A new book, available in paperback and as an e-Book from Amazon, as well as from Kobo, as an E-book, has come my way, “A Teygl in His Pocket,” written by Carla J. Silver and published by Tellwell Talent, Inc. It’s a page turner, a love story, and an adventure story, that takes us from the towns of Hirlau, Stefaneshti, and Botosani, in Botosani Province, Rumania, near the Russian border; to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn, New York; and to Toronto, Canada, with stops along the way in Trieste, Antwerp, and Halifax, in the early 20th century. It’s a story of Jewish bakers and tailors, who leave the Old World for the New, and what they find there. This is a story that was written with love. Silver vividly conjures up the challenging experiences of traveling steerage to North America, in uncomfortably close quarters, and adapting to a New World, with its strange language, customs, and currency, not to mention the new names, easier to pronounce, that it seems to require.
Full disclosure: Carla J. Silver is my cousin and her book concerns her family, our family, and my name appears in the acknowledgments. As she wrote to me in an email, “I did not claim to be writing a history, just historical fiction.” Her grandfather Morris/Moshe Senderowitz and my grandfather Max/Mordecai Senderowitz were brothers who were bakers. She and I share maternal great-grandparents. A teygl, we learn from the helpful glossary, is “a piece of yeast dough meant for starting the next batch of dough.” Many loaves of challah—“an egg bread made with yeast that is richer than regular bread and specifically for the Sabbath”—are baked and devoured in the course of this tale. Carla, who teaches, sings, conducts, plays oboe, and studies harp, is the mother of cellist Beth Silver and animator Adam Y. Silver, who created the book’s cover art. Carla is named for her grandmother Chaya/Clara and I am, in part, named for her grandfather. Much of her family information came from her Aunt Rose Wolfe, the Chancellor of the University of Toronto, as well as from her own mother, Sheila, and much of mine came from my Aunt Rose Lyons, who was close to our Canadian cousins, and who volunteered for the Metropolitan and New York City Opera Guilds and for the Guttman Institute for breast cancer screening, now a part of Memorial Sloan Kettering. My Aunt Rose is acknowledged in Metropolitan Opera Annals, 1883 to 1985, print edition, for her contribution to the research for it. She used to quip, about Carla’s aunt, that though they were both born Rose Senderowitz, her cousin became a wolf, while she became a lion.
Why consider “A Teygl” in these pages? Carla is related to at least three bonafide LGBT individuals. She also participated in the successful effort to get our gay friend Halim, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, granted asylum in Canada through the organization Rainbow Refugee, something I wrote about here last February. Enough said.
I could not put “A Teygl in His Pocket” down. I’m still qvelling from it. I’m reading this story, caught up in what Morris and Clara go through, together and separately, as they leave Rumania—where the Cossacks inflicted pogroms and young men risked conscription into the Czar’s army—and boarded different boats, bound for different countries, at different times, and the efforts they made to find each other in North America. I got so caught up in the narrative that I periodically forgot it was about my own family and was taken aback anew when I saw the name Senderowitz, particularly in parts of the story concerning my grandparents and my uncles. I learned here that Bottoschan—a name I’ve known almost all my life—as in First Bottoschan American Sick Benefit Association, in whose section, in Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn, my grandfather and his other brother Yitzchak/Isaac are buried—is, on the map of Eastern Europe, Botosani, a place in Rumania. Carla and I sparred a bit over the actual names of our great-aunts, with which I thought she’d taken liberties, but, as she pointed out, she was writing fiction based on history, not a literal history, so she gave them the names she wanted them to have.
You don’t have to be related to Carla J. Silver to appreciate “A Teygl in His Pocket.” You may even find something like your own story in it.