules for slaveholders, including Jewish ones, while exulting in the collective emancipation of the Jews as a people. Could Jacob have been obeying some inner compass that would be utterly foreign and offensive to us today? All I can do with these questions, given the opacity to me of Jacob’s inner life, is to say that there is a direct causal connection between his involvement with slavery, which I would consider evil even if he did not, and the life I’m able to live today. It’s my job, not his, to do what I can to make amends, if that is even possible. I cannot remove slavery from our family’s history—my history.
The Lemann store had established itself within ten years of Jacob’s arrival in the United States as the leading retailer in Donaldsonville. In 1846, the year he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, he took out an advertisement in a local newspaper, obviously written for him by somebody else, announcing that he had a wide array of goods acquired from “friends in Cincinnati and New York,” including carriages, carts, harnesses, “negro clothes,” whiskey, wine, tobacco, lard, salt, and sugar. He operated a saddler’s shop, “where various planters can have work of any kind made to satisfaction on the shortest notice.” He was willing to part with any item he carried for cash, credit, or barter.
In one of the old parish records, created in 1848, Jacob confers power of attorney over the store and his investment properties to a man named Joseph Cire for six months, because he is planning an extended visit to New York. It’s obvious from the store advertisement I just quoted that Jacob was operating within a network that went far beyond Louisiana. That was how he got the goods he sold in the store, and probably also the money he was using to buy land and enslaved people. The network was made up mainly of other German-Jewish immigrants. Just as, in Louisiana, Jacob extended credit to his customers and to the people he traded with, outside of Louisiana other German Jews extended credit to him. They trusted one another. They spoke the same language.
What becomes clear as you follow his trail forward in time through the records is that Jacob had more in mind in New York than merely making business connections. He was beginning to move his family there. The evidence I have would indicate that he was seeking not a hometown that wasn’t based on slavery, and not a richer cultural life, but a way to be more actively Jewish than Donaldsonville could provide. In 1852, in New York, Marie came before a court of three rabbis and informed them that she was married to a Jew, had given birth to a Jewish son who had been circumcised, and had herself just recently been immersed in a bath of ritual purification. She was officially converted to Judaism and renamed Miriam.
The presiding official at this ceremony was German-born Max Lilienthal, the most prominent German-Jewish rabbi in the United States, the first American rabbi who held a degree from a university. Lilienthal stood as a living emblem of the hope that German-born Jews could find a miraculous life in America, one previously unknown in the whole great sweep of Jewish history, which would combine all the freedoms accorded to non-Jews in enlightened societies with the full benefits of Jewish observance. In 1846, not long after he arrived in the United States, Lilienthal told his people back home that he was writing them from “New York, from the God-blessed country of freedom, the beautiful ground of civic equality! The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream.” Following Marie’s conversion, she and Jacob had a second wedding ceremony, at Congregation Ansche Chesed, then housed in an elegant newly constructed building on the Lower East Side, which still stands.
In 1854 Jacob and Miriam bought a small house in Newport, Rhode Island, not yet a resort with grand seaside mansions. This wasn’t a location they had chosen by accident or merely because of its climate advantage over New Orleans. The house was just a short distance from the Touro Synagogue, whose home, an austere, imposing painted brick structure built in 1763, is the oldest Jewish house of worship still standing in the United States. Judah Touro, the only son of the synagogue’s founding religious figure, had moved to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century and had become its most rich and prominent Jewish citizen. In 1790 George Washington visited the Touro Synagogue; in preparation he wrote a letter to the congregation promising, astonishingly, that the United States would always be a nation without official religious prejudices, and that every one of “the children of the stock of Abraham” shall “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Like Max Lilienthal, the Touro Synagogue partook of a powerful dream of what kind of Jewish life might be possible in America—though at that point it wasn’t possible in Donaldsonville.
The ketubah (marriage contract) for the religious remarriage of Jacob and Miriam (formerly Marie) Lemann in New York City, 1852.
In 1856, Jacob sold his store, with all its contents, to his chief clerk, Bienvenue Mollere, for just under $15,000, and signed a legal document promising never to engage in shopkeeping in Donaldsonville again. The next year he sold the land under the store to Mollere for $10,000. The year after that, 1858, Jacob and Miriam bought a house in New York City, on Twenty-Third Street, which was then filling up with substantial brownstones. Bernard’s much younger brother Myer—perhaps named for the family’s Mayer relatives back in Essenheim, as Bernard was probably named after Jacob’s father, Beretz—was born in New York not long after that.
When Judith and I went to Essenheim, our guide, Stefan Mossel, told us he had a couple of surprises for us, beyond the official records of births, marriages, and deaths that were stored in the basement of the town hall of Nieder-Olm. He took us to the Essenheim town hall. There, in the kitchen, sitting on a metal dolly, was a massive stone, eight inches thick, with a carved inscription in Hebrew. Stefan told us that it was one of two cornerstones that had flanked the front door of Essenheim’s synagogue, built in 1857, one inscribed in Hebrew, the other, now lost, in German. The Hebrew inscription said that the synagogue had been a gift from Jacob Lemann.
So, nearly twenty years after he had left, Jacob returned to Essenheim as a Jewish philanthropist. We walked around the corner and saw the empty, weedy lot where the small, solid synagogue had once stood. It had operated from 1857 until 1935, when the Nazis forced all the Jews in Essenheim to move to Mainz, a few miles away, which had a much larger Jewish community. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, both of the synagogues in Mainz were burned, and afterward a heavy tax was levied on the Jews to pay for the damage. In 1942 and 1943 all the Jews who remained in Mainz, 1336 people, were deported to concentration camps. In Essenheim, the synagogue was turned into a storehouse. There is a brief old film clip showing it during that period. The missing German-language cornerstone commemorating Jacob Lemann’s gift is clearly visible. Inside the holy spaces, ducks wander around among piles of junk. In the 1970s, the deteriorating building was finally demolished. On the main street of Essenheim, in front of one of the old half-timbered houses, there are small square brass plaques set in the pavement—Stolpersteines, which one sees all over Germany in front of murdered Jews’ homes—memorializing three of my Mayer relatives who were shipped off to the camps.
Stolpersteines, brass plaques memorializing victims of the Holocaust, set in the pavement in front of the former home of the Mayer family, our relatives, in Jacob Lemann’s home village of Essenheim, Germany.
From the Essenheim town hall, Stefan took us to a village called Jugenheim, which is the site of the cemetery where, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, all the Jews in the area were buried. A friend of Stefan who lives there walked with us out to the edge of the village and then down a rough dirt road that ran between cow pastures. There, a few hundred yards outside of town, was the Jewish cemetery, which isn’t marked on any map and would have been impossible for us to find on our own. On Kristallnacht, Jugenheim’s small synagogue had been burned down and the Jewish homes and businesses vandalized; soon after, the Hitler Youth desecrated the cemetery. It was easy for me to picture the scene—frenzied teenage boys given free license to have fun destroying the small monuments that were what was left of ordinary Jews’ lives. Why be confined solely to going after live Jews?
After the war the boys were identified and made to return to the cemetery and repair the damage they had inflicted, but evidently, if that was a rehabilitation program, it didn’t last long. Today the cemetery is a peaceful landscape of mostly toppled headstones resting under tall shade trees, surrounded by a low metal fence. Jacob, during the same period when he made the gift to build the synagogue in Essenheim, also commissioned a rather grand new headstone, considerably taller than me, for the grave of his father, who had died when he was three years old. Miraculously, it still stands untouched in the Jewish cemetery. One side is inscribed in Hebrew, the other in German. The German side says it is the grave of Peraz Lehmann, put up by Sohn Lehmann—who would be Jacob, the son.
The Jewish cemetery outside the village of Jugenheim, Germany, was never fully restored after its desecration by Nazi youth during Kristallnacht in 1938. Jacob Lemann’s parents are buried there.
Stefan had one last surprise to tell us about. In 1859, not long after the opening of the new synagogue Jacob had commissioned, his half brother, Joseph Lehmann, one of the children of Jacob’s father’s first marriage, was murdered in his home in Essenheim, evidently by a knife-bearing attacker who broke in and stabbed him to death. Stefan showed us the official police report describing the murder scene: “His dead body lay outstretched on the floor of the living room with his arms bent above his body, was dressed with jerkin, trousers, vest, shirt and slippers, the kerchief lay loose round the neck, on the side of his head lay the lost kippah.” From this you get a picture of a prosperous, and still religiously observant, businessman. The crime was never solved.
Later, Stefan sent us a slightly different account of the murder that he had found and translated from German into English, written by a man named Adam Probst, a Christian farmer who lived on the same street as Joseph Lehmann, a few houses away. Probst wrote: “About nine o’clock in the evening Joseph Lehmann was murdered in his own home. A strong hit shattered his skull, whereupon his death took place instantly. A golden clock, he still wore that day, was taken from him, his desk was opened and probably a lot of money stolen, because the desk was completely depleted.” From Probst’s point of view, Joseph had it coming. His account went on: “Lehmann was a big usurer and he probably was not completely without money. A suspicion actually rests on his own family, because he was an unjust father, an evil man. His children had to live in poverty although he possessed a fortune from which they all could have lived decently. However, proof cannot be delivered against them. By the way, the murdered had many more enemies than friends, and if the nefarious act remains covered, that will teach the future.”
It’s hard to read this and feel that the Essenheim to which Jacob returned was a place where Christians and Jews lived in prosperous harmony—but perhaps I say that because I know what happened three-quarters of a century later. Jacob had left Essenheim young, alone, much poorer, and willing to venture outside the confines of a Jewish life, including marrying a non-Jewish woman. Now he had come back as a successful middle-aged man, prosperous enough to erect these monuments, and observant enough to put his money and energy into specifically Jewish remembrance. Marie had become Miriam, their marriage had been religiously consecrated, they evidently belonged to two congregations, one in Newport and one in New York, and he was able and willing to invest in the future Jewish life of Essenheim—which, not so many years afterward, forced its long-established Jewish residents to leave, and then joined them into an undifferentiated mass of millions of other Jews and murdered them with industrial efficiency. No Jews live in Essenheim now.
