On April 1, 2020 I started creating cartoons and sending them out as emails to friends. The COVID pandemic and our uncertainty about how to react to it had just begun. Cartoons seemed to be a good idea for me to keep my mind occupied when we weren’t washing our vegetables and cleaning our mail or taking walks as the only activity we thought was safe outside of our house.
When I began I had no idea that for the following 364 days I would create and send out a cartoon every day and often add a story or a commentary about something serious or just a random observation. I added memories from my life and career and someone told me later that I was writing my autobiography and she wasn’t far off. I believe I’ve had an interesting life and I do have a lot of stories. My career as a television news producer was all about telling stories. So when COVID lessened and our lives returned to a new normal I kept coming up with cartoons and writing about whatever I wanted and now I’m in my fifth year of doing this.
I started my Substack recently and a number of people have become paid subscribers. As my wife Jo observed, I now have a job— a responsibility to keep creating and writing. I’m happy to take on this task and since I’m now acquiring new subscribers, I will occasionally republish cartoons and stories from what has become my archive. Here’s one today that’s a bit of family history…
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If history made sense, then the ghost village of Imber would be located today somewhere in Ukraine or Poland— somewhere my ancestors lived well over a century ago. But history doesn’t make sense and Imber is in the United Kingdom on the Salisbury Plain. I’ve never been there and if I ever decide to go, I can but only on one of the few days a year that visitors are allowed.
The village of Imber has always been isolated— “Little Imber on the down, seven miles from any town.” but is abandoned today and has been uninhabited since the end of World War II. There was no battle fought there nor any plague that decimated its small population of less than 200. In 1943 the entire citizenry of Imber was evacuated so that their homes and surroundings could be used as a training area for American troops preparing for the invasion of Europe. After the war none of the evacuees were allowed to return and until recently the site of Imber with its abandoned structures was still used for military training.
The first mention of inhabitants living there goes back a thousand years but Imber’s history has nothing to do with my family and I haven’t been able to find any evidence that reveals how the village got our name but I think I know how we did.
In the past surnames were often tip offs to one's occupation— Baker, Fisher, Mason, Taylor, Weaver... Willie Shoemaker was a famous jockey but it's a good bet somewhere along the way a Shoemaker ancestor shod people and not horses.
As far as I can determine, my family’s name Imber is derived from a Yiddish form of the German word ingwer, which means ginger. The name originally may have indicated that one was a grower or seller of spices as far back as the late Middle Ages.
Ancestry.com claims to have over 10 billion records but my family tree's roots weren’t buried in its database. Whatever records were kept in the Jewish village communities of Eastern Europe called shtetls were nearly all destroyed in the Holocaust.
There are other Imbers beyond close relatives of course who I have run across. Once while boarding a plane, an Imber who I didn’t know was already in my seat. We had both been booked to sit in it so I guess actually, it was our seat. Years I ago I discovered there were two other Peter Imbers in the United States. Out of curiosity I contacted them. One was a doctor in Florida and not Jewish and the other rather testily accused me of siphoning his airline miles. Turned out we even had the same middle initial.
I also met other Imbers in Israel when I lived there in the 1970s. One was an officer in my artillery unit during my time in the army and another was a disc jockey on Israel radio. Both of course claimed to be related to Naftali Herz Imber, the most famous of all Imbers. I had known about him since I was a kid because my father told me we too are his relatives. Everyone in Israel knows of him. Streets there are named after him. Naftali Herz was an itinerant poet who authored a Hebrew poem titled Hatikva (English translation The Hope) in the 19th century which later became modern Israel's national anthem.
School children in Israel are taught that Naftali Herz Imber was the country’s first beatnick. In reality he was an alcoholic and died penniless in New York City. I was told my family on occasion sent him money.
Shamira Imber— the Israeli disc jockey —was at one point suspended from broadcasting because she played a protest song about the Israeli Army's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. That took place on the eve of the day that Israel remembers— and Jews everywhere should —our people’s close call with extinction. I guess some Imbers have rocked the boat. Others just got on one.
My grandfather, Jonas Imber, fled Europe along with his brother Joseph to avoid conscription into whoever’s army was fighting at the time and came through Ellis Island in the early years of the 20th century. One of my most prized possessions is the English dictionary he was given by an American Jewish newspaper shortly after his arrival in New York. Its pages and binding have exceeded their lifespan and I dare not open it.
Jonas and Joseph settled in Reading, Pennsylvania after being advised that opportunities awaited them there and within a decade they went from peddlars with a horse and wagon to businessmen with a store and employees.
Jonas met my grandmother Anna in America and while he learned and spoke the language of his adopted country, Anna, although she comprehended English, hardly ever brought herself to speak it. Like many Jewish immigrants my grandparents used Yiddish when they didn't want their three children to understand what they were talking about, but sometimes the kids could anyway.
Anna was not a great cook. Her chicken soup might have had curative powers, but it could have used a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. My father told me that on occasion Jonas, a kind and patient man, became exasperated by what was offered at the dinner table and would blurt, "Ikh kum heym far dem?" I don't think I need to translate.
The Imber brothers built houses side by side on a steep street above the city of Reading. The houses were identical. Up the hill from them was the mansion of William H. Luden, the inventor of the menthol cough drop. The smell from the Luden's factory downtown is deep in my olfactory memory alongside that of grandmother Anna's chicken soup.
I had never considered why Jonas and Joseph had mirror image houses until I took my wife Jo to see them and she asked me. My mother had the answer.
"The two women didn't like each other and didn't trust one another. They insisted on the same house for each of them because they wanted to make sure neither got a square foot more."
It was the spring of 1929 when both families moved into their new homes and simultaneously, construction was completed on a luxurious three story department store on Reading's main street to house the Imber Brothers' burgeoning business. Six months later in October they lost the store and literally everything else except for the two identical houses when they were wiped out financially by the stock market crash.
My father was 12 at the time. He and his older brother and younger sister all managed to go to college and my father went on to get an MBA after, according to family legend, paying his first year's tuition with winnings from a fraternity poker game at Penn State.
When he returned to Reading after landing in Normandy on D-Day plus 1 he went to work for his father and his uncle at the smaller store they had reopened, but soon realized that Jonas and Joseph weren't about to let him implement any of what he had learned at Harvard Business School. As I've seen in my own life— my mother told me to sit up at the table on the occasion of my 50th birthday —at any age with whatever talents you may have acquired you can remain a child in the eyes of your parents.
My father bought in and then bought out the owner of a women's ready-to-wear store down the street. I liked visiting him there because in the basement was a bowling alley and I'd be given a couple dollars so I could bowl and entertain myself while waiting for him to finish work. The noise from the rolling balls and flying pins was certainly strange accompaniment for the women on the floor above trying on dresses and millenary but apparently, not an obstacle to sales.
At one point the business had expanded to three other retail stores plus two outlets in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. My father's wish was for one of his sons to work with him. I wasn't interested and neither was my brother. We both moved away and pursued our chosen careers. All the stores have been shuttered since the early 1990s.
There is only one Imber left in Reading. My grandfather's brother Joseph's son Harold is still alive. The two identical houses also remain side by side on Eckert Avenue and I doubt their current inhabitants have any idea of how that symmetry came to be. Families take their memories with them and sometimes leave behind mysteries in their place.
A while ago I searched for pictures of the Imber Brothers store on the internet and found something else instead. For sale on eBay was a wood handle for a shopping bag. Imber Bros. was printed on it. The seller believed it was from the late 1800s. Close, but it isn't. I remember those handles and know they were still in use when I was a kid and my grandfather overpaid me when I would fold together cardboard boxes at his store. For $19.99 I bought the handle.
Hi Ralph! Thanks very much for the kind words and for your subscription. Your own family history is fascinating and I want to learn more. Jo and I are in Berlin— my first visit —and it has been impossible for me to separate the past from the present. While away I have scheduled two more posts to be published one of which is about “Sunday School.” My Jewish identity has been shaped by experiences both imposed and sought after. Thanks again for reconnecting!
Best,
Peter
Bravo! Peter. A lovely concise telling of your family history. The truth in such matters lies often behind a scrim of unsuspecting imagination and cataracts.
In my case, I was 14, a freshman at George School in 1959 when I ventured to the back of our then modest library and opened the S volume of an old Britannica and turned to my last name. There I was surprised to find a pen + ink drawing of one Herbert Louis Samuel who was described only as the leader of the English Liberal Party. (If you know anything about Viscount Sir Herbert, as he came to be after serving as the 1st Governor General of Palestine, you will have realized just how ancient was that Britannica.) His image looked remarkably like my grandfather, Ralph E. Samuel, who I knew as 'Papa," and who lived in Manhattan. I recalled a great deal had been made of events in the early 1950s when Papa served as the Chairman of the "Tercentenary of Jews in America." My parents traveled from our Bucks County farm up to New York City for both opening and closing dinners one of which featured President Ike as keynoter. (I still have a copy of Ike's 3 column photo with Papa from page one of the Herald Tribune the next day.) Then in 1959 I told Dad about finding the entry about Herbert and he said only that Papa once told him Herbert was a distant relative. So I came to know a little about my Samuel relations, but just enough for me to keep an eye out for more. And eventually, in a very Shakespearean twist in a pre-class bull session at The New School Graduate Faculty in 1969 I was introduced to a long deceased "perhaps" relative, Sol Wahl Katzenellenbogen (1541-1617) who was reputed to have been the only Jewish King of Poland, and then only very briefly. But that's the beginning of another story for another day.