The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,
small beads of ego, bright with appetite,
whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,
bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf
unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.

From John Updike’s Hospital,
(Mass General, November 23-27, 2008)

Introduction

Turlock – Earthworm Jim, Dr. Ong,  the Crazy Shoemaker, My Ancestors and Me

Details of the past are lost.  Cut fingers, broken promises, a good night’s sleep, a gathering of friends, a journey – all disappear in the long stream of continuing life.  The outlines may remain awhile – a postcard or photo, a sales receipt, a ship’s passenger manifest, a newspaper article, a death notice, but personal experience vanishes.  Trying to resurrect it is an impossible task, but the effort can illuminate the present. In 1880, the outlines of our own family story all momentarily pass through Turlock, a small town in the central valley of California, equidistant from Yosemite, San Francisco and the Pacific coast town of Santa Cruz. It’s an unlikely place for convergence.

In fictional accounts of the town, author Doug TenNapel casts Turlock as the focal point for crazy characters in his creative novels and video games. They include a starring role for Earthworm Jim, a normal earthworm digging holes and fleeing Turlock birds, who is transformed into a super hero, battling evil. There is also Dr. Michael Ong, a paranormal scientist and former seminarian, who heads up a mysterious laboratory in Turlock, staffed by local residents who are working with aliens, mutants, Russian transporter technology and a werepig. Some of the real residents of early Turlock, including the crazy shoemaker who burned down my great grandfathers store, would fit nicely in TenNapel’s stories.  The real story of early Turlock evolves from a sequence of random events and purposeful choices.  A terrible fire in 1883 which burned much of the town, a young woman leaving UC Berkeley after the 1906 earthquake to become a teacher in Turlock, and a painful, early death in 1918, provide an early trajectory for my life and the lives of my children and grandchildren.

Exploring Traces, Making Connections

The earliest traces of our past are in Europe, a thousand years ago. Jewish migration to Rogasen, Poland started in the 11th century, a result of persecution of Jews by Crusaders in Germany. Other periods of Jewish migration followed anti-Semitic outbursts in Germany in the 12th through 15th centuries.   During this time Poland was a haven for Jews, as they were granted powers of self-government unheard of elsewhere. My own origins can be traced back to the early 1800’s, with Simon and Flora Cohen in Rogasen, Poland, and with Louis and Hannah Strauss in Bavaria, Germany. In the early years of their marriages, the public was astonished as ice was created for the first time by refrigeration on a hot summer day, Darwin set sail on the H.M.S. Beagle, photography was invented, the planet Neptune was discovered, and the American Civil began. In Rogasen, except for the invention of photography, these events went unnoticed.

Simon and Flora Cohen had have five sons – Philip, Louis, Nathan, William and Aron. In the mid 1800’s all left Rogasen and never returned. Louis and Helena Strauss left their families as well, and didn’t look back. They also had two sons and two daughters. The sons and daughters of Simon and Flora, and of Louis and Helena married and had children, who also married and had children – and so on – until later generations lost track of one another and forgot their origins. They were busy living their lives. Few will ever wonder about their ancestors, or about Rogasen and Bavaria in the early 19th century.

Then, generations later in the 21st century some of us will read about the fictional Dr. Ong and wonder about the real Turlock. The internet and the world wide web will be invented and our children will play Earthworm Jim on their Game Boy. Google and Facebook will appear, and a few descendants will find each other, as well as traces of our ancestors, as we wander and visit with each other on the web. These traces are often in scanned documents and photos stored on servers in pdf, jpg, and tiff files, as well as in other digital places. Some traces remain unscanned. We find them in boxes in the back of our closets. We begin to ask questions of each other, converse by email and facebook, and wonder about our ancestors lives and the connections to our own.  Two emerge as central in the story I wish to tell:   Max, the youngest son of Louis and Helena Strauss and Aron, the youngest son of Simon and Flora Cohen.

Max Strauss                        Aron Cohen
About 1866                          About 1862

Departure

It’s hard to imagine our children leaving us, never to return. Why did Simon and Flora’s sons leave Rogasen? Why did Louis and Helena leave Bavaria? It can’t have been an easy decision, abandoning everything familiar. We can ask this not only about the Cohens and the Strausses, but about millions of others who left Germany, Poland, and Russia in the 1800’s. There are a few clues which tell us why, and it’s best we don’t forget them.

In 1871, at age 17, Aron set sail from Hamburg on the Thuringia, eventually arriving in San Francisco that year.  His wife to be, Hannah Caro, would come a few years later as would Louis and Helena Strauss.

In 1878, not far from the homes they left, Adolph Stoecker, a German preacher and politician, founded the Socialist Worker’s Party. This was the beginning of the political anti-Jewish movement in Germany, and the very early beginnings of the Third Reich. Ten years later pogroms swept through southern Russia for four years, propelling mass Jewish emigration: about 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in the period from 1880-1920. In 1882 while Louis Strauss was building his first store in Turlock and Aron was starting his cigar factory in San Francisco and store  in Santa Cruz,  the first International Anti-Jewish Congress convened at Dresden, Germany. In May of 1882 a series of “temporary laws” created by Czar Alexander III of Russia resulted in a systematic policy of discrimination, with the object of removing Jews from economic and public positions, to “cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism and one-third to starve.” And there would have been an ominous shadow over Aron’s children’s possible future had he stayed in Prussia: A short distance south of Rogasen is the town of Auschwitz.

A Toast and A Hand Grenade

What did the young Cohens and Strausses know and feel about their futures in Prussia and Germany? We can’t know. They left behind the outlines: ledgers, photos, and traces of their lives and connections to the Jewish community. But none show inner motives. Perhaps in Rogasen they felt as another young man at that time, Walther Rathenau felt, that “in the the youth of every German Jew there is a painful moment, which he will remember as long as he lives when he realizes fully for the first time that he has been born into the world as a second-class citizen, and that no virtue and no merit can free him from this situation.”

So Aron and Louis left. Walther stayed. He made every effort to assimilate, to overcome the problems that were developing in Germany as he lived his life. He became a successful businessman, writer, politician and statesman, eventually becoming the Foreign Minister of the German Weimar Republic. This was a very visible position in a country where, for his community, it was dangerous to be visible.

In the early 1920’s graffiti started appearing on walls around Berlin: “God damn Walther Rathenau: The dirty, stinking Jewish pig.” A few months later, on the afternoon of June 24th, 1922, at 261 Otis street in Santa Cruz, California, Aron was hosting a dinner reunion for his three daughters at home. His wife Hannah and several of their friends were attending. Aron was about to begin a toast to the group. At just that moment, six thousand five hundred miles to the east, three young, nationalist Germans pulled up along side Walther Rathenau’s car as he drove to work. They emptied their guns into him. As he lay dying, they tossed in a grenade. The inside of the car turned red with Walther’s blood. Albert Einstein was stunned. Heeding his friends’ warnings of widespread anti-semitism, he canceled all his lectures; Not too many years later, he left Germany. A few hundred miles away in Prague, Franz Kafka noted ” It is incredible that Walther lived as long as he did; already two months ago we heard rumors of his murder.”  The writing on the wall really was the writing on the wall.

What Aron and his descendants escaped when he boarded the Thuringia in 1871 I cannot know. Had he stayed, had Louis and Hannah Strauss stayed, I’m guessing I wouldn’t be here to write this story, and in any case, there would be no descendants to read it.  But they did leave and came to the coast of California, traveling back and forth between San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Turlock as they lived their lives, and created many new ones.

Oil and Champagne Chalk, with thalo blue, permanent yellow and permanent rose. Some reflection on the top right from the light used to take the photo.

This is Zack’s first day.  He’s doing grand. Paintings below are first layers.  Details will go on in subsequent layers. 

So who is this little guy taking up so much of mom’s time these days?  Hey… he’s not so bad.  Maybe he’s part of the family?   I think this was taken by mom Merissa or Dad Michael yesterday.  It appeared on Merissa’s facebook home page and I asked for a higher res. jpg and she sent it last night.

For those of you following the draft of ancestor journeys, a second chapter will appear in the next week or so.  I”ve been in the library much of yesterday tracking passenger lists for the 1850′s of ships bringing immigrants over from Germany, Russia and Poland.   And I’ve been learning about the cigar trade in San Francisco, where great grandad got his start and made his fortune.  Luckily, he came in 1871 on a steam ship, which was much better than when his brothers Philip, Louis, and William sailed a few decades earlier.

Consider the following from “Journey to America”

It refers to problems on ships coming from England, but similar problems existed in those coming from Hamburg.

In the early 19th century sailing ships took about six weeks to cross the Atlantic. With adverse winds or bad weather the journey could take as long as fourteen weeks. When this happened passengers would often run short of provisions. Sometime captains made extra profits by charging immigrants high prices for food needed to survive the trip.

In 1842 the British government attempted to bring an end to the exploitation of passengers by passing legislation that made it the responsibility of the shipping company to provide adequate food and water on the journey. However, the specified seven pounds a week of provisions was not very generous. Food provided by the shipping companies included bread, biscuits and potatoes. This was usually of poor quality. One government official who inspected provisions in Liverpool in 1850 commented that “the bread is mostly condemned bread ground over with a little fresh flour, sugar and saleratus and rebaked.”

Captains were sometimes accused of using rations to control the behaviour of their female passengers. William Mure, the British consul in New Orleans reported that one captain “conducted himself harshly and in a most improper manner to some of the female passengers having held out the inducement of better rations to two who were almost starving in the hope they would accede to his infamous designs.” In 1860 the New York Commissioners of Emigration reported that there were “frequent complaints made by female emigrants arriving in New York of ill-treatment and abuse from the captains and other officers.” As a result of their investigation Congress passed a law that enabled captains and officers to be sent to prison for committing sexual offences against female passengers. However, there is no evidence that anyone was ever prosecuted under this law.

Travellers often complained about the quality of the water on the journey. The main reason for this was that the water was stored in casks that had not been cleaned properly after carrying substances such as oil, vinegar, turpentine or wine on previous journeys. One immigrant travelling in 1815 described the water as having such “a rancid smell that to be in the same neighbourhood was enough to turn one’s stomach”.

To maximize their profits shipowners tried to cram as many people as possible on board for the trip. In 1848 the U. S. Congress attempted to improve travelling conditions, by passing the American Passenger Act. This legislation prescribed a legal minimum of space for each passenger and one of its consequences was the building of a a new, larger type of ship called the three-decker. The top two decks carried the immigrants and although they had more space, the journey was still unpleasant. It was very dark in the lower deck and their was also a shortage of fresh air. Whereas those on the upper-deck had to contend with the stench rising constantly from below.

This is an image of Rogasen around 1850 taken from the website of Udi Cain.   If you have read the text below the image of my daughter and her new son Zachary, you will know this town is in Prussia, now Poland.  It’s current name is now Rogozno.  It is where the Strauss ancestors came from about 130 years ago.

God save us from ever ending, though billions have.               

The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,
small beads of ego, bright with appetite,
whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,
bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf
unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.

From John Updike’s Hospital, Mass General, November 23-27, 2008

 Introduction

The Crazy Shoemaker, Earthworm Jim and The Real Story

The lines come together in Turlock, a small town in the central valley of California, equidistant from from Yosemite, San Francisco and the Pacific coast. It’s an unlikely place for convergence. In fictional accounts of the town,  author Doug TenNapel casts Turlock as the focal point for crazy characters in his creative novels and video games. They include a starring role for Earthworm Jim, a normal earthworm digging holes and fleeing Turlock birds, who is transformed into a super hero, battling evil. There is also Dr. Michael Ong, a paranormal scientist and former seminarian, who heads up a mysterious laboratory in Turlock, staffed by local residents who are working with aliens, mutants, Russian transporter technology and a werepig. Some of the real residents of early Turlock, including the “Crazy Shoemaker” who burned down my great grandfather’s store, would fit nicely in TenNapel’s stories.  The real story of early Turlock residents arises from a tension between random events and purposeful choices. A terrible fire in 1883 which burned much of the town, a young woman leaving home in 1900 to become a teacher in Turlock, and a painful, early death in 1918, create the trajectory.

I’ll start as far back as traces can be found, in the early 1800’s, with Simon and Flora Cohen in Rogasen, Prussia, and with Louis and Hannah Strauss in Bavaria. In the early years of their marriages, the public will be astonished as ice is created for the first time by refrigeration on a hot summer day, Darwin will set sail on the H.M.S. Beagle, photography will be invented, the planet Neptune will be discovered, and the American Civil war will begin. In Rogasen, except for the invention of photography, these events will go unnoticed.

Simon and Flora will have five sons – Philip, Louis, Nathan, William and Aron. In the mid 1800’s all will leave Rogasen and never return. Louis and Helena Strauss will leave their families as well, and not look back. They will also have two sons and two daughters. The sons and daughters of Simon and Flora, and of Louis and Helena will marry and have children, who will also marry and have children – and so on – until later generations lose track of one another and forget their origins. They will be busy living their lives. Few will wonder about their ancestors, or about Rogasen and Bavaria in the early 19th century.

Then, generations later in the 21st century some of us will read about the fictional Dr. Ong and wonder about the real Turlock. The internet and the web will be invented and our children will play Earthworm Jim on their Game Boy. Google will appear, and a few descendants will find each other, as well as traces of our ancestors, as we wander on the web. These traces are often in scanned documents and photos stored on servers in pdf, jpg, and tiff files, as well as in other digital places. Some traces remain unscanned. We find them in boxes in the back of our closets. We begin to ask questions and wonder about our ancestors lives and the connections to our own. Two of these lives are seeds, which plant themselves in Turlock: Max, the youngest son of Louis and Helena – and Birdie, the granddaughter of Simon and Flora.

Departure

It’s hard to imagine our children leaving us, never to return. Why did Simon and Flora’s sons leave Rogasen? Why did Louis and Helena leave Bavaria? It can’t have been an easy decision, abandoning everything familiar. We can ask this not only about the Cohens and the Strausses, but about millions of others who left Germany, Poland, and Russia in the 1800’s. There are a few clues which tell us why, and it’s best we don’t forget them.

At age 17, Aron set sail on the Thuringia in 1871, eventually arriving in San Francisco that year.  His future wife, Hannah Caro, would come a few years later as would Louis and Helena Strauss. In 1878, not far from the homes they left, Adolph Stoecker, a German preacher and politician, founded the Socialist Worker’s Party. This was the beginning of the political anti-Jewish movement in Germany, and the very early beginnings of the Third Reich. Ten years later pogroms swept through southern Russia for four years, propelling mass Jewish emigration: about 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in the period from 1880-1920. In 1882 while Louis Strauss was building his first store in Turlock and Aron was starting his business in Santa Cruz,  the first International Anti-Jewish Congress convened at Dresden, Germany. In May of 1882 a series of “temporary laws” created by Czar Alexander III of Russia resulted in a systematic policy of discrimination, with the object of removing Jews from economic and public positions, to “cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism and one-third to starve.” And there is a thoughtful prelude to Aron’s children’s possible future had he stayed in Prussia: A short distance south of Rogasen is the town of Auschwitz.

A Toast and A Hand Grenade

What did the teenage Aron Cohen and Louis Strauss  know and feel about their futures in Prussia and Germany? We can’t know. They left behind ledgers and traces of their life and connections to the Jewish community, but none show inner motives. Perhaps in Rogasen they felt as another young man at that time, Walther Rathenau felt, that “in the the youth of every German Jew there is a painful moment, which he will remember as long as he lives when he realizes fully for the first time that he has been born into the world as a second-class citizen, and that no virtue and no merit can free him from this situation.”

So Aron and Louis left. Walther stayed. He made every effort to assimilate, to overcome the problems that were developing in Germany as he lived his life. He became a successful businessman, writer, politician and statesman, eventually becoming the Foreign Minister of the German Weimar Republic. This was a very visible position in a country where, for his community, it was dangerous to be visible.

In the early 1920’s graffiti started appearing on Berlin walls: “God damn Walther Rathenau: The dirty, stinking Jewish pig.” A few months later, on the afternoon of June 24th, 1922, at 261 Otis street in Santa Cruz, California, Aron was hosting a dinner reunion for his three daughters at home. His wife Hannah and several of their friends were attending. Aron was about to begin a toast to the group. At just that moment, six thousand five hundred miles to the east, three young, nationally minded Germans pulled up along side Walther’s Rathenau’s car as he drove to work. They emptied their guns into him. As he lay dying, they tossed in a grenade. The inside of the car turned red with Walther’s blood. Albert Einstein was stunned. Heeding his friends’ warnings of widespread anti-semitism, he canceled all his lectures; Not too many years later, he left Germany. A few hundred miles away in Prague, Franz Kafka noted ” It is incredible that Walther lived as long as he did; already two months ago we heard rumors of his murder.”  The writing on the wall really was the writing on the wall.

What Aron and his descendants escaped when he boarded the Thuringia in 1871 we cannot know for sure. Had he stayed, had Louis and Hannah Strauss stayed, I’m guessing I wouldn’t be here to write this story, and in any case, there would be no descendants to read it.  But they did leave, and came to the coast of California.  They created many lives in the following century, including mine.