It's blowing a gale, and thunderous waves are crashing against the sea wall. I've brought my 95-year-old father to the pretty little town of Peel, on the west coast of the Isle of Man, and the weather is not being kind.
On 13 April 1939, my father boarded the SS President Roosevelt and sailed from Hamburg to Southampton. Three months later, my mother (they didn’t meet until 1943) made the same voyage on board the SS Washington (pictured above).
My perspective on an immigrant’s journey is almost wholly defined by my paternal grandparents, Sara and Julius Seidel. I knew them. I knew their accents. I knew that just about everything in their lives grew from leaving their childhood homes and ma...
I suppose it’s not surprising, if you embark on a journey in search of your family roots, that you end up visiting a lot of cemeteries. That is, after all, where you’re most likely to find your forebears.
Setting out to follow the footsteps of my paternal grandparents, Sara (nee. Jaffe) and Julius Seidel, from their birthplaces in Eastern Europe to America, has been a lesson in realizing how few details I know about their lives — and how the spec...
