Dear Family!
It has been over 18 months since my last letter and I apologize for the great delay. But so much has happened in the meantime that I hope you'll all forgive me.
First the most recent news:
I became an uncle, that is, my sister Marlena and her husband Zoran
became the parents of a healthy baby boy, Marko Schoenberg Fejzo, on March
28, 1997. I'm off to visit him this weekend, but those of you with access
to the internet can see him also at my brother Ricky's homepage at
http://www.berkeley.edu/users/frederic/. You'll find video and still
pictures there.
Marko wasn't the youngest member of our family tree for very long. On April 2, we received word that Nick and Linda Teller in Prague are the parents of a baby boy, Luke Teller. Congratulations!
More recent news before we go back to the beginning. I have changed jobs. After 5 1/2 years at Katten Muchin & Zavis, I am moving on to a smaller office (23 lawyers) of an even larger national firm called Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Beginning May 1, my new work fax number will be (213) 473-2222.
Last but not least, and still in the recent news department, I was married last November 24 to Pamela Mayers in Cincinnati, Ohio. Pam and I have fixed up our house and converted it from a bachelor pad to a quite respectable and comfortable home. We're already anticipating the visits from relatives from far and wide. (At the wedding, I was introduced to about a hundred of Pam's relatives. You'll be happy to know that the size of my family tree has nearly doubled!)
Now back to the beginning:
When I last wrote, in October 1995, things were not quite so sunny out here in California. We had survived, floods, fires, riots and earthquakes, but our family was in the throes of litigation with the University of Southern California over the fate of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. In November, my opthalmologist discovered that the recurring bump on my eyelid was skin cancer. At 29 years old, skin cancer is hardly a phenomenon anymore. I know of three other elementary school classmates who have had skin cancer. In December, the cancer was removed successfully (along with the middle portion of my eyelid) but I am happy to say there has been no recurrence and the surgery is hardly noticeable, even after I point it out to people. I now recommend to everyone, especially those of us with blue eyes and fair skin, to wear sunscreen and protective clothing outdoors.
Also in November, I traveled to Paris with some of my family for a series of performances of Schoenberg operas and other works at the Chatelet Opera. There was also a concurrent exhibit of Schoenberg paintings at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. While we were in Paris we saw Gerard and Inge Friedländer, and met their son Francis (with his wife Maïtia and daughter Emanuelle), and daughter Caroline, as well as Inge's granddaughter from Spain, Alexandra Poole. (Francis and Maïtia welcomed a second daughter, Clara, to the family on August 1, 1996.) I can still taste the chocolate soufflé we at a wonderful restaurant (Palais des Princes) near Rolland Garros. Mmmm. Gerard later came to Los Angeles on his way to Hawaii, and I was able to return the favor by taking him out for some Prime Rib at Lawry's (a famous L.A. restaurant where the football teams try to out-eat each other every year before the Rose Bowl football game.) Gerard showed me marvelous pictures of the Schwarz brothers, and even let me take some home with me to scan into my computer. For those of you who have not been here, I have the entire family tree computerized and the program also allows for storage of pictures so you can see what the people on the tree looked like. I've received family pictures from many of you and would welcome others.
In January, 1996 the lawsuit with the University of Southern California heated up again. We were forced to obtain a second injunction barring the University from using the Arnold Schoenberg Institute for unrelated music classes. The university even filed a cross-complaint, which we answered in kind. Finally, in July, after numerous press reports, including a nice piece on National Public Radio, the case settled. In the end, the university agreed to what the family had insisted on from the beginning, namely, that the entire collection of manuscripts remain together and that it be transferred to a new location by the end of 1998. After the settlement was concluded, my father, uncle and aunt met with representatives of various other institutions and ultimately selected a private foundation formed by the City of Vienna especially for the purpose of receiving the Schoenberg archives. The new Arnold Schönberg Center Privatstiftung will be located at Palais Fanto, on the Schwarzenbergplatz near the Belvedere Museum in Vienna (a far better address than any my grandfather ever could afford while he was alive). The new Center, which is principally funded by the City of Vienna, will house the entire archives, as well as the paintings and drawings that have been touring Europe for the last several years to wide acclaim. We expect the Center to open some time in 1998.
Just before my last letter, two single girl friends of mine asked me
to accompany them to a Friday night "shabbat" dinner at a local temple.
Normally, I hated these types of affairs, because I never seemed to meet
anyone interesting. But I agreed to go to chaperone my two friends, both
of whom had recently broken up with their boyfriends. Sure enough, I was
seated next to a boring, not-very-attractive woman for dinner. As I bemoaned
my sad fate, I noticed that there was a much cuter girl sitting around
the other end of the wide dinner table. Unfortunately, we were too far
apart to be able to speak to each other during dinner. But afterwards,
she was speaking to one of my friends, so I approached and asked if she
wanted to join us for some coffee (note: I don't even drink coffee, but
it sounded like the right thing to say at the time). She agreed. It turned
out that she had moved from Cincinnati to Los Angeles just one week earlier
and so she was eager to make new friends. We all traded telephone numbers
at the end of the evening. Her name was Pamela Mayers. Later that weekend,
Pam called me. (Note: she now claims she just wanted a friend, and had
no interest in dating.) I naturally interpreted this as a good sign and
invited her to accompany me to a concert (Beethoven String Quartets).
The rest, as they say, is history. We began dating. She spent New
Year's with my family. I spent Passover with her family. We were engaged
in July. Pam's mother was able to put together a wedding of 325 guests
in Cincinnati in just four months. The wedding itself was something of
a production. Pam's parents belong to an Orthodox synagogue. Therefore,
the ceremony had to be orthodox and the food was all kosher. I, on the
other hand, insisted that we incorporate some music of my grandfathers
into the ceremony. So, the processionals were preceded by fanfares of
Schoenberg and Zeisl played by a 16-piece brass and percussion ensemble
from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. The processionals themselves
were works by Zeisl and Schoenberg arranged for piano trio, and just before
the cake-cutting, one of Pam's family friends (an Israeli studying opera
in Cincinnati, whose husband works for Pam's father) sang two German Lieder,
one each by Schoenberg and Zeisl. We also had a klezmer band, which played
Jewish music for everyone to dance to. By all accounts it was an incredible
wedding -- at least unlike anything anyone else had ever witnessed. I
participated in such traditional events as the Chatan's Tisch, where the
men meet with the groom and the witnesses sign the traditional marriage
contract, called a ketubah. Pam wrote up a detailed program describing
all the traditional religious elements of the wedding for those of us (like
me) who were not too familiar with the customs. We were happy to have
a number of relatives from the area attend the wedding, including Gerry
and Nicole Davitz (from Corryton, Tennessee) and Dick and his son Paul
Hoffmann (from Oberlin, Ohio). My immediate family and first cousins
were also in attendance including Arnie and Cynthia Schoenberg from San
Diego, Magnus and Julia Morgan from Los Angeles, Lawrence, Anne and Camille
Schoenberg from Los Angeles, my aunt Nuria Nono from Venice, Italy, and
my cousins Cookie and Tom Polsfuss from San Francisco . Thank you all
for the well wishes we received after our wedding. Pam and I traveled
to the island of Moorea (near Tahiti) for our honeymoon and had a fabulous
time. I recommend French Polynesia to everyone as an unbelievably beautiful
place to get away from the rest of the world. It's an eight hour flight
from Los Angeles, and well worth it.
An equally important event, which many of you participated in, was our family reunion in August 1996. Let me first say thank you once again to our cousin Erich Arthold for planning the event, along with his cousin Elisabetta Hartl. If there is a family genetic trait for organization on the Schoenberg side of the family, then Erich certainly has it. (Erich's relative, Arnold Schoenberg, not only organized the twelve tones of the scale, but also his entire life and works, which has made cataloguing the Schoenberg archives so interesting.) I could not imagine a more perfect event, and I've received so many nice letters from all who attended, but the real thanks go to Erich.
Those in attendance during the three-day event were (forgive me if I accidentally miss anyone): Hanna Hirsch, Eva and Erich Arthold, and Wolfgang, Guilia and Elisabetta Hartl from Vienna, Austria; Marcel Jontof-Hutter and his wife, Ata, from Turin, Italy; Paolo Jontof-Hutter from Milan, Italy; Ronnie Jontof-Hutter from Donvale, Australia; Esther Roelofs (and Franz), and Bjorn and Agnes Parée from Wesepe, the Netherlands; Gerard Friedländer and Ruth Feldman from Paris, France; Erich Steiner from New Jersey; Mitzi Seavers from Bray, Ireland; Anneliese O'Callaghan from Dublin, Ireland; Maureen Read from London, England; Hanna Klaus from Washington, D.C.; George and Sonya Teller from Düsseldorf, Germany; Laszlo and Györgyi Molat from Pnom Penh, Vietnam via Budapest, Hungary; Feri, Agnes and Klaudia Molat from Budapest, Hungary; Michaela, Karel, and Karolina Navratilova, and Petr, Jana and Katerina Willheim from Prague, Czech Republic; Mischa and Brigitte Seligman, from Santa Barbara, California; Nicole Davitz from Corryton, Tennessee; Lawrence, Anne, Ronald, Barbara and Randol Schoenberg and Pamela Mayers (soon to become a Schoenberg) from Los Angeles, California.
The opening ceremonies were held at the famous Konditerei Demel. I brought large printouts of the family tree so people could find see how they were related to the others in the room. Most of the people had not met each other before, but everyone was so incredibly friendly, I thought it must be a family trait. We later went on a tour of the Hofburg Apartments, and had plenty of time for private sight-seeing. Pam and I ran into the Jontof-Hutters on our way to visit the Arnold Schoenberg grave at the Zentralfriedhof during our free time. We had a group tour of the new Jewish Museum in Vienna, and a bus ride to a "Heuriger" outside Vienna where we congregated and ate, drank, talked and took pictures to our heart's content on a beautiful terrace. Feri Molat presented me with a fine old print by our cousin, Elsa Beck, whereupon George Teller exclaimed that his family had the very same picture in their apartment in Vienna, and he had not seen it since 1938! Our final evening was a wonderful dinner at Café Griensteidl where everyone toasted our new relatives and friends. My dry written description cannot do justice to the fabulous emotions and friendships generated at the reunion. I felt there was a real sense of connection, especially with the generation who were returning to Vienna, the home of their youth. I am so grateful to all of you who came.
After the reunion, we went to Salzburg for the breathtaking performance of Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" with Pierre Boulez and the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Chorus from Amsterdam. I've been lucky enough to see the opera a handful of times, but never with such impact as it was in Salzburg. With any luck, I may be able to attend future performances in New York or Tel Aviv over the next couple years. I also had time for some genealogical research in Prague and Vienna during my trip. I corrected some mistakes (actually not mine, but mistakes in one of the old marriage registers at the State Archive in Prague) and made the most headway on the Bloch branch of the family (the family of Kamilla Feitler Zeisl's mother) who came from a town called Ckyn, near Budweis in the Czech Republic. It turns out that my great-great-great-great grandfather Mathes Bloch (b. 1778) was the Mohel of Ckyn, who performed circumcisions of all male children, and hence was probably responsible for keeping the register of births that I was able to view at the State Archives in Prague. In Vienna, I learned that my great-great grandfather Max Schwarz was married in the grand synagogue in the Seitenstettengasse on the same day as his brother Adolf, whose grandsons Gerard Friedländer and Erich Steiner attended the reunion with me. that must have been quite a wedding. I also learned that Max's father was a furniture dealer, which explains why my great-grandmother and grandmother decided to pay to ship all of their furniture to the ends of the earth in 1938 when they were planning to leave Austria.
Recently, I discovered some old letters from Paul F. Hoffmann to my grandmother, his half-niece, Gertrud Schoenberg, which state that the mother of his father, Thedor Hoffmann, was named Marie von Biedermann, who was herself the niece of Josefine von Wertheimstein. Apparently the Wertheimsteins were once a very wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. There is now a museum in Döbling inside the Villa Wertheimstein. Paul's letter also gives me leads on some long lost relatives in new Zealand who may know more about this connection.
I've received many, many letters from all of you and hope to continue to receive them, despite my laziness in responding. Lilly Field wrote that she was attending the Bat Mitzvah of her granddaughter Miriam in the Hague in January of this year. Ronnie Jontof-Hutter had this to say about the reunion, "It was a wonderful experience and I don't believe anyone there has not had something deep stir inside them. I was deeply moved when I arrived at Demel's the first morning and watched everyone trickle in, introduce themselves, and then relate to each other in animated discussion, as if it were the most normal thing in the world!" Marcel Jontof-Hutter wrote a wonderful letter expressing his feelings about the reunion, and also announced the birth of his grandson Pietro Chiarabaglio on December 10, 1996 to his daughter Erika. Pietro Chiarabaglio joins his fifth cousin, Pietro Moretti, born to Silvia Nono and Nanni Moretti on April 18, 1996 in Rome, Italy. Feri Molat wrote a long and moving article on the reunion for his local Jewish newspaper.
One development that is opening up new avenues of communication for us is the internet. So many of the family members are now "on line" and others are joining all the time. You can now visit my "home page" at http://www.primenet.com/~randols/. This will provide links for other home pages in the family. If you don't have access to the internet, you probably won't understand this, but if you do, I'm sure I'll hear from you soon. The Schoenberg side of our genealogy is all available on-line at the Arnold Schoenberg Legacy home page. I hope to have the Zeisl side placed on the home page for the Eric Zeisl Archives at UCLA. You can access both of these pages from my home page. I also participate in a newsgroup bulletin board devoted to Jewish genealogy, which is located at soc.genealogy.jewish. Through this group, I was able to find Ruth Hoffman Erez in Israel, and was able to put a relative in touch with Joe and Eleanor Feitler. The internet is already the tool for genealogy and communication between researchers and relatives. Additionally, I have attempted to submit our genealogy to the Diaspora Museum (Beth Hatefutsoth) in Tel Aviv, Israel. If anyone visits there, please see if you can find yourself on their computers.
Pam and I are settling in and I should be back to a more normal routine once I start my new job. We seem to have more and more relatives moving to California, some of whom, like Ruth Gilbert Cromidas, we have yet to see. We have seen John and Gina Bauer, who live just an hour south of us, and John's father, Heinz, came up during his stay in California for a wonderful evening, unwittingly becoming our first dinner guest as a married couple. I expect additional houseguests in the future. Bjorn Parée should be arriving this summer for a few days as he tours the United States. Others are welcome (although you need to give me some warning so I can prepare Pam for the onslaught. But don't worry, she'll be taking her revenge when her relatives start to visit.)
I'll try to finish this up and copy some photographs from the reunion and wedding to send all of you. Nicole Davitz took some of the best photographs, as she did at our wedding (okay, Pam's were good too -- she is a photographer by trade).
There is already talk of a second reunion, perhaps in Prague. I think it is a testament to the strength of familial ties that I have found so many like-minded cousins. I look forward to seeing you all again very soon. Please keep in touch and send me any news or pictures.
Your family genealogist,
E. Randol Schoenberg
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