The Simes and Solomons of Central Iowa

Driving across central Iowa, it’s easy to imagine the countryside when Louis Sime opened his men’s clothing store on the town square of Toledo, Iowa, on April 10, 1877. 

Tama County had been in existence for 34 years.  Toledo, the county seat, had been founded in 1853, and the stately county courthouse (now listed on the National Register of Historic Sites) in the center of the town square had been completed in 1866.

The land surrounding the two towns was richly agricultural.  An 1875 history of the county lists wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, cabbage, timber, and meadows:  “The various tame grasses grow in Tama soil as if by magic.  There is but little labor needed in raising it and the remuneration is good.”

Many of Iowa’s early settlers were drawn by the railroads, whose representatives went to Bohemia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire offering an acre of land to hard workers who would come to build the railroad.

Clearly, the farmers and the railroadmen needed clothes.  The Simes and the Solomons, two intertwined Jewish families that lived in the twin towns of Toledo and Tama City, arrived to meet their needs.

Louis Sime and his wife, Deborah (Dora) Levinson had come to central Iowa most recently from Wisconsin, where all five of his children had been born.  His partner in the Toledo business was Zachariah Solomon.   Louis was 37; Zach only 23.  Zachariah Solomon’s younger brother, George, was married to Louis’s younger sister, known in the family as “Big Sarah.”

In addition to Sarah, Louis had two other siblings, Leah and Abraham I. (“A.I.”), my great-grandfather.  When Leah died in childbirth after the birth of her second daughter in New York, her older daughter Sarah (Sadie) went to live with A.I. in Toledo; the new baby, Rachel, was placed in a New York orphan asylum but eventually she, too, moved in with her mother’s family in Toledo.  Both left in their teens for Chicago, where they met husbands and remained.

Rachel (Rae) and Sarah (Sadie) Goldstein

A.I. followed Louis from Milwaukee to Iowa, becoming a clerk in the establishment of Sime & Solomon when it opened.  Two years later, in 1879, Zachariah Solomon went into business for himself in Tama City, and remained a clothing merchant there till 1914, when his business failed.  He moved to Chicago, where he worked as a clothing salesman at The Fair, and died in 1922. 

Louis had even less success in the clothing business . . . or perhaps he had trouble staying in one place.  In 1881, he had relocated to Gladbrook,and in 1885, he was back on the High Street in Toledo.  He subsequently lived in Belle Plaine, Des Moines, De Witt, and Denison before he moved to Chicago, where he was working as a “laborer” in the clothing business in 1900.

In Toledo in July 1882, when George Solomon married “Big Sarah,” A.I. married his childhood sweetheart, Lena, from “Lebova”:   probably Liubavas, Lithuania, based on other information.  This is when facts get tangled.  Their marriage certificate says her name was Ziman, but her husband’s obituary says her maiden name was Jeruslinsky, and her own obituary says her maiden name was Vatelsky.  Leah’s first husband had the last name Simon, and when A.I. and Hyman and Leah’s father died, their mother also married a man whose last name was Simon.  A.I. had a half-brother, Morris Simon, who was killed in “the Moro insurgency” in 1905 in the Philippines. The coincidences are too great to be coincidences; the families must have known each other and been interwoven in the towns they left behind.

Lena Ziman had arrived about a year before her marriage with – family legend has it – a tag around her neck that said “Toledo, Iowa.”  In fact, the records of the ship she took from Hamburg, the Uranus, note that her destination is “Toledo,” and she was already listed as “Lena Sime.”  Nevertheless, they were officially married a year later by Rabbi David Davidson, a Reform rabbi serving Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Des Moines, Iowa.

A.I. and Lena Sime ca. 1922

I remember stories of trips to Des Moines for kosher meat, but how my grandfather’s family lived a Jewish life in Toledo never really entered my childhood consciousness.  Simon Glazer, in The Jews of Iowa (1904), divided the Jews of Des Moines into eastsiders, mostly Orthodox, who came from the Suwalki region – where I believe the Simes came from – and westsiders, mostly Reform, who established B’nai Jeshurun.  Among their family photos was a “rabbi card” of Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovna obviously copied by a Des Moines photographer.

Nevertheless, when the Simes and Solomons needed a life-cycle event, from a wedding to a funeral, they sought out Reform synagogues and Reform rabbis.

To be continued . . . 

Morpurgos and More in Trieste

At the end of our trip through Dalmatia last year, I contracted a combo of bronchitis and pleurisy, and by the time I made my way to an E.R. and some very strong antibiotics, time had moved on.  Finally editing and organizing my photos last week compelled me to write about experiences that particularly linger in my mind.

Our modus operandi in our travels, as usual, was to spend a few days in a city and try to see it through the eyes of the Jews who live or had lived there.  In Trieste, that is relatively easy.  The great synagogue, extremely well preserved, is outside the historic center of the city.  The grand sanctuary – with an organ – suggests the size of the Ashkenazic congregation in 1912, when the building was completed:  about 5,000. A small congregation of mostly North African Jews has a Sephardic Shabbat Service in a side chapel.  There is separate seating, but all on one level, and all the little girls in front of me turned around with wide eyes and stared when I loudly sang Adon Olam at the end of the service.

The scale of the synagogue contrasts with that of the remaining fragment of the Jewish ghetto near the port.  “Ghetto” is an Italian word that described the area, originally, where the Jews of Venice lived; Trieste’s ghetto was created in the late 17th-early 18th centuries. 

 

Trieste has a small but interesting Museo della Comunità Ebraica di Trieste Carlo e Vera Wagner.  It recounts the story of the ancient community as well as the history and fate of the community in the 19th and 20th centuries, when about 4 million Jews passed through the city on their way to the U.S., South America, and Palestine. 

Trieste also was our introduction to the Morpurgo family.  The name apparently is a variation on Marburg, which in turn is the German version of the city, Maribor, in Slovenia.  One member of the family, Giuseppe Lazzano Morpurgo, moved from Gorizia, Italy, to Trieste.  In 1831 he founded the Generali insurance company, which is now being challenged, poignantly and ironically, by Holocaust survivors to make good on their parents’ and grandparents’ policies (New York Times, June 2, 2011). 

Two other Morpurgos, brothers Carlo Marco and Giacomo, left their apartment to the city of Trieste; it is now the Morpurgo Municipal Museum.  We encountered the name again in Split:  Lucciano Morpurgo, a poet and publisher; Vittorio Morpurgo, who headed the Jewish community; and Vid Morpurgo, who founded a bookstore that just celebrated its 150th anniversary.  The many, many branches of the family include the stepfather of War Horse author Michael Morpurgo.

Two famous Italian Jewish writers are celebrated in Trieste.  Italo Svevo, whose real name was Aron Ettore Schmitz, wrote novels, plays, and short stories; he was a friend of James Joyce and is widely considered to be the model for Leopold Bloom.  Umberto Saba (born Umberto Poli) wrote novels and poetry.  Svevo died in 1928; Saba survived World War II by moving around Italy (in one year he moved 11 times).

One day we took a city bus to an industrial area on the edge of Trieste to visit La Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice-processing factory that the Nazis began to convert to a prison camp in September 1943.  At first it was used for captured Italian soldiers, then as a transit camp for deportees to Germany and Poland, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau.  By early 1944, partisans, political prisoners, homosexuals and Jews – including 700 from Trieste – were being interned and executed as well as dying from the conditions.  By April 1944, thanks to Erwin Lambert – whose designs for gas chambers and ovens also were realized at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor – bodies were being cremated on the site.  On April 29, 1945, the fleeing Germans dynamited the crematorium and its chimney.

On our day at La Risiera, we were two of perhaps a dozen people there.  The factory was declared a national monument of Italy in 1965, well before Holocaust memorials and museums began to proliferate elsewhere.  In 1966, Trieste-born architect Romano Boico won a competition to turn La Risiera into a memorial and museum.  His conception, completed in 1975, is stunning.  Stark concrete entrance walls guide the visitor into the center of the factory, which he described as an “open-air nondenominational basilica.”  Down the center runs a sunken line of steel that demarcates the absent crematorium.  Other parts of the factory house a Museum of the Resistance that traces the German domination of the area as well as their ultimate defeat and trials for their war crimes.

By the time the Germans occupied Italy, about 2,000 Jews lived in Trieste, the rest having either left Italy or gone into hiding; after the war, according to some sources, about 600 and now numbers less than 1,000.  As in so many communities, the Jews left behind both physical and intellectual evidence of their presence but not many Jews.

Sliding backward

Nearly four months have passed since we left Milan, and we are still adjusting.  Our days and evenings have been filled with errands, chores, and deferred maintenance of ourselves and our house.  We’ve had to replace our glasses, our refrigerator, and our tires.  We had to catch up on some of the Academy Award films that hadn’t yet come to Italy in English before we left, and most importantly reconnect with many friends and relatives in Washington and Chicago.

“How does it feel to be back?  Do you miss Milan?  Are you experiencing ‘culture shock’?”  Those are the questions we are asked most frequently.  Our answers are pretty much the same as you would expect:  Most of the time it feels good to be back.  Yes, we miss many aspects of our daily lives in Milan. 

The “culture shock,” on the one hand, is not so much as it was when we returned from two months in the UK in the summers of 2000 or 1979.  The reason for that is the internet . . . globalization . . . everything lumped together as “modern communications.”  We were never really out of touch with our Washington lives.  As we worked at home in the late morning, we streamed “Morning Edition” and in the evenings, “All Things Considered.”  I practiced my Italian by reading Corriere della Sera every day, but I filled in my gaps by checking the New York Times or Washington Post on line.  I could even keep up with my New Yorker by downloading it to our Kindle.

This past week, however, I did experience huge culture shock.  We took our usual Amtrak regional train from New York to Washington.  It took 3-1/2 hours, and we were on time for a change.  The ride was bumpy and so jerky that I couldn’t take a sip of water without getting splashed in the face.  What a contrast to our many trips between Milan and Florence a few months ago:  a smooth ride that took 1-3/4 hours to go only 30 miles less for about $20 less.

Italy has its share of infrastructure problems, but the U.S. is falling behind so many other countries in so many ways.  Since we have returned, we have watched and listened to the continuing statistics on unemployment and services here being cut; this morning's paper describes Amtrak's problems.  Most seriously, the holes in our safety net are getting larger, and we have only ourselves to blame as our country slips back in time.  

Arrivederci, Milano

“No matter how well you think you know someone,” my mother used to say, “You don’t really know them till you’ve lived with them for 24 hours.”

So we’ve had the opportunity to get to know this country of charming people, great food and wine, and artistic creativity in many, many ways, some of them not so charming. 

Espresso.  I am not a chronic coffee drinker.  My routine for most of my adult life has been a half-cup of my homemade brew (black) for breakfast, another half-cup mid-morning, and a full cup with lunch.  I didn’t discriminate, and when my young coworkers went out every morning for a Starbucks, I was happy to drink the coffee in our office kitchen.  After dinner:  a little decaf, also black.  Here I have found myself growing increasingly fond of the Italian habit:  a normali (one shot of espresso) or caffe doppia (two shots) with a packet of brown sugar (canna).  We are fortunate to have 20 steps from our front entrance a gelateria that has been featured in the papers for its Sicilian cannoli.  They are good, but resistible.  Dropping down there for a coffee around 11 after we pick up a newspaper, however, is not.

Similarly, I have never been a sweets eater, but I have never seen as many attractive and delicious dolci as I have in Italy. Perhaps it is because Italian sweets are not so sweet. Every holiday has its unique pastries (e.g. panettone for Christmas, deep-fried or baked chiacchieri for Carnival); every city has its specialty (Bergamo’s polenta e osei); and each pasticceria tries to outdo its neighbor.

Public transportation.  Except for last week’s strike of Milan transport workers, public transportation is remarkably easy to use and accessible.  For three days we rented a car with friends to show them the area around Lake Como; otherwise, for six months, we have depended on trains, buses, and our feet.  No complaints.

Small specialized shops.  We quickly learned that you have to know where to go to get what you want.  A panificio has bread and fresh pasta but not many dolci:  cakes, biscotti, and other dessert items.  A pasticceria (see above) has everything sweet you could possibly dream of plus, usually, a place to eat it with a cup of espresso . . . but not much bread.  A farmacia has prescription medicine, toothpaste, some over-the-counter medications like aspirin, skin creams, gluten-free foods, and petroleum jelly; a supermercato has toothpaste has toothpaste and cosmetics, and so on.  It can drive you crazy.  Or you begin to appreciate the fact that people really know their merchandise.

Flower stands on almost every corner.  They cheer you as you walk by and mark the changing seasons even if you don’t buy anything.

Produce.  I’ve written before about the joys of going to the produce markets.  The proliferation of varieties of fruits and vegetables always available is truly overwhelming.  Good things to eat come from all over Italy, all over Europe, and all around the Mediterranean.  It is fresh and inexpensive.  While it’s common for Americans traveling in Europe to complain about high prices, the fact is that we can buy produce for a fraction of what it costs in a farmers market at home.

Primi piatti.  Consequently, pasta and risotto dishes are also inexpensive.  Risotto with porcini mushrooms, a first course in thousands of neighborhood ristoranti, costs 6-7 €, or about $8.  In Washington, such risotto might appear on the menu of an upscale restaurant and cost $15-20.

That’s the good news.

In the wake of more disgusting disclosures about the not-so-private life of Italy’s premier, Silvio Berlusconi, I ask myself yet again how and why the general population supports and even adores him.  One expatriate suggests that the Italian view is:  “You are born.  You die.  You might as well have the best time in between that you can.”  Berlusconi embodies that attitude and is admired for really knowing how to have a good time.

Rachel Donadio, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, gives what I think is the most accurate analysis I’ve seen yet:  “Italy is a survival culture, steeped in that most time-honored survival mechanism: fatalistic resignation.”  That explains a lot of what we’ve observed.

* why we rarely see a young person offering an older person a seat on a bus or tram.

* the short hours that businesses are open, the long mid-morning coffee and prosecco breaks, the two-hour lunches, and the famous happy hours (“aperitivi”).

* why people park their cars in every inch of space:  on sidewalks, in crosswalks, in the middle of the street, and in other people’s driveways.

* dog poop, everywhere, and almost exclusively on the sidewalk.  While it is a law in Milan and elsewhere, only in Bergamo have we seen a sign that you are required to clean up after your dog.

This is not a third-world country.  Milan justifiably calls itself the “design capital of the world.”  Yet Italy is in 80th place in the World Bank’s “Ease of doing business” survey, down four places from 2010.  A friend told us it took five weeks from the day he bought a new car to the day he could drive it home:  that’s how long it took to switch his insurance from his old car.

In today’s Washington Post, Nina Burleigh notes, “[Berlusconi’s] attitude toward women is the official version of the national norm in Italy, which ranked 74th out of 134 countries . . . in the World Economic Forum's 2010 global index of gender equality."

The “national norm” includes an obsession with one’s looks and clothes.  I have never seen so many parrucchieri (places to get your hair done) for women and men, plus barber shops for men.  Street markets and commercial areas, always packed with buyers loaded down with shopping bags, respond within hours to the latest fashion trend.  Fur coats abound.  The newspapers and television commercials focus almost exclusively on “the beautiful people,” and never mention anyone – in any context – without noting their age.

We have had a wonderful time, we’ve made new friends and, yes, eaten a lot of delicious food.  We’ve appreciated anew the pleasures of small personalized shops, neighborhood bakeries, and walking.  We look forward to returning home and, eventually, to returning to Italy.  As we pack our bags, we stand with one foot in each culture, and each enhances our appreciation of the other.

Debbie Friedman: A Tapestry of Memories

If you have traveled to Italy or fantasized about traveling to Italy, you picture sunshine, fields of sunflowers, a lazy lunch in the shade of a leafy pergola with a glass of wine, a plate of pasta, and a bunch of lavender on your table.

If you have spent winter in Northern Italy, however, the picture in your mind’s eye is foggy.  It is raining hard, or misting.  Your shoes are wet and the cuffs of your pants are wet.  Your umbrella is dripping all over you and the person next to you.  You are cold, chilled to the bone; your toes and fingers are freezing, no matter what you do.

We have now endured seven consecutive cold rainy days. They do not offer a hope of a green spring (though that is their inevitable result). We work around them, running our errands and visiting friends and going to museums, but they make it hard to get up in the morning.

Especially the last few days, when the illness and then death of Debbie Friedman and the shootings in Arizona surround us like the fog and the chilling rain. 

I cannot say I grew up with Debbie Friedman, but I certainly grew into Reform Judaism with her.  I cannot claim friendship or even a personal acquaintance, but she and her music meant so much to me.  She represented the openness of Reform Judaism to new ways of praying and exploring and understanding how people relate to one another and to God.  I grew up in Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and I never attended a Jewish camp until I worked at one when I was in graduate school.  I was an instant convert. 

Eventually, I married a man who had known Debbie from early days at Olin-Sang-Ruby Camp; many years later, I envied our son, who took a class with her when he was a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. 

Up close, I was in wonder at her humility; awed by her sensitivity and vitality; worried about her delicate condition.  From afar, she filled a room, controlled a hall, kept us holding our breaths and singing at the top of our voices.  I often thought in those moments that I could understand what it felt like to encounter Hildegard of Bingen or Joan of Arc.  She would have laughed.

The eulogies at her funeral emphasized all those human qualities.  The overriding metaphor was the tapestry of memory.  Debbie wove that tapestry, and we are all threads.  And even as we are threads, we all have our own tapestries of memories.  For some, Debbie herself is a part of those memories; for others, it is her music that makes the cloth.

Two Views of Tykocin

My father’s cousin, Morris Biales, was raised in the town of Tykocin (“Tiktin,” in Yiddish).  He emigrated at age 13, became a vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and died in 1997 at age 100.  He lived longer into my adulthood that anyone else in that generation of my father’s family.

Tykocin, about 105 miles northeast of Warsaw and 45 miles from the Russian border, was the town where almost everyone in my father’s extended family lived and left around 1900.  In the Pale of Settlement, it was part of the lands that were contested by the Russians, the Prussians, and the Austrians.

In a 1994 oral history, Morris Biales described the relationship between Jews and Gentiles:  “In Tiktin, we lived in peace with the goyim.”  He recounted his memory of the annual Kol Nidre service.  Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Tiktin’s Jews would mow the cemetery, carry the clippings into the synagogue, and spread the sweet-smelling grass on the dirt floor.  Then everyone – including the non-Jewish town officials – would stand side-by-side and listen to the beautiful chanting of the chazzan.

Tykocin is visited today by thousands of young Jews from the U.S., Israel, and South Africa who go on the “March of the Living” and other programs designed to nurture a love of Israel.  Tykocin’s great synagogue, a beautiful baroque structure built in 1642, remains much as it was:  prayers are painted on the walls because not everyone had a prayerbook. 

It is a destination today, however, for a different reason.  In September 1939, the German Army invaded Poland and captured the land around Tykocin; a few weeks later they passed it into Soviet hands.  In June 1941, the Germans invaded again and encouraged the non-Jewish residents of the town to loot the Jews’ property and give it to the Germans. 

On August 25, 1941, the Germans ordered the Jews to gather at the market square for resettlement in a nearby ghetto.  Instead 3,000 men, women, and children were taken to a forest, forced to dig their own mass graves, and then executed by SS firing squads.  The Tykocin massacre was the first of many that the Germans were to repeat in other area towns.

The March of the Living visit to Tykocin is preceded by a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The narrative of these teen trips is that Poland was a killing ground and Israel, where they go after Poland, is the land where the Jewish people was reborn out of the ashes.

This is not my narrative, and it is the reason I have been involved with the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.  The Forum has had some success in arranging opportunities for Jewish and Polish teenagers to engage in dialogue about their shared history, but it’s not a high priority for those bringing groups to Poland, because it is not in their narrative. 

The Forum’s Schools for Dialogue program that I described in a previous blog at least can help Poland’s teenagers – and their parents and friends and relatives and fellow townspeople – grow in understanding.  Learning in depth about the role of Jews in their communities will help them become educated and compassionate citizens of the world. 

Why should we care?

Poland’s economy is growing:  it was the only member of the European Union to avoid the recent recession.  Poland’s college and high school students are part of a global workforce that will be encountering others and shaping their communities wherever they settle.  Poland is a democracy and an important strategic partner of the United States and Western governments.  Poland is a loyal supporter and partner of Israel. 

Based on the narrative of my family, I believe that it is possible for Jewish and Polish people to stand together and listen to beautiful music.   It happened in Tykocin.  It has been happening for 20 years in Krakow at the Jewish Cultural Festival.  With the help of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, it can happen throughout Poland.

Snow on Sunflowers

Those who have been to sun-washed Tuscany, close your eyes.  You see the sunflowers, the fields of lavender, the grape arbor where you had lunch.  You wandered around Florence, drinking in the art and savoring the gelato and were so grateful to return at the end of the day to your air-conditioned room.

I know that when I say we are spending one weekend a month in Florence while we are living here in Italy, that’s what you’re thinking.

Change your mind’s eye instead to Chicago in January.

Imagine that your train gets into the station and there is chaos.  One hundred smokers are lined up waiting for taxis that do not appear.  All the city buses have gathered at the station with their LED signs blinking “Fuori Servizio” (out of service).  All flights are canceled.

The wind is whipping in your face.  The snow is falling at a rate of more than one inch an hour.  It started as rain mixed with snow; then everything froze. You have no choice but to tramp carefully through the slush and ice for the two miles to your hotel with your luggage.  Between stopping to wipe your nose, clean your glasses, and re-up the balance on your cellphone, it takes you 75 minutes.

There is not a plow to be seen, nor a shovel.  People are cleaning their windshields with index cards.  Restaurant owners are fighting the snow with cookie sheets.  The cobblestone streets are filled with 4” of slush.  Abandoned cars, motorcycles, and tourist buses on all the bridges have paralyzed traffic.  The road to Sienna is closed.  Later you learn that in beautiful sunwashed Tuscany, people spent 20 hours in their cars waiting to be rescued.

So when “Biggest snow since 1985 blasts Florence, Italy,” mio marito and I felt fortunate that our hotel was in walking distance, that our room was warm, and that we had dry clothes.  Unfortunately, congregants who lived out of town couldn’t get in, and congregants who lived in town couldn’t get around.  Most of the museums and even the churches closed.  The restaurants were open.  After all, this is Italy.