Art Walk

Sepia Saturday: Finding Lost Treasure, Pt. 8

Continuing with excerpts from my great-grandfather David Blumenfeld's diary, which I discovered two years ago.

The emigrant Blumenfeld family is finally reunited in Ludington, Michigan, poised for a rise to success in the new land. But even here life is difficult...

Winter on the Detroit River, c. 1900

Ben-Zion felt acutely the necessity of making a living and a home for eight in a new country. He was a stranger to the customs of the people and without much knowledge of the language. He had no money and was forced to wrestle in a strange environment for a mere subsistence. ...There were Michigan’s severe winter storms to face, drifts that made the roads impassable and peddling out of the question. The boys found some work and the two older girls worked at dressmaking to help tide them over the bitter winter.

Life became almost intolerable for the family. Kosher meat had to be bought in Detroit and delivered by express. In the summer it came by boat from Milwaukee. Sometimes it was delayed and before it was delivered to the home it was not fit for use and had to be thrown out.

...Ben-Zion and Leah could hardly endure ...especially Leah, who ...imagined she had married a man beneath her in dignity. They both felt despondent at their ill fortune in the land of the free and both grew pessimistic. The boys opened a shop of their own and the girls worked with them.

Tailor shop

And now although reunited after all their trials, the unthinkable happens:

Ben-Zion became very arbitrary and insisted that all money earned be handed over to him. The girls wanted some of their money for respectable clothes but Father Ben-Zion could see no need of it and there was much waste of money and he left the family.

According to the Diary, Leah tells David, “There is no need for you to remain here as we are now making a comfortable living and there is enough quarreling without your presence.”

This implies that her eldest son was somehow causing some friction, although it is not explained further. At any rate, after this last straw, David decides “to shift for himself, and he struck out for the ‘wild and woolly west.’ As his money was limited he only went as far as Chicago.”

Chicago, c. 1885

This seems ironically anticlimactic, but considering the alienness of the new country, it perhaps was far enough for the time being. Apparently David gets some work there but soon he is disturbed to find that he is compelled to work on Saturdays, the Sabbath. As soon as he earns enough to be able to continue on, he does, making it to Minneapolis.

After working there (presumably as a tailor) for ten months, he makes enough money to open his own shop! And it is in Minneapolis that he meets one Lena Laser, a Lithuanian girl the same age as him, around 21.

Lena had come to America from Kovno [Kaunas], Lithuania, with her four cousins and [had] lived in St. Louis, Missouri with an older sister, Yette, and her husband. ...Lena was fond of walking with David on Nicollet Avenue or promenading down to Bridge Square and over the old suspension bridge. Occasionally during the summer they took a car ride to Minnehaha Falls where they sat and watched the endless sheet of water pouring over the high crest of the rock with the sun shining and bespangling it with myriads of brilliant colors. Lena used to tell David of her relatives and of an uncle who was a great rabbi and another who was a shochet [a ritual slaughterer, licensed and trained in this religious role], and what great dignified men they were.

Minnehaha Falls

...She was tired of staying with her sister, whose husband was a fanatical and quarrelsome man. She yearned for a home of her own... She was a splendid housekeeper, always neat and tidy. Her aprons, though of the cheapest material, always looked bright and were cleanly starched. Her cooking and preparing of dishes would satisfy the most fastidious epicure. She was clever at dressmaking and her fingers were deft at the finest embroidery. At lacemaking she showed her highest skill. What could David do but propose to such an ideal girl? They were married on May 11, 1887.

The Lacemaker

Perhaps as a married man and removed from the exigencies of his large and troubled family, David would now be able to find success.

To be continued...
And find more fascinating posts at Sepia Saturday blog

Some of these photos were borrowed from the following sites:

vintageobscura.wordpress.com


www.wichitaphotos.org


homicide.northwestern.edu


commons.wikimedia.org


arts.jrank.org

Sepia Saturday: Mother's Day

Having introduced my maternal grandparents, allow me to present their daughter this Saturday in sepia. Since it's Mother's Day, after all.

This photo has fascinated me since I first saw it as a child.


Imagine my surprise when, visiting the museum in St. Paul, Minnesota, a couple of years ago, I saw a slideshow that included a similar shot of another family. Turned out this was taken by an itinerant photographer who was in the area.

Anyway here's my mom with her two brothers around 1926.


There's rather a dearth of teenage photos of my mother, but here she's the college novelist circa 1947, possibly posing for a book jacket.


Below: I think this was taken at the University of Michigan where my parents met, just before decamping in 1952 to the University of Washington where my father had scored a job under poet and fellow Michiganian Theodore Roethke.


Twenty years later, my mother putting up with a rather silly photo shoot for an article about my professor father in the local paper. Yes, that's me aft, looking goofy. My daughter is now about that age. Good grief.


And another twenty or thirty years down the line, me mum enjoying her garden.



Happy Mother's Day!

Tableaux Redux: Minneapolix

Once a soap factory, now artists' studios




Once a mill, now a city park




Once the I-35 bridge, now an unstated memorial

Looking Backward

Snap


From white the world fades
in, vision begins, of pleating
water, sand defined by sandaled
feet, by footsteps.
     Toward the camera
     a wind fixed.
In this dream's a ghost
far shore of ghost hotels
and trees tall tokens
of horizon.
     Foreground, Mort and Beth
     posed shortly to ride
     on Mama's back, unsure
     of what? Helen,
     mother, propped herself
     up on her stomach.
     Paul wore a woolly jumper
     like a little muskrat.
Grandma fading into
sky arrests his arm
as he hops.

     august 1925 sunset
     all day it's been in the seventies
     hazy with small-boned breezes
     arthur under the oaks drinks limeade
     three poles spike the lake down
     to the farthest ones the kids wade
     they hang on kicking
     pretending to swim

Grandma, hair pulled back,
wore a knit dress
that passed for bathing suit.
     She looks from the camera,
     blends with background.
Who is this picture of? Helen smiled
for the camera but is almost buried
by her children
     staring straight at me
     as into a window.

     In Helen's house I look at the photo,
     her mother long dead, and now Arthur;
     children moved away and married.
     The picture is so sharp I could be there,
     even the distortions are believable,
     monochrome and overexposed lake.
     Depth. I might be Mort,
     wild ears, buck teeth, the asking
     look. The eyes are sharp linchpins.

I could hear the waves,
Paul singing, Oldsmobile horns
from across the lake.
I can't say
     what I'm trying to say. Maybe
     it is that in thirty years
     that girl, Beth, will have a child,
     and in twenty-five unimaginable more
     he will see a photograph
     about which he will try to write.

Mystery Chair of the Week

Abandoned Flour Mill, Minneapolis

Milltown

Ready for the wrecking ball or gentrification: old mills of Minneapolis.

Brick: Minneapolis Tableaux

The icing to a long weekend in the Twin Cities for a family reunion: wandering the Minneapolis "warehouse district." Thanks to cousin Fred for the Nikon, since I forgot to pack my Canon!


The Parking Hut



The Garage



The Shirt



The Chairs