Greetings, friends. (XVI)

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about my Grandpa Mark Sohn.

Technically, Mark was my mother’s grandfather, and then, technically, her mother’s adoptive father. I never met the guy, but he appears in many family stories, always and exclusively as Grandpa Mark.

This past week Adah and I found a cache of family documents, probably passed to our mother from her mother, that illuminates what a larger-than-life character he was for his time. My family, especially those who knew him, are guaranteed to jump on this journal entry with all manner of factual corrections, which I will be forced to print by way of retraction in a future journal entry. Such are the joys of family. I love them.

Anyway. My great-grandmother Adele Aronowsky was born in Bialystok, Poland, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She married a Bernard Meller, and they had a daughter, Lenore, my mother’s mother. It is to Grandpa Ben Meller that I likely owe my male pattern baldness.

At some point while my grandmother was still young, Adele and Bernard were divorced. This would have been in the 1920s or ‘30s, so it was undoubtedly scandalous. Adele met and shortly thereafter married the apparently dashing Mark Sohn. I think Ben had made himself scarce by then, so Grandpa Mark adopted my grandmother and, until she was married, she went by his surname.

Mark was, as I mentioned, seemingly larger-than-life. All of my mother’s stories about him seem to imply that he was a sort of Jewish Paul Bunyan and that he could probably straight-arm an anvil. A cursory search suggests that he came to New York in 1905 from Volochysk, which was then in Galicia, a province of Austria-Hungary, but which has since been, variously, part of Poland, occupied by the Nazis, part of the USSR, and now is nestled in western Ukraine, in the Ternopil district. Not too far from Podkamen, near where my maternal grandfather was born.

Mark evidently lit out at once for the wide open spaces of the American West. My family can probably tell dozens of stories about his time there. They give the impression that he was some kind of wandering Jewish cowboy. He had seemingly gone everywhere and tried his hand at everything. My mother once said that he was a lineman for a time in Washington state, and was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Of course Grandpa Mark was a Wobbly. Undoubtedly he was also a socialist and a Zionist.

This may account for why he never officially became an American citizen. So the story goes, when he applied for citizenship, the judge asked him where he had been during the war. Mark told the judge that he had been a conscientious objector — not an uncommon position for a Wobbly to take — and the judge bawled him out, lecturing him for being undeserving of the rights of a red-blooded American patriot. Certainly proud, and unlikely to stand for being called names by anyone, a government magistrate the least of which, Mark turned on his heel, stormed out, and never went back.

I don’t know much else about Mark, except that Lenore thought of him as her father, and his grandchildren adored him. One of the documents Adah and I found was Grandma Lenore and Grandpa Sidney’s ketubah, their religious wedding certificate. It is printed entirely in Hebrew, but the name handwritten in the blank for the father of the bride is the Yiddish name Mikhel, or Mark.

We also found some letters that hint at the very edges of what a colorful character Grandpa Mark was. One of them is a handwritten note addressed to “Friend Mark” from Edward “Eddy” McKenna, dated March 1930. The letter gives the impression that Mark and Eddy knew in other in San Francisco, of all places, and the affectionate tone gives the sense that Eddy had been the beneficiary of Mark’s generosity in some way in the past.

Eddy writes about receiving treatment at the UCSF hospital for an enlarged liver and an ulcer. He adds, “I never seen such hard times in the 34 years I am in the US. I was begged by men I used to work for.” He uses the phrase “since you left,” implying that Mark had lately been there in person. The letter is simply signed, “With best regards and wishes, Sincerely Yours Eddy.”

This letter prompts more questions than it answers. What was Mark doing in San Francisco? Who is Eddy and how did they know each other?

We found a copy of a typewritten letter from Grandpa Mark in 1937 to his former bank in Brooklyn, asking them to provide notarized verification of his identity to the state of Illinois, because, quote:

I lost track and became separated from my family who were living in Chicago, Ill. in 1905. I recently located four married brothers and four married sisters in New York City in September 1937 and learned that my parents in Chicago, Ill. died fifteen years ago, leaving an estate valued at $5000. As I was the only missing heir my share of this estate was turned over to the State Administrator after seven years when I was presumed to be dead or missing.

I don’t even know what to say about this letter. It’s hard to imagine a time before the Internet, before cell phones, before telephone books were widespread. If someone failed to leave a forwarding address, your letters might go unanswered, and… then what? On the other hand, Adah thought it was “kind of fucked up” that Mark’s parents had died fifteen years before and he had only just found out.

I dunno. How about the handwritten letter to Mark from “Wm. O’Dell, Jr.” of Oxford, Florida, dated November 1956:

I wish to thank you for your consideration for letting me have the twenty acres of land in my property. It is very unsatisfactory to have other people buy into your pasture, as you can understand. I will pay you the seven hundred dollars and accept the expenses of transferring the deed, etc.

I… what?? The mystery of how Mark Sohn came into twenty acres of someone else’s land in north central Florida is only partly answered by a letter addressed to Mrs. Mark Sohn, i.e. Grandma Adele, dated August 1934. Signed P. B. Howell of McCollum & Howell, Lawyers, it reads:

Dear Madam:

In reply to your letters of recent date relative to land in Sumter County, Florida, we advise that the will which was sent us was properly probated and filed in the probate Court in this County… The title passes to him under the will the same as it would have passed had the testator made a deed to your husband instead of leaving it to him by his will.

I’m still left with questions. Who on earth left behind a last will and testament deeding Mark Sohn twenty acres of land in the middle of someone else’s pasture in north central Florida of all places, and, more to the point, why?? The whole thing boggles the mind. Now that Mark and Adele and Lenore have all gone, I suspect I will never know.

Mark continued to raise hell even after he had passed away. He died in 1962 and was buried in the Aronowsky family plot in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. Evidently, Adele wanted his name, and hence her name, Sohn added to the family monument. This apparently caused a ruckus with some of the other Aronowskys, who probably thought it was bad enough that Adele’s scandalous second husband was interred among them, never mind the family monument hauled away in order to have his name inscribed upon it.

We know this because we found a typewritten note dated June 1962 from Grandma Adele to the director of the cemetery society, bringing his attention to an attached typewritten note from her nephew Abe to her brother Bennett Aronowsky:

Dear Uncle Bennie,

Enclosed you will please find duplicate papers signed and completely acknowledged before a notary in the matter of permission being granted to engrave the name of “SOHN” on the existing monument in the plot…

It has been more to me than a labor of love, in getting the entire problem solved as it became a stalemate in the family with no one yielding to satisfy this unwholesome mess.

In the end, Adele got her way, and the name “SOHN” was engraved on the Aronowsky family monument. My sister Adah is named for Adele, and she also bears the same indomitable will.

Anyway, I’m sorry I never got to meet Grandpa Mark. Somewhere I have a recording I made when I was in grade school of my grandmother Lenore’s recollections and family stories. When I find it, I will try to transcribe anything else I learn about him.

Moreover, I’m sure this journal entry will, as I mention, spark a flurry of remembrances from my uncles and cousins, as well as the inevitable factual corrections. My loves, I welcome them.

If you’re reading this, I wish you a long life as rich and colorful as Grandpa Mark’s was. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est, and, while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the judges, too, in memory of that old Wobbly and pacifist, Mark Sohn. See you tomorrow!