I feel I could have titled the above photograph "Central European Immigrant Family," but I also think that, if one is going to employ stereotypes, it's important to get the correct ones, at least.  So if it's not immediately apparent, let me point out that we are not looking at shtetl Jews (which is a category beyond respectable, having acquired serious romantic connotations), but a family of middle-class, assimilated, urban Jews (with shtetl roots).  The man of the family, my grandfather, has been away for the last couple of years.  Soon these five will take a train trip from Prague to Cherbourg, where they will get on a boat that will bring them to him, to America.  They don't know that, where they are going, they will be economically less well off.  They also don't know that leaving their comfortable home in Ungvár will in effect save all of their lives from the unsparing maelstrom of the Holocaust.  The two boys, Joe and Alex, whose father wore a uniform of the Central Powers in World War I, will grow up and enlist in the US Army to take part in the liberation of Europe.

I find the photograph kind of haunting, although I'm not sure I would have this reaction in the absence of a family relationship.  Is it because my mother occupies the central focus? Is it because I have personal knowledge of the way her life turned out?  To me, the toughness of my grandmother is already apparent; my mother seems here, as she always seemed, so fragile in comparison.  Some of grandma's toughness must have rubbed off, though, since my mother survived into her early eighties despite nearly a lifetime of bipolar disorder, originally diagnosed as schizophrenia, with symptoms including delusional paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, a history of nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalization, antipsychotic and antidepressant medication, psychotherapy and, very likely during the 1950s, electroshock therapy.  Oh yeah, during that time, as a working single mother (my father died in 1949), she also managed to raise two boys-my brother and me.

Everyone in both of these photographs is gone, now.  Sadly, Aunt Rosalind, my mother's baby sister, was the first to go.  Uncle Alex, whom I see in the portrait above as equally terrified and defiant, died a few weeks ago.  I knew them all, and wish I could have known them all better.

Site Index
The Unguarded Asylum
Paktorovics/Pactovis Family History.
My grandmother, Melán Paktorovics, with the first four of her five children: (from the left) Josef, Alexander, Jolán (my mother), and (on the right) Edith.  This photograph was taken some time around 1923-1924, just prior to their emigration from what had formerly been Ungvár, Hungary (see map below).  Her fifth child, Rosalind (below), was born in New York, NY, in 1928 .

Around ten years ago, I nominated myself as our family historian, bought a portable cassette tape recorder and a microphone I could attach to my telephone, and started interviewing my mother and her surviving siblings, my Uncles Alex and Joe, by long distance.  I contacted a cousin who is a member of the Mormon church, and got her to send me a copy of the genealogy she had acquired through their search services.  I started to make copies of the oldest photographs in my mother’s family albums.  Unfortunately, through a combination of my long hours at work, sporadic focus, memory gaps (my own as well as theirs), a rather late start considering their ages, downright incompetence on my part (I accidentally recorded trivial material over an irreplaceable fifteen minutes of my Uncle Joe's earliest memories), and occasionally a seeming reluctance on their part to revisit certain details of their lives, whether they remembered them or not, I didn’t get very far. At one time or another, my mother had told me interesting stories about herself, and the relatives and friends who appeared in her albums (she had five); but when I belatedly tried to get her to tell these stories “for the record”, the results were far from satisfying.  I cursed my poor memory for failing to provide adequate backup; she’d gone through the albums with me more than once, yet I had forgotten a good 95% of what she’d told me.

When my mother passed away a few years ago, rather suddenly (there were numerous warning signs that I ignored), my brother and I found among her possessions a package containing family records, documents, and artifacts.  I was already aware of a number of facts regarding our Central European origins (in Subcarpathia, at that time the NE frontier of Hungary) and immigration to the US, and I expected these to provide unambiguous confirmation of what I had been told, as well as fill in significant details.  However, for every question they seemed to answer, ten more were raised.  And now the one person who could have provided further answers about them was gone.

What this is about.
Location of Ungvar, Hungary, now Uzhhorod, Ukraine.  Adapted from original map, Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland" (Dr. Paul R. Magocsi, 1995), which shows the current borders of  Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine. Before WW I, all of the areas included in this map were within the Northeast borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Nevertheless, there they are.  Between them they present at least six different languages: Hungarian, German, Czech/Slovak, Russian/Ukrainian, Hebrew, and English.  I found myself bewildered by my mother’s insistence on keeping these things hidden from us until she was no longer around to illuminate them.  These web pages will represent my efforts to document everything I know and everything I find out about our family, the documents and pictures that provide hard evidence for our ancestry back to the end of the 19th century, and their relationship to the times and cultures in which they lived.  With respect to the earliest, there are more gulfs to bridge than those of just time and distance; one must confront the Holocaust, which obliterated virtually the entire Jewish population and culture that had existed in Austro-Hungarian Subcarpathia when they left.  Nevertheless, this not a "Holocaust Memorial" site; in some respects, I feel that would be presumptuous, considering that my immediate ancestors left before anyone (except perhaps the psychopathic Bohemian Corporal himself) could have had an inkling of what was to come.  However, as it is with all Jews of European extraction, as it is perhaps with all Jews everywhere, it is part of who we are.  As it happened, my mother's grandparents were all deceased before the Holocaust began in earnest (the last, her maternal grandfather, died in 1938); "They didn't live to see it, thank God," was the way my Uncle Joe put it.  On the other hand, there can be little doubt about the fate of most of their relatives and friends, who unfortunately did live to see it.

Whether any of these pictures, documents, and commentaries will be of interest to anyone outside of my immediate family, I have no idea.  I am not a scholar (of history or culture, anyway), and I have yet to travel more than a few miles east of Budapest.  Publishing my “researches” on the web certainly qualifies as a vanity project, but I hope it’s not entirely in vain.  In any case, I think of it at least partially as a gift to my daughter, Sieglinde, my brother Phil and his family, and any future descendants that come after them.  In addition, it is perhaps for my cousins and ancestors, living and deceased, known and unknown.  The rest of it, I suppose, is just for me.

The project continues here, or via the "Family, Page 2" link at left.


 
 
 
 
Rosalind Pactovis, my grandmother's fifth child.  This photograph was taken around 1930, when she was ~3 years old.  Aunt Rosalind and my mother spoke to each other regularly, and I think at times their conversations helped to keep my mother sane.

A Central European/American Scrapbook.
 
Section of a pre-World War I Gönczy map of Ung megye (Ung County), showing location of Ungvár and nearby towns (Ketergény, Minaj, Nagy Kapos, Agtelek, Horlyó) where Pactovis ancestors lived.  Note the proximity to Munkács (now Mukachevo, Ukraine, about 25 miles SE), which was a major center of urban Jewish life until World War II.  Sighet is located ~90 miles to the SE (see adapted Magocsi map above), at the time in Máramaros megye.  Note: High quality images of Gönczy maps of all Hungarian counties of the period can be found at http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/maps/1910/
vmlista.htm.  Each county appears to be available in two versions with different scales.