Sitting on my desk in dim orange light this late May afternoon are Aron Cohen’s naturalization papers that he obtained in 1884, with dates, signatures, addresses and other information, as well as a passport application he made in 1913 indicating the name of the ship, Thuringia, on which he emigrated from Hamburg to New York in 1871.  There is also a pile of census records for the Cohen family, as well as many newspaper articles about Aron and advertisements he placed for his tobacco business in the 1880’s. In a separate pile, I’ve got a folder containing death notices for Aron, his wife Hannah, and his mother Flora, containing additional biographical information, as well another folder with genealogical records, passenger manifests, photographs, personal memorabilia, business ledgers, and correspondence.

How much of a life can be recreated from this pile of words and images?  In creating a narrative, is it important how much is historically accurate and how much is made up?  Could one rearrange facts and chronology, just a bit, for clarity?  When I write, my attention is focused on connecting every line to the next, not letting missing bits and pieces of history or small irrelevancies impede or clutter narrative flow. Does it matter that Aron Cohen’s addresses in various documents are inconsistent, or that my great, great grandfather Simon Cohen was married twice?  I’m going to judiciously alter things just a bit, without sacrificing the historical record.  I won’t defer to every single “fact,” or to missing fragments, which would put potholes in the road.

And anyway, are historical “facts” really immutable? Aron Cohen, on his passport application says he lives in San Francisco, but his death certificate says he lived only in Santa Cruz!  I’m not suggesting what I may write is more fiction than reality. It isn’t.  But I plan on going beyond Aron Cohen and Max Strauss and their families. I’m more interested in their choices and reactions to events, or more generally, about human behavior. I want to go beyond the particular and raise questions about who they were, and who we are as human beings, and how we react to the reoccurring and transcendent themes of our lives: loss, fear, doubt, anger, accomplishment, and sometimes acceptance.

CENSUS YR:  1870  STATE:  California  COUNTY:  San Francisco  DIVISION:  2nd Ward-San Francisco  REEL NO:  M593-79  SHEET NO:  167A REFERENCE:  Enumerated on 13 Jun 1870      by  Isaac Ayer;      POST OFFICE: PAGE NO: 61

Strauss  Louis  46      M     Dry Goods Mcht  $10,000   Prussia
Strauss  Lena  33        F      Keep House                             Bavaria
Strauss  Pauline 14     F                                                       California
Strauss  Samuel 12     M                                                      California
Strauss  Fanny   7       F                                                        California
Strauss   Max    5        M                                                       California

My Grandfather Max was 5 years old when the census taker knocked at the door!

Stanislaus County Evening News
Wednesday Evening, October 4, 1893

One Entire Business Block Totally Destroyed

The Fire Fiend visited our neighboring town of Turlock last night and the main business block of that place with nearly all of its contents was burned.  The fire broke out at 10:30 o’clock in the rear of the shoe store of Leitchman near the middle of the block which was composed entirely of wooden buildings and burned both ways until it reached the street upon either side.  Turlock is entirely without facilities for fighting fire and when it was found that the fire had gained a good headway the entire population worked diligently with buckets of water and wet blankets to save the Allen hotel, across the street, and the old Dallas warehouse.  The trees in front of the hotel were a valuable aid toward saving the building. At the warehouse a number of men arrived with buckets of water and wet woolen articles and put out numerous small blazes which started there.  The building was badly scorched but was finally saved from total destruction.
The properties entirely consumed were L. Strauss & Co’s building and very large stock of general merchandise, M. A Fuller, saloon; — Leitchman, shoes and children’s shop;  R.J. Lecusson, barbershop and building; E. Hill, saloon;  Patrick McGrath saloon and building: Charles Davis, saloon; William Convey, chop house; Meyer Bros., meat market; W.A. Smith, drug store; Sherwood’s tin shop; Charles Huber, saloon, and empty buildings belonging to J.T. Davis.
The shoemaker in whose place of business the fire started lives in the back of his shop and cooks his victuals upon an oil stove. He has set the place on fire two or three times prior from his carelessness and is considered to be mentally unsound. He is known in Turlock as the “crazy shoemaker.”
It is impossible to state the loss at this hour nor the insurance. The loss of Strauss and Co., however, will be the heaviest and will equal if not exceed, all of the rest.

Walking through smoldering timbers of their store the next day was a harrowing experience.  You could hear Max swearing bitterly about the shoemaker. While Sam kept his voice low and controlled, he was in a rage.   The brothers struggled emotionally with the magnitude of the event, and for a week or two they argued about what to do.  Of course Helena was consulted.   Not only did they lose the building, but everything in it, an astonishingly large loss. 

Seeing the Thuringia in Hamburg on a cold, gray morning in 1871, Aron’s pulse rose. His collar was tight and he could feel the throbbing beat. The journey would be a life changing event, and he knew it. Passengers were lining up, following one another like fish in a swirling school.  A flock of birds overhead darted left, and then right, before dropping down like a single living thing, towards the water.  The odor of fresh horse droppings near the edge of the road and drifting smoke from a barrel of trash mixed together,  producing an acrid smell which irritated Aron’s nose. Oily patches shimmered in the water where the hull of Thuringia reflected an image of itself, upside down.  Bits of wood and debris floated on the water’s surface. Dozens of ships were at the docks, both small and large. The size of Thuringia made Aron feel hopeful, but also afraid.  He’d slept little the night before traveling from Rogasen to Hamburg, and had eaten no breakfast. His stomach felt empty, but he had no appetite.

Thirteen years later he would become an American citizen.

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.