Today, we leave Berlin and head to Ulm, the birthplace of Albert Einstein, for one night. There isn’t, apparently, much to see there… a fountain in honor of Einstein, and maybe an outline of the house where he was born (though it seems as if that may be erased thanks to new development, and anyway, that seems a strange thing to preserve?). Einstein’s parents moved to Ulm from Bad Buchau, where my father’s family had lived for at least five generations, but there seems to be even less reason to visit that town, which is very small (about 4k people) and of which I have no stories or any sense of having “come from” there.
My thrice-great-grandfather Moses Leopold Einstein emigrated from Bad Buchau to Montgomery County, Virginia, where he died in 1888. We don’t know in which generation they abandoned their Jewishness, but my twice-great-grandfather was named “Henry John Einstein,” which bears little resemblance to the very Jewish names higher up on the family tree, so provides a hint.
My father was raised Presbyterian, and by people who didn’t much like Jews in spite of their last name.
I loved my father very much, and miss him every day. But I never felt any kinship at all to the rest of his family. They were mean, cruel people with absolutely nothing to recommend them. And so, I have assumed I could not feel kinship with the larger Einstein family, coming as I do from a poisoned branch of the family tree.
And yet, as we pack up to head to Ulm, I do feel kinship with the people in these pictures. Above, in 1935 or 1936, Max Heimbach (left) and Arthur Einstein (right), carrying blanket rolls, are escorted to a police station in Bad Buchau following their arrest. (Both men emigrated, Heimbach to Brazil, Einstein to the US.) Below, Jacob Guggenheimer and his daughter, Irene Guggenheimer Einstein, cross the Stuttgarter Strasse bridge in Ulm that is painted with the sign "Jews are not desireable in Ulm.”
And I *do* feel kinship with the people in these pictures, but I question it. Am I allowed fellow-feeling with the Einstein family as a larger whole if I feel none at all for my father’s parents or his sister and her family? Or, by virtue of how awful they were—and how much harm they would have wished on these other Einsteins, because they were virulent antisemites—is it wrong, perhaps selfish or self-aggrandizing—to want to also know this part of my family history and to call it that: my family history?
Once, several years ago, a distant cousin named Ted Einstein who was researching the family genealogy stopped to visit with Dominik and me in Athens. I was less gracious than I should have been. He asked me for the names of my siblings, and their children, for his research, but I refused to give them. He asked about my father’s sister, and I begged him not to reach out to her, and insisted that if he did, he not mention he’d been in contact with me or give her any information about me or my siblings. Now, it seems silly. But at that moment, it was the first time in decades I’d had any contact with an Einstein who wasn’t part of my immediate, nuclear family… and all the ways in which my grandparents and aunt made me feel afraid (not unduly, I should note) came crashing back and got misdirected toward this otherwise lovely man and his wife. I’m embarrassed by this, and wish I had behaved better. I suppose I should write to him and say so.
So we’ll go to Ulm, and I will think about whether or not I am a part of the Einsteins who lived there, and a part of the Bad Buchau Einsteins, or if having been born into what can only be called “the redneck asshole branch of the Einstein family,” (a descriptor that never ceases to surprise people, who don’t imagine there should be such a thing), these too are a people I’m cut off from.
Fascinating. I ‘m with Lisa. More to find out. But now I’m confused. You were raised Presbyterian, and your father ostensibly was not raised Jewish or identified as Jewish. And I thought your mother is not Jewish. So how were you identified as Jewish growing up?
I'm very interested in this post, and I would encourage you to explore that side of your family even if the closer family members were unpleasant people. We all have those people in our families' pasts, some closer, some more distant. I think, in fact, that's often a place where the stories become very interesting--at least I find that in my own family history.
What happened to Henry John Einstein that made him give up his religion of birth? Was there some trauma that came down, even unspoken, and that created the kind of nastiness you encountered in your grandparents and aunt? Why do you think your father escaped that?
Interestingly, I have a branch of my Campbell cousins from Tennessee that converted to Judaism when my great-grandfather's nephew married a Jewish woman in 1939. I'd never known this branch of my mother's family, probably because they had left Tennessee for Chicago (and then Florida), possibly for economic reasons during the Depression. But I discovered them and met up with my third cousins in Miami a few years ago. One of them has done a lot of research into his Ashkenazi roots but he had never explored non-Jewish relatives even though he still carries the Campbell name. He said he was a bit fearful that all those Campbells from TN would be unfriendly to the Jewish branch, and he was relieved I was not.
At any rate, there's no telling what you will find, but these changes in families are fascinating. You can bet there's a story behind the unpleasantness of your father's family.