Dr. Emil Adler

Dr. Emil Adler lived in Franzenbad, Bohemia. His wife Ella May was from Vienna. Their daughter Hanna went to England in 1939, where she met and married Felix Braun. In 1948 they emigrated to Melbourne, Australia with their 2 daughters.
Source- Elisabeth Schiller, daughter.

Heinrich Adler was the only son of Jacob Adler, the fifth of six children. - four older and one younger sister.

The family lived in Tachau (Tachov), in the Greman speaking region of Bohemia in the western part of Czechoslovakia (mow the Czech Republic) close to the border of southern Germany. Records are scarce, but it can be assumed that Tachau was founded during the 7th or 8th century. It is thought that Jews lived in this area since the 12th century, and reliable information about Jewish settlement is found in castle archives for 1552.

The first officially recorded member of the Adler family was Juda, who died in 1760. No records exist about his father Joachim. Juda's son Jacob became bankrupt, after he over extended himself by purchasing a house, but his two sons, Seligmann and Emmanuel prospered.

Emmanual's son Jakob purchased a house (a house was a big expense for Jews in those days) and started an iron business. His son Heinrich concentrated on industrial enterprises which became very successful. He was responsible for creating Tachau's mother-of-pearl industry and founding the firm "Heinrich Adler". This was later taken over by his sons and later still Rudolf (Rudl) transferred the business to Wales where it is now run by Rudl's grandson, Richard Adler

Heinrich Alder, born on 1852, married Elvira Fanni Buschbaum on 17th June, 1881. She bore him seven children August (Gustl), Olga, Emil, Frieda, Hermine, Ernst and Fanny. She died two weeks after the birth of Fanny. On 3rd March, 1894 Heinrich was married to Marie Monat and they had five children; Elsa, Rudolf, Richard, Martha and Helene. Fanny contracted polio and died a young woman, the other eleven children all married.

My father refused to join the family business (all his brothers did) and was told if he wanted to become a doctor he would have to do it on his own. He went to Vienna where he persued his studies and earned a precarious living. I don't think there was any break in the family relationship as he went home for holidays, it was just the financial support that was withdrawn. He graduated, worked in Vienna, and then served as an officer during the first world war. This undermined his health, and contributed to his death at the age of 49.

Once he graduated his father was very proud of him - he had proved his mettle and stood on his own two feet, as a man should., not living on his father's money. After the war he worked in the general hospital in Vienna (this was still the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and in fact I believe that he must have been in Vienna before the war ended on 11th November 1918, because it is highly unlikely that he was discharged on the day of the Armistice and met my mother on the same day. Because they only knew each other for six weeks before they married on 18th December, 1918. My grandfather bought them "Sshloss Windsor" as a wedding present.

By all accounts my grandfather was an autocratic man who ruled his family sternly, but I remember him as a kindly old man, who smiled easily and always had a kind word for me. I was even allowed to sit in his rocking chair, when nobody else was. I was four years old when he died.

It would never have occurred to my grandfather that my father might have different ambitions than to settle in a health resort and practice mostly as a gyneacologist, or to ask his son's preferences. The family thought that my father did not have a business head (true) and so his elders decided what was good for him, and true to the times he accepted parental authority.

And so, in 1919, my parents settled down to marriage, and tried to run the business in Franzensbad.

-Hannah Brown