Grandpa's Book

By Frank Beck

Autobiography of a refugee, and a description of his integration into English socety.Follows the adventures of Evacuation, education, national Service, career building and marriage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781326052898

Frank Beck

FRANK BECK is a New York City-based writer and translator. He has written about new poetry for The Manhattan Review for more than 30 years.

Book preview

Grandpa's Book

Grandpa’s Book

Frank Beck

First published: December 1999

Fifth Edition : June 2016

©2016 Frank Beck

ISBN 978-1-291-88759-4

Also by Frank Beck:

Grandpa’s second book

Some corner of a foreign field

Memoirs

Some rhymes by me

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren  Philip, Sarah, Thomas and William. Perhaps it may inspire you to do the same thing for your grandchildren later in your lives.  That would be a splendid tradition to found.

Getting old is not difficult.  You already have the experience of birthdays, with presents, cakes and candles.  You’ll have one of those each year, and after about seventy of them you’ll be old.  There’s no more to it than that.  Some people don’t get old, because they die first, but all in all you should hope that doesn’t happen, because in general life is pleasant and enjoyable.

I am writing down some of the things that happened to me because I am hoping you are interested.  If you find it boring, don’t throw it away; keep it for later and then give it to your children.  Many people want to know more about the lives of their parents or grandparents, and don’t think to ask while the people who can inform them are still alive.  Some people go to great lengths to research their family history, and that isn’t very satisfactory, because the available records contain only bare facts, and no unnecessary details.  I myself am in this very position; how I wish that I had listened more carefully to the stories told by my parents and grandparents.  It’s too late now, but had they thought to commit some of those stories to paper, I would have them available now that I am finally motivated to discover the history of my family.  It is for this reason that I wish to break the chain of disinterest.

The real way to record a life story, of course, is to write a diary each day.  I often wanted to do that.  Sometimes, at the new year, someone would give me a brand-new diary to write in, and with good intentions I would write in it regularly for a few days until, inevitably, I would abandon the project with one excuse or another after quite a short time.  Even famous diarists, like Pepys and Evelyn, only kept going for a few years of their lives.  Queen Victoria kept it up for a long time, but in general it is probably easier to sit down and work on it in a concentrated burst of energy at some time later in your life.  You need to do it from memory, of course, but then memory is quite good, and has the advantage that you get a more distant view of the events described and can therefore distinguish between the important facts and the day to day trivia.

In one way, my story is unusual.  Not everyone starts life in one country, is forced to emigrate because of racial persecution, and has to start again somewhere else.  While this makes this particular tale intrinsically interesting, it is important to note that other people’s stories are equally worth telling in their own way.  History is made of life stories, and the tale of someone living an uneventful life in a changing environment carries the thread of history just as surely as the story of someone who makes that environment change.  Everyone has a unique story, and all stories become interesting after a few generations.

It is interesting to consider, for example, how my grandparents, whose life was so changed by the invention of the railway and the electric light and even of the refrigerator, probably never even realised that those changes would alter their world and those of their children.  Consider, for example a world in which Summer food is quite different from Winter food,  travelling is a rare and perilous experience, and bedtime is the hour at which it gets dark.  Even I grew up in a world where America was a week away from Europe, where a telephone call or a drive in a car was quite rare, and where some foods were so exotic that they were reserved only for the rich.  A world where a badly broken bone might spell death from a fever and where the back side of the moon and the inside of the earth were subjects for speculation by scientists.  A world without television and computers, in which it was possible for explorers to get lost not far from the possibility of rescue.  A world in which carpets and well made clothes were expensive luxuries and in which information was freely available only to scholars.

History is made by a series of small changes of this kind, and the long-term result is that you live in a world which your grandparents would no longer recognise.  Indeed it is lucky that we die at the end of three or four generations, since we might have difficulties in surviving in a world so changed from the one in which we grew up.

Some things, of course, don’t change at all.  The way in which people behave toward one another shows patterns which repeat over the generations, and that is why people still identify with the characters in Greek plays, Norse sagas and the plays of William Shakespeare.  Love, hate, jealousy and greed are characteristics which are as plain to see in a primitive tribe as on a spacecraft.  I hope you will see all of these in the ensuing pages and recognise them as familiar sentiments from your own surroundings.

Stay with me . . .

Chapter 2

Ancestors

Every one has eight great-grandparents.  I know nothing about most of mine.   My mother was born into the Schlesinger family from Bratislava, and her mother’s maiden name was Dukesz.  My mother spoke of childhood visits to a farm in Slovakia where her grandparents lived. Her descriptions of arriving at a railway station in the remotest countryside and being fetched in a pony and trap to the house where she spent her school holidays are the nearest thing I have to contact with her Dukesz grandparents.  Certainly there were Dukesz relatives; Franzi and Grete were two cousins of my mother’s who subsequently came to England with us and then finished their lives in America.  To their sixtieth year these two maiden aunts were called the Dukesz girls, but of the grandparents they shared with my mother I know nothing; even their first names are lost to me.

The other great-grandparents of which I know nothing are the Schlesingers on my mother’s side and the Fraenkls on my father’s side.  The Schlesingers, like the Dukesz family,  came from a village outside Bratislava in Slovakia.  One of the sons went to Budapest to seek his fortune; his name was Nathan, and he changed his name from Schlesinger to Sandor, a name that apparently sounds more Hungarian.  Many descendants of Nathan Sandor  survive in Sweden, and I have met a number of them.  The Fraenkls were Viennese Jews, and the only facts I know about them is that they had lived in Vienna for many generations and that they were very religious.   There is a small chink of light on the Becks.  At least I know their first names.  Jonas Beck, being of a cultured turn of mind and a very orthodox Jew, was a scribe.  Orthodox Jews have a righteous contempt for the need to make a living, considering it secondary to the business of praying and serving God.  The profession of Rabbi was traditionally taken up by the sons of Rabbis, who gained the learning needed from their earliest years and were subsequently taken under the tutelage of some colleague of their father’s, rarely having the privilege of attending a Yeshiva or religious seminary.  An alternative profession for such a young man was that of Cantor, but that needed the natural talent of a fine voice.  Third best was to be a Scribe.  Jewish observance is strongly based on the written word, and although the invention of printing had long rendered hand-copying unnecessary, texts used for ceremonial purposes were written by hand, to emphasize their importance.

The texts copied out by my great grandfather Jonas Beck would have included the Mezuzzim or scrolls put up at the lintel of every observant Jewish home.  The mezuzzah satisfies a command given twice in the bible, to post the major prayer of Judaism (The Shema) on the doorpost as a constant reminder of its text.  A similar scroll is used in the Tephillin, or phylacteries, which the orthodox Jew wears on his forehead during his daily prayers, another custom justified by the commandment to bind those words to the forehead as a constant reminder of God’s word.  A good pot-boiler for the scribe needing to earn his living was the Ketuba or marriage contract.  Ketubas are also written by hand, and paid for by the parents of those about to get married, who are at their most generous and in a spending mood at that time.   Also quite useful for a scribe as a way of earning a living is the Megilla, or Scroll of Esther, a short book read out once a year at the festival of Purim.

Finally there are torah scrolls.  The torah, or written law, is a central item in the synagogue.  Orthodox Jews consider the torah to be a direct revelation from God, descendant of a direct line of painstakingly copied manuscripts leading directly back to the original given to Moses.  The Ten Commandments were engraved on tablets of stone and kept in the Ark of the Covenant.  The rest was passed down verbatim from generation to generation until it was finally committed to writing at the time of the Babylonian exile.  Tradition has it that no error, even at the level of spelling, ever crept in during this process, and certainly the manuscripts available bear this out for the written versions.  Dead Sea manuscripts have a text unchanged in two thousand years, admittedly only half the lifetime of the book, but not a bad record, all the same.  The writing of a torah scroll takes more than half a year’s application.  It is written with a quill pen and ink made from ox-gall and lamp-black, on pieces of parchment made from the finest kid-skin.  The text is written, right to left, in columns convenient for the eye to scan, and the skins are sewn together with animal sinew to make a continuous scroll which is read, one text per week, the whole of the five books of Moses being completed in a year.  At the festival of Simchot Torah (rejoicing of the law) the last chapter of the book of Deuteronomy is read out, the scroll is ceremoniously rewound in front of the congregation, and the never-ending work of recital recommenced with a reading from the book of Genesis.

Manuscripts of these various kinds kept my great grandfather Jonas Beck quite busy.  It was painstaking but relaxed work, more free of anxiety and stress than many other people’s professions.  A writing session was obligatorily preceded by a ritual bath, and the biggest excitement of the day would be the commission of a copying error, which could be corrected with the pen-knife, since the ox-gall ink used is brittle when it dries and cracks off the parchment when lightly scraped.  An error committed during the copying of the holy name of God, of course, was another matter.  Such an error required the scribe to fast for twenty-four hours, to say propitiatory prayers, and to reject the skin on which the error had been committed.  It is unlikely that Jonas did this often if ever.  I have seen a torah written by him (a copy survived and was owned by his grandchildren in America) and his handwriting was near perfect.  The Hebrew letters are well-formed, and the only concessions to imperfection are the decorative curlicues on some of the letters and the fact that some of the letters are stretched horizontally to satisfy the requirements for margin justification.

Was such a scribe well paid? Probably not.  The ritual objects were a necessity of life, but many in the community were living at subsistence level, with rent and food to find  and dowries to provide for daughters, to say nothing of support for the various people in the community who for one reason or another were unable to support themselves.   Thus a wealthy couple much respected in the community would have been able to use their considerable wealth, based on a successful poultry business, to provide their daughter Cissie with a dowry and enable her to marry the penniless but worthy scribe Jonas  Beck.  Such an arranged marriage would allow them to carry on making money with an easy conscience, knowing that they had satisfied the heaven-sent injunction to be charitable.  The young couple were reconciled to the arrangement; at least it avoided the risk of displeasing their parents, and experience shows that such marriages carry no more risk of being unhappy than others.

The only other arranged marriage I know of was that of my grandfather Marcus Schlesinger.  Marcus, living in the strictly orthodox community of a village near Bratislava, fell in love with a pretty non-Jewish girl from the village.  This was a Romeo and Juliet situation, unheard of and strictly unacceptable.  As soon as he revealed it to his parents the enormity of the position was clear to him.  He was absolutely forbidden to continue the relationship. (I don’t know what happened to the girl, but one hopes that after temporarily suffering a broken heart she went on to find happiness in a more suitable environment).  A family conference was held, and it was decided that the problem was due to the fact that the boy was in need of a wife, and a more suitable one should be found.  A Shadchen, or marriage broker was consulted, and she quickly came up with a very pleasant girl on her books, who had exhibited similar wayward tendencies and fallen in love with a non-Jewish lad in the village.  Marcus and Leonora were introduced at a tea party set up for the purpose, (these things were done in a civilized manner in the 1890s) and they were not displeased with the arrangement which had been set up for them.  They were both rather good-looking people with similar backgrounds, and they decided on the spot that they would make a go of life together.  It worked.  I know this story because my grandfather told me it, when my heart in turn was broken by an unsuccessful youthful romance.  He was eighty years old by then, and the marriage had lasted sixty happy years.  Many people nowadays, granted the luxury of making their own choice, do worse.

Soon after the birth of their first child, a daughter called Erna, the Schlesingers moved from Bratislava (also called Pressburg and Poszony at various times) to Vienna, the capital of the Empire and a place where it was easier to make a living.  The year would by now have been about 1900.  My Schlesinger grandparents would have been thirty years old at that time.  They were both born in 1870.  The Schlesingers set up a grocery and general provisions shop in a square near the docks in the 2nd Bezirk (borough) of Vienna, took the lease of a flat upstairs above the store, and continued their happily married lives there.  They both learnt to speak German, and when I was a child I was quite unaware that my grandparents’ mother tongue was Slovakian,  since they not only spoke German with a Viennese accent, but as far as I know used that language in conversation with each other.  After arriving in Vienna, Marcus and Leonora had three further children, but tragically lost two of them in early childhood.  One was dropped by a negligent nurse, and one died quite soon from diphtheria, an often fatal scourge of childhood in those days.  By the time my mother Edith was born in 1905, she had only one sibling, her elder sister Erna.  I don’t even know whether the two children who were lost were boys or girls.

These were the heady days at the close of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  My mother and her sister went through the Viennese school system in an aura of patriotic pride.  The music of Strauss, the operettas of Lehar, and the older classical tradition of Haydn,