I never knew my uncle Arthur Goldstein, who died long before I was born. But I owe him a debt I can never repay.
I’m told that Arthur was a lovable, precocious toddler who understood three languages by the time he turned two. But in November 1915, just two weeks after his second birthday, Arthur died of tubercular meningitis. To assuage their grief, his parents resolved to have another child. That consolation baby grew up to be my mother.
Arthur’s tiny grave rests in the Hungarian Cemetery in Brooklyn, next to his parents— my maternal grandparents— and not far from the elaborate granite monument that marks the grave of Erich Weiss, better known to tourists as the magician Harry Houdini. My visits to Arthur’s grave inevitably evoke mixed feelings. On the one hand, what a shame that this bright little child never got the chance to grow up. On the other hand, if Arthur hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be here. The only thing I can do for him now is perpetuate his memory.
Flesh-and-blood connections
Genealogy was once used largely for racist or exclusionary purposes. But for me and most of my fellow ancestor-hunters today, this hobby is more concerned with learning who we are and where we came from, and with fitting our individual lives into the larger context of world history.
Each of us is the product of literally thousands of human relationships stretching back over thousands of years. To understand ourselves, we are told by sages like Santayana, we must know our past. But who can really relate to numbers like 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, or countless other millions killed in wars or famines or plagues? And who can imagine events that occurred centuries ago?
But if you know that somewhere back in the unreachable past some flesh-and-blood ancestor of yours might have died, or almost died, in a pogrom or a flood or, in my Uncle Arthur’s case, from some once-fatal disease— if you know this, then you begin to appreciate how easy it could have been for you never to have existed, and consequently how lucky each of us is to be here.
Another quick example from my own family tree: In 1877, my Hungarian great-grandfather Herman Rottenberg was left a widower with one small child when his wife, Zlatke, died of typhus at the age of 25. In keeping with Jewish custom, three months later Herman married Zlatke’s next-younger sister, Sally Kohn. Over the next 16 years, Herman and Sally had seven more children. The very last of those was my grandfather, Marcus Rottenberg. If a typhus vaccine had been available to save Zlatke’s life… or if Herman and Sally had decided that six kids was enough….
You get my drift. Am I lucky to be here? Oh my yes.
Moses’s mother
Because I’ve been tracing my ancestors since I was 16, by now I tend to see almost every historical event in personal terms. Remember the opening scene of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 Biblical spectacle, The Ten Commandments? Hundreds of Hebrew slaves are dragging a gigantic Sphinx statue on a platform of logs when one of the Hebrew women gets her shawl caught under the logs. An overseer orders them to stop, and the entire procession grinds to a halt just as the woman is inches away from being crushed to death by the Sphinx. The woman, it later turns out, is Yocheved, the mother of Moses.
Most moviegoers took this scene as DeMille intended: as a shorthand portrayal of the Israelites’ suffering in Egypt. But I took it personally because, you see, I’m a kohen— a direct descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses, who was Judaism’s first high priest (a legacy passed down on family gravestones and, more recently, verified through DNA testing). So I watched this scene thinking, “Oh my God— that’s my ancestor! And where would I be if she’d been crushed to death beneath that statue?”
Fatal encounter
These musings were triggered by my recent discovery of another genuine long-ago tragedy, this one in 12th-Century Worms, Germany.
On the night of November 11, 1196, the celebrated Talmudist Eleazer ben Judah ben Kalonymus was in his study, working on a commentary about the Book of Genesis with some students and a junior teacher, when two armed men broke into the other end of his house. Eleazar’s wife, Dulcea of Worms, conducted a business in parchment scrolls and was known to have valuable objects in her home. Presumably the intruders were after these. In the melee that ensued, two of Dulcea’s daughters, aged 13 and six, were killed, and a son was severely injured. Dulcea ran out into the street to cry for help; the thugs chased after her and murdered her as well.
A nightmare, to be sure. But I recently discovered that another daughter of Eleazar and Dulcea survived that attack. This daughter, named Rivka or possibly Gutlin, grew up to marry another esteemed rabbi of Worms, Baruch ben Meir; and that marriage produced perhaps the greatest German rabbi of the 13th Century: Meir ben Baruch, subsequently known as Meir of Rothenburg after the yeshiva he operated in that Bavarian city for 40 years. Although most Jews then did not use surnames, after Meir’s death his descendants began calling themselves “of the family of Meir of Rothenburg,” which eventually was shortened to “Rothenburg.” And as they moved across Europe in later centuries, they adapted the name to the local language: Rothenbourg in France, Rutenburg in Lithuania, and— you guessed it— Rottenberg in Hungary.
So, where would I be today if Rivka/Gutlin had been killed that night in Worms? Or if one of her sisters had survived the attack to marry Rabbi Baruch instead?
History’s luckiest baby
I don’t spend all my time dwelling on such questions. Really I don’t. Especially since I know of one fellow who was far luckier than you or I: literally a million-to-one shot to ever have been born. Follow this chain of genealogical events and see if you can guess where I’m leading you:
In 1795 a daughter named Maria was born to a poor peasant couple in an Austrian forest. As she grew up, marriage was out of the question because her parents couldn’t afford a dowry. So Maria entered what was then the default career for girls in her situation: She became a domestic servant in a bourgeois household.
In 1837, at the age 42, this unmarried domestic servant mysteriously became pregnant for the first time in her life. To this day, nobody knows for sure who the father was, although it seems likely the culprit was Maria’s employer. If ever there was a candidate for an abortion, this fetus filled the bill, yes? But of course, abortion wasn’t an option in 1837. So later that year Maria gave birth to a baby boy whom I will call Alex.
Alex grew up poor like his mother but determined to advance his status. Not until he was 36 did Alex finally find his ticket out of poverty: marriage to a wealthy woman who was 14 years his senior and an invalid to boot. When his wife obligingly died eight years later, she left Alex well-fixed financially.
If he hadn’t been born….
At this point, Alex married his mistress: a servant girl with whom he had already fathered an illegitimate son. They had a daughter as well before Alex’s second wife died of a lung disorder. Now Alex married for a third time, to another household servant who was probably his niece. They had a son and daughter, both of whom died during a diphtheria epidemic in the winter of 1887-88. So, much like my grandparents, Alex and his wife tried again.
And that’s how Adolf Hitler came into the world.
You know the rest. Once he realized how lucky he was to have been born, Hitler committed himself to a life of public service. In the decades that followed, this single individual touched the lives of millions of people he’d never met. Even his critics had to admit that he made a big difference in the world. As the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher observed years before Hitler was born, “The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its aroma, and no man can tell what becomes of his influence.”
And the moral of this story is….
Genealogy isn’t destiny. You may have thousands of ancestors, but you alone possess the power to choose whom to emulate. It may be true, as some historians argue, that without Hitler there would have been no Holocaust. But it’s also true that potential Hitlers arise in every generation.
Genealogy is somewhat like quicksand: Once you get into it, there’s no getting out. Which for the most part is a good thing. But like re-runs of “Law and Order” and second helpings of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, genealogy works best when taken in moderation. Which, come to think of it, is true for most things in life.
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Cathie Behrend:
If Hitler had gotten into his art school of choice, history might have been different.
From reader Len Lear:
I have four siblings, all older than I, two now deceased. In 1939, when my mother was 40, she gave birth to a girl, who died two days later.
She told me that the doctors told her not to try to have another baby. They said it could result in her death or the death of the child. She was overweight and had already given birth to five biological children. And this was 1939. Many more women died in childbirth than now.
But she was determined to have one more child. She liked raising babies and did not like her husband. Whenever they talked to each other, it was an argument. I am amazed that they had sex six times.
Anyway, she proceeded to have the fifth living child in 1940. That was yours truly. Healthy and more or less normal, depending on one’s definition of “normal.”
So if the fifth child had not died in 1939, I would not be sending you this email.