Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  In the year 1601, while it still languished in hamlet status, Sachsenhagen welcomed into its midst, though admittedly on the outskirts of the settlement, a family by the name of Leffmann, the first recorded Jews to make Sachsenhagen their home. Over time, a small, steady stream of Jewish families flowed into the village, provided that they followed a few regulations. In order to live in Sachsenhagen, at least for the next century, a Jew was required to purchase a letter of safe conduct from the sovereign—a prince of Schaumberg-Lippe or a Hessian count—a letter that had to be renewed regularly. These letters of safe conduct amounted to nothing less than a protection racket for the rulers, providing them a steady income from a population that had learned hard lessons of the perils of an unprotected existence. A Jewish household also considered it prudent to supplement its safe-conduct fee with the occasional additional gift, perhaps a finely wrought saddle or the fruits of a plentiful harvest.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews made up about 7 percent of the population of Sachsenhagen; in the census of 1861, of the 695 people living in the village, 52 were Jewish. In 1855, after years of sending their children to Jewish schools in the nearby towns of Rehburg, Hagenburg, and Rodenberg, the elders of Sachsenhagen decided that the distances traveled to those places were too demanding and established their own school. That same 1861 census reveals that the Jewish school in Sachsenhagen taught fourteen young scholars and that they huddled together in a building that measured only twenty feet long, nine feet wide, and ten feet high. The dimensions of the salary the Jewish community was able to offer its teachers were meager as well: fifty thalers per year, though room and board were generously included. Not surprisingly, it proved difficult over the years to attract and retain competent, highly motivated teachers at such wages.

  On July 28, 1869, the local newspaper reported on a joyous ceremony in Sachsenhagen, blessed with fine weather and attended by a large and festive crowd, which featured the laying of the foundation stone for the city synagogue. The building was completed and consecrated the following year and was commodious enough to offer space to the Jewish school and living quarters for the teacher. Life in Sachsenhagen was good for the Jews.

  Death had also been provided for. In 1823, the electorate of Hessen issued the following ordinance: “Each synagogue is permitted to have its own cemetery but its layout, enclosure, the time of its burials and the depths of its graves must follow the regulations established by the police. With regard to Jewish cemeteries that already exist, it is expected that their future use will conform as much as possible to this order.”

  A Jewish cemetery had already existed in Sachsenhagen for nearly a century prior to 1823. Though a map of the village dated 1714 shows no sign of one, it appears that within a couple of decades, a graveyard for the Jews had been acquired. Such an acquisition was no routine matter. Land had to be purchased, and for many years European authorities had frowned on selling land to Jews; even when such transactions were allowed, the land that changed hands was often of substandard value, perhaps swampy or riddled with stones, making it unsuitable for agriculture. But the Jews of Sachsenhagen were fortunate: the land purchased for their cemetery, though outside the boundaries of the village, was flat and arable. Hops grew along the edges of the cemetery, and the soil produced sturdy oaks and elms and a healthy hazelnut bush. The oldest surviving headstone in the Jewish cemetery dates from 1787. But the oldest headstone that is marked by both German and Hebrew inscriptions belongs to Levi Goldschmidt. In Hebrew, the text reads, “Here lies a decent and God-fearing man. He was honest and just. He died at age 60.” He was my great-great-grandfather.

  The former house number 17, now number 9 Oberestrasse, where my great-great-grandfather Levi lived with his wife Johanna and their “poor man’s cow.”

  Levi Goldschmidt was born on July 18, 1799, the son of Jehuda Goldschmidt. Where he was born remains a mystery, although some evidence points south about twenty miles from Sachsenhagen to the town of Hameln. Known as Hamelin in English, it’s the site of the legendary Pied Piper, who rid the town of its plague of mice and rats and then, in revenge for not being paid for his services, rid the town of all its children. When Levi moved to Sachsenhagen is also unclear, but he bought a house there in 1834, at age thirty-five, and married Johanna Frank. Within a very short time, the Goldschmidts were among the most prominent of the Jewish families of Sachsenhagen.

  In a registry of assets for the year 1841, Levi and Johanna are listed as living in house number 17 in Sachsenhagen. (At the time, all the town’s houses were simply given numbers, regardless of the street. Today, the address is 9 Oberestrasse, the main thoroughfare through town.) In 1841, the Goldschmidt family’s assets were modest: two fruit trees and a single goat, considered in those days to be “the poor man’s cow.” By comparison, 108 of the 128 families living in Sachsenhagen had at least one cow, including all three of the other Jewish families. By the end of the decade, however, the Goldschmidt family fortune had soared; Levi had become a Pferdehändler, a dealer of horses.

  As far back as the Middle Ages, European laws prevented Jews from owning land and encouraged them to practice professions that Christians largely avoided. Scriptural strictures against lending money and charging interest led Christians to shun the financial vocations, and thus it fell to the Jews to become bankers and moneylenders. In the nineteenth century, Jews were still barred from journalism, most professorships, and the law. As late as 1905 in Europe, there was little chance that a Jew could become a judge, and even then only if he renounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Although excluded from certain professions, Jews often flourished in those they were allowed to practice, and in the European countryside, they embraced the horse business. In Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the horse trade was largely a Jewish enterprise, and in Germany, most of the prominent suppliers of horses to the well-born and well-connected were Jews. So identified were Jews with the buying and selling of horses that by the 1930s, the rise of National Socialism was accompanied by municipal attempts to expel and ban Jews from the profession.

  In much the same way that the automobile dominates our lives in the early twenty-first century, horses were nearly indispensable in the nineteenth. Urban dwellers depended on horse-drawn conveyances for transportation and commerce. In the countryside, farmers relied on horses to plow the earth and transport goods to and from market. In the 1840s, Levi Goldschmidt recognized that there was no dealer of horses in Sachsenhagen, so he stepped into the breach. Within a few years, he had established himself as a reliable judge of horseflesh and a shrewd businessman and was accepted as one of the trusted elders of the village’s Jewish community.

  Levi was called upon to speak for the community in a dispute involving the Jewish cemetery and a local wheelwright named Georg Buschmann. Not until 1908 was a fence erected around the perimeter of the cemetery, and in 1845 Herr Buschmann began taking a shortcut through the cemetery on his way home. Because the path between the graves was so narrow, the heavy wooden wheels of Buschmann’s wagon would often rumble over a gravesite. Naturally enough, the Jewish families considered Buschmann’s shortcut an act of desecration and demanded a hearing of the district authorities to force the wheelwright to use the common path around the cemetery. Levi was chosen to represent the Jewish side in the dispute, but after more than two months of arguing and proposing several solutions to the problem, the authorities simply threw up their hands and walked away, leaving the matter as it was. Buschmann’s wheels continued to roll through the cemetery.

  Within a few years, however, Levi achieved a healthy measure of satisfaction. Herr Buschmann died and, with his business booming, Levi sold his house number 17 and bought the wheelwright’s much larger house from Buschmann’s widow in 1848. The more spacious home, number 35 on the market square, was a necessary investment; Levi and Johanna had eight children. The eldest was Moses, my great-grandfather, followed by Marianne, Samuel, Ruben, Emma, Hermann, Friederike, and Helene. When he died
, Levi’s household comprised his wife, their eight children, a maid, and two servants.

  The Goldschmidts had achieved remarkable wealth in a short time. The profession of Pferdehändler had been good to them, and in turn Great-Great-Grandfather Levi had been good to Sachsenhagen. At the time of his death, on September 17, 1859, in addition to being remembered as decent, honest, and just on his headstone, Levi had acquired a reputation for magnanimity. He had made gifts to the community that amounted to more than the value of his considerable property, which included the market square house and several fields in the countryside.

  His widow, Johanna, known also as Hanna or Chana, lived nearly another thirty years. She died in Sachsenhagen on October 15, 1887. The inscription on her headstone in the Jewish cemetery reads, in Hebrew, “Here rests a decent and kind woman. Her path was just and charitable. She taught her children the Torah.”

  The eldest child, Moses, was born on February 18, 1835, in the house on Oberestrasse. As the first male offspring, Moses was perhaps fated to take over the family business, but he took to it enthusiastically and with quite spectacular results. Demand for horses increased throughout the nineteenth century; in 1850, there were about 2.7 million horses in Germany, and by the end of the century, at the dawn of the age of the horseless carriage, that number had risen to around 4.2 million. Moses’s customers were his neighbors in Sachsenhagen and the surrounding rural communities who needed horses for transportation and farm work, and he also sold horses to the hotels and hackney cab companies in Stadthagen, Bückeburg, and Hameln that required fine horses for their elegant carriages, and to the military for its elite cavalry troops. A good horse might fetch a price of 800 marks, roughly the annual starting salary for an average worker. Several times a year, Moses would travel to Hannover and Hamburg to purchase horses from north German breeders, and occasionally he’d even go abroad in search of a fine steed at a good price. On one such journey, he went north to Denmark, where he not only bought three horses but also found a reliable worker named David Larsen whom he brought back to Sachsenhagen as his assistant and right-hand man.

  In 1859, the year he turned twenty-four and lost his father, Moses married Auguste Philippsohn, four years his junior and a member of perhaps the most prominent Jewish family in Sachsenhagen. Auguste’s father, Joseph Philippsohn, a successful merchant, had been born in Sachsenhagen in 1813 and could trace his ancestry back to Itzhak Philippsohn, born in the village in 1761. Like his father before him, Moses sired eight children, seven boys and a girl, Bertha, who died in infancy. In time for the birth of their first child, Albert, in 1860, Moses and Auguste moved from the house on the marketplace to a grand house at 94 Mittelstrasse, a place that could boast something only a few other homes could claim, a baker’s oven. On the roof of the house, there were two wooden planks on which, early every spring, a pair of storks would build a nest and care for their young throughout the languid days of summer until the whole family would depart in September in search of a winter refuge farther south.

  My great-grandfather was a pillar of his community, remembered by his neighbors as a kind, generous man and also something of a character, a “Sachsenhagen original.” Julius Geweke, who was born in Sachsenhagen in 1902, asked his father, a saddler, to recall life in the village in his day: “The horse dealer Moses Goldschmidt lived behind our house, over on Mittelstrasse. Whenever Goldschmidt received a shipment of horses he’d place a notice in the newspaper. And when a potential buyer came by to look at the horses, Goldschmidt would have the animals pranced through the streets of Sachsenhagen, his workhand Larsen trotting along keeping pace. Goldschmidt himself would stand in front of his house, smiling, smoking a big cigar, and cracking his whip smartly. The buyer would watch this parade of horses and then pick one out for closer inspection, looking into its mouth to verify that the animal was of the age advertised. After a bit of wrangling, the deal was sealed with a hearty handshake.”

  The family business was not without its conflicts. On January 28, 1884, a dispute between Moses Goldschmidt and a carter named Heine was formally entered into the proceedings of the law courts of Stadthagen. There is no evidence today indicating what the dispute was about, but it took a long time to be resolved. Not until November 5 was a decision rendered, but for Moses, it was apparently worth the wait. The judge ruled in his favor and awarded him the not-inconsiderable sum of 350 marks.

  The grand house at 94 Mittelstrasse was filled with not only the children of Moses and Auguste but four servants as well, who slept next door at 93 Mittelstrasse. They were the butler Fritz Wiebe, the valet Johann Wiltgreve, the housekeeper Fanny Schwarz, and the maid Luise Meuter. There was nearly always a fire burning in the big oven, keeping the house comfortably warm in the winter. And the Jewish holidays were always observed.

  Into these secure and prosperous surroundings my grandfather, Alex, was delivered on New Year’s Day 1879, the seventh of Moses and Auguste’s children. On the same day, in London, the noted writer E. M. Forster was born. That year would also witness the births of Albert Einstein, Wallace Stevens, Ethel Barrymore, Will Rogers, and Joseph Stalin. And on the very last day of 1879, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison would demonstrate incandescent lighting to the public for the first time.

  Thirteen months later, on February 2, 1880, Auguste gave birth to her eighth child and seventh son, Carl Goldschmidt. He may have been one child too many. On November 7, 1881, Auguste died, at age forty-two. On her headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Sachsenhagen are the words, in Hebrew, “Here rests an admired woman, the crown of her husband and children. She was modest and traveled the way of peace.”

  So my grandfather lost his mother when he was only two. I like to think that his large family cushioned the blow somewhat, even though his oldest sibling, brother Albert, was nineteen years his senior. Alex was quite close to his two immediate brothers, Max, four years older, and Carl, and the three of them attended classes every day at the Jewish school in the synagogue. In 1889, when Alex was ten, a superintendent from Kassel, one of the largest cities in the Hessian principality, paid a visit and filed a report stating that the Jewish school in Sachsenhagen currently was teaching only five pupils and that three of them were Goldschmidts: Max, Alex, and Carl. The superintendent declared that with such minuscule attendance, there was little reason to keep the school open. Within two years, it closed its doors and the three young Goldschmidts began to attend the main public school in Sachsenhagen, arriving immediately after the morning religious class.

  Despite the success of his father’s business, Alex had no desire to be a horse dealer. Instead, after staying in Sachsenhagen long enough to earn his Abitur degree (roughly equivalent to two years of college), he turned his back on his rural upbringing and moved northwest to Lower Saxony’s fourth-largest city, Oldenburg, in 1906. He was twenty-seven years old. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that his first apartment in Oldenburg looked out on the city’s Pferdemarkt, or horse market.

  Two years later, just before midnight on April 15, 1908, Moses Goldschmidt died, at the age of seventy-three. Alex and his six brothers gathered for the funeral. Given the resources at hand, it could have been a lavish affair. At the time of his death, Pferdehändler Goldschmidt’s assets were estimated at 76,500 German marks. It’s not an exact reckoning, but in 1913, just five years later, a mark was valued at around four American dollars, making his estate worth approximately $306,000 . . . in 1908. Given the rate of inflation over the past century, when Moses Goldschmidt died, his total net worth exceeded 7 million in today’s dollars. He was by far the wealthiest man in Sachsenhagen and possibly for miles around. The equine occupation had been a runaway, some might say galloping, success.

  But death comes for rich and poor alike. His headstone reads, in Hebrew, “Here lies Moses Goldschmidt, a god-fearing man. He loved justice and followed the road of righteousness. He fed the hungry. He died on a Thursday, the first day of Pesach 5668.”

  THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2011. “Hier ruht unse
r lieber Vater Moses Goldschmidt, geb. d. 18. Febr. 1835 gest. d. 15. April 1908,” I read aloud to Amy. “Here rests our dear Father Moses Goldschmidt . . . ,” I translate from the German side of the headstone. We are standing beneath two tall, graceful trees within the boundaries of the Jewish cemetery in Sachsenhagen on a late afternoon that is turning windy and increasingly cloudy.

  Earlier today, after several fruitful hours in the archives of Bückeburg Palace, we returned to our little Meriva and motored across the flat farmland of Lower Saxony along the ancient trade thoroughfare that is now federal highway B65. We drove into the city of Stadthagen and thence on country road L445 through fields of rye and over a small canal, until we reached the southern edge of Sachsenhagen. I was here once before, twelve years ago, on the dire date of November 9 in the company of my brother. We’d had the devil’s own time finding the cemetery, which is tucked off the road, securely away from view, but with my memory of its location clear in my mind’s unshakable GPS system, I was confident I could find it this time. But there was a glitch in the wiring, and finding the humble graveyard again took several attempts.

  Now that we’ve found it, I note that, as in 1999, the cemetery looks ragged, overgrown, and somewhat neglected. The iron fence that surrounds the place sags here and there, the grass is high, and weeds flourish amid the graves, which seem randomly scattered about. The exceptions, however, are the families Philippsohn and Goldschmidt. My family’s headstones are standing side by side, with Levi on the far left and Moses on the far right, with Johanna and Auguste resting between them.

  It is a profound and unsettling place, and as the wind freshens and the clouds thicken in the late afternoon sky, I am deeply conscious of my vastly diminished family, the loss of Peter is still keen and aching, and yet here are sturdy and lasting memorials to what was once a thriving, prosperous clan of Goldschmidts on whom fortune smiled. As linden branches toss overhead, I try to imagine these long-dead family members, conjuring with the concept that, should the impossible occur and should we somehow meet face to face, there would be a moment akin to looking into a mirror, of noticing with a start a familiar feature, an eyebrow, an ear, the curve of a lip or the curl of hair, a “Hey, don’t I know you?” moment of mysterious yet joyful recognition that I find at this time and in this place overwhelming. I miss my family terribly, those both recently and long departed, and I hug my remaining family, Amy, tightly.