Читать книгу Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman - Страница 8

Part 1. Harry’s Home

The old country was fairly near in psychological terms during the childhood of Harry’s parents, Louis Marks and Sophie Levison Marks. Louis’s parents were both born in East Prussia, as were Sophie’s father and maternal grandparents. Louis’s father, Julius (born in 1834), traveled to America twice in the mid-nineteenth century, the second time as an immigrant. The California Gold Rush lured his two older brothers; Julius, age fourteen, soon followed, traveling by mule across Panama and sailing north to San Francisco. His brothers remained in California and prospered; Julius, however, returned to Germany. When he emigrated some years later, he settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in an area so teeming with German immigrants that it was known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). In New York, he transmuted his teenage spirit of adventure into entrepreneurship: he ran a small department store and invested in real estate. His “more or less arranged marriage” (in 1865) to a shoemaker’s daughter named Esther Buck, fourteen years his junior, followed a pattern then “common in middle-class Jewish families.”1 Among their six children, two sons–Harry (born in 1875) and Louis (born in 1876)–are significant for our purposes. When Julius Marks died in 1887, he left Esther well off and eager to rise in German-American Jewish society. In 1890, she married the cantor of their synagogue, Herman Goldstein. The Goldsteins lived far from the slums of the Lower East Side in a brownstone on East 68th Street on the elegant Upper East Side, where the synagogue also moved.2 Esther had her portrait painted in oil. They had arrived.

Harry’s maternal ancestors fit the same broad pattern. Sophie’s grandparents, Caroline and Solomon Katz, emigrated in the later 1840s and married in the early 1850s; the oldest of their six children, Sarah, married a Prussian immigrant named Aaron Harry Levison, known as Harry (who became an American citizen in 1880). (Because of the proliferation of men named Harry among the Levison and Marks families, in this chapter I sometimes refer to my main subject as “Harry Julian.”) The Levisons settled in the small upstate New York town of Goshen, where Harry established a tailoring business–“Merchant Tailor” is his occupation in the 1880 Federal Census–and participated in civic life, joining the Goshen Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons in 1896; thanks to him, the Levison family plot in Mt. Carmel Cemetery in New York bears the Masonic emblem. Harry and Sarah had five children–a son, Leo; and four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Deborah married Alfred H. Hirschbach, an American-born investment banker who had grown up in Germany and who, later on, introduced Harry Julian to his friends and relatives in Berlin.3 The two other surviving daughters, Hannah Violetta and Sophie, trained as teachers and married two Marks brothers, Louis and Harry. In 1907, Harry Levison met a newsworthy end. A report in a Goshen newspaper– “Suddenly Stricken: Apoplexy Causes Death of Former Goshen Man on Elevated Train”–recounted how “a gentleman sat reading a newspaper” and

remained motionless so long that the attention of the passengers was attracted and one of them, a physician, went to him, felt of his pulse, and then informed the guard that the man was dead, sitting upright in his seat and his newspaper still clasped in his stiffening fingers.

The gentleman was “A. H. Levison, for many years a well-known and highly respected resident of this village, where he conducted a clothing and custom tailoring establishment.”4 He, too, had arrived.

The Levinson–and probably the Marks–family had connections further east than Prussia. Some evidence appears in the will of Harry Levison’s brother Barnett (born about 1835), who emigrated about 1864. When his will was probated in 1910, the Surrogate’s Court published the necessary legal notice (in English) in a Yiddish-language newspaper; it included a long list of possible “heirs and next of kin.” Besides seventeen potential heirs in New York and nearby American states, there were thirteen others in Germany, Poland, and Russia. What happened to the thirteen? How many emigrated? How many, or how many of their descendants, perished in the Holocaust or, for that matter, beforehand in World War I or the Russian Revolution? The answers to these questions would keep a legion of genealogists busy.

For a generation or two, the Levison and Marks families were at least partly German in their language use, and one can assume that the relatives left behind in Europe were also German-speaking, no matter where they lived (there is some evidence that the Levisons knew some Yiddish). The language practice of Harry Julian’s maternal ancestors appears in four brief messages to the seventeen-year-old Sarah Katz after she went to visit family and friends in Germany in the summer of 1872. Her parents, Caroline and Solomon Katz, wrote to her in fairly uneducated German, while her younger sisters, Francisca and Emily, wrote in English. For a whole hour after Sarah left, her mother reported, “die kleine Emily” (“little Emily,” age seven) kept saying: “Schie schut kom bëk.” This sentence defies comprehension until recognized as English written with a German accent: “She should come back.”5 As often happens in immigrant families, the younger generation understood the parents’ mother tongue but used English, which the older generation understood but did not write. The younger generation did not pass such German as they knew down to their own children.

A similar language practice apparently prevailed in the Marks household. Louis, who studied German in college, could converse on cultural topics with his German-speaking stepfather. Cantor Goldstein, an ardent admirer of German culture, advised him to read Shakespeare in the beautiful “original,” by which he meant the Schlegel-Tieck German version.6 Louis later used German during a study trip to Berlin in 1907, when he was an elementary-school teacher about to become a principal. The Royal Prussian authorities granted him “permission to visit certain schools” in Berlin, including a technical school for bookbinders and printers.7 His interest in applied subjects remained: a decade later, he fostered vocational education as principal of a large elementary school. He retained enough German to write a letter to his son in German in the summer of 1931, when Harry Julian was studying the language in Heidelberg. “Perhaps there are many errors,” Louis wrote, “and for that reason you shouldn’t show it to your professor.”

The three children of Herman Goldstein, a widower, were living with his sister in Vienna when he and Esther married and, Esther assured her children, would remain there. Instead, however, they followed their father and became part of Esther’s household. The remarriage alienated Esther’s two oldest sons, Isidore and Harry, who refused to accept money from her to attend college and went to work for silk-and-ribbon merchants. Impressed with Louis’s intelligence, they gave him spending money so that he could go to City College, which was entirely free.8 The trajectory of the Marks family went in one generation from small tradesmen to successful businessmen and, in the next generation, to a top administrator in the New York City school system–the apex of the family until Harry Julian ascended yet higher with a Harvard PhD.9