SEARCHING FOR GALICIA

 
One of my grandmother’s choice Yiddish expressions was “Geven-zhe nit a yold.” (Don’t you be a chump.)  My grandmother — Toby’s mother — owned a candy store, raised four kids almost single-handedly, buried a three-year-old daughter, and during her retirement years, owned a four-suite apartment building. She was nobody’s chump.

Anna Soltzberg (née Seiger) occasionally called her grandchildren — like me — foyl (lazy). She lived at our house for a while. I called her Bub — short for bubbe (grandmother). Bub was not into baseball; she was into the card game casino, the television show Queen for a Day; borscht and boiled chicken. She could eat. She had sugar diabetes. She wore bubbe shoes.

I couldn’t figure out where Bub was from. She was from Galicia, she said. Spain? Galicia was also a province in Austria-Hungary. Bub was from a shtetl called Grodzisk. She came to America at 20.

Anna Seiger Soltzberg (1884-1964). 1598 Laclede Rd., South Euclid, Ohio

In junior high I told my friends my grandmother was from Austria.  Not exactly Vienna, to be sure.  But “Austria” made sense to my friends.

Bub complained about the level of kashrut at my aunt’s house. Bub wanted my aunt not to keep kosher. Keeping kosher was too expensive.  Bub was an apikoros (non-believer), socialist and cheap.

Bub around 1904, New York City.

. . . Grodzisko, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. (The Yiddish name for the shtetl was Grodzisk, GRUD-zhisk) In the 1980s I located the shtetl on the Shtetl Finder map.

Grodzisk was about 60 miles west of Przemysl. The various shtetls had so many different names (Polish, Ukrainian, German, Yiddish). That was the tricky part.

I had a family postcard, postmarked “May 1, 1939, Grodzisko.” It was in Polish and said, “How are you?” On the flip side was a photo of a relative, Mili Seiger. The Germans invaded Poland four months after the postcard was mailed.

Mili Seiger, 1939, Grodzisko

I looked up “Mili Seiger” on the Yad Vashem online archives. There were so many Seigers, Siegers, Zygers, Zaygers and Zeigers, I couldn’t find Mili.

There are three types of Jews. Not Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Try American, Israeli and victims of the Holocaust. Each about a third. These are my people.

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 Plotting Grodzisko [Grodzisk] by Teddy Stratton, 1998: