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 »
Category Archives: Meat
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 experienced make him angry or bitter. I also learned that his kosher butcher shop… 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 »
Coming Soon: My Month of (Mostly) Meats
In my last post, I mentioned my corned beef bliss at the Second Avenue Deli, my visit to the Leo Baeck Institute, and my planned excursion to the Tenement Museum. In different ways, all three experiences reminded me that I’ve been neglecting the meat portion of this blog — the contemplation of what life might… Continue Reading »
