Interview with Fannie Siegle Robbins

3/21/1981, Pittsburgh PA

Interviewed by Alan Saul and Ruth Saul

Additional comments by Emalene Siegle Friedman

Now I’m going to tell you from the day I was born. I was born on February 2, 1890, in Kalusz, Galicia. Kalusz is a small village near Stanislaus, it’s Polish, and it was under the rule of Franz-Joseph and Maria Teresa, and I remember, my first memory of the town, that the Emperor, who was the Emperor of Austria or the King of Austria and the Emperor of Hungary and Poland, and he came to town and we had a parade, and the Jewish congregation came to greet him with the Torah, because he was very good to the Jews, and they honored him with the Torah. He was very kind to Jews and gave them privileges; otherwise, with other dictators, they had no privileges, but under him, he gave the Jews a lot of privileges.

My memory is living with my grandmother, Sarah Schütz was her personal name, and she married Berl Kaufman and they had this only child which was my mother, and her name was Esther Kaufman. This is all in that town, in Kalusz, where I was born. About the courtship: my father, whose name was Gedalia Siegle, and his father was a very good businessman, a horse trader, and other animals, and he went always on a buying trip, and he was an old time businessman, but my mother’s father wanted to join the army, and so her mother, who was Sarah, said, well I will divorce you if you go to the army. Well, he went to the army, and he came home on furlough, and she divorced him.

Well, perhaps you had to, there was conscription, you had to go, but he did it of his own accord and he became an officer, but he was home on furlough, and during that time they got the divorce. So, my mother lived with them and she met this Gedalia Siegle and they were very much in love, and they pointed this out to their parents and the parents got together and they got married. So, they had one child and my father was promised by his father that he would get a year and a half kesht, which meant they would feed them. My grandfather on my father’s side had a certain amount of wealth, he had a nice home, and he lived along a lake, and it was very beautiful and they had what is called a mablsimmer which in German means a furniture room, and in that room they had carpet and upholstered furniture and of course the children were never allowed to go in there. That’s where you put stuff to cool it, cause the door was always shut, and it was a mablesimmer, and they had a front porch, and they had fruit, and everything, and a lake out front. Grandpa Siegle had 7 brothers under the name of Siegle. They are all gone but I knew some of them. The Siegle family in McKeesport, they were the children of….I forget the name… They were all in this cattle business. They were not any better off. They were all business people, which was a rarity in those days, because my grandfather would go to the next town, to Stanislaus to buy this cattle, and amongst them all, they were all together. So his only son, he didn’t have to learn a trade—a tailor, or a shoemaker, God forbid! Not his children! But my father didn’t like that sort of thing, getting those keshts, that was getting upkeep, a dowry.

I’ll give you the Siegle family and I will give you the Kaufman family.

The different Siegles’ names: his name was Gedalia Siegle, that was my father. The other one was David Siegle, an uncle. I don’t really know those names very well. My grandfather Itzig Mates was what you call a swinger. He was not 100% uneducated, he was educated and a business man and a ladies’ man, he was very handsome and very new-fashioned. Now we’ll talk about him. He came to this country to look over and see how his son was getting along. After we were here in this country I would say 8 or 9 or 10 years, I don’t remember, he came and he brought his son in law Sam, because Sam was on kest for life and lived with him for life with his only daughter. The daughter’s name, my aunt, was Morris Gardiner’s only sister…the mother, his wife was Chaje Siegle. She was a little tiny person. She never was here. She was a little tiny person and didn’t have much to say. He was the big man. He was everything. He was very new-fashioned, that grandfather. So he didn’t know how to get rid of this son-in-law, so he decided to take him to America and see that he made a living for …her name was Alte. Alte. Alte was my grandfather’s sister, there was only the two children. No…Alte was my father’s...my grandfather’s child. My father’s sister, yes. And she was pampered because they only had her. And my father decided he didn’t want any more dowry, he was going to America, because his father didn’t let him learn a shoemaker trade or a tailor trade, that was the only thing that was open. He wanted him to be either a rabbi or something like that, which he didn’t relish. And so he went to America. Now I think I finished what he did in Europe. They never lived with his father. They lived with Sarah because Sarah didn’t have a husband, she had divorced him, my mother’s mother.

And we lived in a little house, it was not beautiful like my grandfather’s house, but we had a cow, and we had everything. I remember seeing her coming from the stable where the cow was kept. We didn’t have a farm; it was just a little place with ground and a cow and all the good things in life, but she resented this son-in-law because they had a baby and he didn’t work and they never got along. So anyhow my father picked himself up and came to this country.

Then, before he went my mother gave birth to the second girl, which was very disheartening to the grandmother, she said "He’s not even good enough to have a boy!" She always told him that, so they didn’t get along very well.

After he got here and he saved up a few dollars, he wrote to his wife and he sent to her to come to America.

When he first came to America as with everybody else, they peddled, they went house to house and sold everything. And next to him was Morris Kaufman [of the Kaufman Department Store family?] who came on the boat together; he came from Germany and my father came from Austria. My father came to a cousin in Pittsburgh, that was Joseph Richman (Yossel), and Yossel Richman was the first immigrant from Kalusz that came to this country, and he brought over so many! I don’t know anything about who brought Joe Richman to this country, but he brought his brothers and his mother and the whole family, which was a half a dozen children and a widowed mother.

They saved enough to bring over the rest of the immigrants. So, my grandmother said, forget it, I don’t allow you to go to this country of these wild people, and where my grandchildren, which she loved very much, and she doesn’t want to let them go, and take the steamship ticket and send it back, so she did. Well, he waited for a year, and he thought she would come, and she didn’t come, so he decided to come home again.

When he came home, the first thing they did to him was put him in prison because he was due for the army. So through some bribe and so on and so forth, he got out, he had an excuse, and he tried again to look for work, because he used to walk in and his father would hand a piece of meat or groceries to take to his house, because he lived with the other side of the family, and he said, on that I can’t live, and he decided he’s going back to America. And after he was gone, and after he was gone, she, Nechamah, was born, and after Nechamah was a year old or so, her mother decided she can’t stay here any more, they were in love, and so she wrote again for him to send her a steamship ticket and she would come.

Now I’ll tell you about the trip. That I remember very distinctly.

We went to Berlin by rail, with a wagon to the railroad station, and then I remember driving through the city of Berlin on a wagon, and the flowerpots on the buildings, and I remember saying to my mother how beautiful, the city was so beautiful. And we drove to the steamship where we got it, not in Hamburg, I don’t remember if it was Havre…

Kalusz, I don’t know how many families. It was a very small place. I had never seen a big city before. So when I got to Berlin, that was the first large city I’d ever seen, and I never forgot it, on account of the flowerboxes. I came when I was six years old, not quite, because I came here in June, and the following February I was six years old. And I tell you, on the boat, we were all so sick, because we were down in steerage, and naturally seasick, and seasick, and then you got out of the seasickness and I went to the toilet, and a seaman followed me and tried to molest me. And would you believe I remember that.

In the boat. And we were supposed to land in New York, but instead we landed in Baltimore, because those steamship owners, they were crooks, see,and if it was good for them to land in Baltimore rather than New York…. So after we got to this country my father didn’t know where to locate us, but he knew that some boat had picked us up. Somebody put us on a train to Pittsburgh, and there was my mother that couldn’t speak a word of their languages here, all she had was a card, I remember that card and the address Gedalia Siegle Pittsburgh and the address in Pittsburgh—she held that card up and showed it to everybody so finally they got her into Pittsburgh and there she was with three children and the luggage and all her baggage and everything on her back and she had this Joe Richman’s address. And I remember our arrival, you know we came in, and we stood, the 2 girls, Blanche was 2 years old, and her [Nechamah/Emalene] was 1 ½ and my mother straightened her dress, and they said to him, "Gedalia, where did you get that doll!" And he said, "My children, they’re all pretty." And they said, "No, this doll, we don’t have such a thing!"

I must have already been six years old, because Nechamah was 1 ½ and I’m five years older.

First we lived in Richman’s house which was halfway past Pride Street, I remember…