As I sorted through the photos I found many that I had never seen before. There was one set in particular–taken at my grandparent’s 40th and my parent’s 10th anniversary party in June 1957 that really set me on my explorations.

The photo above shows my father’s parents surrounded by their nine grandchildren. I’m in the front row, second from the right. If you look closely you can see a boy up in the tree.

It was when I was creating an album for my middle sister’s birthday that I noticed that she DID look angelic in the photos. L was always considered sweet, but that’s only one side of her. As we look at more photos you’ll see the other sides.

The Newest Cousin

I also noticed who was in the photos and who wasn’t. There were the most pictures of my cousin N. She was eight months old, but other than the group shot above, a couple of my other cousins weren’t photographed.

My Grandparents

This is a photo of my cousin standing on his father’s palm. I was told that it’s based on trust–the child has to trust the world.

Not all children will do this. Of my uncle’s four children there are only pictures of two of them.

Earthquakes

For the past week I’ve had trouble sleeping through the night.  One factor is Cleo, one of my two nine month old cats, has been attacking my feet in the middle of the night (I kick her out of the room when this happens).

Another is that early Friday morning I woke to windows rattling.  About ten minutes later they rattled again and both cats (Cleo’s littermate Smokey is the other) jumped from the bed and ran for safety.  Since it was 2 am I didn’t get up to check the USGS quake site, but I did it as soon as I got to work (I’m still at Bay Ship & Yacht.  I don’t start at Xerox until July).   I really like their “did you feel it?” feature where they track the distance and area in which it was felt by having site visitors click if they felt it.

There were three quakes, although I only felt two. They were centered about six miles from here–five miles west of Danville, three miles SW of Alamo.  The one that freaked out the cats was a 3.5. The first was a 3.1.  Not very big, but still sleep distruptive.

This morning I again woke to rattling windows.  Today’s 3.1 quake was at 4:31 am and located in the same place as the three on Friday morning.  When I moved to San Ramon in February 2007 I wanted to be east of the hills, away from the Hayward fault. Within two weeks of moving here there was a quake centered about 10 miles away, just north of Lafayette.

Nightmares

Yesterday morning at 2 am  I woke screaming.  I had a nightmare. I had been dreaming about lack of money. My Grandma Fannie was in my dream.  I think that a cat jumped on the bed, but I screamed thinking that Fannie was at my bedside.  I was so shaken that I had to get up for a couple of hours.  I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

For those of you who didn’t know Fannie you’re probably wondering how and why my grandmother would make me scream.  For those of you who did know her, there’s no reason to explain.  She was scary.  She was mean and evil and looked like the witch of the west in the Wizard of Oz.

What’s also scary is that in the photo below she is about 57 — a few years older than I am now.  She looks significantly older.

Fannie resented the fact that my mother married and had four children.  Her marriage ended when my mother was three.  We heard that it was an arranged marriage — her father worked out an agreement with a man who had stayed at his boarding house that Fannie marry the man’s troubled son Harry Stern.

When I was four she moved in with us.  She didn’t have any friends.  She did have a brother, Abe who was equally mean.  Fannie liked L and A, but disliked M and me. She made all of our lives miserable.

One positive thing I can say about Fannie was that she was  talented at knitting and crocheting.  She made crocheted tablecloths for each of us girls.

Amy inherited Fannie’s engagement ring.  It was stolen after Amy died.  We all felt the ring was cursed by the years of exposure to Fannie — it had terrible energy.  Since none of us wanted it, we felt that whoever took it did us a favor — the curse is on them.

I’m unable to post too many photos. I guess I haven’t learned to properly work with this site. So I’m doing yet one more posting to give you the the other paintings by Lizzie. I think that there were more. I know that my father took some to copy, but I don’t know if they were ever returned or if they were lost.

The painting above was inspired by two photographs of my grandparents and by a painting by my Grandma Lizzie. It was painted by M Goodwin about 1969.  M never titled it, but I titled it The Goodwin Family Tree. During the 1950s Lizzie took painting classes at the Jewish Community Center that were taught by the painter John Baldessari. Her style was primitive and M modeled this style in this painting.

The photos that inspired the painting are shown here.  The photo at the right of Grandpa with his arm around Lizzie, holding a bottle of beer in the other hand. The other was the photo of Grandpa smelling the blossoms on the peach tree that was in their backyard.

The painting  that inspired M is to the left. It is of the peach tree in blossom with the sun coming through.  The palm trees Grandpa planted to raise and sell surround the tree. He did not understand the slow growth of palms and the variety he planted never had the popularity of other palms.  When Rozzie had the house moved she didn’t make anything on the palm trees.

Lizzie’s Paintings

When I was in the Cooperstown Graduate Program I did a project on Lizzie’s paintings for my Folk Art class. The instructors, Louis and Aggie Jones wanted the paintings for the Fenimore House Museum collection, I gave them the slides instead.

I have two of her paintings.  One is of trees and hills reflected in a pond, although they don’t match. 

The other is of me. It has the notation To Dora Frumkin, May 10, 1963. I was eight years old.

Unlike genealogy family history isn’t always direct, linear, clean, or pretty. In genealogy you have a chart with names, dates, births, deaths, and marriages – the facts. As I mentioned in my last blog once we add the factor of pictures and place of births we can make assumptions of connections, but just because Vava Brodsky or the poet Joseph Brodsky have the same last name, it doesn’t make them related. Just as births in very distant places doesn’t mean that they’re not. As with all history writing, family history is about interpretation of events. It involves sensing and perceiving what happened and, in the case of identifying the contents photos, intuition.

I recently read a manuscript of an  unpublished book Wonderlust my friend Laurie MacDougall just wrote. It is a fast moving account of her life as the daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter living on a farm in the San Fernando Valley in the 1940′s and ‘50′s. What makes her book work so well is that she found her mother’s journals and poetry and had the transcripts of an interview of her father written for the Screenwriters Guild. It is a caring account of the humanness of family. There is no blame, just compassion and humor.

It is with this type of compassion that I am writing. We all have faults, problems and inconsistencies. Perfection isn’t interesting, but the stories that make us laugh or cry are. This blog is not a memoir or autobiography. It is what comes up for me or others when looking at these pictures. Laurie told me “My family wrote. Yours took pictures”.

Who’s in the photo

After my last post my cousin V wrote me asking “Ok the picture with the Brody Sisters 1946,,,,who is everyone???”

I meant to identify it, but it got late and I just wanted to post the piece. I asked my second cousin Mark to verify that it was his grandfather, Meyer in the photo. He said that he was unsure.   I assume that it is (intuition) because of where he is standing in relation to both Alice and Reine.  I also looked at other photos with Alice in them and he’s there.

Seated:  Shirley, Rozzie (Lizzie’s daughter), Alice, Dora, and Lila (Dora’s daughter).  Standing: Meyer Gaffen (Alice’s husband), Reine (Alice’s daughter), Lizzie, Robbie (Lizzie’s son), and his first wife (whose name I don’t know).

V also asked “Is that the ranch house on Laurel Street…what is the structure to the right???” It is Grandpa and Lizzie’s house, but in the ‘40′s the property was still a chicken ranch and not yet divided.  That happened in the early ‘50′s.  I’m unsure of what the structure is in the background to the right.  It looks like scaffolding to me.

V grew up in that house.  She was born after the property surrounding the house was sold and turned into a housing subdivision.  The property was on Laurel St. between 53rd and 54th in east San Diego.  I grew up about four blocks away.Up the hill at 55th and Laurel.

Comments from V

V also wrote:I read your new insights…you have an amazing, and accurate memory! I enjoy what you write, and I think you are very insightful. Thank you for doing this.I don’t think we are of the same family (rg: as Vava Brodsky)…but, she does look a lot like grandma. I think L looks the most like grandma Lizzie.

I too looked in the mirror and for a moment…I thought I looked just like my Mom.  My Mom and I had the exact same feet, but our features on our face were very different…but, for that moment…I looked just like her…I remember how it struck me…as it did with you as well, when it happened to you.  I think my teeth were a lot like my Mom’s as well, and our teeth were more from the Goodwin side of the family.

RG’s note:  We all have small jaws.   As for the teeth, I think that she’s referring to the size and shape.  She had to wear braces–I didn’t.  She is blonde and freckled and I’m dark and olive complected.

Grandma’s family lived on a Grofts land.  Her father was a blacksmith. I think he was manager of the property and lived well, compared to many Jews.  That is why they had so much money when they came. I think they also needed the money, since they had no one in the US, and needed the money to be able to stay, by showing they didn’t need someone to sponsor them, and help support them.

RG:  The story I remember is that the Groft’s sons and Lizzie’s older brothers immigrated to the US together after the Groft warned Lizzie’s father Max that things were going to get bad.  This is much like Tevya being warned in Fiddler on the Roof. They settled in Providence, RI. The Ellis Island manifests document that Lizzie’s parents were going to join their sons in Providence.

Grandpa’s side of the family was very orthodox.  Grandma was called the shicksta when she married Grandpa.  I believe Grandpa revolted from what he considered the extreme rules of being orthodox and left home at a fairly early age.  Grandma fit his world well…being Jewish was very important…but the orthodox ways were not what Grandpa wanted any part of.

Family resemblence

I heard from Birgit Wolz today.  She took the time to look at what I wrote about her last week.  She wrote “you look just like your grandmother”.  I took no offense to that since she was referring to my Grandma Lizzie, not my Grandma Fannie.  I think that I look like both my parents.In fact, I had an experience about fifteen years ago where as I was washing my face, I looked into the mirror and saw what Lizzie probably looked like in her 30′s.  I told my father about it and he gave one of his famously negative retorts of, “yeah, no great beauty”.

What Birgit doesn’t know is that most of us Brody’s look alike.  We have the high cheekbones and the short heavy legs (with the exception of Valerie) that my mother referred to as “Brody legs”.   The ten Goodwin cousins we do look a lot alike.  Although not V, as I think that her father’s family’s genes must have been stronger, but B and N look more like my older sisters and me than A did.  R certainly looked like us and D did when he was thinner.  It’s not just us Goodwin cousins, but it includes many of the children and grandchildren of Lizzie’s siblings.  But I more than the rest of the cousins have the deep set eyes.

Brodsky family from Kiev

As I thought about the family look or traits I was thinking about how much Marc Chagall’s wife, Vava Brodsky and Lizzie looked alike.  So I just spent the past couple of hours going through articles about Chagall on the web.  Chagall is my favorite painter so I enjoyed looking at the images of the paintings.  I really enjoy the ethereal quality of his work and the colors.  I found plenty of pictures of Chagall, but no photos of Vava-in all of the articles about her or them the photos had been extracted.  I did come up with this painting of Vava.

I learned that she was from Kiev, as was Lizzie, but I don’t know the actual town.  Chagall had commented, “I have another wife-the third-from the Brodsky family itself from Kiev”.  The Brodsky’s were sugar magnates.  The writer Shalom Aleichem who wrote The Tales of Tevya, better known as Fiddler on the Roof, worked for this family. 

I don’t know if my family is this group of Brodsky’s, but it brings to mind Lizzie’s story of getting off the boat at Ellis Island and being asked if they had any money and her father pulled out his money belt to show that they did.  In the Ellis Island logs it showed that they came with $150-more than any of the other immigrants on the ship, and what was a lot of money in 1904 when they arrived on December 15^th on the Hekla that shipped out of Copenhagen.

Vava was 25 years younger than Chagall.  She was his muse and he felt she was extremely beautiful and highly intelligent.  Nothing wrong with that.  Those are good qualities for men to notice.  I certainly like being noticed for both, but sometimes, especially now as I’m getting older, I’ll take the beautiful over the intelligent.

I also found this painting of a chicken that goes along with Lizzie’s chicken rancher days.

Often when I tell people I’m interested in family history they take it to mean genealogy.  I’m not interested in that at all.  I have three Mormon cousins, (my father’s brother Jerry’s wife Merilyn is Mormon) who have eighteen children between them, to take care of that.  I don’t believe in an afterlife where we’re all together in this form of relationship for eternity.

It’s the stories

No, my interest is in the stories.  In fact, I never cared for history until I got to college and realized that it was more than names and dates and kings.  I discovered that it was about movements, art, religion and technology (yes, technology was a factor even during the Renaissance and at Cooperstown we studied folk technology).   I studied architectural history, the bible as history, the history of the decorative arts (form does follow function), popular culture, and the history of the American landscape.  I guess what I studied is now considered American Studies.

What is strange is that when I went to my interview at the Cooperstown Graduate Program Frank Spinney, the Museum Studies instructor didn’t want to accept me into the program because I hadn’t studied early American (Colonial) history.  I had to take a class in Colonial American history in my final quarter at CAL.  I did take a seminar on Colonial Latin America.  I really felt that was far more pertinent to a native San Diegan than learning about what happened in the thirteen colonies.

Great professors

I had some great instructors at CAL.  One of my favorites was Larry Levine.  I took a few classes from him, my favorite being the popular culture of the 1930′s where we saw a movie each week-Sullivan’s Travels and It Happened One Night and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Another was Bob Abzug who taught my thesis seminar (my thesis was on bathing).  Bob is now at the University of Texas, Austin.

My visit with J.B. Jackson

A favorite class was J.B. Jackson’s History of the American Landscape.  I enjoyed it so much that although I had almost no interaction with him during the class (it was a huge lecture with T.A.s) I looked him up when I was in Santa Fe in 1994.

I had heard that he lived outside of Santa Fe.  I looked in the phone book and found the town where he lived.  I went there and stopped at the local museum.  After telling me that he’d probably be in the same clothes he wore in the early ‘70′s, the museum director told me where he lived and called him to tell him I was coming.  Jackson was preparing to give his papers to the College of Santa Fe and was writing about what the history of the American landscape was and had lots of questions for me as a student of his.  I spent a wonderful afternoon with J.B. Jackson talking about gardening, landscape, and life.  He died a year or so later so I’m glad I had taken the time to spend with him.

Discovering social and cultural history changed my life.  It made me appreciate that everything is history and that we are all a part of it.  Family, food, objects all make up history and that’s why I went to a history museum program at Cooperstown.

Comrades and Chicken Ranchers

One of my favorite books is an oral history of the Jewish chicken ranchers of Petaluma, CA, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, the story of a California Jewish community by Kenneth Kann, 1993 (order the book).  I like it because it is a similar story to that of my father’s family who were chicken ranchers in Phoenix, AZ and then in San Diego, CA.  The people he interviewed sounded like my grandfather, a secular Jew who ran away from his Orthodox family, meeting my grandmother when he showed up at a relative’s home in Providence, R.I. 

They moved to Phoenix with their four children after my grandfather developed TB.  My grandmother’s family pooled together to raise the money for the travel expenses.  Much of the money was from a life insurance policy on my grandmother’s brother who had recently died.  The story my father’s cousin Reine tells is that the policy had lapsed, but my grandmother’s brother-in-law who worked for the insurance company got it reinstated.

All in a name

I never called my grandfather anything but Grandpa, although my grandmother was Lizzie. People often just called him Pop.  The thing with his name is that when his brother Izzie heard he was so sick he’d probably die the brother took his name of Irving.  My grandpa then became Irwin, because there couldn’t be two Irving Goodwin in the same family.  It was so confusing that no one used either–he was Grandpa, Pop or Mr. Goodwin.  Grandpa (the only one that I knew) lived to be 76 and died in 1971 after coming home from jury duty.

Grandpa in hat standing next to his brother Izzie/Irving.

back row:  Rozzie, Jerry, Irving, Grandpa, Lizzie.  Front row:  Robbie and Donnie.