The Harvest Reaped

Clement and Rebecca

I was born Samuel Enoch Gendler in 1921 to immigrant parents living in Brooklyn, NY. My Romanian mother, however, had the unique distinction of being born in Paris at the turn of the 20th Century when Paris was (and still is) known as the City of Lights and Capital of the Arts. As was common in those days, she was born to nomadic immigrants traveling throughout Europe, looking for work. In her case, it was her father who was seeking employment as an itinerant tailor. It was an exhaustive effort and one that kept the family trekking through various parts of Egypt, Turkey and France before reaching their final destination, America.

After her father passed away from tuberculosis, the rest of the family decided that they would move to the United States where they had heard the proverbial tale that the streets were paved with gold. Well, they may have found out otherwise but several female family members had preceded them and one had married a fairly successful gentleman with an upholstery business located in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan.

As for my mother, however, it was uncertain whether she would ever see the sidewalks of New York as she was immediately turned down for emigration at the port of debarkation, in Italy, due to a chronic eye infection, probably trachoma caused by chlamydia trachomatis which was endemic in that era.

Only in her teens, she was treated by a kindly physician who burned away the eye membrane that had developed using a “blue stone” that I believe to have been copper sulfate. It was serious as the membrane that formed in these infections could lead to total blindness if left untreated. (Chlamydia is an organism somewhere between a virus and a bacterium which presently causes genital infections, but rarely eye infections.)

After frequent treatments, which she often described as sheer torture, she was then able to emigrate and join the rest of her family. Like others before her, she landed in lower Manhattan with many other Jewish immigrants – as well as with the Irish, the Italians, the Polish and other ethnic groups.

By comparison, my father was born in Eastern Europe, somewhere in the triangular Russian/Prussian/Austrian area that existed then. It had carried the name of Poland for many centuries until 1795. The Poles made many unsuccessful attempts to restore their own country until then. The area was finally reassembled as Poland after the 3 powers that had occupied the area were defeated in WW1. Poland was established then as a democracy under President Josef Pielsucki. Poland remained free until September 1, 1939 when it was invaded and occupied by the German invaders. My ancestors there were hard-working, long-lived farmers. My father told me that his grandfather, in Poland, had died at age105 from the exertion of cutting down a tree and trying to carry it away.

Although it would still be some years before they met, both of them were only teenagers when they arrived in New York City via Ellis Island, located in Upper New York Bay.

Perhaps it was because Ellis Island was the country’s busiest port of immigration that mistakes were often made, resulting in strange reinventions of the family name. Still, there should have been a sign that read “Newcomers Beware!” That’s because the initial interviewing process was usually performed without any interpreters present. Indeed, it is believed that my father, who entered the new land as Clement Gendler, was actually born as Korda Paniecki. But, since several of my uncles had already immigrated prior to his arrival and now bore the name Gendler that became my father’s newly assigned name forevermore.

Another oddity is that the original family name, Paniecki, was usually reserved for nobility, which is puzzling since our family history is that of hard working peasants. Even the acquired name, Gendler, a variant of the English word “handler,” implies that the so-named person keeps a sharp eye out for a great bargain that he can quickly buy and sell, and turn over for profit. Clement Gendler was not of that ilk.

As a student in New York City’s Rand School, an educational facility based on the principles of socialism in 1906, he not only learned a lot about socialism but also met the very pretty Rebecca Goldenberg, the woman whom he would later marry and who would one day become my mother.