In my backlog of unfinished posts, this one — started in November 2019 — seemed the most timely for this pandemic Passover. It’s partly elegiac, which fits the current mood, but it’s also about finding new family. And about endurance. A deli-denying newscaster plays a part in the narrative too. Fake news! Rolled Beef, Redux… Continue Reading »
Category Archives: Meat
A Meaty Heritage
It’s day 16 of the Family History Writing Challenge and I’m feeling grateful that I’m not a vegetarian. It’s bad enough to have to face the dire fates of various family members while exploring the past; I’m not sure I could cope with feeling guilty about the fact that they were butchers. My ambivalence –nay,… Continue Reading »
A Fowl Business: Another Kornmehl Family Butcher Shop (& Freud’s Likely Aversion to It)
This is Day 11 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018 In my last post, I outlined several questions arising from Adolf Schweizer’s emigration form that I was hoping to tackle. The first one related to the nature of the butcher shop that Adolf owned–or worked in. It was very easily answered. In the section… Continue Reading »
Asser Levy: America’s First Kosher Butcher
Knowing of my interest in the the history of Jewish butchers, the ever-helpful Philip Trauring of the Blood and Frogs Jewish genealogy blog sent me a link to a post from New York’s Tenement Museum, “Keeping Kosher in 17th Century New York:” November 15th, 1660 was, by any means, a normal day in the small… Continue Reading »
Rolled Beef: “The Giant Panda of Deli Meats”
I learned a great deal about the late Nathan Kornmehl from the many testimonials that were sent to the memorial page of this blog. By all accounts, he was a generous, kind man, someone who didn’t let the tremendous adversity he faced from the Nazis make him angry or bitter. I also learned that his… Continue Reading »
Freud’s Butcher, Year One: Five Highlights
It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since I wrote my first post here, a speculation on whether Freud ate kosher. It’s been quite the wild ride since then — a statement that might surprise those who think that genealogy is boring. But if you use the term family history — emphasis on… Continue Reading »
My Family’s Butcher Shops
When I started this blog, I knew that my mother’s uncles in Vienna had butcher shops, plural, and that one of them sold meat — kosher meat, my mother said — to Sigmund Freud’s wife. It wasn’t until I did a lot more research that I was able to put names to the butchers, however,… Continue Reading »
Foie Gras, Schmaltz & Grammel: The Food of My People
Foie gras has always been a guilty pleasure. It’s ridiculously expensive, it’s fattening… and then there’s the whole animal cruelty question (which I’ve discussed a bit here). So I’m not sure whether my discovery that it is a traditional Jewish food makes me feel more or less guilty about it. My journey of goose liver… Continue Reading »
Art vs. History: The Butcher Shop in Vienna’s Freud Museum
I have a fantasy, which is not insanely far outside the realm of reality, so maybe I should call it a very ambitious goal: When Freud’s Butcher the book is finished and published, I would like to have my book party in Siegmund Kornmehl’s former butcher shop. That’s not the very ambitious part. The shop… Continue Reading »
Rudolph Kornmehl: 3 Butcher Shops & the End of a Jewish Era in Vienna
I named my blog for Siegmund Kornmehl because he had the luck to open one of his three butcher shops in the same building where Sigmund Freud lived and practiced, but I actually know a bit more about Siegmund’s brother Rudolph. Like Siegmund, he owned and operated three butcher shops in Vienna. There were other… Continue Reading »
