Without A Bridge: An American Odyssey

by Daniel Joseph Koosed

Growing up in the decidedly middle-middle class city of Norwalk, Connecticut, my conception of family never really extended in my mind beyond my mother Anna, my father Martin and my baby sister Elizabeth (Eliz for short). I never got a chance to know my mothers parents because they both died when I was very young. My maternal grandmother, Betty Jane Brower, is a descendent of the Brouwer family of Breuckelen, New Amsterdam who arrived in America in 1642. Her husband, my maternal grandfather, was Edward Toivo Haikio, the youngest of fifteen children born to Swedish and Finnish immigrants. He devoted the middle part of his life to serving in the military, moving my mother and her three younger siblings to various military bases in occupied Japan and Germany. Later in his life, my maternal grandfather sought solace in a rigidly fundamentalist form of Lutheranism, serving as the spiritual leader of the insulated Finnish community he had known his whole life. My mother, however, rejected the unyielding orthodoxy of her fathers religion, converting to Judaism and forever estranging herself from her father. My father grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His father Albert Joseph

Koosed, whom I had a chance to know as an older child, also served as a spiritual broker for his own native religious community, working for twenty years as the

president of Fairmount Temple, his communitys Reform synagogue.

He also

served in World War II, stationed in the Aleutian Islands on the western tip of Alaska. His wife Sadie, my paternal grandmother, passed away in 2009. The last time I saw her, at a luxurious Jewish nursing home in Shaker Heights called Menorah Park, I remembered something my father had told me as a child; the vivid blue of her eyes, transmitted down from her to my father to me, is a product not of an unbroken lineage of blue-eyed Jews but is instead a product of the Cossack invasions of Lithuania-Poland and the subsequent mass rape of Jewish women. In spite of this, I am the genetic culmination of historys relentless drive towards freedom.

My Mothers Line: A Virgin Country

My story begins with an Adam. A soldier in the Dutch East India Company, Adam Brouwer Berkhoven departed from Holland on the Swol in 1641, bound for Brazil. (There is uncertainty regarding Adams original nationality as some accounts claim Cologne, Germany as his birthplace and others cite Hoorn, Holland. As his full name is documented in several places as Adam Brouwer Berkhoven, he was probably German in ethnicity and Dutch in nationality). In 1642, he sailed north from Brazil to New Amsterdam, which is now Manhattan, New York. The new world he entered was, by Western standards, a virgin country. An early Dutch account of the conditions Adam found himself living in describes the early settler

experience as having first discovered this country, of which they took possession as their own in right of their discovery, and finding the country fruitful and advantageously situated, possessing good and safe havens, rivers, fisheriesThe Indians or natives of the land, many of whom are still livingdeclare freelythat before the arrival [of the Dutch in 1609 the natives] did not know that there were any other people in the world than those who were like themselves. Thus, the narrative of my family history begins at one of the most critical junctures in all of human history. As a soldier of colonization, Adam, my earliest ancestor, represents the initial, European drive to spread the forces of civilization across the planet. The theme of growth and displacement begins here and recurs throughout this story. But I am also a product of historys relentless struggle for freedom from religious persecution. In the 17th century, Holland was a zeitgeist of religious

freedom, extending the principle of the freedom to worship to their colonies in North America; in 1655 all Jews in New Amsterdam were granted full citizenship rights. This tradition of religious tolerance is central both to the essence of New York as a bastion of multiculturalism today and the global forces of religious displacement and persecution that have shaped history. Adam Brouwer was an entrepreneur and an individualist, as well as a founding member of the Dutch Reformed Church of Breuckelen. In 1656,

Breuckelen was home to only sixteen families with a total population of 110. Magdalena Verdon Jacobs, Adams wife, gave birth to fifteen children, a large number even by the standards of the time. Magdalenas role as matriarch and respected mother is evidenced by the fact that nearly all of her children had one daughter bearing her name. Adam supported his family through the flour mill he built himself, the first working flour mill on the entire North American continent at the time. The business was successful, allowing the Brouwers to become an

established and well-respected family in New Amsterdam society; early maps of reveal that the street on which Adams mill operated was named Brouwer Straet (Appendix II, street u). It gives me a sense of pride to know that I have ancestors who literally built this country from the ground up. By all accounts, Adam was an obstinate, stubborn and tenacious man. A look at his will provides some insight into this. In his Last Will and Testament, Adam explicitly disinherits two of his sons, Peter and Jacob, for reasons he was disobedient of his father. Through my research I have discovered that my line traces back through Jacob. I cannot help but be reminded of the biblical Jacob, who steals his birthright from his brother Esau. I am descended from a son stripped of his birthright. This divisive circumstance serves as a precursor to the profound divisions the Brouwer family would endure throughout the next decades and centuries. Evidence for this can be found in the proliferation of alternate spellings of

the name itself, splitting from Brouwer into Brewer, Brauer, and Brower, my line.

From the South to the Frontier: Bondage and Liberation

The Revolutionary War seems to be the decisive moment in the fracturing of the Brouwer family. My ancestors moved to Pennsylvania and then to North

Carolina. Frederick Brower was born on December 31, 1794 in Randolph County, North Carolina, at that time a land of few plantation owners and many, many slaves. On November 12, 1815, Frederick married Nellie Hellena Staley. Nellies father Conrad Staley, the son of successful English-German immigrants, was a plantation owner with a vast estate consisting of fourteen plantations. According to a

typewritten family history my mother possesses, A.E. Staley, the familys patriarch, stated that the Staleys originated at Staleys Bridge, England, but being dissenters, went to Holland.1 This story, parallel with my interpretation of Adams journey to America, emphasizes yet again the importance of religious freedom in the narrative of my own genetic history. It is at this point in uncovering my family history that I realized how poignantly a familys genetic history can function as a microcosm for national history. Decades before the Civil War, my ancestor Frederick Brower liberated a number of slaves which had been given to his wife by her father, Conrad Staley. So, in the
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These quotations are from documentary sources passed down through my mothers family. 5

year 1829, the family left Randolph County, North Carolina and arrived in Montgomery County Ohio, remaining there until the next spring before moving to Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Its virtually certain that, having committed the then-

unimaginable crime of liberating these slaves, the newlyweds were forced to leave the state out of fear for their physical safety. Following a number of subsequent migrations, the family ended up in Allen County, Ohio in the winter of 1832, exhausted, destitute and ragged. I can only imagine how shocking this transition must have been for Nellie, raised as a daughter of privilege on a plantation in the South. Abandoning the life of comfort and wealth that she had known as a child for the lethal Ohio wilderness mysterious, dark and unforgiving must have required an unimaginably adaptable strength of will. This Ohio wilderness was very much like the virgin country of New Amsterdam that Adam helped to build. The United States government had only very recently completed their program of systematic displacement (genocide) of Native Americans in the region. There were no roads and there were no bridges. Eventually, my ancestor Frederick secured a parcel of land hitherto completely untouched by Western hands: The next thing was to move the family and household goods from Allen to Putnam County, a distance of sixteen miles through woods and without a road. They experienced great difficulties, caused by mud and water at Cranberry Creek in particular, which at the time was hard to cross without the aid of a bridge. The trip, at a distance of sixteen

miles, lasted six days. Arriving at the town of Ottawa they took possession of a vacant Indian house, they unloaded the wagon. At this point the parallels between my own family history and our national history are truly staggering. Here, two children, both raised by successful European

immigrant settlers in search of religious freedom, reject the intensely stratified brutality of the very society that provided them with this admittedly hard-won security and comfort. Frederick and Nellie Brower committed a profoundly symbolic act of humanity in freeing slaves given to them as their supposed birthright as plantationowning white Europeans. This act, however, forever banished them from the world that had granted them these very privileges. Themselves displaced, they nonetheless profited from the displacement of others by taking shelter in a vacant Indian house, which had probably not been vacant for very long. After their arrival Frederick and Nellie found themselves surrounded by an unbroken forest, deprived of all privileges of civilization. The family survived, of course, and proceeded to establish themselves as one of the most influential families in the area of Cuba, Ohio. To this day the Brower Family Cemetery still exists there, a product of the intensive physical labor the family engaged in immediately after their arrival: All hands went to work and the result was that they had a pretty good crop of corn and vegetables the first year after they arrived in the country. A few days after their arrival they had about twenty-five apple
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trees planted on their land, making a nice orchard. Little Mary Brower, daughter of Frederick and Nellie, lived for only three years, from 1833-1836. As there was no cemetery in the Township, they buried her in their Orchard. The seeds with which this orchard was planted were obtained from John Chapman, who was popularly known as Johnny Appleseed. Seriously. According to the typewritten family history my mother showed me, Frederick served as a soldier in the war of 1812 and witnessed the quelling of a mutiny in the Army by General Andrew Jackson. Thus, it is quite probable that Frederick

himself took part in the so-called Indian Campaigns of the time, which were responsible for the wholesale displacement and genocide of this countrys natives. Fredericks son Brockman Brower (my great-great-great-great-grandfather) married a woman named Angelina Stonacher, who was half-Cherokee. Born in Kalida, Ohio, she died quite young at the age of 25. Considering the nonexistence of modern health care at the time it is almost certain that she died in childbirth, the most common cause of death for young women throughout most of human history. This marriage between the son of an Indian Campaign soldier and the daughter of a Cherokee woman emerged out of parallel trajectories of displacement, both personal and historical. Brockman and Angelina had three daughters and a son, Carmel.

Carmels grandson Orville is my great-grandfather. He married an Irish girl named Helen Marie Gallagher, giving birth to their second daughter Betty Jane Brower on February 22, 1927. On May 9, 1954 Betty Jane married Edward Toivo Haikio, the descendent of Swedish and Finnish immigrants. Six months later, on November 7, my mother, Anna Maria Haikio, was born, indicating that her conception may have been accidental and, thus, probably the key reason for their shotgun wedding.

Across the Sea

My mother was named after her paternal grandmother, Anna Maria Kyro. Anna Marias parents Zacariah and Fena Kyro immigrated to America from Suaningi, Sweden in 1900. Without enough resources to transplant the whole family, Zacariah and Fena were forced to leave their two youngest children at home to remain in Sweden. According to my mothers records, one of the youngest children remembered, all her life, crying in a corner while her older siblings were packing for the trip to America. Anna Maria thus arrived in America with her parents, two sisters named Hulda and Aleda and her younger brother Oscar who was twelve years old at the time. She came to America pregnant and newly widowed at the age of twenty-one; her husband had been killed in a logging accident in Sweden soon before her departure from Europe.

The family settled in Calumet, in the heart of the Michigans Upper Peninsula. This area of Michigan was, at the time, settled almost exclusively by Finnish immigrants. Surrounded on three sides by the Great Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron, the Upper Peninsula was almost completely inaccessible to humans until the advent of railroads in the region around the turn of the twentieth century. The nearly complete isolation of the area must have felt very much like home to these recent immigrants, as the farmlands of northern Finland are some of the most desolate and sparsely populated places in the world. My mothers account of her fathers upbringing seems to reinforce this. According to her, her father did not begin to learn English until he was five years old and entered public school, even though he had spent his whole life in America. His first name was Toivo, which was so common a name among the Finnish community that his first grade teacher gave him the name Edward a strange name for a Finnish boy to distinguish him from the Toivos in the class. A decidedly dreary place, the Upper Peninsula is known for its endless winters with gloomy-gray skied, deep burrowing black flies, mosquitoes, ticks, bone-breaking ice under a thin snow powder coverin virtually all [Upper Peninsula] counties, deer outnumber people. Once again I find myself tracing my genetic history back to the first settlement of a hitherto virgin country, this time one profoundly reminiscent of the Finnish homeland in which the skies are completely dark half of the year.

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The Baby in the Thunderstorm

Shortly after her arrival in Michigan, Anna Maria was going door-to-door searching for work. Suddenly, a severe thunderstorm broke and soon began

flooding the earth. Determined to continue her search regardless, Anna Maria unexpectedly came across a small child wearing nothing but a diaper; he had just fallen into a ditch that was rapidly filling with rushing water. She pulled the baby out and carried him to the closest house she could find. The child belonged to John Haikio, a Finnish immigrant whose wife had died recently. Haikio is a Finnish term meaning a beautiful place. A year later the two were married, a marriage of convenience for them both. John and Anna Maria had four children together and, combining the two families, produced fifteen children in total. My maternal grandfather was the youngest of these children. Every one of these fifteen children suffered from alcoholism. Alcoholism was endemic in the farmlands of far northern Finland. My grandfather and all fourteen of his siblings struggled with this devastating disease their whole lives. John Haikio, who was much older than his wife, had a reputation for being an abusive misogynist and womanizer. He was reputed to have killed his first wife with overwork, forcing her to do very heavy chores such as dragging large sacks of grain from the barn during a late term pregnancy. Unfortunately this served as a model

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for my own grandfather, who was both physically and psychologically toward his wife and children. When John became too old to continue working as a copper miner in Calumet, the family faced an imminent financial crisis. Anna Maria, however, had secretly saved up for years and bought a farm with her own money. Local people were shocked that this woman had the audacity to purchase land in her own name. But my mothers namesake was strong, stubborn and self-sufficient; hers was the only family in the county that refused government assistance during the Great Depression. The strength of Anna Marias will to survive on her own terms makes her an appropriate namesake for my mother.

My Fathers Line: From the Shtetl to the Suburbs

I was unable to find as much information about my fathers line as my mothers, mostly due to the fact that my fathers ancestors came from Eastern Europe at a time when post-immigration communication back home was almost completely impossible. I can clearly remember asking my father about his familys history as a child and, in his simple and straightforward answer, conceiving of antiSemitism for the first time: They were putting all the Jewish boys on the front lines. Not very much is known about the first Koosed except that he was born somewhere around Braslav, Belarus around 1840. Of the various theories Ive

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heard regarding the origin of the name, the most plausible is that the name is some kind of variation of the religious denomination Hasid. However, I have absolutely no knowledge of the particular religious orientations of my Jewish ancestors. The only source of information on my fathers paternal side is contained in a single family tree drafted in 1975; all of the information on my fathers maternal side comes from conversations with my fathers family. According to the family tree, the first Koosed was a distiller by trade whose business was appropriated by the government in 1882. He married a woman named Rivkah and gave birth to an undocumented number of children. One of their children was a son named William, who was born in 1865. Williams wife Bessie was the daughter of Bernard Tatko, head of a family from Teplik, Russia. Bernard was also a distiller; the family tree indicates that he lost his distillery business and was forced to give it over to non-Jews. It was most likely his prior success in business that allowed him to give William and Bessie a 20,000-ruble dowry at their wedding, enough money to emigrate to America to begin a new life of unlimited possibility and promise. The increasingly chaotic and violent environment of Greater Russia leading up to the Revolution was the primary force behind the wave of emigration that carried my Jewish ancestors to this country. From Alexander IIs emancipation of the serfs in 1861 until the outbreak of violent revolution in 1905 the entire Russian

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Empire had become mired in increasingly explosive outbreaks of popular discontent. In keeping with the ancient Russian tradition, Jews were frequently targeted as scapegoats for this state of increasing instability. Manyeh, one of Bernard Tatkos daughters, had her hands chopped off by non-Jew robber while protecting the till of her pharmacist husband. Another child, Morris, was killed in the Communist Revolution. Rochel came to the United States after the Revolution but killed herself in 1928, her daughter Mollie having been raped, tormented in trying to escape from revolution before becoming insane, placed in an asylum. Of all Bernards

children, my great-grandmother Bessie was most fortunate, using her wedding dowry to get out in time and immigrating to Philadelphia around the year 1890. William and Bessie gave birth to seven children; their third son Morris David my great-grandfather was born in Kiev. He married a woman named Sarah Shapiro and gave birth to three daughters and a son my grandfather and namesake Albert Joseph. He and his older sister Mildred (Micky) were both born in

Philadelphia; the two younger sisters were born in Cleveland, Ohio, which was where the family permanently settled. The largely Jewish community of Shaker Heights, a quiet and prosperous suburb of Cleveland, was structurally similar to the isolated community of Calumet, Michigan that my Finnish ancestors founded in the sense that both were

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predominantly endogamous, insulated communities of new European immigrants seeking to recreate the cultural environments of their native lands as closely as possible in America. My paternal grandmothers name was Sadie, but everyone always called her Shanie. Her mother was named Hannah Zohn. She came from a shtetl called Kovno in (what is now) Lithuania. Narrowly escaping certain death in the days before the outbreak of World War I, Hannah took a train from Lithuania to Antwerp, Belgium and then a boat from there to the United States. Upon her arrival she reconnected with her fiance whom she had become engaged to in Lithuania; he had arrived two years earlier. The couple eventually made their way West towards Cleveland, where other family members had already begun settling. While I have virtually no information on Lewis Garbers line, I do know that Hannah had between seven and eight siblings and that all of them were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. This discovery surprised me. My fathers father had spent most of his

professional life as the president of Fairmount Temple, an experience that had shaped his views of organized religion in profoundly cynical ways. For example, my father once told his father that he was considering becoming a rabbi. My

grandfathers response: Theyre all shmucks. Thus, my father himself has always held a generally irreverent and cynical view towards organized religion in general and

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organized Judaism in particular. Because of this, the only time I ever really heard my father talk about the Holocaust was with a tone of critical disdain towards the modern tendencies of Jews to turn Holocaust remembrance into a kind of religion unto itself, its primary objects of worship being death, guilt and pain. I must admit that I have inherited my fathers critical views towards belief systems organized in really any way, making my discovery of my own familys Holocaust history that much more surprising. In attempting to research this lost piece of my familys history I discovered that the Jews of the Kovno Ghetto accomplished something truly amazing during the Nazi occupation: they recorded their own history. They accomplished this through a number of different mediums including clandestine photography, illustrations, miniature albums containing charts and graphs, personal diaries and even original

responsa, the traditional rabbinical form of religious dialogue.

Such incredible acts of creation must have required a profound sense of both the imminent destruction surrounding them on all sides and a tenacity of will to survive through expression in the face of unimaginable terror. Its difficult to

articulate the the emotional impact of this discovery because what had at first seemed to be a dead end in my genetic history in fact represents the power of such history itself: it is the fundamental right to know and embrace ones identity, even if the cost is death.

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Conclusion: The Best Part of Me

Of all the themes contained within my genetic history, none is more powerful than the recognition of religious freedom. This liberating impulse underlies nearly every chapter of this story, from the development of New Amsterdam as a bastion of New World religious tolerance to my mothers decision to convert to Judaism, the daughter of a fundamentalist Lutheran preacher. Even on my fathers side, where the escape from religious persecution became literally a matter of life or death, I find the essential motivation the same, and endlessly inspiring. Perhaps the struggle for freedom produces its own rewards. Having been raised in a liberal, affluent, suburban Jewish community, my father had never been forbidden to question as my mother had. I was raised to believe that questioning everything is a quintessentially Jewish virtue. For my mother, having been raised according to an ideology of complete religious obedience, Judiasm represented not only religious, but also intellectual and emotional freedom. For me, my grandmother Shanie will always be my hearts link to my familys history. After all, I share not only her ocean-blue eyes, but her nicotine addiction as well. Toward the end of her life, Shanie required an environment of assisted living to help her live with Alzheimers disease. In 2008, I flew to Ohio with my father, my stepmother and my sister to see her for the first time in years essentially to say

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goodbye. The apprehension that filled my mind as I walked into Menorah Park was a kind of dread Ive never experienced before. What I did not count on, however, was the fact that, just as during the rest of her life, my grandmother was still the proverbial life of the party. Surrounded by the sad and disturbing sights and sounds that inhabit every nursing home, my grandmother laughed all the way throughout our time with her, even joking openly about her own inability to think logically anymore. While she could not distinguish any of us as individual members of her family, she absolutely knew that we were her family. I will never forget the moment that I realized that this woman will always be my hearts link to my familys history. My hands in hers, Shanie looked up at me, her bright blue eyes opened wide in a moment of lucid, genetic recognition. The last thing my grandmother ever said to me was: The best part of me is in you. And it is.

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Appendix I: Street Map of New Amsterdam circa 1660

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Appendix II: Shanies Eulogy 2

Dancing, singing, laughing, good food, family, friends and children. These were the joys and pleasures that filled my grandmothers heart to the very end. For Shanie Koosed, there was absolutely nothing in the world more important than the friendships she cherished, the family she loved and the children she so loved to care for. In my 23 years on this Earth I have never met anyone with a more unshakeable faith in the basic goodness of people. And this was not a faith based on any particular philosophy of human nature or any intellectual consideration of the ever-shifting balance between good and evil in the hearts of men. No. For Shanie Koosed, the very purpose of existence was to share it, to share the heartbreak along with the jubilations of life, to share both the sorrows and the joys of our so very short time here. In one sense, this meant that once Shanie loved you, there was no escape. You could be sure that, no matter what you said or did from that moment on, she would be there, ready and willing to do anything to help you, whether you liked it or not. About two years ago, I came with my father, stepmother and sister to visit Shanie at Menorah Park. We all understood that this visit would essentially be our
2

I wrote this the night before my grandmothers funeral and didnt realize it was her eulogy until no one spoke after I delivered it. 20

goodbye to her.

I had not seen her in a number of years and throughout the

journey from the East Coast to Shaker Heights that inevitable question kept echoing in my head: will she know me? In some ways, I think, age distills our lives into the very essences of our personalities. In the case of Sadie Jean Koosed, she was made of a unique

concentration of generosity and sweetness, nothing else. No, she couldnt remember our names, but it didnt make any difference because she was delighted to see us! She filled our final visit with jokes, laughter and even with some of her world-famous renditions of hits from the 1940s. But it was not until it came time to leave that I understood. Staring into my eyes as we were saying our final goodbyes, Shanie told me: The best part of me is in you. It didnt matter whether or not she knew who I was because she knew exactly what I am: the flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood. The life that she still lives.

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