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Mr. Sippelin, I'm going to build me a stone fence
Rabbit, rabbit. Tomorrow is Erev Rosh Hashanah and a week after that is my thirty-fifth birthday. I want a better year. A better life in general would also be all right.
I always thought my grey-green tweed flat cap—the one I had repaired by Salmagundi in the spring—belonged originally to my grandfather. At the time of his death it was being stored with the black lamb astrakhan that belonged to my great-grandfather Noah (nobody of my generation wears it, but I couldn't give it up) and and the enormous shedding wolfskin hat that was very definitely my grandfather's, because my mother remembers him wearing it through Midwestern winters. I inherited all of them and have worn the flat cap ever since. But my aunt and my uncle who are in town for the New Year saw me in it, looked at each other in amazement, and unanimously identified it as "Grandpa Bernie's!"
This is my grandmother's father, my brother's namesake, the Brooklyn pharmacist Israel Bernard Madinek. He died in 1964. (His funeral was the site of the legendary exchange between the sententious rabbi who kept declaring, "Life depends on the liver," and the infuriated widow who finally burst out, "But he died of a heart attack!") He is supposed to have been born on January 25th, 1894, somewhere Russian that came down to me as "Padolia," which I think now must have been Podolia. According to the one story I heard growing up, he came over alone at age sixteen, never sent for any of his family, never allowed Russian to be spoken in his house: his father was a rabbi who had abandoned the family. My grandmother grew up speaking English and "Yiddish you could break a leg on." About six years ago, sorting some family documents, my mother discovered photocopies of a passport issued by the Russian Empire in the name of Ilsinik I. Myatinek—I thought at the time that the date on it was 1914, but now I want to double-check. A year or so after that, my mother handed me a document in Fraktur to translate. It turned out to be an original contract for passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Linie: Srul Meydanik, aged nineteen, previous residence starting with P, sailing to New York on the Pretoria on December 5th, 1913. I don't expect ever to fill in these gaps or discrepancies, to know which version of his age was the right one, if either, or whether the story about his father was true. I only know the year he graduated from Columbia University's College of Pharmacy of the City of New York—1919—because Google digitized the relevant publications a couple of years ago. It was easier in those days to make your past disappear. He was a difficult parent, a better grandparent. My 1928 contraband copy of Joyce's Ulysses came originally from him. My grandmother remembered him giving her mercury to play with as a small child, all the small shivering drops rolling back and forth and running together in her palm. Even if it dates back no further than the 1950's and was manufactured somewhere in New Jersey, I like knowing that I am wearing his hat.
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derspatchel informs me that today Massachusetts' transgender anti-discrimination law finally goes into effect. Good start, October. Keep it up. I am off to a birthday party.
I always thought my grey-green tweed flat cap—the one I had repaired by Salmagundi in the spring—belonged originally to my grandfather. At the time of his death it was being stored with the black lamb astrakhan that belonged to my great-grandfather Noah (nobody of my generation wears it, but I couldn't give it up) and and the enormous shedding wolfskin hat that was very definitely my grandfather's, because my mother remembers him wearing it through Midwestern winters. I inherited all of them and have worn the flat cap ever since. But my aunt and my uncle who are in town for the New Year saw me in it, looked at each other in amazement, and unanimously identified it as "Grandpa Bernie's!"
This is my grandmother's father, my brother's namesake, the Brooklyn pharmacist Israel Bernard Madinek. He died in 1964. (His funeral was the site of the legendary exchange between the sententious rabbi who kept declaring, "Life depends on the liver," and the infuriated widow who finally burst out, "But he died of a heart attack!") He is supposed to have been born on January 25th, 1894, somewhere Russian that came down to me as "Padolia," which I think now must have been Podolia. According to the one story I heard growing up, he came over alone at age sixteen, never sent for any of his family, never allowed Russian to be spoken in his house: his father was a rabbi who had abandoned the family. My grandmother grew up speaking English and "Yiddish you could break a leg on." About six years ago, sorting some family documents, my mother discovered photocopies of a passport issued by the Russian Empire in the name of Ilsinik I. Myatinek—I thought at the time that the date on it was 1914, but now I want to double-check. A year or so after that, my mother handed me a document in Fraktur to translate. It turned out to be an original contract for passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Linie: Srul Meydanik, aged nineteen, previous residence starting with P, sailing to New York on the Pretoria on December 5th, 1913. I don't expect ever to fill in these gaps or discrepancies, to know which version of his age was the right one, if either, or whether the story about his father was true. I only know the year he graduated from Columbia University's College of Pharmacy of the City of New York—1919—because Google digitized the relevant publications a couple of years ago. It was easier in those days to make your past disappear. He was a difficult parent, a better grandparent. My 1928 contraband copy of Joyce's Ulysses came originally from him. My grandmother remembered him giving her mercury to play with as a small child, all the small shivering drops rolling back and forth and running together in her palm. Even if it dates back no further than the 1950's and was manufactured somewhere in New Jersey, I like knowing that I am wearing his hat.
derspatchel informs me that today Massachusetts' transgender anti-discrimination law finally goes into effect. Good start, October. Keep it up. I am off to a birthday party.
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Insofar as I can take any credit for being related, thank you!
And 1928 contraband copy of Joyce's Ulysses WHAT.
It is a copy of Ulysses from the days when it was banned in the U.S.! It's bound in a very cheap red cloth whose dye will come off on your hands if you hold it for too long; its opening pages contain no copyright information, no mention of author or title, just a list of printings—of which this book is the tenth, from Shakespeare and Company, Paris, in November 1928—and the last printed page contains the mysterious notation "Dijon. — Darantiere". My grandmother put a bookplate in it, but that was some years after the fact. All of the pages are very brown. I'm very fond of it.
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The name sounded familia*, so I went and looked it up. Meet Maurice Darantière, "French printer and editor born July 11 1882 in Dijon" [...] "famous for printing James Joyce's Ulysses for the bookshop owner Sylvia Beach". Beach is the founder of Shakespeare&co, btw.
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Thank you so much! I had no idea.
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Thank you for reading! They are the kind of thing I really like to know.
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That's wonderful! Thank you.
He was traveling steerage: the document is a Zwischendecksbeförderung-Vertrag, "between-decks passage contract." I'll see if I can get a photograph of it sometime. My mother knows where it is.
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That is amazing.
It's wonderful you have his hat and his copy of Ulysses.
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The punch line is that the same rabbi officiated at my great-grandmother's (my namesake's) funeral a few years later and as soon as he started in, "Life depends on the liver . . ." my mother's family completely lost it and had to pretend they were all sobbing their eyes out instead of laughing.
It's wonderful you have his hat and his copy of Ulysses.
I like having these pieces of the past.
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The 1920 Census (when he was listed as a boarder with the Edelstein family in Manhattan) gives his age at the time of the census as 24, his immigration date as 1913, his original country as Russia, native language Yiddish but able to speak English, occupation pharmacist, working in a store.
His naturalization record says he was 39 at the time of admission (July 3, 1934).
His WWII draft registration gives the birth date as 25 Dec 1894
I remember playing with mercury in the mid-1960s.
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His birthplace is given as Podilei, Russia.
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Whoa.
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I'm not surprised by it: I just don't ever expect to have a definitive answer.
His WWII draft registration gives the birth date as 25 Dec 1894
That's interesting; the information I have says January. I wonder what it says on the passport. (I notice there's a choice of birth years, too.)
It is very strange to me that all of this information is available to the internet at large. I'm not saying it's not useful. Just strange.
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It's a factor I hadn't considered, so thank you! [edit] At the time when Russia switched over, the Julian calendar was only thirteen days behind the Gregorian, so I don't think it would explain enough of the discrepancies, but it's still neat.
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Yeah. I was born in 1981 and I was taught from toddlerhood not to play with the contents of broken thermometers.
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It made me really happy to know!
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Nine
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We must have photographs somewhere: I remember them from the walls of the bedroom I used to sleep in at my grandparents' house, along with the Venetian glass and the volcanic rock used to weight the window sash. I have no visual memory of him, though. I'll ask my mother.