{"id":33925,"date":"2026-01-06T13:01:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T18:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=33925"},"modified":"2026-01-06T13:23:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T18:23:50","slug":"searching-for-galicia-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/06\/searching-for-galicia-2\/","title":{"rendered":"SEARCHING FOR GALICIA"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nOne of my grandmother’s choice Yiddish expressions was “Geven-zhe nit a yold<\/em>.” (Don’t you be a chump.)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Anna Soltzberg (n\u00e9e Seiger) occasionally called her grandchildren — like me — foyl <\/em>(lazy). She lived at our house for a while. I called her Bub — short for bubbe<\/em> (grandmother). Bub was not into baseball; she was into the card game casino, the television show Queen for a Day<\/em>; borscht and boiled chicken. She could eat.<\/em> She had sugar diabetes. She wore bubbe<\/em> shoes.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t figure <\/span>out where Bub was from. She was from Galicia, she said. Spain?\u00a0Galicia was also a province in Austria-Hungary. Bub was from a shtetl called Grodzisk. She came to America at 20.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Anna Seiger Soltzberg (1884-1964). 1598 Laclede Rd., South Euclid, Ohio<\/p><\/div>\n

In junior high I told my friends my grandmother was from Austria.\u00a0 Not exactly Vienna, to be sure.\u00a0 But “Austria” made sense to my friends.<\/p>\n

Bub complained about the level of kashrut <\/em>at my aunt’s house. Bub wanted my aunt not<\/em> to\u00a0keep kosher. Keeping kosher was too expensive.\u00a0 Bub was an apikoros<\/em> (non-believer), socialist and cheap.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Bub around 1904, New York City.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/span> . . Grodzisko, Galicia<\/span>,<\/strong><\/span> Austria-Hungary. (The Yiddish name for the shtetl was Grodzisk, GRUD-zhisk) In the 1980s I located the shtetl on the Shtetl Finder <\/em>map.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Mili Seiger, 1939, Grodzisko<\/p><\/div>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

\u00a0Plotting Grodzisko [Grodzisk] by Teddy Stratton, 1998:<\/small><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  One of my grandmother’s choice Yiddish expressions was “Geven-zhe nit a yold.” (Don’t you be a chump.)\u00a0 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 (n\u00e9e Seiger) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,16,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-history-not-boring","category-kinder-the","category-toby-stratton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33925"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33953,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33925\/revisions\/33953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}