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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’swagon 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 enthusiasticallyand 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