The SS President Arthur: The Zionist Mayflower, Part I

Once I tracked down the story of my great-grandfather's death at sea and burial in Haifa (see June 19, 2012, blog entry), I was determined to learn as much as I could about the circumstances surrounding his voyage. 

In fact, it was an historic voyage for many reasons, many "firsts," but I never have been able to determine why he was on it.  Was he a fervent Zionist?  Was he planning to make aliyah?  Though he had a round-trip ticket, that may have been a requirement of the British mandate government.  Was he planning to go, as were so many of his fellow travelers, to the opening ceremonies of Hebrew University?  At almost 70, was he looking for a thrill:  to be on the first ship to display the "Zionist flag"?  Or was it simply the next ship leaving for the Middle East?  Alas, no one will ever know.

The ship itself, however, and its voyage, prove to be irresistibly interesting to me.  While a Wikipedia entry gives an outline of its story, I found so many more details to fill in.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone interested in publishing it, so I will take the route of many and tell the story here in several installments.

For Jews in the United States and around the world, Wednesday, April 1, 1925, marked a watershed moment, the founding of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. The institution fulfilled the dreams of many Jews, including – among the most prominent – Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, and the first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann.

Many American Jews attending the ceremonies had arrived only the day before on a steamship that deserves its own place in Jewish and Zionist history. Its story is more than a footnote to the many forms the Zionist dream has taken over centuries; at the same time, its short life demonstrates how a group of entrepreneurs appropriated that dream until it literally went up in smoke.

Jacob S. Strahl

Jacob S. Strahl, an active Zionist and municipal court judge from Brooklyn, headed a syndicate of owners of the new American Palestine Line and its ship, the S.S. President Arthur. On October 9, 1924, these owners announced their intent to operate regular passenger service between New York and Palestine.[i]

For what they said was “the first of the ships to be operated by the new line,”[ii] they purchased a 25-year-old ship built by A. G. Vulkan of Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland). Originally a passenger ship for the Hamburg-American Line to be named the Borussia, and then the Teutonia, it was finally launched as the Kiautschou. The North German Lloyd Company bought it and changed its name to the Princess Alice. 

The U.S. captured it in 1914 and renamed it the Princess Matoika before using it as a troop transport through the rest of World War I.  In 1920, the Matoika was a last-minute substitute that carried some members of the U.S. Olympic team to Antwerp. They found conditions on the ship, which by then had been converted to a mail carrier, so terrible that they “mutinied.” After a total reconstruction, the Matoika made nearly a dozen trips from Europe, bringing immigrants to the U.S. It had two more owners and finally was renamed the President Arthur to conform with the names of other ships owned by the United States Lines company. [iii]

Strahl clearly was a master at publicity. Prior to his announcement on October 9, 1924, he had traveled to Palestine, and while passenger lists routinely appeared in the New York Times, his name always had a modifier. Among the passengers departing on the Paris on July 23, 1924, was Strahl, on his way “to Jerusalem to organize a Jewish life insurance company.”[iv] When Strahl returned on the France, the Times described him as “one of America’s leading Zionists.”[v]

 

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[i]  “Zionists to Run a Fleet,” New York Times, October 10, 1924, Sports/Automobiles section, 21.

[ii]  Ibid.

[iii]  A complete history of the ship appears on rootsweb.ancestry.com. Joe Hartwell, “USS Princess Matoika,” http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cacunithistories/Princess_Matoika.html. Accessed March 18, 2009.

[iv]  “Ocean Travelers,” New York Times, July 23, 1924, 6. The company became the Judea Industrial Corporation, which Strahl and others ran from 1927 to 1929.  “Celebrate Stock Sale,” New York Times, August 15, 1927, 11; “Start New Fire Insurance Company,” New York Times, July 6, 1928, 32; “ “To Invest Funds in Palestine,” New York Times, August 16, 1928, 33; “Judge Strahl Feted in Jerusalem,” New York Times, August 17, 1928, 5; “Asks Judea Accounting,” New York Times, April 13, 1929, 14; “Fight Adding Stock in Judea Company,” New York Times, July 6, 1929, 14; “Judea Directors Upheld,” New York Times, May 9, 1930, 24.

[v]  “Jusserand Due to Arrive Today,” New York Times, October 3, 1924, 11. Accessed December 10, 2009.

In search of a myth

Jacob Drapekin

This spring, my story of my search for my great-grandfather, Jacob Drapekin, was published as a "success story" on the Jewish Genealogy website.

I retell the story here, slightly differently, with a few more photos and illustrations.  In subsequent blogs, I plan to tell the story of the SS President Arthur, the ship on which my great-grandfather died.

Like most children, I grew up with family stories.

Among my culturally assimilated, non-Zionist family, the most persistent – and unverifiable – story was that my mother’s grandfather, after spending many years in America, “died on a ship to Palestine.”  The captain, knowing Jacob Drapekin’s dream, buried him when the ship reached land rather than at sea.  The only fact was that there were no facts: no dates, no documents, no clues.  It seemed so unlikely.  His daughter, my grandmother, had no blue-and-white box and never planted a tree in my name.

When my husband, a Reform rabbi, wanted to return to Israel in 1977 to show me where he had studied for a year, I was the first on both sides of my family to go.

In Haifa, we found an abandoned cemetery across the road from the old port that I figured was the most likely place.  The stones ranged from difficult to impossible to read.  Many were shattered; all were covered with weeds and vines. A self-appointed watchman asked for shekels to say Kaddish, assuming we American Jews could not, but he could give us no information.

Late one night in 2005, I typed my great-grandfather’s name into Google.  On the screen appeared:  “It was on the 24th day of March that one of the passengers – Mr. Jacob Drapekin of Chicago, who was making the trip to spend his last years in Palestine ...”

One click led me to the diary of Herman Hirsch.  His great-grandson, Arthur Hirsch, a Parkinson’s disease activist in Canada, had transcribed the diary and put it on his personal website.

Herman Hirsch had been a passenger on the SS President Arthur on its maiden voyage from New York to Haifa.  Among other events he recorded:  “It was on the 24th day of March that one of the passengers – Mr. Jacob Drapekin of Chicago, who was making the trip to spend his last years in Palestine – died on the ship.  After consultation with the Captain and Officers, Mr. Drapekin's last request was granted – to be buried in the Holy Land, and on Tuesday, March 31st, with his coffin draped in the American flag – it was placed on deck.  The last rites were performed in Hebrew and English by Rabbi Ashinsky.  The Captain also said a few words.” Finally I had some facts: not many, but enough to know my family's story had at least a grain of truth.

In 2009, about to leave for Israel for my fourth visit, I consulted the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) where I found “Jewish Names in Selected U.S. State Department Files (RG59),” including a search engine for a database assembled by volunteers from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington.  “Drapekin” produced no results, but “Drapkin” yielded:

DRAPKIN, Jacob Haifa Palestine Box #4580, File 367, Document n.113

A week later I was at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, holding “Report of the Death of an American Citizen”:  one “Jacob Drapkin,” from Chicago, of “chronic endocarditis and myocarditis.”  Included with the six sheets is a list of the property in his possession: a $10,000 letter of credit, “one watch and chain with knife,” $1,435 in cash and “American Express cheques,” one sealed bundle, one sealed valise, and one locked trunk – all witnessed by a second-class passenger.  There was a roundtrip ticket, which may or may not have indicated his intention not to make aliyah or, my husband suggests, may have been a requirement of British authorities.

And there was one other fact: his body was buried in "The Jewish Cemetery, Haifa, Palestine."

I returned home that afternoon and found an address for the president of the Haifa branch of the Israel Genealogical Society; a few hours later, Hanna Steinblatt confirmed that the cemetery I’d visited in 1977 was the only one in use until 1934.  She included the phone number of the chevra kadisha – the burial society – to contact for more information.

And so, in a drought-ending downpour on a spring Sunday in 2009, my husband and I waded through wet, waist-high brambles and weeds seeking grave 17 in row 6.  There were no rows, no sections, so my husband called the chevra kadisha.  “Do you speak English?” he asked in Hebrew.  “Why should I speak English when you speak Hebrew?” replied the man on the other end of the line.  (So typical:  answering a question with a question!)

My husband read out the names on the stones nearby.  “Leave the cemetery and walk in through the other entrance to the north.”  When we did that, my husband called again and read more names:  “Walk to your left.” More names.  “Walk toward the sea.”  More names.  “Go back to your right.”

Between Yosef Halutz (grave 16) and Yaakov Kretzman (grave 18) in the packed cemetery, there was the space of one grave with no marker: Jacob Drapekin’s. We couldn’t leave a stone, but we did say prayers.

Back home, I returned to the Internet to learn more about the SS President Arthur, and it is a fascinating story indeed that I will continue in future blogs.  Suffice it to say that the Wikipedia article cited the death of my great-grandfather, but not his name.

In 2010, the Israeli Knesset Minister of Religious Services Yaakov Margi complained about the condition of the cemetery in Haifa. Hanna Steinblatt reported to me that an agreement was reached: the cemetery will be maintained by the municipality and the Ministry will “make paths and reconstruct the place.”  There are recent photos on the web (Google "Old Haifa Cemetery") that show that is happening.

Friends ask if I’ll put up a stone. I’ve looked into it, but publishing his story may be an even more lasting matzevah (marker) for Jacob Drapekin: A second-class passenger whose funeral was attended by hundreds of prominent Jews and reported around the world, thanks to a sympathetic sea captain, a first-class passenger who wrote about it, his great-grandson who put the account on the Internet 80 years later, and volunteers who believe that facts matter.

From Lemonade Stand to Graduate School

My first transistor radio was a baby-blue and silver box about the size of a Kindle.  I bought it from Sears with $50 I had netted from selling lemonade.

How could I earn so much money from lemonade?  We lived about a mile from the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, and a large nearby field, home of four or five Little League diamonds, served as a satellite parking lot for the fair.  By the time people reached their cars on a hot August day in the late 1950s, when no one carried a plastic water bottle, they were pretty thirsty.

All summer my mother and I would stock up on cans of frozen concentrate when they were on sale, keeping careful track of how much we spent, and for three days on Labor Day Weekend, my lemonade stand became a family enterprise.  Mom would make the lemonade, Dad would transport it in the car about two blocks to my stand, my little brother would shout, “Ice-cold lemonade, made in the shade!  Only 10¢ a glass, get it while it lasts!”  One summer I told him to stand on a board on a pile of rocks, and a rusty nail pierced the sole of his foot.  My dad rushed him to the hospital for a tetanus shot, and I felt guilty for weeks.

The transistor radio fit under my pillow, and it transported me everywhere:  to Chicago, where I listened to Dick Biondi on WLS; to Montreal, where I tried out my high school French-in-progress; to Detroit, where WJR broadcast “Ask the Professor.”

That program should have been called “Stump the Professors,” and I accepted the challenge.  The first time I submitted questions, I won a year’s subscription to The Atlantic Monthly.  A few months later, I submitted a list of “foreign dishes” like risotto and rinktum-ditty that they could not identify, and I received Harper’s Magazine; a year later, I beat them with four questions drawn from my current reading (e.g., who was Roger Chillingworth?) for another year of The Atlantic.

Looking back at those magazines, as I prepare to toss them after 50 years of moving them from Indianapolis to Topeka to Chicago to Washington, I see how much they shaped my interests over the years, and I am particularly struck by how they echoed and resonated through the years of my adult life.

• Countless full-page ads for European vacations, Harvey’s Bristol Cream, and the Book-of-the-Month Club.
• Poetry by Randall Jarrell, Maxine Kumin, and Theodore Roethke, with whom I later took a seminar when he was a visiting poet at the University of Cincinnati (“Roethke makes me/think in poesy” was my first feeble attempt).
• The famous photo of Freud and Jung at Clark University that I saw 1,000 times when I served as editor of publications at the Menninger Foundation and helped with the Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress.
• “The Angry Young Women,” an essay by Ellen Moers comparing contemporary women writers to those of the Victorian period.
• “Why Nobody Can’t Write Good,” by John Fischer, a piece on the teaching of English in college that concludes, “I have hopes that the colleges will someday refuse to admit any student who cannot read and write”:  my sentiments exactly after teaching Freshman English at two universities some 15-20 years later.
• A Bell Telephone System advertisement for “educational television:  help for busy teachers, hope for crowded classroom.”
• “The Nation’s Worst Slum:  Washington, D.C.” by Agnes E. Meyer, drove me to D.C. rather than away.
• A loving tribute to “England,” by Ken W. Purdy, shaped my anglophilia.
• “The Writer as Moralist” by Saul Bellow, the subject of my doctoral dissertation.
• A report on the Cornwall town of St. Ives, which I finally visited in 1972.
• A critical essay on The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James, who was the subject of an entire course I took in graduate school.
• On one cover, in my mother’s precise printing, is her household budget for the month.
• On many others, words that must have puzzled me:  beatific, necromancer, penumbral, subterfuge, lachrymose, rapport.

I don’t remember being encouraged or driven to do this, or be like this.  I was ambitious, self-directed, curious.  Later, I realized that people thought I was a “show-off,” a “Miss Know-It-All.”  I was proud of my SAT verbal scores, ashamed of my math scores.  My father went over and over the arithmetic with me.  I had stomach aches in math classes; a friend tutored me privately in math.  I never got it.  I had “math anxiety” before Sheila Tobias gave it a name.

Instead, I loved words; I loved books; I loved reading about books, and people, and places.  I wanted to write with them all, meet them all, see them all.

From theory to reality

Reading obituaries over the years, I often wondered how I would face a terminal illness.  It was purely theoretical, of course, as I weighed that against the pro’s and con’s of dying suddenly in a plane crash.

In mid-August 2011, I had a chest x-ray for heart attack symptoms.  My heart was fine, but an x-ray revealed a mass in my chest.  A CT scan confirmed something in my mediastinum, the space between my lungs.  In the next few days, as I went from pulmonologist to thoracic surgeon to radiologist and from scan to scan to biopsy, the news got worse.  By mid-September I had a diagnosis of Stage 3 non-smoker’s lung cancer.  The doctors I saw were in general agreement that surgery was extremely risky, if not impossible, because it appeared to be entangled in nerves and blood vessels.  So I began chemotherapy.

At the same time, my oncologist at George Washington University Hospital encouraged me to see a specialist at Johns Hopkins, and in mid-October, I did that.  He confirmed the chemo cocktail I was taking, and he suggested that if the chemotherapy seemed to be effective – to be determined by a scan after my second treatment – there was a surgeon at Hopkins whose opinion I should seek.

Friends shared with me in these early weeks the positive stories of people they knew who had survived – or are surviving – various kinds of cancer.  Some of them told me more than I wanted to hear, though I knew their intentions were good.  Because it was widely known that my husband and I were scheduled to spend five months serving the congregations in Milan and Florence that we had served the previous year, we shared widely with family and friends the reason we were not returning to Italy.

For the most part, we retreated.  My treatments were on two days every three weeks, and for a few days after, I would be extremely fatigued.  We avoided crowds, saw a few friends, and relied heavily on Gmail and Netflix.  We spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices.

Primarily, I tried to cope with my new reality.  Now I had limited time, according both to the doctors and the weight of statistics for this kind of cancer, and my once-abstract question would be answered:  How would I respond?

The lung oncologist at Johns Hopkins had told me to “acknowledge the statistics and then set them aside” because each case is different, and I was a “healthy 64-year-old woman with cancer.”  All my doctors advised me not to rely on the internet for accurate information.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was devastated, of course.  There is no imagining – or forgetting – the feelings I had when the young E.R. doctor sat down and said, “We need to talk.”  I read as much as I could, bit by bit, of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  My immediate assumption was that I was not a good person, that I must have done something wrong to deserve this punishment.  No, I hadn’t smoked (everyone’s first question).  I asked myself over and over, “Why don’t bad things happen to bad people like terrorists and dictators?”

I had to accept that my having cancer was something I could not control.  Nor could I control the doctors’ schedules nor the time that elapsed between having a test and learning the results of the test.  I could be treated, but I couldn’t control whether the treatment would be effective.

Early on, I recognized the value of Kushner’s message:  what matters is not the amount of time one has but what one does with that time.  I didn’t want to waste it.  The projects that mattered to me were my writing, my genealogical research, and the appropriate disposition of my possessions.  My bucket list was not traveling – though there are plenty of places I would like to visit – but rather controlling my legacy.

In many ways, I am the self-appointed keeper of our family stories and history.  I must write them down to pass them on.  And in the last few years, I had given away the possessions of my in-laws, my parents, and my aunt, making literally thousands of decisions about treasures and junk.  I wanted not just to spare my family this chore; I wanted to make my own decisions about photos, papers, jewelry, purses, scarves.

My other resolution was to try as best we could to live as if I did not have cancer.  In a way, in part I believe because I was asymptomatic, I was in denial, but I also recognized that I did not want to immerse myself in the world of cancer.  In addition to staying off the internet, I did not seek out any groups.  I really didn’t want to hear from strangers; I spoke to friends who are survivors who had valuable lessons to teach me.  After a few minutes of talking about me, I always tried to turn conversations in other directions. 

In November we learned that the tumor had shrunk significantly.  I applied to see the surgeon at Hopkins – a process not unlike applying to an Ivy League college – and was accepted, not just to see him but to be operated on by him.  Eventually, I completed five chemo treatments and had my surgery on January 24.

When the doctors removed the upper lobe of my right lung, the tumor came out with it.  It had not been attached to my chest wall, despite its appearance on the various scans.  The only affected lymph gland the surgeon could find was in the part of my lung that he removed.  The procedure the doctors used was VATS (Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery), during which a camera and a knife were inserted under my right arm through small incisions.  This less invasive method, plus the fact that I was in good health otherwise, meant that my recovery has been relative rapid.  Though not painless, it has been remarkably easy.

I face five years of scans:  five years of the kind of nervousness and waiting that were telescoped into five intensive months.  I remember how apprehensive I was the night before my needle biopsy, then my first chemotherapy treatment, then the night before my brain MRI, then the night before my surgery.  It did get easier, for me.

Many friends have asked if I am angry that the doctors were initially negative about my prospects.  I am someone who lives by Mel Brooks’s lyrics from The Twelve Chairs:  “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”  Having heard the worst news at the beginning, the relief is palpable.  Having been given hopes that turned out to be false would have been as devastating as the original diagnosis.

In addition to being declared “disease-free,” much that is positive has come out of my experiences thus far.  Over the weeks, as people learned about my illness, they sent messages that demonstrated how much they cared for me or – if they didn’t know me very well – how much they cared for our family.  I knew that the Mi Sheberach prayer was being said for my recovery in synagogues around the world, and that my non-Jewish friends and neighbors were praying for me in their churches.

I did get a lot accomplished in terms of my long-term goals, though there is still much to do.  My article about searching for the truth about my great-grandfather is about to be published as a “success story” on the website JewishGen.org.  I blogged about my maternal grandfather’s family, early Iowa merchants.  I have organized most of my published and unpublished materials into a meaningful format.  I have cleared out file drawers and begun to donate photographs and papers to the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, the American Jewish Archives, the Indiana State Historical Society, and other repositories.  I’ve used a portion of my collection of postcards to thank people who sent me cards and jokes.  There is still much to do, but at least I have begun.

Bad person, good person; smoker, non-smoker; radon, backyard electrical transformer; good genes, bad genes.  Cancer is unpredictable and controllable only within limits.  There is a seemingly endless variety of cancers.  Everyone responds differently to treatment.  Because I have been a seriously hardcore control freak, this was perhaps the most difficult challenge to me.  I could not explain or control my cancer, but I can control how I respond to it.  I hope I won't need reminding.

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A Remnant of Jews in Tama County, Iowa

Michael J. Bell, in “True Israelites of America” (Annals of Iowa 53, 2, Spring 1994), comments that well into the 1850s almost all the permanent Jewish settlers in Iowa were peddlers who traveled through the state:  “Those early Jews who came to Iowa were among the first generation of American entrepreneurs.  For the young Jewish businessman, a small store in the right community offered the opportunity for a Jewish immigrant to link himself to the rising prosperity of 19^th-century American and to develop a sense (however limited) of individual power and independence.”

In addition to Louis, A.I., and Zachariah Solomon, at least two other Sime men followed this path to integration if not prosperity.  Louis joined his sons, Max and Simon, in Des Moines in 1889 for two years where they operated “Sime Bros Clothing and gents furnishing goods” in the city center.  

Max Sime

In October 1892, the two brothers opened yet another store in Denison, Iowa, in the southwest corner of the state, which they ran for eight years.  Shortly after they opened their store, prairie fires – a frequent occurrence – swept the nearby countryside.  In an act of charity, the Simes donated clothing to the victims; in 1893, they donated 5 percent “of All Cash Sales” in December “to be distributed among the deserving poor and needy in Denison Township.”

Simon Sime

Max especially became active in the life of the town.  He was an officer in the local whist chapter (a popular card game that had a national organization) and a charter member both of the Order of the Eastern Star and the International Order of Odd Fellows. His wife and daughter also were founders of the Order of Eastern Star.  The brothers had a float in Denison’s July 4^th parade.

In March 1900, Max became a member of Denison’s city council, but in May of the same year the business failed and the brothers declared bankruptcy.  Both brothers ended up in the clothing business – working for others – in Chicago, where they both died, Simon in 1932 and Max in 1945, after being struck and killed by an automobile.

The only early Sime settler who prospered in Iowa was my great-grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sime (“A.I.”). After working in his brother Louis’s business and moving around like his brothers and cousins from one small Iowa town to another, he established Sime’s Clothing Store in 1896 in Toledo, at the corner of Broadway and High Streets, where Louis had originally had his store on the main square.   

608 Broadway

He and his wife owned a big white house at 608 Broadway, and they had three sons and a daughter.  A.I. was active in many civic organizations, and when he died of tuberculosis in 1923, his obituary was the lead story on the front page of the Toledo Chronicle.

Hyman, 2nd from left, at Northwestern

His oldest son, Hyman – my grandfather – left Toledo to study pharmacy at Northwestern University and received a PhG (pharmaceutical graduate) in 1904.   

With his first paycheck, Hyman bought his parents a Tiffany lamp to hang over their dining room table.  He worked as a pharmacist in Dayton and Clutier, Iowa, as well as Wayne, Nebraska, before settling in Chicago, where he married my grandmother, Mary Drapekin, in 1913.  By 1918, he had his own drugstore, which he maintained till the Depression when – family legend has it – he gave away too many medications to people who never paid for them.  From then on, he was a druggist in someone else’s store.

Sampson Sime

The second son, Sampson, went to Iowa State University and became a civil engineer, settling eventually in Kansas City.

A.I. and Lena’s only daughter was “Little Sarah,” who started working in a Toledo bank in 1916 and retired in 1965 from her position as assistant cashier of the State Bank of Toledo; it was clear to all of us that she ran the bank!  Sarah lived with her youngest brother Zelic in the big family house on Broadway.  In 1921, Zelic became a partner in his father’s business and ran it until his death in 1949.  Sarah sold the business in 1962 and died in 1972 in a nursing home in Gladbrook, 20 miles away.

Sarah and Zelic

When I was a little girl in Chicago and St. Paul, we would take a summer driving trip to Toledo.  The Sime house was on a double lot, and Aunt Sarah, who collected rain water in a barrel to wash her waist-length hair, grew all kinds of vegetables.  When we would arrive, there were always many rituals.  First, she would call the operator on the crank telephone in the kitchen so the news could be relayed to others in town.  Then we would go into the vegetable garden and pick peas to shell.  Then I would go up Broadway to visit Sarah’s best friend, Estelle Born, and pick up a little red wagon she would lend me.  In the evenings we would go to band concerts on the Courthouse Square, and when we got back in the dark, we would go into the garden to listen to the corn grow.

On a “roots road trip” we took about three years ago, my husband and I drove across Iowa, beginning in Denison, and followed Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, which runs through the center of the state, to Toledo.  The countryside is still beautiful, with rolling hills and fertile fields. 

Sime's Corner, Toledo Iowa

The towns, not so quaint.  Town squares and downtowns are full of empty storefronts, many of which were remodeled in the 1970s and 1980s with unattractive siding (like A.I. and Zelic’s store, now an insurance office).

Iowa is still drawing new immigrants, just as it did 140 years ago.  A.G. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times (November 14, 2011) on the front page about towns in Kansas where “Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many place.” 

Of the towns in Iowa where Simes and Solomons lived, Denison in particular reflects a similar influx; the 2010 census counted 42.1% of the population as Hispanic. Denison is home to three major animal-processing plants:  beef, chicken, and pigs’ blood.  The stores on its main street, where the Sime brothers sold men’s clothing, now feature dresses for La Quinceañera.  Fine old Victorian-era homes shelter multiple tenants. 

1994

2009

The only visible remnant of the Sime family of central Iowa is an old barn with a fading sign just a few miles outside of Toledo.

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.