Look for Kernels of Truth in Family Stories

I love a good family story. "Teddy was late to his own wedding because his horse ran off." "They gave Mom their unopened pay packets every Friday and she doled out a handful of nickels for the next week's subway fare." "Minnie wouldn't accept a suitor chosen for her by her family--she threw his engagement ring out the window."

These three stories were passed down in my mother's family tree. Too bad I can never confirm the story about the horse that ran away. And at first, the other two stories sounded a little outlandish, despite multiple cousins having heard variations of those legends from family history.

New World, new approach to household finances

Then I was introduced to two books that changed my understanding of these family stories. The first was Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars by Elizabeth Ewen. The author looks at the lives of Jewish and Italian women immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the peak years of immigration to America. Mothers and daughters learned to approach household finances in a different way when they moved to America. In the Old World, barter was an everyday experience. In the New World, cash was an absolute necessity.

The chapter on "Our Daily Bread" describes the common experience of the immigrant mother as strict organizer of household finance, demanding unopened pay packets from working children and only giving back the bare minimum of coins for each child to get to their job in between paydays. The rest was kept for rent, food, and other household expenses.

There was the kernel of truth in my family story: According to descendants, my great-grandma Lena Kunstler Farkas (1865-1938) stood at the door of the family apartment on payday with her hand extended, taking pay packets from teenage and adult children as they arrived home from work. 

Sometimes my great uncles Julius and Peter wouldn't have enough money for subway rides to and from work, so they would reportedly walk home from Manhattan to the Bronx on occasion. Speculation was that the boys actually dared to spend a nickel or two on some treat or diversion. Instead of asking for more from Lena, they walked home and said nothing. Lena was a strict disciplinarian and no one wanted to get on her bad side or they'd get a sharp rap on the head. Really.

Marrying the family's choice?

The second book I read was Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, a Polish-born Jewish author who immigrated to New York City with her family in the 1890s. This overwrought 1925 novel tells the story of conflict in a poor Jewish family transplanted from Poland to tenement life in lower Manhattan. I find historical fiction such as this sometimes offers windows into attitudes and challenges from past generations (allowing for excessive drama in the narrative).

This book really caught my attention when the father of the family rejected the men that three of his daughters want to marry. Instead, he arranged marriages to bring himself financial gain, even though the daughters would be unhappy. The youngest daughter resolves to only marry for love. And after many trials and tribulations for the family, that's what she does. New world, new approach to marriage. 

In my family, Lena's husband Moritz Farkas (1857-1936) earned little in his work in New York City, so everyone had to pitch in to keep the household afloat. Moritz was very fond of all his daughters, and each thought she was the favorite, by the way. When my grandma Minnie, the oldest daughter, fell in love with Teddy Schwartz, Moritz and Lena objected because they thought their daughter could do much better. That's when they arranged what they believed would be a more suitable match, a marriage they hoped would give Minnie a better life. 

Minnie would not even consider an arranged marriage. Knowing her as I did in later life, I can imagine her throwing the engagement ring out the window to show her final answer to the arranged marriage. Family story is that Peter and Julius scrambled down the stairs of the tenement to the sidewalk to search for the ring, but no one has any idea whether they found it and who kept it. With Minnie as the role model, every one of her siblings who married chose his or her own partner. It was a new world and the family learned to adapt. Kernel of truth!

Did Teddy's horse really run away on the morning of his wedding to Minnie? It doesn't really matter...what matters is that there are kernels of truth to explain the stories passed down through the decades, and to remind descendants that ancestors were more than names and dates on a family tree. Thinking of my great-grandma Lena, who collected paypackets to finance her household, on the 87th anniversary of her passing, in March of 1938.