Family genealogy
My Grandmother Hava Kronental
My grandmother Hava Kronental was born in Warsaw in 1883.
Around 1900, his mother died.
What did her mother die of?
One curious thing is that between the birth of Itzack, her first younger brother, and that of Sabina, 9 years passed, with no trace of children during that period?
I might be on the trail of a sister Rosa Kronental and a brother Salomon Kronental... to be continued
What was his education like in Poland?
Several clues prove that she spoke and wrote Polish.
Apparently, music held a certain place in the lives of the Kronental children. I think the family came from the lower middle class, and this taste for music is also found in the Szternis family.
My grandmother must have thought that her brothers and sisters were old enough to leave for Paris in early 1912.
She must have been married to my grandfather, at least religiously.
She married in a civil ceremony in August 1914 in Paris, and her first daughter, Marie, was born two months later.
She spent the war years in Paris, in their apartment on Rue St Claude, near the Pletzl.
My grandmother was a housewife and she loved going out with her friends Mrs. Scherer and Mrs. Odesser, women who wore hats.
One of my cousins, now over 90 years old, still remembers my grandmother.
What I learned from Grandma
I didn't know her very well.
When I was born, she was already 68 years old and she died when I was six.
We lived with her, in the apartment that had been allocated to her in 1931, so twenty years earlier.
My memories are vague… a few snippets of Yiddish and her bad French, a few attempts to pass on to us her "mame loshen", the grey sofa bed, in which she slept, in the dining room, since… in fact I don't know, if it was after my parents' marriage, or at our birth?.
Did we have our own room when she died, or when my sister Cathy was born?
She must have been overjoyed at my little brother Didier's circumcision party, which took place at home.
And I have no memory of his death, six weeks later, nor of my grandmother's reaction.
As a grandmother, I "feel" her presence with us, my sister and me.
But my aunts told me that when they asked him to look after their young children, he would say: "I raised you, now it's up to you to raise your own."
Yet, she made herself available to my sister and me, especially on vacation. I see her in this photo sitting on the beach, holding me on her lap, a faint smile playing on her lips.
At her age today, I feel like I look a bit like her, with a different hairstyle. Her forehead is receding, she doesn't have bangs, and her white hair, pushed back, seems to be held in place by small combs on each side.
I see her in another holiday photo, sitting and smiling on a chair, surrounded by her two eldest daughters, Marie and Annie, and her three grandsons, Jacky, about ten years old, Lucien and William, six and five years old, sitting on either side of the chair, held by their respective mothers. No one on her lap this time.
Presumably on holiday in the summer of 1952
Also on holiday with my aunts and cousins around 1950
Grandmother had a reputation for not being very "motherly" towards her three eldest children.
She had a preference for Marie, the eldest, whom she encouraged to take dance classes at the Chatelet.
Annie and Raymond, the next two, felt more neglected. They harbored a strong resentment towards him.
According to my research, my grandmother was the eldest of her siblings and when she was 17, her mother died.
She had to take care of her younger brothers and sisters: Sabina six years old, Max, three years old, Chana one year old (or at birth, because we do not know the reason for Sura's death).
It was said that taking care of young children broke her professional aspirations and that she experienced this period as a sacrifice.
So, in Paris, she prioritized outings with her friends Mrs. Odesser and Mrs. Scherer, over the well-being of her home.
A cousin, Myriam, whom I thank for her precious memories, described her to us as always elegant, wearing a veiled hat. In her family, it was said that she was a regular at the Dufayel department store on Rue de Clignancourt, which played a pioneering role in the development of consumer credit: a collector would visit the borrower's home every week to collect loan repayments.
Grandma's friends in hats: Mrs. Odesser and Mrs. Scherer
My mother didn't feel the same way at all.
She was the youngest, diagnosed as a cyst by the doctors. My grandmother was forty-three years old at the time, in 1926. The relationship with this baby was more like that of a grandmother.
And then my mother's sisters were 12 and 10 years old at the time and had to take care of the babies when they got home from school.
My mother was very close to hers.
A good cook, she passed on to him the recipes of Yiddishland.
She used to accompany him, as a child, to the Opéra's gallery and to the Opéra Comique. My grandmother was a great lover of classical music.
Her mother, my great-grandmother Sura Sternis, certainly had a musical education which she passed on to her children.
His brother Abraham was a diamond merchant and enjoyed a good position.
In my research, I found a Rosa Kronental, a pianist, born in 1968; she could be a sister of her father, Moshe-Aron. Further research is needed.
The wife of her nephew, Charles Kronental, Hélène Prager Kronental, would say of her:
" She was a vigorous and very optimistic woman. Everyone liked her because she was always joking. "
My father also had a very favorable impression of my grandmother:
“ When I first started seeing your mother in Paris, I brought a silk blanket from Poland. Your grandmother couldn’t believe it. Your mother’s family was poor. And it was your mother who worked to support your grandmother after your grandfather died in 1945. When I first met ‘Mama ,’ I was told there was a grandmother. For me, it was paradise. Having a mother at home was the most wonderful thing. And I was kind to her.”
I've always pictured my mother as a strong woman who knew what she wanted. I think that's an inheritance from my grandmother, whom I could easily have seen as a suffragette.
