ACassel's Pages

Tag: BCassel

  • Aharon Pick’s Diary

    Here’s what I’ve been up to: As a young man, my grandfather had a friend named Aharon Pick. The two of them collaborated on a project to collect Yiddish folksongs in and around their hometown, Keidan, in Lithuania. My grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in 1904; Aharon Pick went to France, where he graduated from…

  • B. Cassel

    B. Cassel

    My grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, was born in Keidan, then part of the Russian empire, in 1877, and arrived in New York in 1904. He had served as a clerk in the Russian army and worked as a bookkeeper in Riga, but his first business enterprise in the U.S. was a candy store. The photos…

  • Unburying the past

    From 1935 until his death in 1941, my grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, edited a monthly bulletin called “The Keidaner,” a publication of his landsmanshaft, or immigrants’ club. The Keidaner Association of New York began in 1900, like all such groups, as a mutual-aid society. Its members, recently arrived in the U.S., helped each other find housing, jobs…

  • *היימ–ארבעט

    איך האָב ניט ליב זיך צו באַרימען מיט מיין יחוס, אָבער איך וואָלט פאָרט געוואָלט דערמאָנען, אַ דער זיידע מיינער איז געווען אַ שטיקל פאָלקלאָריסט. ניט קיין פּראָפעסיאָנעלער און דאָך אַ גאַנץ פעאיקער. סוף 19טן יאָרהונדערט, ווען די פּעטערבורגער פאָרשער – גינזבורג און מאַרעק – האָבן פאַרבעטן די פאָרשטייער פון דער אינטעלעגענץ זאָלן זיך פאַרבינדן מיטן פאָלק…

  • Kedainiai

    I came to Lithuania for two reasons. One was to revive my flagging Yiddish language skills. The other was to revisit Kedainiai, which I did this weekend. As some know, I have been obsessed with this place since about 1990, when I discovered my grandfather’s memoirs about his home town, called Keidan in Yiddish. As…