Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Max Silverstein was one of my paternal great-grandfathers.  Displayed here are his citizenship papers which were taken out in October, 1888:

Be it remembered that on the fifteenth day of October, in the year of Our Lord 1888, Max Silberstein appeared in the Superior Court of the City of New York and applied before the said court to [....] become a Citizen of the United States of American pursuant to the several acts of the Congress of the United States of America…

Thereupon it was ordered by the said court that the said applicant be admitted…by the said Court to be Citizen of the United States of America.

My newly discovered second cousin [correction: first cousin, once removed Bob corrects me], Bob Silverstein (son of Harry) writes this about Max and his emigration to this country from Hungary:

My father told me a few things about Max Silverstein but I don’t remember if he said when he came to the US.  He was from Szentes Hungary.  At the time, it was actually called Austria-Hungary.  You can find Szentes on a map.  It’s a fairly big city.  There was a Szentes "society" [landsmanschaft].  It was made up of Jews from Szentes and they would have periodic get togethers.  He also told me that Max was an avid baseball fan.  Even though he couldn’t read English, he would follow the standings in the newspaper and keep up on all the statistics.

His mother was named Mary (believe it or not).

Max’s affection for baseball is very interesting.  Of course, Ken Burns has told us that baseball was the great equalizer and you could be a fan no matter whether you were a greenhorn or a wealthy baron of industry.  I’m sure that explains Max’s love for the game.

My grandfather, Marcy, was an avid fan (Brooklyn Dodgers) as was my father (Boston Red Sox from the Ted Williams era) and my uncle Stan (New York Giants).

Max eventually married Tillie Neustadt.  Bob writes further about Tillie’s background:

Other information about Tillie Neustadt according to my father:  Her "real" name was Cecilia.  I don’t know what it was in Yiddish.  She came from Wiener Neustadt, which is a fairly large city about 60 miles west of Vienna.  [UPDATE: a reader from the city corrects this information in a comment below saying it has 40,000 inhabitants and is 30 miles south of Vienna] She came to the US when she was 8, so she was educated here.

The next is a little unusual, but I’ll repeat as I remember, Tillie had a brother who ran away from home when he was 12 years old.  He ended up in Ohio where he was adopted by a prominent family.  He eventually became a high ranking Ohio state official.  Something like Secretary of State.  He once came to visit the family on Elizabeth Street and he was obviously much better off financially than the Peekskill family.

My mother said she once wrote a letter to the Ohio side of the family, but they never responded.  We supposedly have some wealthy relatives in the Cleveland area.

Eventually, Max and Tillie moved to Peekskill where they had six boys and two daughters.  One of the boys was Marcy Silverstein, my paternal grandfather.

tags austrian_jew, hungarian_jew, immigration, jewish_geneology, peekskill, Silverstein, Szentes, U.S._citizenship, wiener_neustadt

Before I get to the issue at hand, a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics throwing light on the breastfeeding practices of American mothers (see Reuters AlertNet - U.S. doctors urge mothers to breast-feed longer) inspired this post.  While the study finds that the rate of breastfeeding has gradually increased over the past decade, the incidence of breastfeeding at six months of age is still only 33% (those mothers who solely breastfeed or supplement).  Only 1 in 7 breastfeed exclusively at 6 months (which is what the AAP recommends).  The numbers should be higher, much higher.

There’s one thing I don’t fully understand about the study (and perhaps one of my more learned readers can explain this to me), pediatricians encourage EXCLUSIVE breastfeeding for the first six months of life.  My wife breastfed all our children, but even though she stayed home for the early months she always supplemented.  If she didn’t she would never have gotten any sleep.  So someone tell me why is exclusive breastfeeding so important (or is it)?

When my family travels back east to visit my wife’s and my family, I notice a tremendous sociological gap in attitudes toward breastfeeding.  Perhaps this is an overblown or mistaken notion (and please correct me if you disagree), but I sense that there is a more rigid and traditionalist attitude in the east toward religious, moral and cultural issues–breastfeeding being one.

On one of these trips, I read this remarkable story in the New York Times, Removal of painting irks nursing mothers.

Newburgh’s (NY) Stewart International Airport unveiled an art exhibition which included a four-panel display called She Nourishes by Shawn Del Joyce.  One of the panels showed a mother breastfeeding.  Horror of horrors!  A small group of airport passengers complained about the impropriety (!) of showing such an indecent image in a public (though privately owned) building.  The airport directed that the offending artwork be removed.  In the New York Times, Stewart spokeswoman Kiran Jain explained:’

‘We reacted to this particular thing in the same way we would if someone told us the knob in the men’s room was broken,” she said. ”It was immediate and we responded to our passengers. They come first.”

Hmm.  Tell me again how a painting of a mother breastfeeding is like a broken men’s room knob?  There are so many weirdnesses about this analogy I’ll just leave you to ponder them.

Ms. Jain placed her foot even deeper in her mouth when she tried to defend the airport’s philistinism to the Times Herald Record thus: "Breast-feeding is ‘a controversial issue all over the world.’"  Whoa!  Controversial??  Maybe in Newburgh, but not where I come from (Seattle).  What do they put in the water there anyway to make people such nervous nellies about a perfectly normal function of the human body?

The Record story continues:

Only in America is there a juvenile sector of the population that regards the nourishment of an infant as a sexual act. America is like a preadolescent who hides copies of National Geographic under his mattress so that, after dark, he can surreptitiously whip out his flashlight and be titillated by pictures of bare-breasted African women nursing their babies.

I can’t help but wonder how Stewart officials would react to real, live women breast-feeding their babies in the airport. Of course, far be it for me to suggest that all breast-feeding women in the region should hold an organized nurse-in at the airport. It’s not my place to foment a demonstration.

I just mean, I’m really, really wondering what would happen if such a thing were to occur. Really. If you get my drift.

And guess what happened, a group of mothers held their own Feed-In demonstration against the prudery of Stewart Airport officials.  Good for them.

Which brings me to my adventures in breastfeeding with my own family.  On the same trip in which I read the above Times article, I spent an afternoon with my blood relatives.  Janis needed to breastfeed our then 1 year old son, Jonah.  Janis breastfeeds very discreetly in these types of situations and probably sensed there might be some sensitivity on my mother’s part, so everyone in the living room hardly knew what she was doing.  Nevertheless, my mother got up with a big "harrumph!" and stomped out of the room saying something like: "I’m not going to stand for this!"  Shades of Stewart (Stewart is about 20 miles from my family’s New York home)!

My mother is, of course, a prude.  She’s never been comfortable with the human body (her own or anyone else’s).  And, in fact, my mother was quite emotionally abusive to all of her children (that’s a separate post entirely).  So she didn’t come close to earning the right to complain about what Janis had done.  I was livid (lots of baggage there of course that had nothing to do with this particular incident) on my wife’s and Jonah’s behalf.  Why should they be made to feel they’d done anything wrong when they’d been engaged in what should be one of the most natural activities a mother and baby can do?  [In my original post, due to my faulty memory (writing a few years after this incident happened) I mischaracterized what follows in this story (which I am now correcting).  I apologize for my faulty memory and for the hurt my description caused to any family members who were there.]

Anyway, no one in the room at the time of the incident said anything as my mother stormed out, perhaps out of stunned shock.  Then one relative in the room said: "Hey, but look at it this way–your dad [who is dead] would’ve reacted a lot worse to breastfeeding."  And this is supposed to comfort you somehow?  At that point, I left the room.  Two of my relatives then told Janis they were sorry about what happened.  But neither talked at all about my mother’s behavior.  One has to give them credit for being sensitive enough to say they were sorry to Janis (who was in shock at the time).  But the problem is that my mother’s behavior was but an exagerrated version of what passes for the norm in the east (a strong resistance to breastfeeding in public).

Aside from the weird proclivities of my own family, I really wonder whether here in the west there may be freer or looser social attitudes toward a whole gamut of issues: religious affiliation, divorce, gay/lesbian rights and last but not least breastfeeding.  I wonder if any sociologist has studied this?

USA Today published its own interesting take of the AAP study: USATODAY.com - Nursing moms advised to keep babies close by

I’ve written here in this blog about my father, Jule Silverstein’s roots in Haverstraw, NY. In doing research on a series of posts I’ve written about my family’s history in the Hudson River Valley, I came across this wonderful poster (”The Rebellion, Its Cause and Cure”) which promotes: “A meeting for a free discussion of the Great Principle involved in the present War for the Union” to be held on September 24th [1862] at the Wigwam, which I’d suspect was a tavern or bar of that time. I’d guess that this meeting would’ve been a recruitment session to encourage Haverstraw natives to join the Union army since several Union regiments included recruits from the village. Haverstraw and its environs played an especially important role in Revolutionary War history and this poster indicates that her sons continued to serve faithfully the Union cause.

My father was a social studies teacher at Haverstraw, and later North Rockland High Schools from 1954-1989. He especially liked American history and of course, local history. I share these interests. That’s why I so enjoyed finding this poster on the web.

Yesterday, I took my 3 year old son with me for lunch at the Frye Museum café. I noticed in the lunchroom a poster for the current exhibition, Eloquent Vistas, a collection of 19th photography from George Eastman House that detailed great American landscapes.

I am a keen admirer of photography and decided I had to see the exhibit. Jonah, of course, loved the photographs of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the train trestles over the Appamatox. But I was struck by William Henry Jackson’s “Peekskill Bay, Hudson River,” an 1882 portrait (see below image) of Peekskill’s harbor and the Hudson River beyond. Why? My family roots go back to 1900 in Peekskill and I’m always interested to learn anything new about the town. I’d previously never heard of William Henry Jackson or of this picture, so I was naturally excited.

I went home and searched forlornly online for that image or any other historic photos of Peekskill or that portion of the Hudson River. The Eastman site didn’t seem to have the picture on-line. Nor did any other site. But finally I discoverd the Detroit Company Collection of the LIbrary of Congress. Eureka–I’d found it!

I was awestruck at the treasury of American cultural and social memory represented by the Library’s American Memory website. It is meant to be a comprehensive online digital repository of the American past. Unlike, many such online repositories, I found it to be rich in artifacts and a treasure trove of our heritage. The photographic images below are all from the Photos and Prints section of the site. All the Jackson images in this post can be viewed at the “William Henry Jackson, Hudson River” search result page of the American Memory site.

In my online search for the Jackson Peekskill photograph, I managed to locate a remarkable Hudson Valley photographer, Gene Panczenko, who took a 2002 photo (see right) from virtually the same location as Jackson. It’s interesting to compare what a historical photograph and a contemporary one of the same site look like.

WHOEVER has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print ...

First, I should explain my own personal interest in the 1949 Peekskill riots. My maternal grandmother's and grandfather's families settled in Peekskill sometime before 1920 and I still have a few family members who live there. As a child, I spent lots of time there visiting my dad's family. I always felt especially close to my great uncle Izzy (Isadore) Goldsand, who was a leader of the local Jewish community, a large property owner, real estate entrepreneur and Democratic Party operative. (In fact, my grandfather Marcy Silverstein used to drive with Jim Farley [Haverstraw's Democratic Party boss] into NYC ...

My dad, Jule Silverstein died in December, 1995. He was born (1925) and raised at 103 Hudson Avenue in Haverstraw, NY. He attended Haverstraw High School. After graduation, he enrolled in the Navy in 1943. He married in 1950 and started teaching in the Haverstraw (later North Rockland) School District in the early 1950s. He taught social studies in the District until his retirement in 1989. He had a family of five sons of which I'm the oldest. Dad died in Lake Worth, FL of a cerebral hemmorage in December, 1995. In 1996, my brother Marc called with news that the North Rockland Sports Hall of Fame intended to honor my dad as ...

Marcy Silverstein (bottom left) & the Victory A.C.Nine--1920 The Goldsands & Silversteins came to Peekskill, NY, one of Westchester's many river towns, in the first two decades of the 20th century.  As a teenager (and before the era of driver's licenses), my grandmother, Cele, drove her father around the county delivering liquor to speakeasies during Prohibition.  He needed her to drive because he wrecked every car he ever owned.  My grandmother & grandfather moved to Haverstraw, NY in the early 1920s.  She married Marcy Silverstein around 1920 and they moved across the River to Haverstraw....