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Abstract
A corner of the vanished world of Galician Jewry emerges from 104 postcards brought to America from Poland by the central figures of this family collection—Jacob and Matylda Schiff Sicherman. World War 1 is central to the story: Jacob served in the Austro-Hungarian army, while Matylda coped with two small children amid the uncertainties of war. Discussion of the cards' languages—German, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew—and analysis of their images and geography set the context. The Sicherman and Schiff families were mostly Hasidic, although some Schiffs were fervent Zionists. Education, work, and social customs are discussed as they apply to the writers. Jacob's 1917 cards record his experiences escorting deserters to their home bases in the far reaches of Austro-Hungary. In 1922, as antisemitism surged, he emigrated to America. Several years later, his wife and two daughters followed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Carol Sicherman's scholarly interests have focused on intellectual and social contexts in several distinct areas of research – Renaissance English literature, African literature, African higher education, and American sociopolitical culture in the 1930s and 1950s. Her two reference books on Ngugi wa Thiong'o won the Conover-Porter Award of the African Studies Association. Her two most recent books are Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000 (2006) and Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism (2012). She lives in Oakland, California.
Notes
1 With regard to first names, I am using those that predominate in the postcards; for example Matylda and Jacob Isak, not Matel and Yankel, as they were known to family and friends. I am indebted to the multitude of resources of JewishGen.org and the Gesher Galicia group on JewishGen. I must single out certain volunteer translators and transcribers: Isabel Rincon, Andreas Schiff, Yocheved Klausner, Bogna Lorence-Kot, Barbara Katz, and Natalia Aleksiun. Major specialist libraries report no similar collections. A search in Historical Abstracts yielded no scholarship on postcards of the type in the Sicherman/Schiff collection. Replies to my query on JewishGen revealed a collection of seventy-eight thus far untranslated reportedly German cards written in Hebrew script in 1909–1918, which had been exchanged among members of a single family, as well as a large collection of family postcards that had been discarded because “they were just postcards.” Weinbaum's Careful Old Letters is based on a family collection of 169 letters and postcards and begins at the point where the Sicherman/Schiff postcards end. Klich and Weiss, The Postcard Age, represents the apogee of deltiology and contains virtually no cards like those in the Sicherman/Schiff collection. Guenther's Postcards from the Trenches, published after this article was completed, reproduces ninety-two cards painted in 1915–1916 by Otto Schubert, a soldier-artist who depicted scenes from his service on the Western front. Guenther's extensive research into the history of postcards includes information relevant to the Sicherman/Schiff collection.
2 The song, which remained popular during the Weimar and Nazi periods, declares “that we stand faithfully together” (Germany was an ally of Austria-Hungary in World War I).
3 The owners have allowed me to treat the cards as a single collection arranged chronologically (they had fallen out of their original order). The owners intend to donate them to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where they will be digitized.
4 None of Jacob's cards written between January 1915, when he was drafted, and his first card as a soldier in April 1915 remain; nor any from the six months between September 4, 1916 and March 3, 1917, or the nearly eleven months between September 25, 1917 and August 7, 1918, his last card.
5 Rings, Introduction to Sperber, God's Water Carriers, l.
6 Boyarin, A Storyteller's Worlds, passim. Noble was the grandson of Jacob's uncle Nuta Sicherman's son-in-law, Mendel Wolf Noble.
7 Carline, Pictures in the Post.
8 Kuzmany, “Brody always on my mind.”
9 The volunteer, Russ Mauer, accomplished the task with infinite patience.
10 Matylda's mother (Malke Zeesel Sicherman) and Jacob's father (Chaim Shmuel Sicherman) were among the children of Yehoshua Wolf Sicherman and his wife, Rachel.
11 Aron (b. 1890) was given his father's surname. His brother Jacob (b. 1883) received his mother's name because Yoil Tepper and Feige Schiff had not yet been civilly married. In such cases, the child was often given the mother's surname. Jacob and Matylda's children bore their father's name from the beginning, even though the civil marriage ceremony did not take place until 1916.
12 Polish was the dominant language of Galicia from about 1870 (Schatzker, Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, 119). Salaman Schiff is the only man who wrote in Polish; as a Zionist, he was a proponent of modern languages.
13 Peckerar, email correspondence with author, June 19, 2017.
14 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 98.
15 Boyarin, A Storyteller's Worlds, 32.
16 Information in this paragraph is from Jacob's autobiography and from Matylda's grandson, Rabbi Joel Silverberg, who quoted his mother, little Rose of the postcards, speaking wryly of her grandfather (email, September 27, 2015).
17 Deák, “Jewish Soldiers,” 18.
18 Schoenfeld, Jewish Life in Galicia, 143. It appears that Sobel and Herman either were serving at the military hospital (Marodenhaus) or were patients in it.
19 Vitalis ran this studio 1911–1920 (“Antwerpse fotografen actief na 1906 – Een aanvulling op de Directory of Photographers in Belgium,” Spoorzoeker, accessed June 10, 2017, http://spoorzoeker.petereyckerman.be/2012/07/25/antwerpse-fotografen-actief-na-1906/). A postcard photo taken by Vitalis ca. 1920 shows similar studio furniture (“M. Vitalis, Anvers .163 rue du Vanneau, 10 rue de l’Offrande ‘vrouw’: Maria Van Rverbroeck 1910,” delcampe, accessed March 4, 2016, http://www.delcampe.net/page/item/id,242709004,var,M-Vitalis-Anvers-163-rue-du-Vanneau-10-rue-de-lOffrande-vrouw-Maria-Van-Rverbroeck-1910,language,F.html).
20 Leib Chameides (b. ca. 1890) was the son of Jacob's friend Mayer Chameides, a relative through his and Jacob's marriages to a Schiff (Chameides, Strangers in Many Lands, 279). Many members of the Borysław branch of the Chameides family perished in the Holocaust; that could have been Leib's fate (Chameides, 276–9). The liquidation of Borysław's Jews took place in 1941–1944, most of it in the earlier years: “Out of the 14,000 Jews of Borysław, only 1500 remained by the spring and summer of 1943, Holocaust and Survival, Drohobycz, Borysław and Vicinity, accessed August 14, 2016, http://www.drohobycz-Borysław.org/en/drohobycz-boryslaw-and-vicinity/holocaust-and-survival-2).
21 The card was published by Postkartenverlag Brüder Kohn (Kohn Brothers Postcard Publisher), which employed a number of artists to produce cards such as this one. For information about Salomon Kohn, who died in Auschwitz, see “Salomon Kohn (Verleger),” Wikipedia, accessed July 27, 2016, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Kohn_(Verleger)); and his Nobelist son's interview (28 April 2014) at “We Would Be Separated, Quite Likely Forever,” The Current, accessed July 27, 2016, http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014121/we-would-be-separated-quite-likely-forever.
22 Unovsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism, 142.
23 For the most part, I use the place names given by the writers in the cards.
24 For an account of the development of the oil fields, including the social history of the area, see Schatzker, Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, and the closely related historical novel of the same title by Julien Hirszhaut that is printed in the same volume.
25 Schatzker, Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, 49, 59. Jacob's memoir is a source of this and the following paragraphs.
26 One reason for early marriage was the avoidance of “moral lassitude, or strange and sinful thoughts” (Margoshes, A World Apart, 58). Advice regarding the age of marriage is in chapter five of The Ethics of the Fathers, accessed July 22, 2016, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2099/jewish/Chapter-Five.htm.
27 Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation,” 72.
28 Gelber, “A History of the Jews of Boryslaw,” JewishGen, accessed August 6, 2016, http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Drohobycz/dro171.html). According to Gelber, in 1880, Jews were 79% of Borysław's total population of 9318; in 1910 their proportion had fallen to 45.1% – 5753 out of 12,767.
29 Polonsky, Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2, 122–3, 322, 350; Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation,” 79–80; Wróbel, “Jews of Galicia,” 10.
30 Parush, Reading Jewish Women, xiii, 58. For an overview of girls’ education in Eastern Europe see Polonsky, Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2, 336–43.
31 The Tsene u-Re’ena originated in the seventeenth century. Although it was not devised specifically for women, it became theirs because it was written in the language they knew best. The Sicherman births included twins and a set of triplets; in the 1880–1890s, when these babies were being born and dying, food production was inadequate, and “the high death rate and low life expectancy” might be attributed to “inadequate nutrition” (Schatzker, Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, 12).
32 In his autobiography, Jacob mentions Jews in Satmár trading in tobacco, sugar, candles, and “other scarce commodities.”
33 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 26.
34 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 34–5; Sicherman, Nachlas. A Boyaner Hasid was a follower of the Boyaner rebbe (Yitzchok Friedman, 1850–1917), whom Jacob had met shortly before his wedding and described as “exceptional even among his peers.” When the Russians overran Boyan, the Rebbe fled to Vienna. As the cards show, Jacob visited him in Vienna in 1915, and hoped to attend his shiva in 1917.
35 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 19–20, 36, 95.
36 On the population, see Wróbel, “Jews of Galicia,” 4. On Zionism in Galicia, see Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 399–417.
37 A. Schiff, “The Brothers Shlome and Yitzchok Schiff,” 307–10 is the source of this paragraph. Matylda had three cousins named Matylda Schiff. Our Matylda was the oldest, followed by Meilech's sister (b. 1891, who married Charles Glaser); two Matyldas were born in 1900, one marrying Isaak Schiff and the other marrying Aron Tepper. The Matylda Schiff who married Isaak was the daughter of Berish Schiff, our Matylda's uncle; born in 1900, she was too young to have been Salaman's collaborator, who apparently was an unrelated Matylda Schiff.
38 Wolff, Idea of Galicia, 317.
39 An-sky, The Enemy at his Pleasure, 9. On the fleeing Jews, see Wolff, Idea of Galicia, 354.
40 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 27, 77, 88. Nutritional deprivation gave Beile rickets.
41 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 196; Rozenblit, 82, who also (90) cites examples of fearful recruits who found ways to avoid the front.
42 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 192.
43 Two other cards were written in Hebrew: on 30 September 1905, cousin Jacob Schiff in New York sent New Year's greetings to Mordechai Shmuel Schiff; and on 3 September 1918, cousin Matylda Schiff (later Tepper) wrote Jacob a newsy message from Graz, where she was recovering her health.
44 Polonsky, Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 3, 25.
45 Wolff, Idea of Galicia, 370; Kershaw, To Hell and Back, 106; Boyarin, A Storyteller's Worlds, 28; “Welcome to Sanok, Poland!,” JewishGen, accessed August 19, 2016, http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Sanok. The Ukrainians, who started the civil war, believed that Jews sided with the Poles and therefore deserved annihilation (Chameides, Strangers in Many Lands, 63).
46 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 51.
47 Schiff, Lost Boryslaw, 73; An-sky, The Enemy at his Pleasure, 222.
48 Kershaw, To Hell and Back, 99, 106; Boyarin, A Storyteller's Worlds, 65–6, 71–2; Schatzker, Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, 156; Polonsky, Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2, 136.
49 Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 163–86; Sicherman, Nachlas. On earlier Jewish emigration, see Wróbel, “Jews of Galicia,” 5.
50 Jacob's sponsor was a small congregation on the Lower East Side called Ateres Chaim Halberstamm, with which one of his relatives was connected.