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Tag: Immigrants

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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The Two Faces of Ella – A Tribute to My Enigmatic Late Aunt

I have recently become fascinated with my Dad’s family, perhaps because many of them are an enigma. I never met my paternal grandparents – my grandmother Nettie died in 1951 at the age of 67 and my grandfather Abraham died in 1955 at the age of 71. My dad is 90 and has beaten the familial odds by leaps and bounds – a 26-year colon cancer survivor; he has been on medication for hypertension since he was in his 40s. I wrote about my grandfather Abraham in my Triangle Fire article. When I was younger I was not that interested in discovering facts about my mysterious grandparents, but with my dad’s own mortality looming on the near horizon, I feel compelled to fill in the missing pieces. The problem now is that my dad’s memories have faded, although some of the facts were probably unknown even when he was a much younger man. My dad was the youngest child and his eldest sister Ella essentially served as a surrogate mother because my grandmother was in a deep depression after immigrating to America – and for very good reasons. She was separated for years from my grandfather, fending for herself and her children and being forced to board a German soldier in her house during WWI. Most of her family died in Poland, either in pogroms prior to WWII or in the Holocaust.

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