My families from the East
Family genealogy
Title 2
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?
Hawa avait 17 ans et dût s'occuper de ses petits frères et soeurs. Sabina avait 6 ans, Max avait alors 3/4 ans et Hanna, la petite dernière, avait soit quelques mois, soit 1 ou 2 ans. Je n'ai pas trouvé la date de dècés de cette arrière-Grand-Mère, ni sa tombe. Il n'est pas impossible qu'elle soit décédée en couche.
Une chose curieuse entre la naissance d'Itzack, son premier frère cadet, et celle de Sabina, il s'est écoulé 9 ans, sans trace d'enfants pendant cette période?
Quelle fut son éducation, en Pologne ?
Plusieurs indices prouvent qu'elle parlait et écrivait le polonais.
Apparemment la musique tenait une certaine place, dans la vie des enfants Kronental. Je pense que la famille était issue de la petite bourgeoisie et on retrouve dans la famille Szternis ce gout pour la musique.
Ma Grand-Mère a du estimer que ses frères et soeurs étaient suffisamment grands pour partir pour Paris début 1912. Elle devait être mariée à mon grand-père, tout du moins religieusement.
Elle se maria, civilement, en aout 1914, à Paris et sa première fille naissait deux mois plus tard.
Elle passa le temps de la guerre à Paris, dans leur logement de la rue St Claude.
Ma grand-mère était femme au foyer et elle adorait sortir avec ses amis Mme Scherer et Mme Odesser, des femmes à chapeaux.
Une de mes cousines, âgée aujourd'hui de plus de 90 ans se souvient encore de ma grand-mère .
Grandmother through the years
Grandmother: young woman
in Poland
Grandmother already a mother of two little girls, Marie and Annie, around 1918.
Grandmother in 1953 with my little sister on her lap
Grandmother with my aunts Marie and Annie and their children: Jacky and Lucien Firer and William Doukhan.
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 convey to us her "mame lochen", the sofa bed in which she slept, in the dining room, since… actually I don't know.
Did we have our own room when she died, or when my sister was born?
She must have been overjoyed at my little brother's circumcision party, which was held at our house. And I have no memory of her death six weeks later, nor of her reaction.
As a grandmother, I feel her presence with us.
But my aunts told me, when they asked him to look after their young children: "I raised you, now it's up to you to raise yours."
She was always available for 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 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 children, felt more neglected. They harbored a strong resentment towards her. According to my research, my grandmother was the eldest, and her mother died when she was 17.
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 preferred outings with her friends Mrs. Odesser and Mrs. Scherer, for the overall well-being of the home.
A cousin described her to us as always elegant, with a veiled hat on her head.
In her family, it was said that she was a regular at the Dufayel department store on the rue de Clignancourt, which played a pioneering role in the development of consumer credit: A collector came every week to the borrower's home to collect the loan repayment.
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 by the doctors as a cyst. My grandmother was forty-two years old at the time. Her relationship with this baby was more like that of a grandmother. And then my mother's sisters, aged twelve and ten, had to take care of the baby after 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 upper balcony and to the Opéra Comique. My grandmother was a great lover of classical music. Her mother, my great-grandmother Sura Sternis, had received a musical education which she passed on to her children. Her brother Abraham was a diamond merchant and enjoyed a comfortable life.
Her nephew Charles' wife, Hélène, said 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 started seeing your mother in Paris, I also brought a silk blanket. Your grandmother couldn't believe it. In your mother's family, they were poor... And it was your mother who worked to support your grandmother after your grandfather died in 1945. And when I 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 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.