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Tag: Grandparents

A Boy Grows in Brownsville, Brooklyn

My dad, Samuel Weiss lost his fight against COVID-19 on December 27, 2020 at age 97. We would have long discussions on the phone about his childhood and this ramped up during the first months of the pandemic. My dad was the only one of his siblings born in America. There was a huge age difference between him, Ella, Jack, and Dottie, due to circumstances surrounding my grandfather’s immigration to America. As a result, little Sammy was doted on by his siblings. Ella was really more of a mom to him than an older sister before she got married. A few years ago, I wrote a blog about the grandma I never knew and my dad filled in some additional blanks during our conversations. When he died, I felt grief of course, but also an overwhelming compulsion to connect to and understand his past and what made him the dad I knew. I think this was amplified by the fact that he was the last immediate family connection to the grandparents I never knew, Abraham and Nettie Weiss.   The Curious Mystery of My Grandfather Abraham While we covered a lot of territory, some of my questions will forever remain unanswered. Looking back, perhaps my dad didn’t even know all the answers because his parents didn’t share much. I did confront my dad with evidence that my grandpa had another family somewhere in the NY area based on DNA results from my daughter. In fact, I believe my Aunt Dottie was aware of this, but my dad was in denial until close to the end of his life. This doesn’t surprise me because my grandfather Abraham emigrated by himself to NYC in 1905 and was separated from Nettie until late 1911. After my Uncle Jack was born in 1912 in…

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Howard Clothes Tribute – Epilogue

It was really nice that so many family members reached out to me and commented on my first Howard Clothes article. This yielded a good deal of insight and information, which inspired the desire to write this epilogue. Based on my communications with family members, I found out Elaine Winik is the sole surviving child of Samuel and Minnie Kappel. I also discovered she wrote a book entitled Still Looking Forward, published in 1996. I decided to purchase a copy on Amazon and gave this to my dad to read first. After all, it was his family with the connection to Howard Clothes and to Minnie and her mother Mollie Sennowitz. Elaine’s book filled in a lot of blanks including first names of people who were unknown to me when I wrote the first article, and had escaped my dad’s memory at this point in life – he is 92 after all. A few weeks later, I had the pleasure of talking to Elaine on the phone, and she graciously sent me a few clippings and photos that I have added to this blog. My dad got a real kick out of this passage from Elaine’s book: After living with us, grandma came to my parents and said that although we all were wonderful to her, the house wasn’t kosher, and besides, she missed her Yiddish-speaking contemporaries. If mother and dad would pay rent to “the greenie,” (all immigrants were referred to as greenhorns) her newly arrived cousin from Russia, she would live with him and his wife. Of course we could come and visit her there. She also mentioned that it would be very nice if my parents would furnish the apartment for the “the greenie” as he had no money at all. They did, as they asked.

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