Sara Ranz

Her granddaughter Beverly writes: My grandmother, I adored her. She was a dear happy lady. I always remember her with a smile on her face. She used to come to visit us with her little brown bag in hand, always bringing hard cooked eggs and a roll for herself. I was hoping to have her eat something in my home, but she had the strength of convictions.

She walked to shul every Saturday, she had her own quiet way of observing her religion, and never imposed her beliefs on anyone. When I go to services on Friday night, and during the High Holy Days, I especially feel her presence, and approval for the faith she gave me. She was always trying to teach me Yiddish and I would try to teach her English. She could not say Pennsylvania and for some reason it tickled me.

When she was very ill, my father made sure she got excellent medical care and surgery for her cancer. She would just say she had a little cold, she never complained as the family gathered around her. When Joey came home from WW II, he took care of her like a baby. Surgery gave her another 2 years, enough time to see Madelynn born. I was so proud to take Madelynn to see her.

My father's shoe store was very busy during Easter, since every one bought new shoes, especially, for the children. When it coincided with Passover my grandmother would never let dinner begin until "Harry arrived," which was, of course, after the stores closed. There were happy dinners, with Howie, Joy and myself, under the table playing tricks.

Abraham & Sarah Ranz are buried in United Hebrew Cemetary, 122 Arthur Kill Rd., Staten Island, NY 10306. The exact location is Block 24, Row 13: Sarah is in grave 23 and Abraham is in grave 24. The plot is maintained by the Independent Slutzker Benevolent Association.

The following was added by Allen Ranz:

.....Most of the information I got about my grandfather came from my father and Uncle Jack, who regarded Abraham Ranz as an almost mythical figure and both identified strongly with him. I understand that Abraham, whose name while he was in Russia was Avram, pronounced as "Av-rum" came from a fairly educated family that may have included a rabbi or two, although in the old country rabbis were a dime a dozen. In past centuries, however, the family may have included peddlers, because the word "Ranzel," in Yiddish, means "knapsack." According to my father and Jack, he did not marry my grandmother in an arranged marriage, as was the custom, but eloped with her at the age of fourteen or fifteen against everyone's wishes, after having completely rejected the Jewish religion. My grandmother, Sarah, came from a family of Jewish tinkers, which were called Blechers, after the Yiddish word for tin, because they made their living by recycling old tin utensils. "Blecher" was used in lieu of a last name by everyone who practiced the occupation of tinker, and when my grandmother later came to America she told people that her maiden name was Sarah Black.

Because Blechers were regarded as low-classed, almost like Gypsies, my grandfather's elopement was not well received in the village where he had grown up. When the teen-aged newlyweds came back to his home town in a horse and wagon, angry villagers threw rocks at them. Abraham Ranz became a revolutionary labor agitator in Czarist Russia and ran afoul of the police. This, I heard, was the reason for his emigrating to America, though the story that he came here to avoid being drafted into the army may also be true, because in Russia conscription was often selectively enforced against uppity Jews. The story goes that he crossed the Atlantic in steerage, and landed first in Cuba, where he stayed for a few months, Abraham Ranz came to New York around 1894, which would have made him 25 years old at the time, and lived first in the Lower East Side. He sent for his wife and four year old son several years later and settled in East New York, Brooklyn, which was considered a step up from the teeming ghettoes of Manhattan. In spite of working fourteen hours a day, he continued as a socialist and a union organizer. Abe Ranz was one of the founders of the Jewish Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, a radical union of Yiddish speaking needle trade workers in New York City. He was also an associate of Daniel De Leon, founder of the Socialist Labor Party and later of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). Uncle Jack remembered attending De Leon's funeral in 1914 along with his father, at which several thousand left wing workers lined the street as the socialist leaders casket was carried through the streets of downtown Manhattan. Jack also remembered, as a teenager, acting as a bodyguard for his father when he was being threatened by labor gangsters, riding the subway with him armed with baseball bats.

In spite of having left school very early in life, Abraham Ranz was self-educated and spoke Yiddish, Russian, and absolutely un-accented English. Every night he read the Jewish Daily Forward and the Freiheit, a socialist newspaper in Yiddish. On Friday nights my grandmother, who was very religious, would shut off all the electric lights and have only Shabbos candles lit, but my grandfather would switch the lights back on to read his papers. When Jack, at the age of eight or so, complained that kids in school were making fun at him because of his payeses (Orthodox Jewish sidelocks), his father was outraged that his son should have to bear the brunt of ridicule as a result of old-fashioned mumbo-jumbo. He immediately got out a pair of scissors and cut the sidecurls off, making him a big hero to his second-oldest son. He also taught my father, Joe Ranz, about Darwin's theory of evolution (like his father Abe, Joe Ranz, was a confirmed atheist until his dying day).

The following was added by David Malkin:

I was only six years old when Grandpa died so I only knew him in the last years of his life, when he was very old and I was very young. Because of the age differential, and the fact that I saw him only occasionally, communication between us was minimal. The little that I do know about him, I learned from my mother, but she was one of the younger siblings, so the facts that she apprised me of were perhaps hand-me-downs and not first-hand knowledge.

I understand that Abraham, when he worked, he earned the grand total of $26.00 a week. On this, he raised nine children, and purchased a two-family house in Ozone Park, Queens. Neither Abraham nor Sarah ever, as it was related to me, actually purchased the house. The mortgage was structured so that it was only the interest that absolutely had to be paid, and the bank retained title to the property, which reverted to the lending institution upon Sarah's death. Again, I don't know if these are the facts, but they are what I was told and what I have gleaned over the years.

I know that Abraham was a capmaker, a trade that, these days, is essentially, if not totally, non-existent. Whether he was a capmaker before he arrived in America, I don't know. If someone taught him the trade in Europe, I have no idea who that person might have been. I do know that he was an atheist, in contrast to Sarah, who was devout. I know that he loved to read, but there is some confusion about Sarah's literacy.

I have a long-ago memory of arriving at the house in Ozone Park on a Saturday morning with my mother, probably some time after Abraham died, and going to the shul to find Grandma Sarah because she wasn't at home. To my mother's surprise, Sarah was following the service in a siddur. As far as my mother knew, Grandma couldn't read, but I think what my mother had actually been told was that Grandma couldn't read English. I have a strong feeling that Sarah was not illiterate, but I have no idea of her level of education.

In many ways, my grandparents were a study in contrasts, but they both seem to have had a gift for getting along with other human beings, even if their means of doing this were somewhat different. Despite Grandpa's intellectualism and Grandma's down-to-earth approach to life, it seems that they were both Humanists. I suspect, but I cannot know for sure, that, having experienced the Romonov's czarist tyranny over ordinary Russians, they both understood the value of a single human life and the meaning of freedom.

My mother told me that Grandpa--she called him"Papa"--never used corporal punishment on his children. When they were bad he called them "brats," and this was such a contrast to his usual kind demeanor that the kids were usually shocked into good behavior.

I was told by my mother that, shortly before she died, Grandma Sarah gathered her children around her and summoned the wisdom of more than eighty years of living. Her words were simple. She said (of course, in Yiddish), "Be good to one another."

I only knew my grandfather in his last years. At that time, he was old and frail. It's hard to picture that man as Allen describes him, a young firebrand, but that is what he was. I don't think he would have disagreed with Grandma's final dictum.

The Promise (as related by David Malkin):

I must have seen Grandma Sarah's engagement ring at various times, but I have no memory of it. The ring was considerably more than a decorative item. It was a promise to our great-grandfather that, come what might, Abraham and Sarah would have the wherewithal to overcome misfortune. In Russia and the Ukraine, especially when cold air swept westward across the Urals and winter came, life could be perilous. That ring was a guarantee, a pledge to Sarah's father--and her mother--that the young couple would somehow survive. As events transpired, that promise was kept in America.

At the end of the Nineteenth and the turn of the Twentieth Century, life, even in the United States, could be treacherous. New arrivals quickly realized that the streets were not paved with gold. The streets were paved with cobblestones that devoured shoe leather as they walked from shop to shop looking for work. There were also many stairways to climb. The walk was even more physically demanding with a sewing machine slung across your back. These machines were made to fit into openings in the tables at the various job sites. Is it possible that the sewing machine we played with as kids was the one that Abraham carried on his shoulder?

There were hundreds, even thousands, of men like Grandpa Abraham. I suppose that at first these itinerants went to the establishments of "landsmen" (pronounced "lantzmen"), places where their native language was spoken. In Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Armenian, Italian -- in dozens of languages and dialects -- men carrying sewing machines over their shoulders would ask, "Please, do you have work for me today?" Grandfather Abraham, a cap maker, was just one of many who asked. Sometimes, there was work. Sometimes, there was not.

Sometimes, for weeks on end, usually in the dead of winter, the question was asked in vain. At home, there were children and a furnace to feed, to say nothing of the need for shoes and shirts and pants and dresses.

The promise of the ring was kept by removing it from Sarah's finger. In hard times, if you wanted to see Grandma's ring, you would have had to look into the window of the pawn shop. There are no bridge loans for the poor. The only collateral Abraham and Sarah had was that ring, and so they would pawn the promise for cash. In the spring, when things got better, they would redeem it.

Make no mistake, the ring represented survival. I wish I knew enough to look at it when I was little, but my mother didn't tell me about the ring until Grandma was long gone.

The saga of the Ranz family is a uniquely American story that has been played out over and over again, millions and millions of times in this country of immigrants. Abraham and Sarah, if economically poor, were rich in children, and their children were successful. The promise to Great-grandfather was honored. We, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, survive as artifacts of the long-ago promise that was embodied in that ring.

(David continues:) We are taught in history about the ebb and flow of sovereignties and empires, mediated by monarchs, presidents, generals, and powerful armies and navies, but we are taught very little of the travails of ordinary people caught in the powerful tides of change. Perhaps, as there is a branch of economics called micro-economics, there should be a branch of history called micro-history, for, in truth, that is what we are studying now as we examine the lives of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants.

Abraham left his native land, his family, and his friends to move nearly halfway around the world, but his life, to say nothing of the lives of his wife and children, and his childrens' children, will never be anything more than a statistic, an insignificant footnote in a history text. It is left to us to record his story.

The history that we record, the visits to Grandma's house, the holidays with relatives, the parties, the weddings, the funerals, will never appear in a college textbook. The story is ours and ours alone. The pictures we look at and the tales we tell are a way of stopping the river called Time, at least momentarily, before we are drawn once more into the current, wood-chips in a torrent of seconds, minutes, hours, and days.

Why do we study the photographs and the narratives so avidly? Because there is a powerful lesson to be learned from the saga of our family. We are not slaves to the flow of time. The course of a life is not immutable. Our fates are not foreordained. Grandpa Abraham would not allow himself to be a mere wood-chip, thrust by currents and eddies into a life he did not want. Abraham defied the current, and he changed his life, and the lives of his children. His was a sort of courage that we have never had to call upon. If he hadn't opted for a different way of life, we would never have existed, and there would be no tale to tell.