You never write, you never call…
Lili reminds her stepson to stay in touch
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“We really have enough to worry about as is and have no need to also lose sleep over the fact that you are not writing. You can believe me that I was seriously worried before deciding to give you a call.”
Neustadt, Upper Silesia/Brünn
Hans Joseph Pinkus was a direct descendant of Samuel Fränkel, founder of a textile factory in Neustadt (Upper Silesia), which for a while was the primary employer in the entire region and one of the world’s foremost producers of linens. His grandfather, Max, had been a personal friend and patron of the Nobel Prize-winning author Gerhart Hauptmann. His great-uncle, the scientist Paul Ehrlich, had been a Nobel laureate, too. Lili, Hans Joseph’s stepmother, was hardly intimidated by this pedigree. In this letter, written on June 8, 1938, she gives him a major dressing down for having neglected his correspondence with his parents and sternly inquires whether he flunked his exam in the Czech language. At this point, 16 year-old “Pipo,” as the family called him, was staying with his step-grandmother in Brünn (Brno, Czechoslovakia) and attending school there. His parents and half-sisters lived in Neustadt: the directorship of the the S. Fränkel company had been handed down to male members of the Pinkus family for several generations and was now held by his father, Hans Hubert.
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Institution:
Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin
Collection:
John Peters Pinkus Family Papers, AR 25520
Original:
B 2, F 16
on the days before
Curated by Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin © 2018 Leo Baeck Institute
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