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.