{"id":1997,"date":"2016-03-02T06:36:50","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T14:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/?p=1997"},"modified":"2023-07-21T09:00:07","modified_gmt":"2023-07-21T16:00:07","slug":"marcus-weisberg-d-1880","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2016\/03\/marcus-weisberg-d-1880","title":{"rendered":"Marcus Weisberg or Weissberger or Veiszberger… (d. 1880)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some people ask me about my last name. “Hey Aharon, where does your last name come from?” etc.[1<\/a>]<\/sup> It’s a question I’ve long wanted to know myself. I know Varady is a common Hungarian last name and I knew that it was probably something else before it became Varady (or Varadi as some living relatives still spell it).<\/p>\n

Well, after some genealogical sleuthing, I’ve determined (as far as can be determined) that four generations ago, our family name was Weisberg<\/strong>. (In official records, the last name of my great-great grandfather Marcus<\/strong> (Majer<\/strong>) can also be found spelled as Weissberg<\/strong>, Weisberger<\/strong>, Weissberger<\/strong>, Veiszberger<\/strong>, and once even as Weinberger<\/strong>.) <\/p>\n

Cousins of my father recalled a family legend that the family name was something like Waisbecker<\/strong> or Weisenberg<\/strong>. Both are, so far, unattested in the records I’ve found, although the latter is so very close. And there were certainly Weisenberg’s in the city he lived in — Nagyv\u00e1rad<\/strong> in the Bihar<\/strong> province of Transylvania<\/strong>, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary<\/strong>, but now part of Romania<\/strong> and called Oradea<\/strong>. (The city would probably still be full of them if it weren’t for the Nazis — most of the 20,000+ residents were rounded up and murdered in Nazi death camps during WWII.)<\/p>\n

Our family has no memory of Marcus Weisberg, and I haven’t found a record of where or when he was born, or of any older relatives of which I can be certain. He is, what Dutch genealogists might call, a doodloper<\/em> — a “dead walker<\/strong>” — a better word I think than a dead end<\/em> or a brick wall<\/em>. But I will try to imagine him given the few details I’ve gleaned. In a hypnopompic<\/a> vision, I imagine him in sepia-tone, resting against a wall or a fence, wearing a top hat, a long dark grey frock coat, and with a face thinner than my great-grandfather’s. He also sports a mustache.<\/p>\n

I haven’t been able to determine when exactly Marcus was born, or whether he came to Nagyv\u00e1rad from somewhere else nearby. I did discover this, however: Marcus was a grocer who died in 1880 around three years after his son, my great-grandfather Josef<\/strong>, was born, and a year after his second son, Avraham<\/strong>, was born. I wasn’t able to find any details of his death outside of the marriage record of my great-great grandmother, Leni Klein<\/strong>, in 1881, which simply states that she was a widow of one Markus Weinberger<\/strong> (but also gives her name as Weissberg n\u00e9e Klein). <\/p>\n

29-May-1881
\nKOHN, Samuel<\/strong> (age 43, parents unknown), Groom from Derecske
\nWEISSBERGER, Leni<\/strong> (age 38, from Nagyvarad Local Gov’t Bihar, parents: SPICZER \/ KLEIN [see note below])
\nBride widowed from Markus Weinberger <\/strong>[2<\/a>]<\/sup>
\nBride’s mother [Anna<\/strong>] remarried to Aron Spiczer<\/strong> and widowed from Abraham Klein<\/strong>
\nRomanian Nat’l Archives-Oradea:785 138-05 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A sad story begins to resolve in the darkness. A year earlier, on April 1st, 1880, Leni gave birth to twins, both stillborn. Leni was 36 years old. What happened to Marcus? Did he die of grief, of stress, of old age or disease? Perhaps he was working and blamed himself for not being there to help his wife at a crucial time… who knows?<\/p>\n

According to a 1918 report on my great-grandfather by the U.S. Bureau of Investigations<\/a> (the agency later called the FBI), Josef left Nagyvarad for Budapest when he was thirteen, probably sometime in 1890, and began his career as a carpenter’s apprentice. I haven’t been able to learn what ever became of Avraham Weissberger. He Magyarized his name to Varadi<\/strong> in 1898. Josef (soon Joseph<\/strong>) adopted the last name Varadi a couple years later, and a few years after that, emigrated to the United States where he also began to use the variation, Varady<\/strong>. I am keen to note that Joseph made no mention of his previous surname in what must have been a serious and stressful interview with government agents in 1918. I believe this was intentional given his experience as a Hungarian Jew and I.W.W. socialist, navigating the torrid seas of modern nationalist preoccupations and paranoia. (I’ll write more about Joseph Varady [1877-1962] in a future post.)<\/p>\n

So, why was there all of this name changing in the first place? Our family legend is that a family member or friend, a clerk working in the national records office, changed the name because of some impending pogrom. This excellent article from YIVO on the Jews of Hungary<\/a>, however, provides the actual historical context by which Hungarian Jews chose and changed their last names to conform to Hungarian national standards and expectations:<\/p>\n

Another measure with far-reaching consequences was the 23 July 1787 decree ordering [Hungarian] Jews to adopt personal and family names. Only personal names had to be German, but most chose German family names as well, though a few elected typical Hungarian ones that became identified as Jewish, such as Farkas. While the intention of the decree was to acculturate and standardize, paradoxically a new ghetto of names came into being. The personal names adopted by Jews soon came to be identified as Jewish no matter how Teutonic in origin and were rapidly abandoned by non-Jews, only to have Jews shift to the new onomastic \u201cneighborhood\u201d in the next generation and repeat the process. Likewise, toward the end of the nineteenth century the peculiar constellation of German family names\u2014colors, animals, occupations\u2014usually identified their bearers as Jews. This transparency was made somewhat opaque by the presence of Calvinists with their share of Old Testament names and of German Schwabs who also had some family names in common with Jews, including Gross or Klein. Even when Jews began to Magyarize their names, a trend (exaggerated by historians) that began in earnest in the 1880s and was brought to a near standstill in Trianon Hungary, there was a tendency to cluster in the choice of names, thus vitiating the assimilatory intent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trying to visualize all of this for family members can be overwhelming so here’s a little genealogical chart I’ve made from a screenshots of the tree rendered by familysearch.org (with some light editing).<\/p>\n\n\t\t