Photoessay #2904 - Poppy

Undated picture of my maternal grandfather Irwin Baumann.  How old is he in this picture?  40?  50?

Found this in an album of old postcards that I'm supposed to give to my cousin but somehow I want to hold onto them.  That there's a story in there I need to tell.  It is fun to look at the addressers and adressees and recognize then names in the family tree.

When my grandparents were married, it was considered the union of two of the most prosperous New Haven Jewish families.  Or so I was told.  But they came under hard times when the family business failed, Baumann Rubber Company.  I think it failed before the stock market crash and there must have been a lot of mortgaging going around because everybody lost their homes and material possessions.  My grandparents endured a lot of economic privation.  They never got back on their feet financially again.

My grandfather never worked steadily after that.  He did sell some insurance a bit.  My mother thought he might be suffering from fibromyalgia like she did.  He did medicate himself according to her. My grandmother worked, I remember as a child visiting her at work in a 'dry goods' store downtown.   When my mother married my father, it was on the condition that he would help support her parents.  He honored that promise.  They came to visit us in California from back east but my parents always bought the plane tickets.

I remember him, I associate the smell of cigar smoke with him.  Very social, loved to join clubs but rather a lost soul somehow.  My mother told a story that my grandmother found that he had borrowed $100 to buy meat for her visit (maybe one of us was with her) and my grandmother was so mad because she would have to pay it back.  We had great roasts though, my mom remembered.

I write a lot about my maternal grandmother (Regina Zunder Weil Baumann)'s grandfather Maier Zunder.  The prosperity and the intact network of Bavarian Jewish families did not endure.