This has to be a collective letter to all of you, and to Maddie, Jori, and Barry, who have become so much a part of our family, and of course, for Jodi, Jen, Erica, Bryan. You have a proud heritage and I hope that in some way this letter will keep it alive for you and yours.
For the past few years people all over the world have been passionately interested in searching out their roots. But long before, in fact for as far back as I can remember, I have sought mine. As a child I was told wonderful family stories...stories that delighted and enthralled me, but more important, stories that gave me a tremendous pride in my heritage. Now it is time for me to pass on to you what information I have.
I only wish that I knew more. Over and over I have looked at the wonderful photographs in the family album and thought, "if they could just speak to me!" I read from their faces strengths, pride, intelligence, and achievement, but I cannot reconstruct their feelings and dreams, their disappointments and pain. I wish I had questioned my grandparents whom I knew and loved so well. But unfortunately youth is not aware of endings, and I never even thought to record, rather than depend on faulty memory, the tales my parents so vividly told.
If someday though, you choose to read this, it will be my gift to all of you, and hopefully the lives of your forebears will be no mystery, but rather a clue to your beginnings. If then only one of you, your life or mind or spirit, is enriched, this truly will be worth writing.
This letter will probably revolve for the most part around my mother. Not that my father was less dear or less important, but she was the storyteller, not he. It was of her heritage that she always spoke with such pride and intensity, and which she so badly wanted to pass on to her descendants. I hope though, as I write, that his story will unfold as part of hers, for certainly they were as one! So let this letter start with RGB.
My mother never became internationally famous like an Eleanor Roosevelt or a Golda Meir, though I used to jokingly call her by both names. Nor did she attain great riches or high position in the world. But whatever or whomever she touched, I know that she made her personal world and that of those around her, a better place in which to live. She was truly a remarkable woman, but what a fun one! She was wife, mother, daughter, matriarch, and friend. She was a doer and an achiever at home, in the community, and in her career. She was a survivor and she made every day of her 83 years count as something special and meaningful. This is in essence her story.
I often used to tease my mother that she was born not with one "silver spoon" in her mouth, but with at least a dozen! She was the first grandchild born to the Calmy and Alcalay families, and for her it was a golden world. The Calmy family of Bucharest, Romania, was prominent, wealthy, and distinguished. It boasted of bankers in Paris, Rome, and Milan, doctors and lawyers in Romania, and scholars in Palestine. The Alcalay family, equally prominent, traced its roots to the fifteenth century, to the Court of Spain where an ancestor was an advisor to the royal court of Queen Isabella. He was Count Yehuda Alcalay, renowned for his position, his education, and his wealth. Despite all this, when the Jews were expelled from this great and flourishing country, he too was forced to flee with his loved ones.
Now here is the first gap in this history, and the story as I know it begins four hundred years later with the Alcalay family and my grandfather's birth in a Moorish graveyard just outside of Turkey. I would like to research this period for you, but wouldn't that be a wonderful project for Jodi or Jen, or Erica or Bryan? You could do this at school and really have fun! But let me start again with four generations back since this period was still alive in my mother's memory and this is what I was told, and what I remember.
In the city of Ploisti, Romania, in the last decade of the last century my great grandfather, Peritz Alcalay, lived with his family. He was a renowned scholar and philosopher, a leader in the community and beloved by all who knew him. He was a gentle, caring man who spent his days amongst his books. He was the most respected member of the synagogue, but despite all the importance afforded him by his peers, he was never too busy in later years to share his wit and wisdom with the little granddaughter who was to become my mother. My grandfather, Jacob Alcalay, for whom you are named, Jeff, was the oldest of three sons. He chose not to lead the scholarly life of his father, but to enter the business world. He was to become a very wealthy grain merchant, a self-made young tycoon! He was handsome and very much the "man about town" and probably the most eligible and sought after bachelor in the Jewish community. His life was rich and powerful in every way, and one questions what prepared him for the hardships that were later to be his.
Jeff, you once wondered whether or not you would have the fortitude to survived anti-semitism, expulsions, loss of position and all worldly possessions. I truly believe you would because of your inheritance, because this inheritance includes real strengths! Your forebears did not face the horrors of the Eastern European Jew - the pogroms, rapes, and murders in Russia and Poland, the ghettos, nor thank God, the ultimate obscenity of all, the Holocaust of this century. Nor were they confronted with the poverty of the Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine; nor the utter degradation and misery of every Black who dealt with slavery.
Your great grandparents fortunately knew none of these miseries. They led an affluent life with every luxury, and with a social position that was unequaled. They lived, however, in an openly anti-Semitic country, and an environment where corruption was overt and government sanctioned. They felt the oppression of not being free to speak out, where schools were closed to Jews, and where every government official, petty or important, had to be bribed if one were to survive. When ultimately the family decided to flee to America, they knew the fear, the despair, the different problems to be met at every stage of the way. What emerges for me as the real strength and character of these wonderful people is that not once, ever, did I hear one complaint about this period, not one word boasting about how they dealt with adversity. The story was simply and factually reported, never as "how difficult for us, how unlucky we were, or how could we have endured such hardships?" Yes, Jeff, your family passed on a remarkable heritage and could we all not learn from them?
Now back to my grandfather, Jacob Alcalay, the first Papapa, the very, very handsome young millionaire who was to meet and fall in love at first sight with my grandmother. The story is now yours, Rob, because you are truly the romanticist of the family. Your great-grandmother, whom we were later to call Mamama, was the youngest child and only daughter of the socially prominent Calmy's of Bucharest. When you look at her pictures in the family album, you see the lovely young girl Ernestine, with a 22-inch waist line - proud, educated, adored and spoiled by her parents and her four older brothers. In addition to a liberal arts education (which was certainly unusual for the women of that era) and a fluency in several languages, she was proficient in all the skills of cooking, baking, sewing, and fine embroidery...all this being considered essential to the young lady who would oversee and expect excellence from the servants she would someday command. Her sewing abilities were so great and so recognized that she was chosen from all of her classmates at school to work on the dowry for the Princess of Romania, an honor indeed for one so young. All through my childhood I was to benefit, with beautiful hand-sewn clothes that she made just for me.
She was preparing to enter a Lycee in Germany for her higher education when love in the person of the first Papapa came into her life. She was just fifteen, and apparently it was love at first sight! Of course she was considered much too young to be married, and there are funny stories related to their courtship which must be told! Naturally she had had no thoughts of marriage, she, the spoiled darling of her family. It seems, however, that my grandfather had come to a party at her home, had taken one look at her, and announced that she, and only she, must be the bride for him.
The willful young Ernestine agreed, refused to go on with her studies, and threw one tantrum after another. Meanwhile my grandfather, also willful, also in love, sent his father from Ploisti to Bucharest to remain in her city and not return until he had persuaded the Calmy's to give up their beautiful and precious daughter.
Friends came with wicked tales that my grandfather was a "man about town," a "roue," and that he had mistresses all over Europe. But my young, wise grandmother answered, "with my ears I hear, but with my eyes I do not see." And so permission was finally given, and they were wedded! The young couple traveled all over Europe before settling down, as was the custom of the day, with my grandfather's parents in Ploisti. This proved to be a most unhappy arrangement, and when the young bride became pregnant, my grandfather took her back to her own family in Bucharest and left her there.
Tongues wagged and rumors flew. It was said that the worst predictions had come true, and that she was indeed abandoned by the "roue" from Ploisti. But it was just the opposite. My grandfather had quickly recognized that there could not be two mistresses, his mother and his bride, under one roof, and so he had built one beautiful mansion for himself and his wife to live in, and another for his parents. He then proceeded to shower my grandmother with every conceivable gift and luxury. I know he would have approved of both of you, Rich and Jeff! It was truly a beautiful love match, and my grandfather was indeed the gallant husband and lover always. He was a magnificent provider, and the Alcalay home was the center of Ploisti society.
My grandmother, who became Mamama to us when we were born, was known for her beauty, all of her parties, culinary arts, and most important, for her charities - of which her favorite was providing weddings and dowries for every indigent peasant girl who could not afford her own. These wedding festivities would be preceded by days and days of preparation with servants scurrying about making my grandparents' house and gardens even more beautiful than they were ordinarily. There would be frantic hours of sewing the bridal gown and the trousseau and the priceless linens, all donated by my grandmother. And Rob, how wonderful that you, three generations later, the great, great granddaughter, did your own mitzvah by donating your wedding gown to the bridal library in Israel for the young women there who cannot afford the luxury of their own bridal dress.
RGB never forgot the cooking for those occasions - the pastries, the breads, the chickens roasted and garnished and the marvelous meats and dishes of every description. Hours and hours of preparation, aromas to tantalize every sense and to permeate every corner, delicacies imported from other countries, everything choice and the finest. And of course, everything supervised by my grandmother.
Then the wedding themselves: the flowers, the music, dancing, drinking and eating, whole families participating and the children, wide-eyed with the excitement of it all and always, always, included in the celebration! How RGB loved recalling these wondrous days!
But for my mother, the most thrilling times in her life were when the gypsies appeared. The awe, the color, the mystery, the complete fascination combined with utter but delicious fear - these were the adventures RGB loved best. Romania was a country where the gypsies roamed freely. They came uninvited, sometimes in the middle of the night, into the villages and towns to peddle their wares, foretell the future, and perform their own wonderful and exotic and mysterious brand of music and dancing. They were lawless, but exciting, inscrutable, yet fascinating. They were fortune tellers and con artists, performers and thieves. They were sinister figures evoking terror and imagination. But no one could resist a visit to their camps. I know this is where my grandmother learned to tell fortunes, which she truly believed in, and where she picked up so many of her superstitions (which I regret to say she passed on to me.) Even RGB, more the skeptic than her mother, believed in the truth of fortune telling. And Jeff and Maddie, you were to see so many years later, the way she captivated your guests by foretelling their futures through the magic of the cards!
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