Uncle Sam

My Uncle Sam (Andrea, Charles and Jeff's father) was the youngest of the Hochbaum siblings.  Born January 19, 1917, he was known in the family as Schulem (sp?) and that name appears on the ship manifest when he and my father came to the US in 1938.  He stayed with my father on Ellis Island for almost two weeks when my father was detained at Ellis Island because of an eye infection.



Sam's parents both died in 1928 [though there is some question about this, see the notes at the end of this link], and I assume he and Regina went to live full-time in Beuthen after that.  He would have been 11 years old, Regina, 13, Henry, 15.  The older children, Marte, 23, Daddy, 20, and Erna (aka Esther), 19,  would have been responsible for them, and also for running the family business.  It must have been an interesting time.

We know from Andrea (and the pictures) that Sam played soccer and was a champion ping pong player.  He also rode a bicycle:

And he played chess:

I don't know who he's playing with, but my guess is that that's Charlie, hiding behind the chair....

Both Sam and Regina have lots of pictures of friends from Beuthen in their photo albums, though interestingly there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap.  I thought I'd include some of Sam's pictures, starting with the young women, just because I think it gives us a sense of what life in Beuthen was like.  This clearly wasn't an Orthodox religious community, and life seems to be notably middle class. As Alice said to me, "They went to the opera!"

 (Check out the silk stockings!)

And here are some of the guys:

 There are several more mysterious pictures, too, that I'll talk about in a subsequent post.

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My Uncle Sam died young, of a sudden heart attack, in 1962.  He was 45 and left his wife, Selma Goldberg Hochbaum  -- the niece of Chrzanower Young Men's Association President David Wishner -- with three children:  Andrea, 16, Charles (known to us as Charlesie, to distinguish him from Charlie), who was 10, and Jeffrey, just 5.  Uncle Henry, Sam's partner in Center Novelty, took over the business, and Aunt Selma went to work as a saleswoman in Mays, a local department store, to support the family.  

I was just 18 when Uncle Sam died, and so didn't know him very well.  I always thought of him as easy-going and quiet, and possibly the nicest of the Hochbaum sibs (who were, all in all, a pretty nice group).  I'm not sure that goes along with excelling in soccer and ping pong, and whether Andrea and Charles and Jeff share that view.

So I asked Andrea...Here are her comments:

My father was very progressive and liked to try new things. He was quiet at home, leaving the child-rearing mainly to my mother. I suspect my brothers barely remember him. He was funny around his friends "on the block" and social at work, especially when visiting his clients. He seemed very well-liked by the store owners from what I could tell on the special days he took me to the city. Everybody at work and in the stores gushed over me and seemed so nice because I was Sam's daughter.

I so admire how the Hocbaum siblings started their new lives in America. I can't even imagine how hard that was but that's the whole point of this blog, isn't it? I admire that my father could speak so many different languages and was an astute bussinessman. Our fathers brought with them some 'European' rules that didn't always jive with our culture but our dads made us feel very safe and secure.

Some great pictures from Andrea

You may have been wondering what is going on, and why there have been no new blog posts for so long.  Yes, I have been distracted by other things (as is my wont), but I have also been trying to fill some gaps in my own knowledge of history, to provide some background on the labor camps and the displaced persons camps and what went on in Chrzanow during the war. 

This is taking more time than I expected, but it's interesting history that isn't written about much, and some day I hope to be able to do a decent job of sharing some of it.

This week, however, the postman brought a wonderful collection of photos from Andrea Hochbaum Friedland (my Uncle Sam's daughter, for those of you who haven't memorized the family tree yet).  So I took a break from reading history to scan some of my favorites.  There'll be a lot more coming!

Here, for starters, is my grandfather, the original (for our purposes) Chaim Hirsch Hochbaum:

That's a fur collar around his neck.  He is clearly a Hochbaum, with what a nurse in Florida once called the Hochbaum "bedroom eyes"  (I had never thought of them that way).  Do we know anyone in the family who has a forehead like that?  He was born in 1876 in Chrzanow, and died around 1928.

I had asked Andrea for pictures she had from Europe.  Here are two wonderful pictures, from the family business:

That's Uncle Sam in front of the sign.  The white lettering is my translation, thanks to Google translate.  I've written about the business a couple of times, most completely in The Pearl Corp, but this is the first time we can see what it might have looked like.

And here is another picture of the business:

That's Sam waving, and his older sister Erna in the apron. This looks to me like a delivery of some local produce, but that is a guess. 

And here is a picture, also probably taken in Beuthen, of Charlie and his parents.  We don't have a lot of these, so this is special, too.

And, last, but not least, here's a picture of Uncle Henry and Uncle Sam (on the left, standing next to each other) and what we assume is their soccer team.

Andrea wrote: 

     My father was on a soccer team but he excelled at PING PONG. 

Gina told me a story about how my father was supposed to get a medal but Hitler was giving them out. The family wouldn't let him go to the ceremony and were very afraid for his life!

Sam was the youngest of the Hochbaum siblings, born in 1917.  This picture is undated, but he was probably 20 or 21 when it was taken. 

There will be more coming.

In the meantime, some belated Happy Birthday wishes to Andrea and her brother Charles.  I'm usually not good with birthdays, but I was deeply impressed at an early age that Andrea and Charles shared the same birthday -- September 14th.  How's that for family planning?  And, just to answer your next question, their younger brother Jeff's birthday is October 16th.