{"id":343,"date":"2013-10-01T11:29:30","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T18:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=343"},"modified":"2013-10-01T11:29:30","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T18:29:30","slug":"prague-blog-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Prague Blog #1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sep 30, 2013<\/p>\n

I am heading off to the Czech Republic with my 13-year-old son Nathan to attend the rededication of an old synagogue in Ckyne, southern Bohemia.\u00a0 Our first stop is Prague, the capital city where my great-grandmother Pauline Nachod was born in 1848.<\/p>\n

I have been to Prague before.\u00a0 The first time was when I was a teenager, during the Communist era.\u00a0 At that time, getting a visa to enter the country was difficult and tours were very constrained.\u00a0 Interaction with ordinary Czechs was pretty much out of the question.\u00a0 I returned to Prague in 1991, after taking the bar exam.\u00a0 Following a brief lunch with my aunt Nuria\u2019s friend, the musicologist Ivan Vojtech, I tried to track down a cousin of my paternal grandmother Gertrud Kolisch.\u00a0 I looked in the caf\u00e9\u2019s old telephone book that had not been updated in twenty years and found Dr. Rudolf Kolisch.\u00a0 So I called the number.\u00a0 The young man who answered (I later learned he was just 15) did not speak English, nor French, but uttered a few words in German before hanging up on me.\u00a0 \u201cMy grandfather is dead.\u00a0 My mother is not here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Traveling alone and having nothing better to do, I took the address in the old phone book and decided to try to see if I could find my cousins.\u00a0 I took the bus to the outskirts of town, to a residential park filled with 10-story apartment buildings.\u00a0 When I finally found the building matching the address I scanned the intercom directory.\u00a0 No Kolisch.\u00a0 My grandfather is dead, the boy had told me.\u00a0 His mother wasn\u2019t home.\u00a0 So the apartment must be listed under the mother\u2019s married name.<\/p>\n

Well, I had come this far.\u00a0 Undeterred, I went over to the sandbox playground next to the building.\u00a0 Some young folks about my age (25) were playing with their babies in the sandbox.\u00a0 I asked if they spoke English.\u00a0 No luck.\u00a0 French?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 German?\u00a0 No again.\u00a0 One of them spoke a little Russian, but my four weeks of Russian in seventh grade didn\u2019t get me very far.\u00a0 So I took out a little notebook and drew a picture of my family tree, up through my father to his mother and her father, then sideways over to his brother down to his son and then to ?, the woman in the building.\u00a0 They understood enough and ran to get the help of an old lady in a nearby building.\u00a0 She spoke German with me and told me she would call my cousin. In a little while I was ushered into the building and introduced to my cousin\u2019s neighbor, with whom I conversed for nearly an hour in French.\u00a0 Who knew I could even speak French?\u00a0 I thought I had forgotten it all.<\/p>\n

Finally, my cousin Michaela Navratilova walked through the door.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember my grandmother, who died when I was just a baby, but from the photos I knew I could recognize that Michaela had the same face.\u00a0 No doubt she was a Kolisch.\u00a0 With tears in her eyes, we embraced.\u00a0 She had known of our existence, but had never communicated with us.\u00a0 Her father and brother had died over a decade earlier, and she felt herself completely cut off.\u00a0 With only her father\u2019s books to remind her of the more cosmopolitan world before 1939, she had until the fall of communism in 1989 never seriously allowed herself to dream of traveling abroad or of meeting another member of her father\u2019s family.\u00a0 And now here I was, opening the door for her to the outside world.<\/p>\n

Michaela took care of me for the next several days, showed me the little cabin in the woods that her husband had built with the plum tree laden with fruit.\u00a0 We went hunting for mushrooms.\u00a0 At each one, she said \u201cHmm.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen one like this before.\u201d\u00a0 On the way back to the cabin, we stopped at the local gas station and she asked the woman who lived upstairs to come down and inspect our basket of mushrooms.\u00a0 Returning to the car with a smile, she assured me the old woman said they were all non-poisonous and edible.\u00a0 Not completely convinced, I let her son Tomas, the one who had answered my initial phone call, taste the stew first.\u00a0 When he didn\u2019t drop dead, I ventured a taste and then dug in.\u00a0 For dessert, we ate dozens of homemade plum dumplings called Zwetschkenkn\u00f6del in German.<\/p>\n

I returned to Prague in 1996.\u00a0 Pam and I had just become engaged and she joined me on a trip to Vienna for a family reunion I had organized with the various branches of my family.\u00a0 Beforehand, I had planned a side trip through Moravia and Bohemia to visit the towns where my ancestors had lived.\u00a0 The plane landed in Vienna after a long flight and we immediately set off into Moravia in a rental car.\u00a0 Many hours later, \u00a0we arrived at Kromeric, exhausted, and found a hotel.\u00a0 Waking up the next morning, eager to explore, we looked for our car.\u00a0 And looked.\u00a0 And looked.\u00a0 It was gone, taken during the night.\u00a0 The hotel claimed that the parking lot out front was not its responsibility, which was small comfort.\u00a0 I had been too tired to put the \u201cclub\u201d on the wheel and bring the last bag up, the one with Pam\u2019s dresses, to our room.\u00a0 She still hasn\u2019t forgiven me for losing them.<\/p>\n

After touring the bishop\u2019s palace in Kromeric, we decided to go directly to Prague and boarded a train in nearby Holesov (birthplace of my great-grandfather Hermann Jellinek).\u00a0 The train stopped on the way in Pardubice (birth-place of my great-great grandmother Rosalie Reichmann).\u00a0 As we had no food or drink, I decided to get off the train while we are stopped at the station and buy something to drink at a small stand.\u00a0 I handed the woman a large bill, the only one I had, and she mumbled something in Czech and ran off to make change.\u00a0 As I waited for her to return, the whistle blew for the train to depart.\u00a0 I grabbed the change from the lady and ran for the train, just hopping on as the train gained speed and headed out of the station.\u00a0 By the time I got to our cabin and found Pam, the train was at full speed, and Pam was white as a sheet.\u00a0 Day one of the trip: car stolen, dresses stolen, and now alone on a train, not even certain where she was going.\u00a0 She thought I had abandoned her! Our stay in Prague was clouded by the difficulties of our first day.\u00a0 It took two days, until we arrived in Vienna, before Pam smiled again.<\/p>\n

After the family reunion and a trip to Salzburg for a performance of Moses und Aron, Pam returned home and I went back to Prague alone, staying in the apartment of my cousin Nick Teller.\u00a0 Nick had been raised in England and Germany.\u00a0 His father was my grandmother\u2019s cousin and his mother was from Prague, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.\u00a0 Nick worked at the German Commerzbank in Prague, almost as a quadruple-agent.\u00a0 He could play British, Czech, German or Jewish and witnessed the worst prejudices of all these groups in Prague.\u00a0 I used my stay to visit the Czech State Archives and get copies of records of my family.\u00a0 These records had been maintained by Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia since 1782, when the Habsburg Emperor Josef II issued his famous Tolerance Patent, granting Jews some civil rights.\u00a0 (They would not be fully emancipated until after 1867.)<\/p>\n

The records had been collected during World War II, as the Jewish communities were liquidated by the Nazis, and ultimately were deposited in the Czech State Archives.\u00a0 One of the books I found was for the small town of Ckyne in southern Bohemia.\u00a0 All I knew of the town was that Rosa Bloch, the maternal grandmother of my grandfather Eric Zeisl, was born there.\u00a0 She was apparently a nasty lady, who burned my grandfather\u2019s early compositions and criticized him for \u201cplaying instead of practicing.\u201d\u00a0 My grandfather half-joked that he had three enemies in his life: Hitler, the sun and his grandmother.\u00a0 That he would put her in the same category as Hitler gives you some idea of what she must have been like.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I found the old record books from Ckyne in the Czech State Archives.\u00a0 Probably no one had looked at them for decades.\u00a0 I traced back from Rosa to her father Isak and then to his father Mathes Bloch.\u00a0 I soon noticed that Mathes Bloch had signed as the mohel for all the boys born in the town in the first half of the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 The whole book was in his handwriting.\u00a0 I triumphantly reported back to my family that we were descended from the Mohel of Ckyne.\u00a0 Only years later, when the cemetery was photographed, did I learn that Mathes (or Mendel) Bloch was in fact not only the mohel, but the rabbi of Ckyne.<\/p>\n

Several years later, I received a call out of the blue from a man in Boston named Alex Woodle.\u00a0 He said that he just learned that his family, who came over to the US in the 1840s, may have come from Ckyne.\u00a0 I pulled out the copies I had made of the pages where the Blochs were mentioned in the old record book, and sure enough, right next to them were the records for the Wudl family.\u00a0 Alex was thrilled to get confirmation and help tracing his family back another generation.\u00a0 Ultimately, he went to Prague and Ckyne and even made a film about his discovery that was shown on TV.<\/p>\n

I kept in touch with Alex and over time we discovered a number of other families that descended from the Jews of Ckyne.\u00a0 Amazingly, many of these families also had avid genealogists.\u00a0 Emily Rose even published a successful book on her family.\u00a0 Rochester professor Phil Lederer put up a detailed account of his roots trip to Ckyne on his website.\u00a0 So did Francisco Fantes.\u00a0 Heleen Sittig in the Netherlands had an entire website devoted to her family tree.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, Alex announced to me that a woman named Jindra Bromova in Ckyne had arranged for the town to repurchase the old synagogue building and restore it.\u00a0 She managed to raise over 200,000 Euro from the European Union and intended to turn the building into a Jewish cultural history museum of southern Bohemia.\u00a0 Apparently, this synagogue, built in 1828, was the finest example of synagogue architecture left in the entire region.<\/p>\n

The Czech Republic was not bombed very much in World War II and so many of the synagogue buildings, including the very old and beautiful ones in Prague, still stand.\u00a0 The Ckyne synagogue had been abandoned as Jews moved to larger towns and was sold\u00a0 even before the Nazi era.\u00a0 From what I have seen, it is a large, rather ordinary looking building.\u00a0 But the inside has been nicely restored and so I am curious to see what becomes of it.\u00a0 When Jindra wrote to tell me that there would be a rededication ceremony, I decided I wanted to be there.<\/p>\n

As it happens, the rededication is on October 6, just six weeks after our son Nathan\u2019s bar mitzvah.\u00a0 Pam and I decided it would make sense to pull him out of school for a week so that he could attend and participate in the ceremony, as the representative of his ggggg-grandfather Rabbi Bloch.<\/p>\n

So we are off to Prague.\u00a0 Michaela will be meeting us and she and our cousin Petr Wilheim will take us to Theresienstadt on Wednesday.\u00a0 I have never been to a concentration camp before.\u00a0 When I admitted this to a group of Holocaust survivors a few years ago, I was berated and told I must go.\u00a0 I have misgivings.\u00a0 First, I am not someone who needs to go somewhere in order to be reminded of the Holocaust.\u00a0 As the President, and for the past ten months Acting Executive Director, of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, I have to deal with the memory of the Holocaust nearly every day.\u00a0 I also don\u2019t feel any special connection to the main camps.\u00a0 My great-grandfather Sigmund Zeisl was deported to Theresienstadt in July 1942 and deported two months later to Treblinka, where he was presumably murdered on arrival, if he even survived the train ordeal.\u00a0 There is nothing at Treblinka for me.\u00a0 Just a monument at the place where he was taken for execution by his kidnappers.\u00a0 If I wanted to connect with my great-grandfather, I would go to Vienna, where he lived for ll but the last two months of his 70-year existence.<\/p>\n

Of course, I have read a great number of books about Theresienstadt.\u00a0 My great-grandfather\u2019s time there was no doubt brief and terrible.\u00a0 The elderly did not receive enough food to survive for long and the crowded and diseased living conditions made the mortality rate astronomically high, even in this supposedly model ghetto.\u00a0 Theresienstadt was a garrison town, built to house soldiers, and what remains are the same barracks and buildings.\u00a0 Now they house museum exhibits about the infamous Nazi ghetto.\u00a0 I am at the same time eager to see how the Museum deals with the subject-matter and at the same time afraid of the emotions my trip there will be sure to evoke.\u00a0 I am not sure how traveling with my son will affect me.\u00a0 Just thinking about it makes me well up with sorrow and indignity and terror at the inhuman cruelty of it all.\u00a0 Being there will not be easy for me, which is why I have avoided it until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sep 30, 2013 I am heading off to the Czech Republic with my 13-year-old son Nathan to attend the rededication of an old synagogue in Ckyne, southern Bohemia.\u00a0 Our first stop is Prague, the capital city where my great-grandmother Pauline … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}