Davidson Family Saga

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=82 BGCOLOR="#003333" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#FFFFFF" FACE="Arial" ><B>Davnob Family History</B></FONT><B>     |   </B><B>  </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Davnob Family History"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> <B>Davidson Family Saga</B>   |   <A HREF="id3.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Oral History"><U>Oral History</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id4.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="From the Family Reunion"><U>From the Family Reunion</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id15.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Moishe of Hull"><U>Moishe of Hull</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id6.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Avram Haim Davidovitz"><U>Avram Haim Davidovitz</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id16.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Salits of Vilna"><U>The Salits of Vilna</U></A></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#003333" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id2_m.htm#p1" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Davidson Family Saga"><U>Part One</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id2_m.htm#p2" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Davidson Family Saga"><U>Part Two</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id2_m.htm#p3" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Davidson Family Saga"><U>Part Three</U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" height=398 BGCOLOR="#006633" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <I>Davidson Family Saga</I></div> <div> by Uncle Joe</div> <bR> <div> The Davidson Saga by Joe Davidson (1960) first appeared in the early gestetner printed editions of Davnob at then end of the 1950s - and was reprinted in the early 1990s.  </div> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="p1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A>PART ONE (First Published in DAVNOB in September 1958)</div> <bR> <div> To the limited but knowledgeable readership of DAVNOB, it would be pointless to say that we are a family of immense numbers. They all know this! But there are many in the family to whom it would be good to offer the reminder that even 40 years ago we were a big family. </div> <div> Should we therefore, just to get this saga into good chronological order, start right at the beginning - so that we may know from whence we came? </div> <div> On a fateful day of March, in the year 1894 - 64 years ago - a ship, casually known as one of the "immigrant ships" docked in the port of Hull. Standing, crowded together, on the deck, were some hundreds of frightened-looking Jewish men and women, each holding tightly on to their queer-looking bundles - bundles which held all their earthly possessions. </div> <bR> <div> They had reached their destination. </div> <bR> <div> Some were lone pioneers to this land of freedom and opportunity. Others came to relatives who had arrived a year, or some years, before, and having found work of some kind or other, had established a sort of bridgehead to which their loved-ones, whom they had left in Russia - the Land of Oppression - could one by one be brought over - and for whom the fare money, shilling by shilling, was hungrily scraped together. </div> <bR> <div> But, my dear readers, it is no part of this chronicle to recall the poignant story of those immigrant days. We of DAVNOB are concerned in this writing with only one of these immigrants, a young and lovely girl, standing white-faced, with heart-throbbing - and wide, frightened eyes that searched behind the iron barricades on the quayside for a brother she had not seen for five years - her eldest brother, who was to meet and shelter her in England. </div> <bR> <div> As she looked to her left and to right, a cold dread and terror must have gripped her. Had anything gone wrong? Had there been some terrible misunderstanding? Were the papers she c1utched all in order? How could she explain to all these lordly Immigration, Customs and Passport officials, who barked orders and herded them together, that her brother Malech should be there, that the fare was paid, and that Malech would make everything right? </div> <bR> <div> How she must have prayed, "Send Malech, Send him quickly." </div> <bR> <div> And then she saw him, and almost fainting from joyous relief, she saw that he was running towards her. </div> <bR> <div> Soon she had left the dockside and was secure and happy with her brother and his fam11y. </div> <bR> <div> And so, Annie Salit, at 16 years of age, having left her homeland, her widowed mother, two younger brothers and her elder sister, faced a new life, in a strange, new land. </div> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="p2"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A>PART TWO (First Published in DAVNOB in March 1959)</div> <div> For Annie Salit the new life she had entered, after so much anxiety and difficulty, yet with so much hope, presented itself as a picture of which the main outlines were cheerlessly familiar - poverty and insecurity.</div> <bR> <div> These were indeed the conditions which her first sixteen years of life had introduced, and now, amongst so many things in England which were so different, these two she was immediately to recognise as being still her closest and most loyal companions.</div> <bR> <div> Had she been of a reflective turn of mind it would no doubt have occurred to her that there is nothing so consistently similar in its implications and reactions as the similarity to be found in the cramped lives of all that great international brotherhood, the poor and underprivileged. </div> <bR> <div> Uncle Malech was a tailor and had two fundamental aims as a philosophy upon which his life was to be fashioned - the first was to be a pious, honest and upright Jew, and very close second, to be respected as a good tailor and a sincere craftsman. Somewhere, a fairly long way behind, was a third aim - somehow or other to make a living. If one is to record history, one must be jealously careful of fact, and this history shows that his whole life was a reflection of his success in the achievement of the first two aims, but in the matter of earning a 11ving, one can only find a depressing record of failure. </div> <bR> <div> For many years of his life - almost the whole of it - he lived hand in hand with all the restraints on pleasure that poverty enforces, and yet with it all there seemed to shine from his handsome, bearded face a benign inner tranquillity that seemed to rise above, and even to ignore the shortcomings of his material conditions. </div> <bR> <div> He was not only liked, but sincerely respected by all who knew him. </div> <bR> <div> Five years before my mother had arrived, he himself had left Vilna and reached England, almost penniless - an immigrant seeking a relative in Hull, a Mr. Marmer, also a tailor, who had already achieved a precarious foothold in the town. Uncle Malech had followed the usua1 pattern amongst the immigrants from "Der Heim". He had left his wife and daughter Rachel, until he could, by scraping a black-bread-and-herring livelihood, save enough to send them the fare money. It took two years before he was reunited with his family. </div> <bR> <div> A small house - if one can dignify such a brokendown collection of bricks and mortar with the name of a house - in a slum street, known as North Street, had, by almost superhuman efforts, become the home of the Salits, in this great Mecca of freedom, to which the eyes of so many Jews in Russland were turned. </div> <bR> <div> The slum areas are with us today, but the great tides of progress that have swept across our land, have almost obliterated from human memory the unmentionable obscenity of the slums of the years 1900 to 1913, and North Street, if one is to really appreciate its standing as a slum amongst slums, requires a far more descriptive pen than mine. I remember it always only in association with the word "squalor" . The word "landlords" in the minds of poor people who pay rent, has always had a most unenviable connotation, and the mental picture has always been of a sort of rich pot-bellied oppressor, who lived on the sufferings and the blood, sweat and tears of the poor. </div> <bR> <div> The landlords of North Street would be unjustly described by such a picture. From the bottom of my heart I pity them! For "rent" to the citizens of North Street was merely a sort of abstract economic formula slightly understood, very much disliked, and consequently, held very much in abeyance. </div> <bR> <div> Some refrained from paying on the twin grounds of Principle and Inability; others purely because they had no money. But as far as the landlords were concerned, on any grounds, they just didn't get any! </div> <bR> <div> Here Uncle Malech lived, and here, in the next four years, were born to him three other daughters. </div> <bR> <div> In the early Spring and late Autumn he was busy - he had a few coats to make. But in the ever-lengthening intervals between, how he lived in the absence of work is just one of those miracles, that like all other miracles, have no comprehensible explanation. </div> <bR> <div> It was into this unwholesome little world of day-to-day anxiety, insecurity and hardship, that the young girl who was to be our mother, was introduced. </div> <div>  <A NAME="p3"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A>PART THREE (written 1960 but first Published in DAVNOB in 1988)</div> <bR> <div> Annie Salit was now a member of the Hull community, and before very long she was found a job in a slipper factory. I have never clearly known just what she did in this factory, and I should think that my brothers and sisters would have the same difficulty in imagining her in factory surroundings. </div> <bR> <div> Here she met two friends, Pechy and Annie, and this trio became, during the years that followed, inseparable. </div> <bR> <div> For about two years the three friends worked the hours usual to workers in those times, from eight in the morning to seven at night. The five day week was still just a beam in the eye of the most imaginative of social reform dreamers. (Yet from all I have heard of this period, and indeed from my own very early experiences of it, providing you had a job - however lowly a job - there existed a sort of warm, human happiness in these workshop relationships. One must remember that within the workshop you had people of generally the same educational standards, the same hopes, the same fears; they were participants in the same simple pleasures and subject to the same type of all-too-frequent misfortune. </div> <bR> <div> There was therefore a closely-knit and somewhat interdependent community of interests between them. </div> <bR> <div> My mother always thought and spoke of these two short years with a certain wistful yet pleasurable glow. </div> <bR> <div> In the October of the year 1898 there happened what was to be perhaps the most wonderful moment in all my mother's life, for there came the meeting with the man who was destined to be our father. </div> <bR> <div> He was some ten years older than she, of a far higher level of education and experience, and had travelled much in America and Europe after having left his native Poland. Whilst our mother had come from a poor and working-class background, our father had enjoyed in his childhood and youth the comfort and considerable refinement of a middle-class and fairly moneyed background. I rarely remember him speaking of his own parents and family. Some deep quarrel seemed to have caused an irreparable rift between them, and had caused him as a very young man to leave his home and seek a livelihood in America. During the next few years, both in America and later in France, he seems to have met with little success - a situation which seems to have continued when he eventually came to Hull. At the time of his meeting with our mother he had become a liner in the tailoring trade - a machiner. He was an extremely handsome man, and in those days would have stood out among his contemporaries, not only for his looks, but for his obvious refinement in outlook and behaviour. </div> <bR> <div> They must have achieved love at almost first sight for within six months - in the following March - they were married and set up home in a small four-roomed house. They were ideally happy in their love, despite the insecurity and irregular employment. </div> <bR> <div> Here in the following December, I was born, and I was named after my mother's father. </div> <bR> <div> During the next two and a half years their life followed the normal pattern of the Jewish working-class people of those days - long hours of work for a pittance in the short period of the year when tailoring was busy, interspersed with long stretches of unemployment, and no work aT all for at least half a year. How they lived, even for those who experienced it, was never quite explainable. This was a condition suffered by so many that a philosophy of resignation seemed to apply itself </div> <div> to this perpetual condition. The one substantial security in this great welter of insecurity in which our parents lived, was the love they had for one another - this was real, constant and never in any danger, no matter how hard and unkind material fate may have from time to time smitten them.</div> <div> It is from this noble and lovely element in the lives of our parents that l trace the pattern so beautifully woven into the family lives of all my brothers and sisters. It is ingrained in the very tissue and is consciously, or subconsciously, the first principle in the shaping of all that happens m every family situation.</div> <div> A little over two years after my birth, our brother Moishe came into the world. According to my mother, however great the happiness my birth brought her, this was transcended by the joy of her second born, for it appears that this second child - blue-eyed, golden-haired and of such perfection - had all Hull talking about him.</div> <div> I have always felt that although each one of her children was precious to her, our brother Moishe was perhaps closer to her heart than was any other. There no doubt other reasons for this, but these I will write about as they enter chronological rhythm of this saga.</div> <div> Sufficient for the moment if I allow myself a few saddening reflections on the impermanence of physical beauty!</div> <div> So bad had unemployment become in Hull at this time that within three months of our Moishe being born, our father left his wife and children and travelled to Bristol, where he had heard that there was some hopeful prospect of a job. After a short time so unbearable to both of them had this parting become, they decided, despite all the almost insurmountable difficulties of doing so - and they can be well imagined that Mama and the two children should go to Bristol. This they did, and being again united, they faced a strange and perhaps uncertain future, having left behind them relations and friends, and having started a new life amongst complete strangers. For here in Bristol it seemed that there might be hope.</div> <div> Did Bristol enfold this little family with a kindlier embrace than that which they had found in Hull? All our father wanted the chance of working, no matter how hard, for what God knows was just a meagre living even by the impoverished standards of 1900.</div> <div> But it was not to be. For here in Bristol they found the same insecurity and hardship. Here in Bristol they learned the bitter lesson that hardship and insecurity were the twin emblems of the working-class order in the tailoring trade. Geography made no difference. </div> <div> After twelve months in Bristol, and having established the great truth that Bristol and Hull, and indeed every other town, afforded the same ample opportunity of achieving uniformity in the Spartan virtue of doing without, by dint of Heaven knows what means, we returned to Hull.</div> <div> During the years that followed, my mother often spoke of her days in Bristol with an emphasis from which we were always quite certain that her memories were tinged with a bleak and barren joylessness. The story of her journey to Bristol, of having to change trains somewhere, of the kindly stranger who helped her in this nightmare journey with her two young children, and her cases, on a cold winter's evening, is very familiar to all my brothers and sisters. If it is possible to feel a great debt of gratitude to an unknown, then I believe that this feeling resides permanently in then hearts of all her children. Ancient and Unknown Stranger'. From the columns of DAVNOB however belatedly, we, the Davidsons, salute you, for you deserve an honoured place in this, our saga!</div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>