Sam Hermanson, butcher by trade, saw this mountain country as a business opportunity and accumulated enough cash to buy a piece of property in the new world. This was where he decided to set up shop. North Fork, West Virginia. He would not budge, and here, finally, is where the Hermanson side of the family settled, and here also is where the narrative pretty much runs out, replaced by snippets and snatches of hearsay and recall. Katie Rose, my grandmother, mother of Elizabeth and five other children, Katie Rose and Samuel Hermanson were newly married before he left the Pale. Eventually, she joined him in West Virginia, and a flock of Jews descended on North Fork, most related to them both. I know very little about them other than there was a cousin so ugly she was called “Scheine der Monkey”, beautiful like a monkey, and there was the time my grandfather and his buddy, Chiel Shorr, were chased by robbers. Sam jumped over a downed tree trunk and dropped to the ground behind it, hiding himself from view. Chiel had no place to go but over the log and on top of my grandfather where they both hid, stacked, until it was safe to stand again. Chiel Shorr had been so scared he peed all over my grandfather. Of course, Uncle Milton, who would have told me this story, would never have said the word “pee”. He probably said, “Make a shoosh” which is how that particular function was described in my family, as in “Do you have to make a shoosh?” When I was growing up a mother across the street called it “tinkle” as in, “Go tinkle” which horrified me. Shoosh! Get it right. How hard is that to say?
My grandmother, besides raising children (one of whom, a boy, died at an early age, two, I think), cooked and served kosher meals in her house to the Jewish peddlers who passed through the region. My mother emphasized that her mother had servants in West Virginia, and my best guess is that they were “shvatzas” from Cinder Bottom, the Negro section of town. I get the feeling Nana had airs. Certainly, Elizabeth, her fourth child, did.
Katie didn’t take to life in North Fork. One doesn’t hear that Sam had any complaints. His butcher shop was successful but she wanted to move up to Baltimore where favorite relatives lived, like Tante Pesha and Sheine the Monkey. My grandfather didn’t want to leave, but the fire changed all that.
The town fathers concocted a secret plot to make a fortune. They planned to take out fire insurance then burn down the town, collect, get rich. Why I do not know, but my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with it. He was the only merchant in town who didn’t buy fire insurance. A gross miscalculation. One night the town burned down. Everyone collected. My grandfather was wiped out. To make matters worse, he was drunk the night of the fire. People tried to help him. They’d go into the shop and bring all the tools and furniture out whereupon Sam dragged it all back in. This is how my mother, Elizabeth, remembers it. The other thing she remembers was being carried across a bridge at night away from the fire. She would have been four.
The only place the family could go for help was Baltimore, and that’s how we got there. A man who spoke eight languages but could not read one was never again a success in business. I posit no cause and effect, just a simple truth as I received it. Sam wanted to go back to West Virginia, but Katie wouldn’t go with him, so they stayed in west Baltimore on Holmes Avenue, a brick, row house. Whenever I visualize the house I see my grandfather, sloppy drunk, staggering home on the sidewalk, supported by another man who for some reason I picture as Italian. Later that day he was found upstairs on his knees with his head in the gas oven, just in time. My mother is ninety-seven and still wishes she had named me after him. Samuel. Stephen. Samuel. Stephen.
I like my own name better.
