Dear Cousins:
It has been exactly one year since my last family letter, and although I have been in touch with many of you since then, it probably is about time for another. The primary reason for this letter is to announce the upcoming family reunion, scheduled for August 21-23, 1996 in Vienna, Austria. Erich Arthold and Elisabetta Hartl (Jontof-Hutter branch) have very graciously offered to help plan the details. Erich used to be in the Vienna Boys' Choir and now works for the music agency founded by Elisabetta's father, Wolfgang Hartl. You can reach Erich and Elisabetta c/o Austroconcert International, Gluckgasse 1, A-1010 Wien Austria, tel: 43-1-513-26-57-12, fax: 43-1-512-6154. Mischa and Brigitte Seligman (Kolisch branch) are travel agents and have also offered their assistance. You can reach them at 2700 Exeter Place, Santa Barbara, CA 93105, tel:1-805-682-6322, fax:1-805-682-8776. Attached is a list of recommended hotels. Please tell me as soon as possible if you are planning to come to the reunion so we can keep you informed of the details. Everyone is invited, of course, and I hope that those of you who do come will also extend an invitation to your other relatives who do not happen to be on my tree but might nevertheless be interested in joining us.
Many of you were kind enough to write me after my last letter and make necessary corrections and additions to the tree. I am also looking for photographs and pictures (new and old) which I will input into my computer using a new family tree computer program. Some of you have complained about the format of my trees, for which I apologize. I have purchased a computer program to store the information but the printout of the trees is now too large to send to everyone. I will try to bring a computer to Vienna so everyone can see the trees with the pictures and other information I have entered.
We have discovered a number of "new" cousins. Lilly Field (on the Kolisch tree) was able to provide me the address of her former neighbor Joe Feitler (on the Zeisl/Feitler tree) who lives in Chicago. Joe is a computer engineer. His daughter, Barbara was living in New Haven, Connecticut, but just moved with her family to Detroit, Michigan. Before leaving, Barbara had a chance to get in touch with her second cousin Patsy Kumekawa, who lives in North Haven. Joe's daughter Janie received her PhD in Logistics and Transportation from the University of Maryland and is now teaching at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California. Joe's daughter Carol lives in Syracuse.
Gerard and Inge Friedländer (Schwarz branch) visited us for an evening while Peter, Carol and Nicholas Kambour (Zeisl branch) were in town. Gerard put me in touch with Maureen Read, a District Judge in Bow County Court in the East end of London. Her daughter Charlotte won two gold medals in fencing (epee) at the Commonwealth Championships in Canada last year and will be married on December 30. (Maximillian Fuchs (Jontof-Hutter branch) was apparently also a fencing champ.) Maureen's son, Marcel, is an electrical engineer.
My brother Ricky spent three months in London, working at the Commerzbank branch where Nicky Teller (Schwarz branch) used to work before relocating to Prague last year. Ricky made a visit to the O'Callaghan's (Jontof-Hutter branch) in Dublin and had a wonderful time (and helped fill in some of the names on their huge branch of the tree). Ricky is now starting his third year in the PhD program at statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. My sister Marlena received her PhD in genetics from Harvard University and moved to San Francisco with her husband, Zoran, who also received his PhD in electrical engineering from Northeastern University. This summer, Marlena and Zoran went to Belgrade to visit Zoran's parents and to Greece for a well-deserved vacation. My little sister Melanie started her first year at Yale University this fall and plans to study music composition (of all things).
Julie Schoenberg, Nicky Teller, and David Seligman (Kolisch branch) have each announced (separate) wedding plans for later this year.
Perhaps the most amazing discovery of a new relative came via a young musicologist in Italy, who was doing research on Arnold Schoenberg's Jewish works and recognized the Jontof-Hutter name. He put me in touch with Marcel Jontof-Hutter of Turin, Italy. Marcel's family documents caused a complete upheaval in his branch of the tree, solving one riddle but creating others. I am now certain that his branch stems from Emanuel and Anna Jontof-Hutter, not Isak (Karl) Jontof-Hutter and Anna von Lämmel, as I had once believed. (Werner Jontof-Hutter sent me the birth certificate of his father which confirms this.) The relation to me remains the same, because Anna Jontof-Hutter was the sister of Isak Jontof-Hutter and also of my great-great grandmother Karoline Jontof-Hutter. Anyway, that puzzle is solved, but the supposed connection of that branch to the famous von Lämmels remains a mystery. Marcel is a surgeon (but also teaches music history) and his brother Sergio is an architect who designed the university and stadium in Turin. Their mother founded a modern dance school, which is now in the hands of Marcel's daughter Erika.
Wolfgang Hartl put me in touch with another cousin on the Jontof-Hutter branch, Esther Roelofs, who lives in Wesepe, Holland. Esther has two children, Bjorn and Agnes. Her brother Albert is a sailor, her sister Petra Chabas lives in the Hague. Esther's sister Nina lives in Israel at Kibbutz Maagan Michael.
I also tracked down (with some help from a kind person on the Internet) our cousin Ruth Erez (Schwarz branch) in Israel. She had not heard from us for many, many years and immediately picked up the phone to call and say hello. Ruth has a PhD and works as a therapist and lecturer. Her husband Itché is an electrical engineer. They have three sons, two of whom were air force pilots. Ruth's niece Sharon Kleinhandler sent me an email from New York and promises to send a bunch of new information. I found pictures of Sharon from when she visited Los Angeles as a young girl.
Steve Stoliar (Kolisch branch) lives in Los Angeles and is a freelance TV writer who also does voice-overs. He filled me in on the names of his immediate family, rounding out the descendants of Karoline Kolisch. I still have yet to get in touch with the Israeli Kolisch branch cousins (Almoslinos and Ossowizkis) whose family tree I received from Victor Gurewich. That would certainly open up some new avenues for research. Perhaps our newly found Israeli cousins from the other branches can help me track down Usi and Ora Almoslino or Avinoam and Tamara Ossowizki.
We lost a couple of cousins this year. George Steiner (Schwarz branch) died in September 1994 just before my last letter arrived and I have been in correspondence with his widow Edith Steiner. George was one of the first people I found several years ago when I began digging into my family history again and I enjoyed his letters very much. I received a letter from his niece Faye Fishman, a non-practicing optometrist. Her husband is a patent attorney and she has an 8 year old daughter, Brittany.
Werner Jontof-Hutter's wife Erna passed away this summer. Werner is one of my most faithful correspondents. Earlier this year he sent me a 25-page typescript of his mother's amazing memoirs, which recount her family's regal life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. The memoirs are truly fascinating, like opening up a window into a lost and forgotten time. They are too detailed for me to summarize here, but deserve a wider audience.
Barbara Barbieri (Schoenberg branch) wrote last year that her son Christopher had developed Hodgkin's disease. Christopher would enjoy receiving letters to encourage him in his fight with this disease. His address is 253-21 147th Road, Rosedale, New York 11422. Barbara's sister, Karen Burberry, is setting up a home business in Florida designing and making doll clothes.
A growing number of us have kept in touch via email. Paul Sanders (Zeisl branch) claimed to be (at 61) the "oldest computer freak on the family tree," but that distinction probably goes to Joe Feitler. Paul's son, David, lives in Ivrea, Italy and works for a company that is building a digital cellular network. (My brother-in-law Zoran Fejzo is also working with cellular phones, but in hardware design.) Neil O'Callaghan's friend emailed me that Neil had a daughter, Juliette Helen O'Callaghan, on October 10, 1994 and that the family has moved to Marburg, Germany. Doug and Paula Schwartz (Kolisch branch) also celebrated the birth of a daughter this year. Joe Franke (Schwarz branch) was also in email contact for a while. Ronnie Jontof-Hutter in Australia uses his friend's email account to keep me posted on his activities. Ronnie testifies as a psychologist in a high-profile criminal cases and also is running a TB project in South Africa with Russian doctors. Alan Field (Kolisch branch) works for Lexis Counsel Connect in New York, which is a computer network made especially for lawyers. Nearly everyone in my immediate family is now also on the internet. Email addresses are included in the attached address list. Please send me new addresses. Most everyone will have an address by the end of the century, I predict.
Believe it or not, I have been busy practicing law for the past year. (I am trying to keep genealogy as an avocation (hobby), not a vocation (job)!) I had a big victory in a case this summer for the producer/director Ivan Reitman. My boss, Howard Weitzman, has moved on to become an executive vice president at MCA/Universal, but I am still at the firm plugging away. Most recently I helped my father, uncle and aunt obtain an injunction against the University of Southern California to prevent the university from dismantling the Arnold Schoenberg Institute before it can be transferred to a new, more receptive institution. Other than that, this past year has been a bit less eventful than the past few years here in Los Angeles. Now that the O.J. trial is over, perhaps things will settle down some more.
I am looking forward to the reunion next August and hope that many
of you can make it. Vienna is a beautiful city and it plays a large part
in most of our family histories. (All four of my grandparents grew up
there.) We will try to schedule a few group "events" but leave most of
the time for sight-seeing and relaxing. I hope to see you all there and
hear from you very soon.
Your cousin,
Randol Schoenberg
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