Time for another family tale. My father’s mother was born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the city of Lvov (then called Lemberg) in the year 1872. I always say that she lived to be 100, although she actually died a few weeks before her 100th birthday. She married my grandfather while still in Europe. He came to the United States in 1892 and died before I was born, in 1939. My grandmother, with their very young son, my Uncle Al, followed him to the United States the next year. They lived in Mobile, Alabama, in Galveston, Texas, in Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri, and in St. Louis, moving to St. Louis from Kansas City, in 1917, when my father was 14.

My grandmother was very selective in what she said about her past. Now and then, I would try to learn something, and ask her a question. She would have made a good politician, because she found it very easy to evade the question if she didn’t want to answer.

The best example of this perhaps was when I asked her how she met my grandfather, who was not from eastern Galicia, but from northern Lithuania, in the Russian Empire. Her answer to that straight forward question was “Oh, you know.”, and she clearly was not going to go beyond that.

But at one point, when my sister was in high school, they sat down and my grandmother told her much more than she ever had told me. Much of what I am going to say here came from my sister’s writing.

My great grandparents were Leo and Toby Dicker. Leo was from a wealthy family in Lvov, and was educated to be an engineer. Toby was from a poorer family and apparently was never fully accepted by Leo’s family. Unfortunately, Leo was killed when he was in only his mid-30s, in an accident that occurred during the construction of a railway line between Lvov and Russia, a cave-in of some sort. Leo’s family did not take Toby in, but forced her, with her three children, to open a small dairy farm on the outskirts of Lvov where, I think, Toby lived the rest of her life.

It was a small farm, and money was usually tight. It was also not in a Jewish area, but a primarily Catholic region, and Helen was sent to a Catholic convent school, where she learned Polish, German and French, and was taught a number of subjects commonly taught to girls, including sewing, embroidery and so forth, all of which would prove very helpful to her later in life.

I remember that, although she went to a Catholic school, she told me that she was always an outsider, and recounted to me the one time her mother decided to give her a birthday party and invited all of her schoolmates, none of whom came.

I think her education ended when she was 12. She had met a Polish opera singer, Paula Wolescak, and helped her by sewing dresses and costumes in return for piano lessons and the chance to learn a lot about music and theater. I don’t how long their relationship lasted, but at some point, Wolescak stopped performing (her husband insisted) and my grandmother met the man who would become my grandfather and married him. I assume it was some sort of arranged marriage, but don’t really know.

After being in America for a year or so, my grandfather had made enough money to provide my grandmother with a ticket to take a ship out of Hamburg to come to New York. Unfortunately, he did not send enough money to pay for 1 year old Uncle Al’s ticket, which my grandmother did not think was necessary. So the story is, that my grandmother, wearing a large shawl, wrapped her son in it, and sneaked him on board, bring him with her, without paying for his passage.

My grandfather was working as a peddler in Mobile, and my grandmother helped increase their income by taking on sewing jobs. She didn’t like Mobile, and after a few years they moved to Texas and then, for reasons I don’t know, to Kansas City. After years of financial struggle, they opened one store, and then a larger one. I think the stores were general merchandise stores, and my grandmother kept sewing and making blouses and other articles of clothing which were sold in the store, and were also sold wholesale. They were able to buy a fairly large house, for a growing family (eventually including 8 children who would grow to adulthood). As an aside, we knew the address of the Kansas City house and went to see it, only to find it an empty lot. But about half of the houses on the block are still standing, so you can get an idea of what the neighborhood must have looked like.

At about the same time, Helen became homesick for Europe and her mother, so she cashed in her husband’s life insurance policy, took the proceeds and with two of her daughters, her oldest and youngest daughters, my aunts Mary and Gertie, she went back to Galicia to see her mother, and stayed about three months.

At some point after that, my grandfather apparently was ill and needed surgery. The cost of the surgery and the recovery period took a toll on the family’s financial strength, and the entire family left Kansas City and moved to St. Louis where my Uncle Al was already living and had started his wholesale business.

I think my grandfather worked with Uncle Al, but I am not really sure about that. My grandfather (again, I never met him), along with his brothers, had had a strong religious education in Lithuania. At least two of his brothers became rabbis in the United States (one in Washington DC, and one a traveling rabbi in the North West), but my grandfather wanted nothing of a Jewish religious life. It seems to me he never really found himself, and never developed a real career in this country. I tried to find out more about him from my father and my aunts and uncles, but again seemed to face a wall. All my father ever said was “you would really have liked him” and all I heard from the others was what a great father he was. It seems to me that the Hessel house, financial problems and all, was quite a happy place.

My grandmother had nine children, of whom eight lived. For most of her life after my grandfather died, she lived, quite happily, alone. I never met anyone who was her “friend”; I don’t know if she had friends. She spent a lot of time with her children and their families, six of whom were in St. Louis, so she had a place to go to dinner almost every night of the week. I remember, when I was probably 7 or 8, she decided to visit her daughter in Anaheim, California. She went by train and, if I am correct, stayed about 2 years, then returning to St. Louis.

When she was about 80, she got sick for the only time in her life (that I know); she got a very severe case of shingles, and was hospitalized. We all thought this would be it, that she never would recover her energy. She came to live with us for a year or more, and then with her daughter, my Aunt Millie. But then one day she decided she was fine and wanted to live by herself. She took a small apartment in the Forest Park Hotel, in the city’s Central West End. The Forest Park was partly residential and partly transient, and housed a lot of professional actors and musicians as they were playing in St. Louis, making it a very interesting place. It had a first floor coffee shop, which was good and friendly and convenient. It had a swimming pool often filled with theater folks, and that was fun.

My grandmother was able to live by herself until she was well into her 90s when her body and mind began to fail her and she moved, or was moved, into the Delmar Gardens Nursing Home. She died three years after I had moved to Washington.

As to my grandmother’s seamstress abilities, in Kansas City she apparently worked for a theater making costumes. She made a lot of her own clothes, and a lot of knitwear for family members. I wore a sweater she made for years.

I don’t know if any of my aunts had the same talents, but my sister was a fashion major in college, and gor a while operated her own boutique in Clayton Mo. And my daughter Hannah, before kids took up so much of her time, did a lot of theater costume work. Will granddaughter Joan followvthe same path? I would not be surprised.