This is the Interview with my mother, Marci Silverman. My mom has been researching the family tree for the last four years, spurred on after the death of her mom, my grandmother Elaine Gross. My mother has signed up with Ancestry.com and Jewish Gen. She has called third cousins, and interviewed many family members in order to garner as much information in regards to our family history.
When you were growing up were you interested in learning about your culture and where your ancestors were from?
When I was your age I wasn’t really invested in discovering about my heritage. I knew plenty about my Jewish culture; we celebrated all the holidays, Passover, Purim and the like. But as far as life in the Eastern European shtetl, my interest was very limited. I never bothered to ask my grandparents about the lives of their parents in Eastern Europe. The only grandparent that was born in Eastern Europe was my grandmother Vivian ‘Grandma Vi.’ She died when I was about seven. I remember her vividly. I would go over to her apartment and she would make foods that I was not accustomed to. I remember tasting shav, a cold soup made of sorrel and borscht, a soup made of pureed beets. As a young girl, my palate was not very sophisticated, and I recall wanting to spit out the sorrel soup. Some food found its way into my napkin under the table. My grandmother cooked the Russian food of her mother. It was food typical of the town of Litin, near Kiev in the Ukraine. Of course today, I have a greater appreciation for Russian food, and all culturally diverse foods.
So the short answer is no; as a child growing up in Brooklyn, I was not interested in knowing more about the lives of my ancestors. It was much later as an adult when I had children of my own, that I discovered this burning desire to know more about the lives of my Eastern European family and where we came from.
When you began searching on Ancestry.com and discovered that many of our family had died in the Holocaust, how did you react to this finding?
It was when my mom, Juliette’s grandmother got sick, I realized that there was so much that I did not know about my family heritage. I had a strong will to discover every tidbit of information I could. I interviewed my mother and many family members. One of the questions I asked was if any family members had perished in the Holocaust, and the answer was always no. One day, at the beginning of this process I discovered on the internet a family tree from the Holtz family. A distant cousin living in Massachusetts had done a fairly thorough examination of my mother’s mother’s family (my grandma Fanny Holtz). I contacted this cousin, and she informed me that my great-great grandparents Yechiel and Esther had 22 children. Of the 22, five came to America, Mexico and Cuba. My great grandfather Fishel Holtz left Lipno, Poland and came to live in Brooklyn, New York. My cousin told me that many of my grandmother’s aunts and uncles, Fishel’s siblings, had perished in the Holocaust. I was in complete disbelief. My grandmother, who I was very close to had never given me any inkling that family members had died in such a horrific way. My grandmother never told my mother, or my two aunts. I felt that this cousin must be mistaken, but she insisted that she had interviewed my grandmother on three separate occasions, and that my grandmother was fully aware of the fate of these family members. I came to realize that many others in the Holtz family perished in the Shoah. Many I now know of died in Auschwitz and Majdanek Concentration Camps. I currently know some of their names, but not all of them. I came to realize that my grandmother wanted to spare us, shield and protect us by not telling us of this horror. She held onto this knowledge, protecting her children and grandchildren from this terrible truth.
Through the process of assimilation, how has the Jewish religion changed in our family from generation to generation?
For the most part, my great-grandparents that came from the shtetl’s of Eastern Europe were Orthodox Jews. They varied in religious fervor, but all were of course kosher. They would only walk on the Sabbath and attended synagogue. They would never consider eating out in a restaurant that wasn’t kosher. They all conversed in Yiddish, and retained the foods and culture of life in the shtetl. They held jobs, and some even started their own business, so they were assimilating in economic ways, still retaining their religious and cultural identity. Their children, my grandparents were all born in America, except for my grandmother Vivian, who I mentioned before. All four of my grandparents kept a kosher home. They went to temple, but they were much more lax, and did not attend every Saturday. They travelled and ate out at non-kosher restaurants. They would drive to temple on Saturdays and religious holidays. They continued to celebrate the Jewish holidays and family celebrations were paramount. Some Yiddish was spoken, but only when they didn’t want their kids or grandkids to understand what they were saying. My parents also kept a kosher home. We belonged to a temple, but very rarely went on the Sabbath. We always went on the High Holidays, the same as previous generations. My parents were completely assimilated, as were their parents before them. My parents had non-Jewish friends, but they always made it clear that they wanted their children to marry within our religion. When my husband and I got married we decided that keeping kosher was not something that we wanted to do. My sister on the other hand married an Orthodox Jew, and so she has actually assimilated into a very religious Sephardic community. While we rarely go to temple, it has always been important to me to celebrate the holidays so that my kids could understand their rich cultural heritage. Both my children were bar and bat mitzvahed and so were my husband and myself. So my family in the assimilation process has gone from Ultra-Orthodox to Conservative to somewhere between Conservative and Reformed. I’d like to believe that while we no longer frequent a temple, our family has retained a lot of that cultural pride from earlier generations.
During this immigration period to America were there any family members that could not assimilate to the American culture?
Coming to America is a difficult process for any immigrant. Today, for instance some Columbian’s move to areas in Queens to live with other Colombians in an effort to retain their language and customs, sometimes delaying complete or even partial assimilation into American society. It was no different when my great-grandparents came to America. They came from all over Eastern Europe in search of religious and economic freedom. Life was very hard on the Lower East Side, and they lived together in crowded tenements, speaking their common language, Yiddish. While most of my family embraced their new lives in America, not all of them were successful in the assimilation process. Another great-great grandfather on my mother’s side was one of those people that could not adjust to life in a new land. His name was Marcus Mintzer, and he was born in January of 1849 in Brody, Austria. He came to America on November 19, 1897 with $1.00 in his pocket to reside at the home of his son Friedrich at 135 Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. Marcus was the father of seven children, one being my great-grandmother Clara Mintzer. Life for Marcus was difficult, and making a living to support the children left at home proved to be taxing. Marcus is still with the family in the 1900 census, but after the death of his daughter Clara in 1909, I discovered that he no longer resided with the family in the 1910 census. Could he not make a living to support his family? Was he stricken with grief due to the untimely death of his daughter? I questioned most of the older generation to try to get some answers. I called up a granddaughter (Sylvia Mintzer) of Marcus to see if she could enlighten me. She had heard stories of his disappearance. Sylvia told me that she believed that he probably could not assimilate into society. It was believed that he found America to not be religious enough for him, and that sometime between 1909-1910 Marcus returned to Austria to live out his days without his family who all remained in New York.
What made you want to make a family cookbook, “Oodles of Love”?
My grandmother Fanny Holtz Berman was a remarkable woman. She was strong and loving and made sure that the family always stayed together. Besides all that, she was a wonderful cook, who taught me everything I know in the kitchen. So when I started to discover my heritage, I thought it would be nice to honor the memory of my grandmother in the form of a cookbook. She would sign all her notes and birthday cards with “oodles of love,” hence the title of the cookbook. I explained in the forward of the book why I wanted to create such a cookbook. A portion of what I wrote is this: “Fanny epitomized what it was to be a great Jewish mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She kept a review of June Roth’s Jewish Mother Cookbook. Roth writes," a Jewish mother cooks with a handful of this and a handful of that, but she happens to be blessed with the right sized hands.” That was the type of cook Fanny was. She just had an intuitive sense in the kitchen. She made everything look effortless. I personally learned so much in Grandma Fanny’s kitchen. We were fortunate to have such a person teach us how to be great Jewish women.” The cookbook was a way to pass down Fanny’s legacy and family history to Juliette and to the rest of the family.