"Munich," No Thanks
My mother's family always was the one we knew least about. My grandfather was a big, gruff self-made man, born in the waning days of the 19th century, who had lifted himself out of the slums of Philadelphia by sheer will and work. Arbeit macht frei, and for him, in America, it was true. He survived the tuberculosis that cut a swath through his family and he survived the Great Depression and he raised a family in comfort.
We loved him, because he was Pop-Pop. But when I stand back and think about him, as I approach the age he was when I first knew him, I realize he was not especially a nice man. Nor do I think he'd ever have wanted to be known as one. They were a tough brood, his clan, and they nursed grudges and even though he had ten siblings, seven of whom survived to adulthood, he was estranged from the families of all but one of them by the time I knew him.
And he rarely talked about his family or his past. We knew little beyond his odd family name, "Goodfriend," that he had and bequeathed to my mother as her middle name. Nobody else we knew, growing up in the Pennsylvania countryside, had that name. It had a firm, warm, familial quality that seemed to ill-suit the clan that bore it. My grandfather had been raised in a Catholic home, we knew, but my grandparents on that side never attended any sort of religious service, except for weddings and funerals. Their children married in the local Schwenkfelder church, because it was local.
Bill Goodfriend had thick, wiry dark hair and a dark complexion, which he also bequeathed to my mother. She often was mistaken for Italian.
Later, when I was in college, my mother had a career in social work in Philadelphia. There, lo and behold, she met another Goodfriend, from an extended family. They got to talking about the name, trying to determine a connection, and the woman asked my mother something that implied she was Jewish.
"I'm not Jewish," my mother answered.
"We're all Jewish; all the Goodfriends are," was the reply.
So that night my mom called her parents, who still were living then, and they confirmed it. Yes, in fact, my grandfather was Jewish on his father's side. He never talked about it. He was not fond of his father, and he also knew that his ancestry, if it were known, might hold him back in his relentless march up the ladder of the American Dream. He was a suspicious man, but I wonder if his suspicions weren't valid in this case. Would a known Jew have been promoted to foreman tool maker at Hunter Pressed Steel Co. in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in 1930?
They never told my mother, because they didn't think it mattered. By the time I found out I was part Jewish, I was 22, and it didn't matter much to me, either. The irony was, the public high school I had attended was largely Jewish, and at the time I couldn't date the pretty Jewish girls I knew because it would have offended their grandparents if they brought home a goy.
But knowing my grandfather's secret shed some light on some incidents in my mother's history: the way she sometimes felt herself singled out or rejected without reason in some institutions, and her father's fierceness in response when that happened.
Later we pieced together the family. The Goodfriends were a thriving and learned New York Hungarian-Jewish family, and my grandfather's father, David, was the "black sheep" of the family, a designation he earned permanently by marrying an Irish Catholic girl and moving to Philadelphia.
The family name, which we had assumed was a pure Ellis Island creation, appears in Europe as Gutfraind or Gutfreund. There are not many of them, and it's a fair bet that most of us are related on some level.
If learning I had some Jewish in me didn't make any difference in my daily life, it did slowly change the way I knew, and felt, the history of the Jews. After all, that drop of blood I inherited from my Pop-Pop would have been sufficient to send me to Sobibor in another time and place.
Since then, I've read of other Goodfriends, including some who survived the Holocaust, and some who didn't.
And I read of Yossef Gutfreund, a tall, burly man like my grandfather. Yossef was a wrestling referee, 40 years old, when he accompanied the small Israeli team to Munich in 1972.
In the iconic images of that tragedy, Gutfreund is the body you see in the shattered helicopter cockpit, torn and bleeding and dead and still strapped upright in the seat.
In honor of him, cousin on some level to my grandfather and my mother and my son and me, I will be remembering what one almost forgotten root of my family tree endured in Europe, and I won't be seeing Munich the movie.
We loved him, because he was Pop-Pop. But when I stand back and think about him, as I approach the age he was when I first knew him, I realize he was not especially a nice man. Nor do I think he'd ever have wanted to be known as one. They were a tough brood, his clan, and they nursed grudges and even though he had ten siblings, seven of whom survived to adulthood, he was estranged from the families of all but one of them by the time I knew him.
And he rarely talked about his family or his past. We knew little beyond his odd family name, "Goodfriend," that he had and bequeathed to my mother as her middle name. Nobody else we knew, growing up in the Pennsylvania countryside, had that name. It had a firm, warm, familial quality that seemed to ill-suit the clan that bore it. My grandfather had been raised in a Catholic home, we knew, but my grandparents on that side never attended any sort of religious service, except for weddings and funerals. Their children married in the local Schwenkfelder church, because it was local.
Bill Goodfriend had thick, wiry dark hair and a dark complexion, which he also bequeathed to my mother. She often was mistaken for Italian.
Later, when I was in college, my mother had a career in social work in Philadelphia. There, lo and behold, she met another Goodfriend, from an extended family. They got to talking about the name, trying to determine a connection, and the woman asked my mother something that implied she was Jewish.
"I'm not Jewish," my mother answered.
"We're all Jewish; all the Goodfriends are," was the reply.
So that night my mom called her parents, who still were living then, and they confirmed it. Yes, in fact, my grandfather was Jewish on his father's side. He never talked about it. He was not fond of his father, and he also knew that his ancestry, if it were known, might hold him back in his relentless march up the ladder of the American Dream. He was a suspicious man, but I wonder if his suspicions weren't valid in this case. Would a known Jew have been promoted to foreman tool maker at Hunter Pressed Steel Co. in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in 1930?
They never told my mother, because they didn't think it mattered. By the time I found out I was part Jewish, I was 22, and it didn't matter much to me, either. The irony was, the public high school I had attended was largely Jewish, and at the time I couldn't date the pretty Jewish girls I knew because it would have offended their grandparents if they brought home a goy.
But knowing my grandfather's secret shed some light on some incidents in my mother's history: the way she sometimes felt herself singled out or rejected without reason in some institutions, and her father's fierceness in response when that happened.
Later we pieced together the family. The Goodfriends were a thriving and learned New York Hungarian-Jewish family, and my grandfather's father, David, was the "black sheep" of the family, a designation he earned permanently by marrying an Irish Catholic girl and moving to Philadelphia.
The family name, which we had assumed was a pure Ellis Island creation, appears in Europe as Gutfraind or Gutfreund. There are not many of them, and it's a fair bet that most of us are related on some level.
If learning I had some Jewish in me didn't make any difference in my daily life, it did slowly change the way I knew, and felt, the history of the Jews. After all, that drop of blood I inherited from my Pop-Pop would have been sufficient to send me to Sobibor in another time and place.
Since then, I've read of other Goodfriends, including some who survived the Holocaust, and some who didn't.
And I read of Yossef Gutfreund, a tall, burly man like my grandfather. Yossef was a wrestling referee, 40 years old, when he accompanied the small Israeli team to Munich in 1972.
... Gutfreund apparently heard the rattling of the door at the threshold of that ground-floor duplex, the apartment the other Israelis called the Big Wheels' Inn because it housed senior members of the delegation. When the door cracked open in the darkness, he could make out the barrels of several weapons. He threw his 290 pounds against the door and shouted a warning: "Danger, guys! Terrorists!" For critical seconds Gutfreund succeeded in staying their entrance, allowing his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, to shatter a rear window and flee to safety through a backyard garden. But the terrorists, using their rifle barrels to crowbar their way inside, soon had Gutfreund subdued on the floor.
In the iconic images of that tragedy, Gutfreund is the body you see in the shattered helicopter cockpit, torn and bleeding and dead and still strapped upright in the seat.
In honor of him, cousin on some level to my grandfather and my mother and my son and me, I will be remembering what one almost forgotten root of my family tree endured in Europe, and I won't be seeing Munich the movie.
