to our grandparents
and their children, our parents
On Mother’s Day in 1974 I wrote my Grandmother Ehrlich that:
I know you … view my high school graduation
with more sentiment and such, but to me it’s only the prelude to
a lot more work… Today at dinner, Dad told us several stories
about his childhood in Chicago and the like, and
[that] he’d wanted for some time to write all his
memories down. I suggested that we tape record his stories, and
later I could write them up for the future.
Four such sessions were taped that summer: three with my father
and the last with my grandmother, who visited us in Kansas City
MO that August. I learned that my grandparents had kept a
childhood diary for their firstborn, my father’s older sister
Martha; which Grandma Ehrlich then undertook to translate from
the original Hungarian, sending me a copy in installments.
Martha herself wrote me, contributing her slant on the family
history; as did her daughter, my cousin Sherry Renée. In
October 1974 I replied to S.R.’s reminiscent letter, saying it
was just what I needed to untangle my mental logjam: “I [had
begun] to wonder just what I was going to do with all the
material I was getting. I never dwelled on the matter for fear
of finding myself at a dead end.”
Logjam broken, I planned to divide the Ehrlich Family History
into two volumes: the first concerning my grandparents, the
other my father’s childhood. But by “dwelling on the matter” I
did find myself at a dead end—wanting to turn the
material into a novel, without much of a clue as to
how. So the
History’s finish date kept moving “father and father off” (as I
Freudianly remarked in March 1975).
As a writing project it remained officially active for another
year or so. Doubtless trying to prime the pump, Grandma Ehrlich
wrote her own five-page autobiography in 1976. I took three
separate stabs at a fictional adaptation—As the Day is Long—but
these stabs did no more than scratch the surface. And when my
grandmother asked in 1979 that I send the diary translation to
S.R., I did so after only the most token effort to make myself a
copy first.
Despite this sparkling track record, I was asked in 1983 to
rebuild my mother’s albums of memorabilia. This led me to a
wealth of maternal-side genealogical information, which I
translated into so thick a grove of hand-drawn family trees that
I ended up calling it Family Forest (for the next twenty
years, till it was loaded onto my
www.SkeeterKitefly.com website
as Fine Lineage.)
In August 1983 I regathered the Ehrlich History material, “again
being struck by the interesting story it would make.” Setting
to work on this in January 1984, I expected it to be soon over
and done with. There was a palpable need for haste: Grandma
Ehrlich, now aged eighty-eight, had entered a nursing home fully
expecting to die, while terminal cancer was forcing my Aunt
Martha into painful early retirement. So I slapped together
An Honest Tale Plainly Told
in February 1984 with more than the usual
feeling of obligation to redeem a forsaken project. All the
eyes in all the old photos seemed to stare at me askant, making
observations on what a henyélő
I was.
As things turned out, both my grandmother and aunt would hold on
for several more years; and both expressed delight with An
Honest Tale. To me, however, it was no better than a
cobblejob: a patchwork pastiche of excerpts, extracts, and
badly-xeroxed
illustrations. It did manage to present the upbringings of
József Ehrlich and Matild Kohn; their meeting in Budapest and
marriage in Kolozsvár
(where they produced daughter Márta); their coming to America
and settling in Chicago (where they added son George); and how
József, who wanted to be a teacher, ended up in the fur
business. But my guiltridden jury-rigging haste hadn’t allowed
me time to retrieve my aunt’s childhood diary, so I postponed
recounting Martha and George’s adventures till a second volume
could be compiled—by September 1984, I thought.
That summer I called on the family’s principal out-of-town
figures, some of whom lived in Washington state and some in the
Mojave Desert. For the first time I was able to study the
original diary kept for Martha from 1919 to 1934, written
entirely in Hungarian. My grandmother’s 1974 treatment had
begun midway, with the journey to America; the earlier years in
Kolozsvár looked to be unfathomable. But my initial despair was
quickly dispelled by the discovery of a complete English
translation, made by Grandma Ehrlich back in 1953. This version
introduced me to a host of long-lost European relatives,
speaking in their own words. Contemporary events left their
mark as well: little Márta’s second birthday
was fittingly celebrated in September 1921, but as an aside her
father wrote:
We hope we can give you the upbringing we both wish to. It is
very hard my dear, lots of difficulty lies before us. You will
think it was impossible when you are old enough to read this
book. Hope you never will have to know the
terrible things that are going on in this world today.
The Ehrlichs, subjected to shakedown harassment, had just lost
their millinery shop.
The family history had a succession of imposing backdrops: World
War I, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the loss of
Transylvania to Romania, the postwar surge of anti-Semitism, the
cutback of American immigration, struggles adapting to the New
World and weathering the Depression, dealing with the frightful
loss of those left behind. And my grandparents coped with life
in different ways: the ebullient Matyu “fell in love with
America the very first day there,” quickly making good in her
chosen field as an expert milliner, fearlessly tackling an
unfamiliar language and environment. The more inhibited Józsi
had a harder time of it: never comfortable with English, he
dreaded being taken for an ignorant unlettered “bohunk,” and
given the chance would have quickly decamped back to Europe. He
found contentment in his home and household, raised his daughter
to become the dedicated teacher he’d wanted to be, and above all
remained true to his principles and beliefs.
I uncovered such a wealth of untapped material that the
project’s focus shifted. Discussing it with my cousin S.R., we
conceived a Definitive Edition—To Be Honest—that would be
“not dry” but written with a view to publishability. An
Honest Tale Plainly Told would serve as both source and
further draft. Martha’s Diary, presented in its
twice-translated entirety, comprised Volume II in August 1984;
the rest of Martha and George’s adventures (through 1942) went
into Volume III, completed in November. The Definitive
Edition’s three-part/eighteen-chapter scheme was defined in
April 1985 by a scissors-and-tape layout and reinforced by an
index-card boildown. Paying a visit that month to the
University of Illinois campus, I began extensive research into
the European side of things, from the Hapsburgs’s heyday to the
Holocaust.
By the end of spring I’d crammed thirty-four single-spaced pages
with ancillary notes, causing my old Smith-Coronamatic
typewriter to literally shake itself to pieces. That summer I
went so far as to accompany S.R. on her honeymoon odyssey to the
Mojave Desert and back, digesting (to and fro) a superabundance
of Ehrlichian archives
from 1943 to 1963. Volume IV waddled forth in August 1985, so
heavyset that I had to jettison its Ancillary Appendix—and move
To Be Honest’s overoptimistic deadline to March 1986,
half a year further along.
The Definitive Edition taught me the fine art of
rewriting—how to
revise, revamp, and rectify. During the next six months I
edited, abridged, and condensed my multivolume embarras de
richesses down by 50%, bringing To Be Honest in
precisely on schedule. During the summer of 1986, this draft
underwent fine-toothed emendation (or rather extirpation—few
pages escaping scissors and tape). The final version of To
Be Honest, completed in September, tipped the scales at
around 75,000 words: suitable tonnage for a marketable book.
The next step was to prepare this piggy for market—a process so
unprecedented, so far as I-and-mine were concerned, that it
engendered a whole new spate of aches as I reduced the book to a
twelve-page Outline, then a single-page Synopsis, capped off (on
the sixth or seventh try) by a Cover Letter that wrapped up my
first-ever Book Proposal. And then, “as Victoria said when
Albert croaked—‘All, all is over!’”
More than I knew. Between October 1986 and February 1987 I sent
out Book Proposals to a couple of publishers and a couple of
agencies, getting all four BPs back with commendable if
regrettable swiftness. The last-arriving letter came from an
genuine (so to speak) New York literary agent, who’d decided
To Be Honest was not something she could “market with
success or with enthusiasm at this time.” By which point I had
come to the same conclusion: structured as it was, the book had
proved unseaworthy. Despite a year’s worth of polishing and
furbishing and waterproofing, it had ended up less-than-marketably
“dry” after all.
My basic instinct, as in the mid-Seventies, was to novelize the
material—along similar lines, perhaps, as Diane Pearson’s
Csardas.
Although this descends at times into subgeneric romance,
Csardas is soundly plotted and deftly written, maintaining
historical authenticity through the changing fortunes of a
half-Jewish Hungarian family from 1914 to 1948. But how to make
To Be Honest that shipshape, if not unsinkable?
“More ‘narrativized,’” I decided, “fewer quotation marks.” If I
stuck to the diary format, it might compensate for the
sketchiness of the opening chapters by keeping Józsi and Matyu’s
childhoods at a reminiscent remove. Gaps could be filled with
artistic license: “I suppose I should put down on paper what I
remember of my own father,” József might write, describing how
as a boy he could be disciplined by a stern paternal look, but
his capricious brother Sándor had to have his hand smacked with
a ruler (and would then boast about it, claiming Father had sent
all the way to Vienna for this ruler, keeping it under lock and
key in a special drawer).
Et cetera and so forth. But while the story’s beginning could
be shored up, its ending posed other problems. Difficult to
save it from being a downer: at the end of his life my
grandfather suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and when
ultrasonic surgery failed to ease its tremors, he must have felt
let down by the rational world where Science held the promise to
solve all problems. And in fact he pretty much turned his face
to the wall and died.
Another insoluble dilemma was posed by Grandpa Ehrlich’s having
been in the fur business. No matter that in the days before
central heating, a fur coat was a winter necessity; you can
hardly envision a modern-day miniseries about an unvillainous
furrier. Yet change him to a milliner, or a tailor or
haberdasher, and you lose unique details of the Depression fur
trade: each year’s first snowfall would net the children a whole
nickel each, because snow heralded the beginning of “the
season”—people would pick up their coats from storage (and pay
their bills, enabling the Ehrlichs to pay theirs).
No: better, perhaps, when all was said and done, to “mine” the
Family History for material rather than expect it to stand up on
its own. So I thought until 2003, by which point the Skeeter
Kitefly Website was up and operational but running low on fresh
entries. Why not let To Be Honest, a full-length
whole-written book, take its share of Internet bandwidth? The
first three chapters were uploaded in March; the next three in
October; the seventh not until Memorial Day 2005; and the
remaining nine at intervals during 2006—while all the eyes in
all the old photos again stared at me askant. (Once a
henyélő, always a henyélő.)
Significant new material was discovered concerning the Ehrlichs
in Győr (Grandpa’s birthplace) and how Grandma’s brother Jenő
and his family survived the Holocaust; this was uploaded as
appendices in 2008. A year later my brother Matthew visited
Cluj, Romania (formerly Kolozsvár, Hungary) and reported his
findings about the Kohns/Kuns there; these resulted in three
more To Be Honest appendices.
As I worked intermittently on Fine Lineage, and added
other family historical webpages in 2016—George’s
Navigations, The George & Mila Show, and
Arrived Safely
No Catastrophes Yet Love Jean—I turned up occasional new
details deserving inclusion in To Be Honest. But not
till 2021 did I resolve to create a revised and
better-illustrated edition, drawing upon newly-available
resources, to mark [a] the centennial of the Ehrlichs’s October
1923 arrival in America, [b] the fiftieth anniversary of my own
embarkation on the project in May 1974, and [c] my Grandfather
Joseph’s 130th birthday, with a view to [d] making this my Last
Word on the Subject.
Neither in 1986 nor in 2024 did/do I claim that ours is the most
dramatic Family History ever written, or the most poignant, or
the most (at times) absurd. Merely to its being “interesting
enough even for a stranger,” as Grandpa Ehrlich himself observed
in 1931; and true to life. True, of course, since it came from
being honest.
For this revised edition I have tried wherever possible to
rescan illustrations from original images. When those were
unavailable, some Photoshoppery has been applied to old Xeroxed
copies. For the web version I have taken advantage of
direct hyperlinks, squeezed in a few more footnotes, and added/improved
some illustrations from photos discovered after the text edition’s
March 2024 release.
Thanks to my cousin S.R. for her assistance in preparing the
original edition of this Family History; and to my brother
Matthew for his encouragement and many contributions,
particularly in visiting and reporting back from Cluj (formerly
Kolozsvár) in 2009.
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P. S. Ehrlich
December
2024 |
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