Edith (1851-1931) was the only one of Simon and Therese’s eight children who never got married. She wrote occasional verse and eulogies and acted in a drama in which the characters were called The Lie, A Deaf Citizen, A Jew, An Officer. She stood in front of the Tollare bazaar in the summer of 1893 collecting money and then distributed milk to the schoolchildren in the winter. Betty became the mother of Gerda Meyerson, so she was the cousin of my maternal grandfather Erik Hirsch and Axel Hirsch. Gerda’s life consisted of intensive social good deeds for the poor and the outcast. She founded a home for female workers, the central guild of social work, the Swedish society for the welfare of the deaf. As a speaker and a journalist, she fought and lectured for workers’ right to a vacation. She was a warm, optimistic, and energetic person. She never got married and was buried next to her twin sister Agda, who fought for the rights of nurses and was for many years the leader of the Swedish nurses’ society. When Gerda Meyerson died, the newspaper Social-Demokraten wrote: ‘She was the best friend of innumerable workers, their truest source of solace in life’s hard times.’
The brothers Moritz, Isaac, and Oscar Hirschmy grandfather’s father and his brotherswent to a Jewish boys’ school where most of the teachers were not Jewish. The school was closed down in 1878. Oscar Hirsch’s photo hung in the entrance to the congregation’s main hall when he was the director from 1912-22. It wasn’t really belief that held them together but rather a loyalty to their ethnic background and to all the various family members, who had intermarried so often that many were related to one another in two or three different ways. My maternal grandfather and his parents were far removed from the synagogue and also from Jewish rituals. S. A. Duse’s anti-Semitic detective stories were on their shelves and were devoured without any reaction. Somebody might say about a cheap clerk that he was a real Jew; then you would smile. It was the arrival of Hitler that made it clear who the real anti-Semites were.
Leja and Sachs, Josephson and Rubenson, Marcus and Eliasson, Bonnier and Lamm, Schuck and Hirsch: they were well-educated businessmen who fitted in easily. Outside the ghetto of history, they embraced a liberal enlightenment culture. Their identity was as Swedish as that of anybody from Dalecarlia. They could be seen on Strandvägen and Dalarö, rarely on Lidingö or Djursholm. They preferred a residence in the city and a house on the archipelago. From Mullberget’s far northern darkness to Gerard Bonnier’s Kåltäppan, the blondest of Swedish summer dreams, they built houses that encapsulated the dreams of the period.
The wandering Jew, the eternal exile, was a concept they didn’t recognize. My maternal grandfather had an apartment on Sture-plan and a summer house on Stegesund. Everybody in his circle was a good Swede who paid his dues to the Jewish congregation and was buried by a rabbi. But they had nothing to gain by emphasizing their Jewishness, and it didn’t particularly show up amidst the Christmas hams and Easter eggs. Also the first names became Swedish after the middle of the nineteenth century: Karl, Oskar, Lars, Kerstin, Karin. But they liked to show a biblical tradition in their middle names: Aron, Ruben, Simon, Rebecka, Sara.
Translated by Peter Stenberg and Lena Karlström.