The Finkel Family Memoirs

“Both Max and Bessie arrived in the United States in 1905, after having fled the tyrannies, anti-Semitism, persecutions, poverty, and hunger of Eastern Europe. Grandpa was twenty years old at the time. He took up the trade of carpentry, as his father before him. Grandma was fifteen years old and had seen the horrors of a pogrom which had killed her mother. She was unhappy with her stepmother and lonely for her older sister, who was already in the United States. Grandpa and Grandma settled in the Lower East Side of New York, met each other, and married in 1910. They had simply moved from one shtetel to another. Yiddish was the primary language spoken at home by the entire family. By the time Murray was born in 1922, Belle was twelve, Esther was nine, and I was five years old. We had been exposed to English, which became our second language.” -A. Allan Finkel Four generations after Max and Bessie’s arrival in America, we Finkels have multiplied and thrived in our new home. From the Old World to Ellis Island, from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, from Long Island and South Fallsburg, these memoirs tell our story.