I want to thank you all for coming this morning to share my interest in the translation of old family letters. Before I start, I’d like to tell you a few things about myself, to put my interest in letters into context. My family left Germany in 1938, and all of our family members who were not foresighted or fortunate enough to leave perished in the Holocaust. My parents wandered around for a number of years, in several countries on two continents, before they settled in Philadelphia just after the War. Two of my mother’s sisters settled in Israel, and my father’s two brothers in South Africa. About these latter I heard very little; I’ll have more to say about this later.

I did my share of wandering, too, and never felt that I had a real place to call home. I was born in Philadelphia, but my parents took me to Germany with them in 1951 when I was five, and when they went back to press their claim for reparations. From what I’m told, I learned German so thoroughly that I virtually forgot my English. But it was a somewhat traumatic accomplishment in two directions. The shock of the new language silenced me for almost six months, after which I began to speak perfect age-appropriate German. And when we returned to the United States, I had to learn English all over again. In spite of—or because of—what happened to their parents, my parents, particularly my father, continued to see themselves as German.

So when I was 11, I was sent to a school in Switzerland that was run by Germans who had opposed Hitler, and had left in 1934 rather than see their famous and beloved Odenwaldschule turned into a Nazi showcase. The new Ecole d’Humanité served during the war as a haven for displaced children, particularly Jewish children. Through the Ecole I got to see another facet of Germans and German culture.

In part because of these experiences, which were both very enriching and very disruptive, I have been fascinated by issues of culture, history, identity, and family. When I began translating professionally, these issues were not yet foremost in my mind. But by a stroke of luck, I was asked to translate a large body of family letters owned by a German businessman. In the process I came to see the potential that the translation of letters and diaries can have for people engaged in researching their families and their identities. My particular sensitivities, my cast of mind, and my linguistic skills enabled me make these documents come alive for other people. Even more, they enlivened something in myself, and they brought to a focus in me my various interests in history, culture, and identity. What I want to do today is show you something of how letters can do this.

Genealogy is a process of filling in gaps in our knowledge and understanding of history, especially family history. In many cases we rely on public records for dates and family interconnections because this may be all that is available to us. But this is really "bare-bones" genealogy: such records, important as they are, tell us nothing about the personalities, motivations, struggles, and defeats and triumphs of our subjects. Letters, diaries, and the like give us a unique glimpse into their world at the most personal level, and for this reason they are always worth evaluating. In my experience, even the most unpromising-looking material can yield unexpected and astonishing nuggets.

For example, some time ago I was asked to translate about 100 letters between a German Jew living in England and his Jewish legal representative and various Nazi functionaries in Berlin. These letters, which dated from the late 1930s were dry, dry, dry. But what emerged from them, dropped out the bottom, so to speak, was a glimpse into this man's inability to recognize that the rules of the game in Germany had changed. He had been retroactively accused of stock fraud based on new Nazi laws. The Nazis convinced him to place his money, as a show of good faith, in the Dresdener Bank in Amsterdam, which they controlled—whereupon they froze his account. The man innocently went through all the legal channels, sincerely believing that he would get his money back. Destitute, he somehow nonetheless managed to get himself and his family to Sao Paulo, Brazil. And what was the first thing he did there? Like any good German, he registered with the German Consulate—even though his citizenship had long been revoked. This blind faith in the continued integrity of German institutions was, of course, a commonplace among German Jews.

Another example. A client called me to discuss some short stories written by her grandfather, a labor judge before the Nazi period. She sent me five stories to translate and then came to my office to discuss them. I asked her to tell me a little about the writer and about why she wanted to have them translated. She said that her own father, the writer’s son, had refused to even talk about him, and now she felt the need to establish "contact" with this man. Her father had himself recently died, and all she knew was that his father had abandoned the family for another woman. "That's interesting," I replied. "Three of the five stories you sent me are about love triangles." So here we have a man grappling with his family transgression, trying somehow to express it or perhaps justify it in his mind. Whatever the case, this revelation proved important to my client, who subsequently used the stories in her work as an artist.

This is another filling in of gaps. As I am sure you have discovered, there are a lot of dead ends in genealogies. Sex, money, religion, and politics can break families. Politics are a matter of public record most of the time, religion sometimes is, but sex and money often are not. Often even the memory of such things as love triangles is suppressed, to say nothing of money quarrels or financial failures, and clues can only be gleaned from chance mention in private documents such as letters, diaries—or stories.

What are letters, really? (I use the term in the broadest sense here.) They are documents of the times in which they were written. They are sometimes personal, sometimes public, but above all they are full of clues about the writers and the social and psychological conventions they took part in. They are an activity of community and they define that community. For genealogists, letters hold vast potential to increase their knowledge of particulars and to expand their areas of research. They also make possible cooperation between researchers whose families may not even be directly related. For example, here are some of the names of people discussed substantively in the letters I will be discussing today: SCHLESINGER, WALLERSTEIN, LANDAU, TRAUB, WAISS, HAGEL, EMRICH, KAHN, HERZ, WILLSTAETEN, HOFFMAN, WORMS, WILAND, FRIEDMAN, SCHWARZ, NETTER. This listing represents perhaps one-tenth of the names mentioned in the letters. I can envision a sort of clearinghouse in which vast bodies of letters are searchable and cross-referenced on the Internet. Let’s say that descendants of the Pforzheim Landaus have letters from the period in question. It could very well be that some of those discuss their downstairs neighbors, the Rieses—and perhaps in some detail.

Over the past 7 years I have translated two larger bodies of German letters. The first involved 200-plus letters written back to Germany from the Midwest. Part of this correspondence has been published by the University of Nebraska Press as Lives and Letters of an Immigrant Family. The Van Dreveldts’ Experiences along the Missouri.

Today I will talk about 450 letters that I recently finished translating. They were written between 1884 and 1888 by a mother and daughter, Regine and Marie Ries, from a Jewish family in Pforzheim in the German state of Baden, where the Rieses had a small business manufacturing and selling jewelry. Pforzheim was, and still is, the jewelry capital of Germany. For reasons that are not clear, Moritz (born Moses) Ries was not particularly successful in his work, and so his sons Berthold, Viktor, and finally Otto were sent to seek their fortunes in Tucuman, Argentina. They were supposed to send back money to support the family. In 1884, their daughter, Marie, was sent to work as a governess in the home of Henry Traub, a wealthy Jewish businessman and banker in Constantinople. Traub’s wife, Anna Herz, was a relative of Marie's mother, Regine (born Rachel). The sons rarely sent word of themselves, let alone money, which was a source of constant anguished hand-wringing and the subject of many letters.

Here are 2 photographs of Marie, the second with her husband Gustav.

Since I want to use my own experiences of family gap-filling to illustrate the enormous potential of letters to genealogists, let me say that there are no large bodies of letter in my own family. My grandparents on my mother’s side lived in Mannheim, however, which is not far from Pforzheim. They were middle class—my grandfather was a small cigarette manufacturer—and I imagine that they would have recognized the way of life described in these letters. By getting to know the Rieses intimately, I have gained some understanding of the world in which my own family moved.

Here is a rough draft of the Ries family tree, which I put together almost entirely from information I found in the letters. This is not to say that there are no other sources, but this was all that was available to me. I’m not a genealogist per se, but I make note of important dates—birthdays, marriages, deaths, emigration dates, etc.—because they help me to date letters.

For instance, let’s say that a letter, undated except for "Friday," mentions that Berthold’s birthday was yesterday. If we know from other sources or letters that his birthday was on the 4th, then the letter was written on September 5th, and because over the 4 years of the correspondence, Friday only falls on September 5th once, we know that it could only have been written in 1884. In addition, information gained in this way has enabled me to reunite odd letter fragments (often only marked with a day) with the main body of the letter.

There are many perpetual calendar sites on the Internet.

But even if the information on the tree were complete, it would still yield up nothing about the particularities of the sons’ emigrations and their effect on those left behind. What I want to illustrate now is the intimate correlation between correspondence, genealogical "information," and the broader context of community and personality in which lives are lived.

Here are short sections of 4 letters from Regine to Marie: