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, blatant hypocrisy -- when it comes to meat eating is a topic for
Kornmehl butcher shops
Losing Freud, Finding Stella
It's been nearly a year now since I started Freud's Butcher, and what a roller coaster ride it's been! I'll talk more about that in August, the actual one-year blogiversary. It's just a fortuitous coincidence that these last few weeks have made me re-examine one of the blog's basic premises, while reminding me why I started writing here. My Mother's Story -- and She Stuck to
The Last of the Kornmehl Butchers (Maybe)
I’m excited to welcome as my first guest poster one of my newly discovered relatives. Jill Leibman Kornmehl is the daughter-in-law of Nathan Kornmehl, at 96 years old the patriarch of the Kornmehl family. At least as far as I know. New branches of the family keep cropping up. I'm not ready to say anything definitive -- thus the title I gave this post. The more genealogical
Did Freud Eat Kosher?
My mother didn't talk much about her early life in Vienna, but one of the things she told me was that Sigmund Freud's wife used to buy kosher meat from one of her uncles. I recently learned the identity of this uncle: It was Siegmund Kornmehl, who had a kosher butcher shop on the ground floor of 19 Berggasse,* where Freud's home and offices were located. (It's now the Sigmund