It has been close to 200 years since my family emigrated from the area that was once the Prussian territories to the guldene medina, the land of gold, America the great. My great-great-great-great-great grandfather Louis, on my father’s side of the family, wrote a booklet of memoirs on his 80th birthday, a sheaf of typewritten recollections which have been passed down through the generations of my family. Louis describes the highlights of his immigration journey; a journey in which a poor young man dreaming of religious and social freedoms came to a country he would later describe as “this glorious land,” and lived those dreams, all the while remaining true to his vision of equality and human dignity for all.
Louis’s father Solomon, the son of Coshman ben Solomon, married Deborah Kuhn, the Rabbi’s daughter in the early 1800’s. Louis writes with evident pride that his parents married, rather unusually in that era, “for love,” unusual in their community and era. Their love withstood many challenges, the least of which was poverty: “[Though] for a time they were obliged to struggle to make both ends meet, love and harmony took up their abode with them.” Tragically, four of their ten children died in their lifetimes. They also faced religious persecution: Though Prussia had granted emancipation to the Jews living within its borders, 21 territorial laws limited the economic and social mobility of several minorities including the Jews, thereby denying the family full citizenship.
Louis was a restless student, and didn’t much care for Hebrew school. At a young age, he begged his father to to apprentice him to a woodworker in the community. This request granted, Louis proved to be an adept worker, and began setting money aside, helping his parents with their own bills. Recognizing how limited opportunities were for Jewry in Prussia, he decided to emigrate to America. He writes, “I favored a free republican government where certain forms of religious belief were not essential to civil privileges and liberty.” Since it was hard for minorities to receive emigration documents, Louis “resorted to the expedient of forging what was essential to pass along.” He secured passage to the United States; and, after a sad goodbye to his beloved family, proceeded from Demmelsdorf to the port of Bremen on foot, a journey that probably took about a week.
The month-and-a-half-long passage from Bremen to New York was uneventful, and Louis, evidently quite a charming young fellow, quickly made friends with his landsmen, several other young men seeking religious freedom on the American soil. Upon landing, Louis writes, “My companions and I passed the first days on shore in seeing the sights of New York. We found friends and acquaintances and were well received by all of them.” Afterward Louis and some of his friends traveled on to Cincinnati, where there was a growing Sabbath-observant yekke – German Jewish – community, complete with two synagogues and a Hebrew school.
In Cincinnati, Louis earned a living first as a peddler, saving enough money to open two businesses. His first venture failed, but the second, a dry-goods shop, flourished, allowing him to provide passage for his parents and younger siblings to Cincinnati. After joyously reuniting with his parents, Louis courted his future wife Yetta, and married her in a double wedding shared with his best friend, Jacob and Jacob’s fiancée.
Throughout his reminiscences of these important milestones, Louis peppers his narrative with twin sentiments: a deep and abiding aversion to social inequality, and a passionate defense mankind’s inherent right to freedom and citizenship. He says he never looked back at the old country with any love. “My native land did not claim my affection because its laws deprived me of those privileges that should have been the inalienable right of mankind,” he writes. Louis describes proudly attending a speech by Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War and decorating his delivery wagon in Whig colors to show his support of President Lincoln. He notes with pride that his loud opinions against slavery made crossing the Mason-Dixon line, even to sell his high-quality dry goods, a dangerous venture. When visiting Mrs. Weil’s boarding house in New York, he tells of an argument he had with a Southern man at the table. Louis was appalled that the man, a “co-religionist” who had once hailed from the same past as he, could even begin think of slavery as acceptable. The southerner drew his pistol and a fellow Cincinnatian leapt to Louis’s aid. As Louis says, “The Southern gentleman was only too glad to get away.” Shortly after, Louis joined the Union army as a proud American citizen, only to be sent home in order to supply the army with the flannel underwear necessary for the soldiers’ uniforms.
After the Civil War, Louis continued to participate actively in religious affairs and advocate for civil rights and freedoms, never losing his dedication. He would regularly collect charity for the sick in Mt. Sinai hospital in New York, and become known among his friends for a passionate dedication to those less fortunate. In Louis’s obituary, his close friend writes, “[Louis’s] shibboleth was, ‘In this work we are neither Christians nor Jews, it is for our common humanity.’” This universalism was of great pride to Louis, who took care throughout his life to treat all men and women, of every “race, creed and religion” with the same respect, dignity and kind countenance.
200 years is both a long and a short time. In this time Louis’s descendants have scattered across the United States, some leaving the Jewish community over time, and others, my own more immediate family among them, adopting the more stringent practices that the Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian immigrants brought to America after the Holocaust. My own grandparents are descendants of that original German Jewish community in Cincinnati, but most of the Jewish customs and ideals that I was raised with are traditionally litvish, originating from the customs established over the last millennium by the yeshivas in Vilna. My family has moved over state lines, away from and back to Ohio in their journey to Ultra-Orthodoxy. My brother, a Talmudic scholar, and my sister, a rabbi’s wife, have both settled across the Atlantic in Israel, while I have returned from there to live in New York City. However changed the religious and social landscape is, I see some of Louis’s journey in my own. Like Louis, I am journeying forth from a small insular community, armed with a mixture of pride in my religious roots and a desire to expand beyond traditional boundaries by studying to be an astrophysicist. I only hope that I can undertake my personal immigration story with the same vivacity and deep, passionate integrity that resonate through my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s memoirs.
