The Hue and Cry at Our House by Benjamin Taylor

Author:Benjamin Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-26T16:59:32+00:00

Our parents, upon their engagement.

| CHAPTER FIVE |

FOREBEARS

How different was Mom’s family from Dad’s! The Bocksteins, so musical, dressy, pleasure-loving and spendthrift. The Taylors, grim as Plymouth Brethren. Harry and Lena Bockstein’s Spanish colonial house on Windsor Place always smelled of baking pies. B.B. and Bertha Taylor’s house in Tyler smelled of Lysol. The Bocksteins were successful wholesalers of fruits and vegetables and, after the war, frozen foods, as well as distributors of Pearl beer, a premium brand of the time. They had works of art on the walls and went around in a Pierce-Arrow and had live-in servants. The Taylors ran a sad-sack grocery.

Mom’s people—the Bocksteins and, on Little Bubbe’s side, the Goldbergs—had settled in Fort Worth and Shreveport, respectively, in 1904 and 1907, their passage from the Pale of Settlement paid by Jacob Schiff. This greatest of German Jewish philanthropists was alarmed by the glut of Yiddish speakers in New York and wanted to divert some of the floodtide of immigrants fleeing Poland, Belarus and other imperial Russian lands in the wake of pogroms—at Kishinev, Odessa and Białystok, to name the best-known among hundreds. Schiff’s Galveston Movement was based on the idea that Jews landing well away from the Northeast would found new communities of their own in the South and Middle West. This was how my grandparents and great-grandparents came to make new lives in such un-Jewish places. Bubbe Bockstein, née Goldberg, was born in 1896 in Pruzhany, a market town, then Russian, later Polish and now Belarusian, at the confluence of the Mukha River and the Vets Canal. Grandpa Bockstein, whom she would meet in Shreveport, had been born in 1886 and grew up in Sielce, forty kilometers northwest of Lublin.

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