Below is an introduction for Bronia’s Album. The full version can be found at broniasalbum.wordpress.com. To get in touch with Phyllis, email PhyllisMindell [at] gmail [dot] com.
Bronia’s Album
When my mother left the shtetl of Yaworow in 1925 to go to America, her family and friends gathered for a farewell event at which they signed a blue velvet autograph album and added their names to a list of guests at the event. Participants in a flowering of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, they signed in five languages – later another friend and my father signed in English. The album traveled, along with postcards and other documents, with her to New York and later to Brooklyn. When she died in 1989, the album moved to my home and later my apartment in Washington, D.C. It won little attention until I trained to be a guide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and decided to have it translated and printed as a memento.
What started out as a simple effort to translate the little 90-year-old album grew into an extensive history quest: trying to figure out the English equivalents of signatures, having an historian research European death records, googling names, and making inquiries with cousins and other family members. More research awaits the next generation or scholar and the comments of readers. All the research findings, postcards, photographs, documents are now in PDF available to family members and, upon request, to those who wish to learn more.
The brief biography of my mother that follows synthesizes what she told me, what research unearthed, and what can be gleaned from a tape recording made when she was in her 70s by my cousin Marion Mohl. Where possible, names and other specific information missing on the transcript have been added; I’ve also moved some of her words around and undertaken minor editing. Wherever they appear, her exact words are italicized. Missing details sometimes turn up on postcards or old notes. This part of the job makes one understand the joy of the historian: imagine finding the exact address Brania was looking for on her first day of work on a postcard mailed to her from Paris! Or the name of the cafeteria listed as “inaudible” on the transcript in handwritten notes from a conversation. Or coming across an old photograph of three children and realizing that they are Brania, her sister Anna, and Shlomo, the little brother who died of cholera.
As this little book stands ready to go to press, one goal remains unmet: the quest to learn the fates of the guests. Because 90% of the Jews of Poland were murdered by the Nazis and their allies, we must assume that most of those who didn’t emigrate did not survive the war. My parents learned that Brania’s beloved Dauermann grandfather and grandmother were shot in the Jewish cemetery when the Nazis came to town. Two Dauermanns signed the album, one of whom was that loving grandfather, Yehoshua. That entry alone brings him back into our lives.
Those who wrote in English and other friends, Nathan and Sheva Ausubel, Max Wohlberg, and Sol Gross (my father) emigrated to the United States, where they lived long and fulfilling lives. Nathan Ausubel became a scholar and chronicler of Yiddish literature and folk tales; Sheva (whose postcard from Paris is included here) was an accomplished artist; Max Wohlberg was a renowned cantor and composer whose works are sung in synagogues all over the world. Sol Gross’s delightful letter to the grandchildren is added here to preserve his version of the family history in his own distinctive voice.
Thanks to Nicholas Smith, who undertook the job of organizing information and images from many sources into a single form; to Grazyna Zareba, who translated the Polish entries; to Lotti Einhhorn, who translated the German entry; and to the cousins who helped flesh out dates and names.
Phyllis Mindell
Washington, D.C.
the word grandma 