an international family history

Some thoughts on

Café Heimat
Louise Jacobs
Ullstein Taschenbuch 2007

This is one of several interesting books the street libraries of Düsseldorf offered me this month, and I read it immediately in my ongoing quest to learn how best to distil family history into book format.

Jacobs is a household name in Germany as a leading brand of coffee. It is the standard middle of the road coffee that your aunties would share at their Kaffeeklatsch since the 1950s and 60s. By the time I started drinking coffee, this brand was so desperately uncool I probably never bought their coffee. Also, I was shopping for fair trade, single origin coffee of course. Note that the whole Fair trade concept is largely motivated by companies like Jacobs who developed clever ways of keeping the money that consumers pay for their coffee in Bremen, rather than paying producers in the developing world a fair share of it.

Thus I didn't read the book for the coffee connection (although I'm sure the brand recognition helped the author to get it published), and I also don't care how much money the Jacobs family earned with the coffee business and how many race horses they bought with it. So let's look at it as just another family history with interesting international connections.

The story telling switches back and forth between two branches of her family tree, namely that of her maternal grandmother Ann Jessurun, whose name line descends from Sephardic Jews in Portugal who came to Hamburg at one point (glimpses of that lineage are on GedBas). During Nazi times her great-grandparents with two young daughter emigrated to Portugal, and onwards to the US. Later her grandmother ended up in Nicaragua, and her grandaunt in Bresil. I'm loving the Latin vibe here.

Her paternal family comes from a farmstead near Bremen, which has been handed down to the oldest son since the 16th century, so nothing too exotic there. The excitement comes from the younger sons who have to go out into the world to find another way of earning a living. Her great-granduncle went to Bremen to set up a shop there (born in 1869, so a little bit older than our shop keeper Julius, born 1883). Her grandfather Walther Jacobs went to America to learn all about capitalism and then came back to Bremen to work with his uncle in the shop, which he then turned into the successful coffee business.

That is obviously more than enough material to fill a book and keep readers interested with the back and forth, culture clashes, success stories and deathly dangers. The author adds an extra layer to it with the discovery story of how she found out about various relatives - not surprisingly as she was still around 20 when she investigated all this and discovered lots of things that clearly weren't discussed openly in the family.

She also dramatises the story with dialogues which may in part come from the memories her older relatives shared with her, but in other parts must have been made up. To me when I write about family history, this would be a bridge too far. While I am happy to speculate about thoughts and motivations, I wouldn't put words in people's mouths when I don't have a record or evidence that they actually said them. In summary, not an example I would follow, but an interesting read nonetheless. I suspect it may have been inspired in part by the Ullstein novel by Sten Nadolny about the Ullstein family who founded the eponymous publishing house where both books appeared.

What's missing from the book? There are obvious asymmetries in the way the Nazi times are treated in the two branches. The tribulations of the Jewish family having to emigrate are covered at great length, but for the coffee family the 1000 years seem to be passing quite quickly. Now that the membership files of the NSDAP are on open access, there may be another journey of discovery to be had here. I note also that two other grandparents are just floating by without revealing much about their lives, namely the wife of Walther Jacobs, Lore Beckmann, and the husband of Ann Jessurun, Fritz Grobien.

Oh, and the music is missing too. The one reason I am interested in the Sephardim is that I happen to love their music, and that isn't even mentioned. There is some singing on special occasions and I recall somebody in the family played cello at one point, and great-grandfather Fritz Jessurun shows off his dance moves late at night in a jazz bar in New York, but for wealthy and cultivated families in the early 20th century, there is less music than I would have expected. Oh, the Jessurun girls got to hear Albert Einstein play his violin - because they were staying with a family friend whose job involved delivering eggs to the great physicist.