My grandfather (Charles) with my dad and Aunt Gerrie in the stroller. On the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ 1938.
My ancestors came from Eastern Europe—Riga, a coastal city in Latvia, Bialystock in Poland and somewhere in Romania.
They headed to the eastern US in the late 1800s/early 1900s and settled in the Philadelphia area, leaving their homes as the pogroms made it hard to live in their hometowns.
My immediate family stayed in Philadelphia until my generation, when my sister moved to southern Florida (and my parents followed her) and I moved to (in this order):
College Park, Maryland,
Providence Rhode Island,
Rohnert Park, CA
New York, New York,
Irvine, CA
Costa Mesa, CA
My brother and his two teenage children remain in the City of Brotherly Love.
One of the great telling things about my family’s assimilation into the US is how their first names changed. My paternal greatgrandfather was named Itzak and he married Yetta. Their nine children were named Joe, Henry, Al, Sam, Harry, Bessie, Lillian and Bertha. My grandfather was named Charles. That there were nine of them living in poor immigrant conditions in the South Philly and Stawberry Mansion neighborhoods of Philadelphia is dramatically different from my parents–Edward and Elaine—raising my brother and sister and I in the Fox Chase (working class) and Laverock (middle class) sections of the city or suburbs. My maternal grandparents were named Lena and Isadore (called Whitey). My aunts and uncles were named Shirlene, Geraldine, Arthur and Herbert.
One interesting note about my Pop Pop Charlie (dad’s dad) was that he joined the Navy at age 13; a big boy who lied about his age . . . to get ahead in his world, I guess, or at least out of the house. He became a boxer in the Navy and is referred to as an old timer at 26. He retired from the Navy at age 40, after which he met and married my grandmother, Nettie, and became a policeman. His brothers had jobs like:
Joe, the oldest . . . also a policeman
Al was a salesman and moved to California
Sam was a motorman, what they called men who worked on the trolleys
Harry was a cab driver
Henry had Parkinson’s Disease, as did my father’s younger sister, my Aunt Gerrie.
I think my mother’s grandfather, who was always called “Zaida” in front of me (a Yiddish term for grandfather), sold produce from a cart on the streets of Philadelphia. The story goes that he and his six or seven brothers came to the US from Romania to make some money. All of them went back to their home in eastern Europe pretty quickly, except my Zaida. No one knows why his brothers went back or what happened to them once they left the US. My great grandmother died and my Zaida remarried (to Esther) and they had two children who were close to my parents’ ages. Uncle Ben and Aunt Etta moved to the San Francisco, California region and raised 5 children with their spouces–Ben with Lee (Ben, Jr., Sandy and Barry) and Etta with Woody ( Paul and Susan) and brought Double Bubba (my family’s name for my great grandfather’s second wife) with them. My maternal Uncle Herb relocated to Miami Beach, Florida in the 1960s, married Norma (for a time) and didn’t have any children that I am aware of. My Uncle Arthur still lives in the Germantown section of Philadelphia with my cousin, his son Peter.
My Pop Pop Whitey holding me as Uncle Herbie admires his first nephew. January 1956.
That’s a little of my family’s geographic history.
Debra Levine
photo by Keith Weng