My grandfather, Louis, my father’s father, chose to leave Russia instead of serving in the Tzar’s army. He would have been about fifteen, and he traveled with a brother, whether older or younger I don’t know. Also, I don’t know my grand uncle’s name. What I do know (although I don’t know how I know) is that the two brothers decided to separate, my grandfather to stay in Baltimore, and my grand uncle to go out west and look for employment with the railroads. There must have been some correspondence between them because the story goes that my uncle actually did get work with the railroad. First payday came, but as the list was called out my uncle realized his name had been omitted. Same time he noted one of the names called belonged to a dead man he’d seen dead with his own eyes. Uncle’s hand shot up in the air, and the pay envelope went right to him. He took the dead man’s name as his own, so, right then and there, a whole chunk of family disappeared down the rabbit hole of immigration history.
My grandfather, Samuel, my mother’s father, is the root of another story. I tell you this as it was told to me by my Uncle Milton, the first scribe in our family. These were coalfield Jews, part of an immigration wave that came over from the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe throughout the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and settled in southern West Virginia, North Fork, to be exact, a small town on the north fork of the Elkhorn River. The Pale where Jews were forced to live by law included Lithuania, Poland, and western Russia. The way my family got to West Virginia was a love story, sort of, perhaps in the manner of one written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Enemies: A Love Story.” Here at last is the Hermanson version.
Somewhere in the vicinity of eastern Lithuania and the Russian border (what today is Belarus), love bloomed between my grandfather’s brother, Mischa Lazar, and Tante Pesha, a distant cousin and the daughter of an important man. According to Uncle Milton, their love was like a flower: it budded, it bloomed, it died, it rotted. Again, according to Uncle Milton, Mischa Lazar was a shlemazel, not to be confused with a shlemiel, the difference being that the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlamazel. Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup! One spilled soup too many and Pesha became a raving maniac, shrew of shrews, a bite like a weasel. She tore into him from tooth to tuchos. If people were around (as they usually were), she implored them to see how cursed she was: Mischa Lazar, the dunce, the dim, the damned. Who didn’t hear her?
One day Mischa Lazar disappeared, vanished as if he’d never been. Dogs were brought in. Trackers sent out. No sign. No sign never at all. It was assumed he was set upon by robbers and no doubt smoldering in a shallow grave by now. Pesha herself was sure of this. Ever since he disappeared she’d been getting chills in bed at night that meant a ghost walked over her grave. Who else could it be but him, that despicable lowlife, that “vantz”, that “shtucke drek?” But, the chills abated, and the days began. Days. Weeks. A month. Two months. Nothing. And then. Something. Word came back from a distant town, Vitebsk, that Mischa Lazar had been spotted, so the family sent my grandfather, Samuel, to bring him back. Samuel actually found him in Vitebsk (a town of some size) even though Mischa Lazar did not want to be found, and wanted even less to go back to Pesha. How my grandfather persuaded him to return home I do not know, but within a week he took off again, stole a horse in the middle of a moonless night, and disappeared into it. Remember, Pesha’s father was an important man. A big shot. A man of influence. He thrust a fat wallet at my grandfather and ordered him to bring that “mamser” back. So, this time, Samuel tracks Mischa Lazar all the way to Scandinavia, Sweden, where it was. That’s how we got the “son” tagged onto our name. Hermanson. How hard could it be to find a Jew fresh from the shtetl in Sweden (long black beard, long black coat, muddy clodhoppers)? Well, Samuel found him again. That night Mischa Lazar produced a bottle of aqua vit, drank his brother blind, and took off once more. Samuel wired Pesha’s father for instructions. “Find him,” bellowed the important man. Pesha wailed that she missed her Mischa, but no one believed her.
This time Mischa Lazar’s trail led across the ocean. He did not enter this country through Ellis Island, we know that, and some think he might have come through the port of Galveston. If so, why go all the way up to Baltimore, because that’s where my grandfather found him next, rather, found of him next: Baltimore, Maryland; the Hebrew Free Burial Society. The name Mischa Lazar was on its books. No last name. A nobody. A doctor claimed the cadaver for his experiments. My grandfather took to his room at the boarding house for seven days without shaving or shoes and sat mourning on a low and uncomfortable stool, the Jewish way: he sat shiva. On the eighth day, Samuel took stock and decided here was a business opportunity.
Sam outfitted a peddler’s pack with notions, gadgets, candy, toys, overalls, and other assorted ready to wear clothing, nothing fancy, just good quality. His plan was to head south and sell his wares on the way with hopes of setting up a business whenever he got to wherever he was going. By trade he was a butcher. The pack weighed a hundred pounds, so my grandfather bought a horse, too. While piecing together the bits of information about my grandfather’s travels, I came upon the most surprising old photograph: a well dressed young man on horseback – clean shaven, jacket, tie, fancy boots – with a huge smile on his face and a cigar in the side of his mouth like a big shot. Both horse and saddle were fit and fine. This young man was ready for business. This young man was a pack peddler! Why was I surprised? Because for years I had carried the image of an older, bent over, rabbinical type with a beard and clothes from the old country who trudged the hills and hollows of the south peddling his wares. The young man on horseback was anything but that. He was sure, confident, ready for the world. “Here I am,” he seems to be saying, “Just watch me!” He had an uncanny resemblance to my Uncle Josh, Samuel’s first born.
Samuel traveled across Maryland and down into West Virginia, way down deep to the Tug River, just this side of Kentucky, feuding grounds of the Hatfields in West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, right there across the river from each other. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield from this same clan. Early into the fever that propelled the world into its first world war, Dr. Hatfield came across a Negro giving a stump speech about how the “colored men’s gonna get all the white womens when their mens be away at war.” Hatfield pulled his pistol and shot the speaker dead. That same Dr. Hatfield was shortly thereafter elected to the U.S. Senate.
Anyone who has ever fully experienced Elizabeth Hermanson, fourth child of Samuel, will understand the irony of this situation.
By the way, Sam Hermanson actually ran into Mischa Lazar again. He had paid the funeral parlor to have his name put in their books. Sam wasn’t looking for him, but there was Mischa Lazar in West Virginia with a peddler’s pack of his own.
“I’m not going back to that “chalerya” again,” Mischa Lazar told my grandfather,
“Go where you want,” said my grandfather, “I’m staying here.”
He did, and brought the family over to join him, the only kosher butcher in North Fork, West Virginia.
