On March 19, 1994, a Jewish family reunion took place in Givat Haim, a kibbutz situated midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Such meetings are hardly unique among Jews these days—a few weeks earlier, 85 members of the Rothschild family, all descendants of Mayer Amshel (1743-1812), had assembled in Frankfurt—but neither are they all that frequent.
The reason is not far to seek. The major migrations in modern Jewish history have left few genealogical records to be traced, and the catastrophe that befell European Jewry in this century destroyed virtually all that remained. Although the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv regularly receives communications from individuals attempting to document that they are the direct descendants of King David, close inspection invariably reveals one or more missing links. In other cases, the family name is so common that research is virtually impossible. (There are about a hundred Rothschilds, not to mention Epsteins and Shapiros, in the Tel Aviv telephone directory alone.) Few Ashkenazi families can trace their origins back further than two or three generations with any precision.
Nevertheless, 105 Laqueurs from over a dozen countries, largely unknown to one another, came together on a Sabbath afternoon in Givat Haim. What they shared in common was documentary evidence that they were progeny of a man named Eliezer who lived in the Silesian village of Staedtel around the beginning of the 18th century.
The idea for this particular reunion first occurred to two women members of Givat Haim about a year before we assembled, and most of the preparatory work was done by younger members of the clan. Obviously, it proved impossible to locate all the world’s Laqueurs. On account of marriage—the blessing and bane of genealogists—women had taken new surnames, and certain branches of the family had not been Jewish for generations or had vanished from purview altogether. Nevertheless, having sent out chain letters, the organizers succeeded in finding a surprisingly large number of descendants of Eliezer and of his three sons, David, Joseph, and Moritz.
Laqueurs ranging in age from four months to ninety-four years turned up at Givat Haim. They came from Israel, where a quarter or perhaps a third of them now live, from all sorts of nooks and crannies across Europe, and from as far afield as Chile and even an Indian reservation in New Mexico. I did not see any physical similarities among those present that afternoon, but others claimed to have discerned a variety of common traits. Although no formal social survey was undertaken, among the roughly equal number of men and women in attendance were at least a dozen kibbutzniks, a half-dozen physicists, another half-dozen computer scientists, about the same number of doctors and nurses, several professional Israeli army officers, three university professors, two photographers, a banker, a young unemployed Dutchman, a collection of housewives and pensioners, and—just in case we had needed a Christian benediction—one Protestant clergyman.
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What is the history of this remarkable group of people? In the months leading up to the reunion, much effort was expended in searching for the family’s origins, and an astonishingly large quantity of material was uncovered, including old letters, archival records, and published and unpublished autobiographical sketches. In the end, the clan’s origins remained obscure, but we certainly reached a higher and more satisfying degree of ignorance.
Eliezer Alexander, the first Laqueur, is thought to have come to Silesia from Winzenheim, today a suburb of Colmar in Alsace, at the invitation of the dukes of Württemberg, who had large holdings both in Alsace and Silesia and were looking for competent managers to help develop their land in the East. Rabbi David of Staedtel (1770-1846), one of Eliezer’s three sons, seems to have served as the family’s advance man for this relocation. The Duke was an intellectual of sorts who wrote books and operas and felt bored in the Silesian wilderness. David, a first-rate chess player, hence became a frequent guest in the castle at Carlsruhe near Staedtel. As recently as 1925, a visitor to the castle was shown the cupboard in which the kosher dishes used by Rabbi David were kept.
There is, however, no certainty that this version of events is authentic. On repeated visits to Winzenheim, I have failed to uncover any records shedding further light on Eliezer, and the archives of the once-sizable Jewish community of Staedtel have disappeared.
According to another version of the family history, the Laqueurs had originally come from the East, from Lachwa, a small town in White Russia south of Minsk, or perhaps from Lak (there are two-score places bearing that name, most of them tiny hamlets in central Poland). Thousands of Jews from France and Germany had settled in Eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages and then re-migrated to the West in the late 17th century, fleeing the almost constant fighting and pillaging during and after the wars among the Russians, Poles, Swedes, and Ukrainians. Perhaps the Laqueurs were part of that wave.
What we were able to establish with some certainty is that the name Laqueur first appears in Staedtel in the early years of the 19th century, which is about the time Jews in the German-language areas of Central Europe received family names. It is spelled in a variety of ways in the documents: Laquer, Lacquer, Laqueer, Lacoeur. French names were much in fashion at the time in Staedtel and its vicinity, and surnames that pointed to professions, such as Graveur and Translateur, were quite common. Perhaps my family name had something to do with the application of lacquer to wood, but we simply do not know.
Jewish life in Staedtel in the 19th century was harsh, and the community was desperately poor. Food, clothing, and wood for heating were scarce; travel a rarity. The railway grid that spread across Europe, carrying prosperity with it, bypassed Staedtel, ensuring that it would remain a little village and leading its Jewish population further into decline. In 1842 there were 241 Jews; fifteen years later the number had dwindled to under 100; by the 1920’s, the last Jew had left.
As the Laqueurs moved out from Staedtel to nearby towns such as Oels, Festenberg, Namslau, Brieg, and Medziborz (Neumittelwalde), their social and economic position improved. At the beginning of the 19th century, they were apparently employed as peddlers or, at best, traders, selling leather goods and spirits and buying cattle. An occasional male nurse or teacher was sprinkled among them. By the 1860’s they had become “merchants” and gained respectability if not riches. Their letters also show that within one generation they had acquired a perfect mastery of German; Hebrew was forgotten, and Jewish-German, the dialect mixing Yiddish and German that had been their common language, was now frowned upon.
Laqueurs who continued to reside in Silesia would usually gather once a year in early June to visit the cemetery in Staedtel, a tradition that was continued by a dwindling band until 1937. But gradually, as the family scattered, relations among the various branches became distant and eventually ceased. And added to geographical dispersion were two other factors: conversions to Christianity and Standesbewusstsein—the awareness of one’s position in society. In brief, those who had not quite “made it” became an embarrassment to the others. It was not primarily a question of income and poverty—no one was very rich in the family at the time—but of social standing: a physician or a lawyer was more highly respected than a merchant (unless the merchant was very well off). A government official, too, however low his rank, was regarded as a person of authority and far more presentable than, say, a commercial traveler.
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Among foreign branches of the family, a Hungarian line emerged when Joseph Laqueur—it is unclear whether he was the son or grandson of Eliezer—moved to Budapest and married a certain Maria Braun. Some of his descendants Magyarized their name to Laki; today there are more than 60 Lakis in the Budapest telephone directory. Others chose the spelling Laquer. By fate, or perhaps genetic predisposition, a Laquer would collaborate with a Laqueur in pharmacological research in Holland in the 1920’s. (Medicine has always been strongly represented in the family.) The Laqueur went on to produce synthetic testosterone; the Laquer, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia until his death in 1954, was the first to isolate vitamin B-l.
In addition to the Hungarian, there was a Russian branch, which produced more exotic fruit still. Eliezer’s son Moritz, a trader in leather goods, married a woman named Sarah, who bore him one son. At some point in 1810, he suddenly disappeared. He had converted to Christianity, studied medicine in Berlin and Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia), and settled in Russia, where he changed his name to Boris Lakier. He then moved to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov where he headed the local quarantine station.
Boris would have lived out his days in this backwater of a backwater but for a freak occurrence. In 1825, Czar Alexander I visited the city, fell ill, and died. The task of signing the death certificate fell to Dr. Boris Lakier, an honor for which noble status was conferred upon him and his name was eventually inscribed in the Ikonnikov, the Russian list of aristocratic families.
Boris married again and concocted a fable to explain his lofty position in society. He claimed to be the descendant of a French judge, one De Laquierre, who had fled from Clermont-Ferrand to Russia during the French Revolution. By the end of the century, fable or no fable, this branch of the family had come to regard itself as Russian stock of impeccably pure quality; the terrible secret of its Jewish origins had been forgotten. Boris’s three sons married within the Russian nobility, and their offspring produced several well-known men of letters, one or two Czarist ministers, a commander of the Black Sea fleet, a governor of Kiev, and the owner of a piano factory in Moscow that fell into bankruptcy in the 1880’s.
Boris’s third son, Alexander, had an especially strange fate. (I have written about him at length in my memoir, Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go.) A lawyer by training, Alexander served for a time as secretary of the committee preparing for the emancipation of the serfs. A man of great intellectual curiosity and an inveterate traveler, he published accounts of foreign countries, including the first serious Russian-language portrait of American political and social conditions, in leading Russian journals. Alexander was forgotten in his own lifetime but has recently been rediscovered by the Russian public as the author of an outstanding textbook on heraldry, a subject which has gained new interest on account of the Russian nationalist revival. Alexander’s grandchildren lived through the Russian Revolution, lost their wealth, and emigrated. In the 1920’s, they could be found in Paris; others went to Argentina by way of Turkey and Yugoslavia. One of them, a fluent Russian-speaker, currently serves in Argentina’s embassy in Moscow.
Finally, there are the Laqueurs in Israel, who today, thanks to Nazism and World War II, constitute the family’s largest single contingent. Many came in the 1930’s; some arrived after the war, from Holland, Britain, Switzerland, and Latin America.
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Family ties, which had been loose or nonexistent before 1933, rapidly drew closer as the Nazi peril grew. To have an uncle or second cousin who could support one’s application for a foreign landing permit became a matter of life and death. If in the end a substantial number of Laqueurs succeeded in escaping from Europe, this was largely the result of help rendered by distant kinsmen. And indeed relatively few members of the family—perhaps 20 to 25—perished in the Nazi mass murder (several more would die fighting with the Israeli army in 1948-49).
“Families, I hate you!” André Gide wrote. “Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.” But Gide never had to run for his life. By the time the Laqueurs rediscovered their family, the “closed doors” were those of foreign countries, and it was not “happiness” but physical survival that was at stake.
This was certainly true in my own case. In 1938 my parents had no money, and war was pending. The only feasible way for me to leave Germany was to obtain a student visa for study at the Hebrew University in Palestine. An uncle provided the wherewithal: two years’ tuition and minimal living expenses. As it happened, this uncle was in a German penitentiary at the time, having run afoul of the Nuremberg laws (the charge was defilement of the Aryan race through sexual intercourse). But because he had been an officer and a highly decorated veteran of World War I, he was granted certain privileges, including the right to dispose of his property while in jail. Were it not for him, my departure from Germany on November 8, 1938, one day before Kristallnacht, would have been impossible.
A great deal of help came from the Dutch branch, headed by one of the two distinguished pharmaceutical researchers. And thanks to this branch’s holdings—which included a division of a large laboratory in Latin America that the Germans aimed to acquire—the Nazi economics ministry extended a bare modicum of protection to Dutch members of the family as well. The researcher and his wife survived the war, although their children were deported toward the war’s end (most of them managed to return).
A second cousin of mine, caught with his family in Holland at the outbreak of the conflict, hid with his parents in a small attic that was thought to be uninhabited. This Anne Frank-like existence was quite intolerable for a restless and adventurous boy, so in the middle of the war he made his way through occupied Belgium and France into Spain and ultimately to Palestine. The journey lasted almost a year, and included a stint as a foreign laborer in a German army installation; the problems entailed in this sort of life have been depicted in the film Europa, Europa. Yet another member of the family had a less heroic time of it; he seems to have survived by working for the Amsterdam Judenrat.
A number of Laqueurs made their way back to Germany after the war. Those who had survived in Turkey, half- or quarter-Jews according to the Nuremberg laws, returned in 1945. One of them became a career diplomat. Another, Richard Laqueur, had been a distinguished historian in the Weimar period and rector of one of the most prestigious German universities. When Hitler came to power, neither his Protestant faith nor his conservative and patriotic convictions protected him. During the war, already in his sixties, he ended up washing dishes in Chicago; after his return to Germany, he did not even get his professorship back.
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For the Laqueur family, then, as for most other European Jewish families, Hitler’s war against the Jews far exceeded in its impact any of the slow historical processes and individual decisions which had gradually dispersed our clan from its humble roots in Staedtel. But as we gathered in Givat Haim, the Holocaust was not the central memory or focus. Instead there was a desire to look back even further into the past, to learn about forgotten people and places. As I watched and listened to my kinsmen, I could not help wondering what we still had in common other than descent from Eliezer of Staedtel—and why so many of us had been drawn to this reunion and had devoted so much time and energy preparing for it.
Ours was obviously no longer a family in the conventional sense of the word, not even a compound or extended family, however broadly these terms might be interpreted. Our biological connections were minimal, and we shared no household or other significant social links. For the most part, as I noted at the outset, we had not even known of each other’s existence a few months earlier. On the other hand, as anthropologists have learned, f ictive kinship can be as strong as biological kinship, and to address a fellow member of the Laqueur tribe as a cousin did not, curiously enough, seem in the least out of place.
As I contemplated what held us together, for a few moments a wholly fantastic scene obtruded itself on my mind. What if Eliezer and his three sons were somehow able to join us that afternoon at Givat Haim? Their first reaction, I felt, would have been one of wonder at the seeming chaos confronting them, for there was no one on the scene who in any way resembled a head of the family, and everyone seemed to speak on an equal basis, irrespective of social rank, sex, or even age. How could our ancestors tell, from clothing, bearing, or language, which were the figures of substance or importance? In these circumstances, I suspect that our ancestors would have been drawn to the young people so prominent in the crowd, tall and well-built, many of whom were speaking Hebrew, the holy tongue, much better than even the most learned men of long-ago Staedtel.
But as I stirred myself from these thoughts, I found I still did not fully understand why we had gathered together. Was it just to see and be seen? Was it to discover firsthand a bit more about who we are and were, how the branches of our family tree had unfolded and grown? Or was there, in addition to personal and intellectual curiosity, perhaps something else animating us: some unnamed feeling of satisfaction or, better, defiance, all the more intense for our having survived history’s most ghastly hour?
Whatever in the end drew us together at Givat Haim, it became apparent to me that if dispersal was one way of summarizing what had happened to us as a clan—for we had truly come together from the four corners of the earth—perhaps the real significance of our reunion could only be captured by a term like recovery or, even, normalization.
