THE ONLY REAL EXTENDED FAMILY we were aware of and to which I was particularly close, were on my mother's side. And there were quite a number. The ones in England were related via my maternal grandmother, Esther Leah Feigenbaum, while those relatives of my maternal grandfather, Shia Steinschneider, lived in France.
Their origin was in a small township called Wirsemp in the Shedletz region of Poland. Poverty was so rife, the pogroms so terrifying and the future so uncertain, that all who could, got out and left the country as soon as they were physically able. As as adolescent, my mother Yetta, who had already begun working at the age of 12 in a Warsaw shop, was already determined to leave and seek her future elsewhere. So she departed for Paris and made her way to her uncle, a brother of her father's, whose home was a haven for all incoming family from Russian-dominated Poland. While living and working for the next two years in Paris, she nevertheless had some yearning to visit her two uncles in England, the brothers of her mother. When expressing this desire to her Paris family, they were upset for some reason and told her that if she went, she should not return! She travelled to England and lived for several years with her Feigenbaum uncles in Grimsby, a small fishing town on the North East coast. During the train journey she had a romantic adventure with a young writer who begged her to join him and go on to America! She was determined however to go to Grimsby. Which is how she came to be living in England, marrying in London and eventually gibing birth to two girls, Mary (in 1916 during a Zeppelin air raid in World War 1) and Lottie (1922) and two boys - Philip (1925) and my self.