Alex's Wake Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 inSachsenhagen 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