Dear Cousins:
We have had quite a year in Los Angeles. Perhaps the January 17 Earthquake was an omen of things to come. Since June, the country has been focused on the O.J. Simpson murder story, which for us has hit all too close to home. For the first few days, my boss, Howard Weitzman, was O.J.'s attorney. Then the media frenzy turned to my father, who was the judge in 1989 when O.J. was convicted of spousal abuse. The city attorneys lied and said that they had requested jail for O.J. back then, but that my father refused to sentence the football star to jail. The truth, proved by the transcripts of the 1989 hearings, is that the city attorneys specifically asked that "[O.J.] would serve no jail time" in their sentencing recommendation (which is quite normal for first offenders). But the damage had been done and my father was forced to hold a press conference to defend himself against a growing number of misinformed attackers. The press conference was carried live on CNN and covered by all the major networks and local stations. I've attached a copy of a Los Angeles Times article, which doesn't fail to mention that I now work for O.J.'s then attorney, Howard Weitzman. The irony is that in 1989 I worked for the district attorney not Weitzman, and that I almost didn't get my job because Weitzman was angry with my father for how harshly he had sentenced O.J. (making him do an extra 32 hours of community service on top of the original 120 hours sentence and forcing him to continue counseling for 6 months). The Times also mentioned that O.J. and my father live on Rockingham, but of course not the fact that they don't know each other. The big lesson for us: you cannot necessarily believe what you read or hear in this case.
Things have settled down again, although the traffic on Rockingham is very heavy and it seems that everyone in West Los Angeles has some personal connection to the murder story. (I sat on a plane earlier this week next to a women who had been at the dance recital where O.J. and Nicole were last seen together the afternoon before the murders.)
Earlier in the year, in April, I actually was selected to sit on a jury in a gang murder trial that took place on the same floor of the courthouse where the Simpson trial is now taking place. As we entered deliberations, it became clear that I was the only juror who harbored a doubt about the defendant's guilt, although the main eye-witness had changed his story and the prosecution's story was that the defendant had shot the victim with a shotgun, ran up to his friends, handed them the shotgun, and then continued down the street where he was picked up moments later. The police had then seen another group of gang members coming out of another street, one of them carrying the shotgun used in the murder. The police retrieved the gun after chasing the other suspects unsuccessfully. It seemed a bit implausible to me that the defendant was actually the person who shot the shotgun, considering that he was captured moments later two blocks away from the group with the gun. His fingerprints weren't on the gun and there was no gun powder residue on his clothes or hands. Nevertheless, our initial vote was 11-1 for guilty (he was, after all, a gang member, which for some jurors was enough to convict him of any crime, no matter what the facts or evidence). After four days of difficult deliberations, I managed to convince four others that there was a "reasonable doubt" before we ended up with a hung jury, 7-5. I recommend to everyone the old movie classic, "Twelve Angry Men". It could not be closer to the truth, and very accurately portrays the type of characters I also witnessed on my jury. As a lawyer this was an invaluable, if somewhat exasperating, experience.
We've been visited by a few cousins this year. Gerhard Friedländer stopped in Los Angeles for just one night on his way to Hawaii. My mother and I marveled at the strong family resemblance. The conversation was in German, French and English -- sometimes all three at once! Michaela and Karolina Navratilova visited us from Prague and took in all the sights of California, including, Yosemite, San Francisco and Monterey Bay. I also had a wonderful afternoon in Washington, D.C., visiting with Hanna Klaus, who runs an educational project concerning natural family planning education. If I am not mistaken, she was going to attend the population conference in Cairo that took place earlier this month. I met Malcolm Schwartz when he and his wife Carol and daughter Stephanie came out to visit his so Doug, a lawyer who works right across the street from me. Apparently, mine is not the only family tree newsletter they receive, but I am still waiting for Doug to give me some more addresses so I can contact some of the other twigs on his branch of our tree. Malcolm, like Doug and I, is a Princeton graduate and is a partner at a national accounting firm.
Those of you who actually take the time to inspect the revised family tree will notice some new branches. Through the help of Dr. Victor Gurewich in Cambridge, Mass., who sent me a family tree that his mother had received, we have learned of a whole slew of new Kolisch cousins. Some of my sources now contradict each other, but the current composition of the tree is my best guess at who fits where. If Victor has time to send me some addresses of these new cousins, I may be able to extend the tree even further.
I have finally made contact with relatives in Rio de Janeiro. Erna Orthof wrote me that her husband Geraldo Orthof had died at age 90 just weeks after receiving my first letter last year. Geraldo was a very well-known painter, and his works are on display at Palais Palffy in Vienna. I also spoke with John Neschling, a conductor who now lives in Switzerland. John has promised to put me in contact with our remaining cousins in Brazil. He will be conducting an opera in Mexico City later this year.
By following one cousin to another I finally got in contact with Feri Molat in Budapest. He has sent me several long letters describing his family, and even sent me pictures of his great-grandmother Rosa together with her twin brother, my great-great grandfather Max Schwarz. Feri was very happy to make contact after all these years of separation, and would be happy to hear from other Schwarz family members. He speaks German and is the press chief of Hungary's largest insurance company. Feri is planning a trip to Israel in October and hopefully will be able to track down Ruth Hoffman Erez (b. 1940), with whom we have lost contact. She was last seen in Ramat Gan/Tel Aviv in 1974 by George Teller. Letters to her old address have been returned undelivered. I also have yet to find Peter Gilbert, and Gerhard Friedländer has promised to send me the addresses of Maureen Reed and the Freedman's in England, so I can continue tracing the Schwarz family tree.
Patsy Kumekawa responded to my last letter with lots of family information of her own. I met Patsy while I was at Princeton, where she was a Dean of Students. Over lunch one day, we discovered that we both had relatives from Vienna. I asked what her family names were and it turned out we both had ancestors named Feitler. I told her that my great-great grandfather Michael Feitler owned a shop with his younger brother on the Mariahilfestraße, but that the store had gone bankrupt, allegedly because of the younger brother's incompetence. Michael and his wife Rosa Feitler then moved in with their children and the very bitter Rosa became the bane of my grandfather Eric Zeisl's existence. (She used to chide him as he composed on the piano with the comment "see, he plays instead of practicing." Later, he said that he had only three enemies: Hitler, the sun and his grandmother.) After I told my story, Patsy called her mother, who told her that her grandfather Feitler had indeed owned a shop on the Mariahilfestraße with his brother, but she had been told that it had closed because of the older brother's mismanagement! Patsy and I happily decided to end the family feud and I am very glad to have reestablished contact with her.
George Steiner is planning a trip to Asia next year. No relatives there yet, but maybe he'll find some! Lilly Field, our other genealogist, has been tracing down family information from the archives of Austria and the Czech and Slovak Republics. Her son Alan graduated from law school this year. Lilly's daughter Rachel wrote me from the Hague and daughter Ruth "Jeanne" from France.
Wolfgang Hartl visited my aunt Nuria Nono in Venice and left her some photographs of his grandparents, which I picked up on my vacation to Italy earlier this month. Michaela Navratilova brought us a wonderful picture of my great-grandfather Rudolf Kolisch, who was a famous doctor who authored several books and numerous articles on the treatment of diabetes. I would appreciate very much receiving old family photographs from all the rest of you. Photocopies are fine; laser color copies even better. I will eventually bind everything together in a book for the family reunion and would like to have as many pictures as possible. We also have several painted portraits, including one of Lazar Schwarz, the paterfamilias of the Schwarz Family Tree.
Nuria Nono has set up the Luigi Nono archives in Venice, and is busy cataloguing the music, writings and letters of her late husband. Nuria has also spoken at several conferences and universities about her work at the archives, as well as on her very successful document biography of her father Arnold Schoenberg. Nuria is now working with her brother Larry Schoenberg on a traveling multi-media Schoenberg exhibit that is scheduled to be unveiled in Paris next fall. Nuria's daughter Serena is an extremely accomplished painter who has begun showing her works in Italy and hopes to have a show in Los Angeles sometime soon. Daughter Silvia is working as a press agent for a publisher in Rome. Both Silvia and Serena appeared in the new movie directed by Silvia's boyfriend Nanni Moretti, "Caro Diario" (Dear Diary), for which Nanni won the best director prize at Cannes. The film has received rave reviews all over Europe and will be opening in the United States very soon. Serena plays a reflexologist and Silvia is herself in this semi-autobiographical film.
Arnie Schoenberg married Cynthia Hernandez this summer in a small private ceremony conducted by my father. A larger ceremony and celebration is planned for next March with Cynthia's family in Mexico City. Julie Schoenberg is sailing back to the United States from Europe. She and two friends are scheduled to set off west from Lisbon any day now. Julie lived for the last few years in Madrid and is planning to return to Southern California. Camille Schoenberg is a freshman at the University of California at Santa Barbara and may study mathematics, like her father (and several cousins!).
My sister Marlena made a breakthrough discovery this summer and is on her way to completing her PhD in genetics at Harvard. While looking for the gene responsible for a type of uterine tumor, she accidentally discovered the gene responsible for a very common tumor known as a "fat tumor". She still hopes to find the uterine tumor gene and is now racing against some Dutch researchers who are on the same track to see who finds it first. Her husband Zoran just finished his PhD in electrical engineering at Northeastern. The two of them hope to find jobs and come back to California sometime next year. My sister Melanie is a senior in high school and is applying to universities. She would like to study music (of all things) and hopes to attend college on the east coast. She recently composed an anthem for her school. My brother Ricky passed his qualifying exams at Berkeley in statistics and is now traveling through Europe. He is planning to work in London for two months at the Commerzbank, a job which cousin Nick Teller helped him obtain. He will return to Berkeley to begin work for his PhD next year.
For his part, Nick Teller is moving from London to Prague to direct the Commerzbank there, which makes his parents very happy, since Nick's mother, Sonja Teller, is from Prague and never imagined that one of her family would return there. George and Sonja Teller sent me a bibliography from a new book on Czech Jews which may hold some more keys to our history. Did you know that until 1848 there was a limit on the number of Jewish families in Czechoslovakia. Many Czech Jews had to emigrate to Hungary in order to marry and start families, which accounted for over half the Hungarian Jewish families by 1900. That perhaps explains our possible cousin, Pierre Kolisch of Portland, Oregon, whose name I came across while doing some legal research. He had earlier made contact with my great-aunt Maria ("Mitzi") Kolisch. He says that his father's family was from Budapest, but may have originated in Czechoslovakia. I am still waiting to hear from him the names of his parents, grandparents and the rest of his family so I can fit them into our tree.
Werner Jontof-Hutter says that he and his family have survived the upheaval in South Africa and hopes that the next five years will be more peaceful than the last. He sent me some information from his mother's memoirs. His grandfather was the banker for the King of Serbia (incidentally, my sister Marlena and her husband Zoran just visited Zoran's parents in Belgrade, so we've come full circle!) and had a box at the opera next to the Czar when the family lived in St. Petersburg, where Werner's mother was born. I would appreciate receiving a copy of his mother's family history, as I am sure it contains many interesting family stories. Likewise, Hanna Klaus told me that her mother taped an oral history. Naturally, I would be extremely happy to receive copies of any family histories, letters or memoirs from other family members. I would like to incorporate as many stories as possible into the family tree book I'll prepare for the reunion. Feri Molat and Gerhard Friedländer both had similarly funny stories about the deafness (and flatulence) of my great-great grandfather Max Schwarz, who as the oldest of 16 children, allegedly presided over his siblings like a dictator. According to family legend, he once refused to speak to one brother for over a year because the younger sibling had dared to get up to fix a sandwich while Max was thinking over his next move in a game of chess. Max was apparently quite a character. He had a lengthy correspondence with the Hungarian patriot, Kossuth Lajos, and once wrote to Mussolini to suggest that if a dam could be placed at the Straits of Gibraltar, the water level of the Mediterranean could be lowered and the size of Italy increased! He was a jeweler (as is Gerhard Friedländer) and won a medal at the Paris 1900 World's Fair.
Some of us have joined the information revolution and have started using electronic mail (e-mail) to communicate. I have already sent a few messages back and forth to Joe Franke, author of a guidebook on Costa Rica, who is running a non-profit international environmental and health research corporation. Recently, Joe's organization has been attempting to support the activities of a Buddhist monk, Pra Prachak, who is a severely persecuted forest activist in Thailand. He'd like to hear from anyone who is interested in this worthwhile project. Joe's brother Paul and his wife Karen had their second child, Olivia, in March of this year. If any others of you have access to e-mail, I recommend it highly. My internet address is 6044921@mcimail.com. Other addresses can be found on the mailing list attached to the family tree.
We were very sad to hear from Melanie O'Callaghan of the untimely death at age 41 of her daughter Helen O'Callaghan Macken. All the family sends its deepest condolences to her family, and especially her three children, Stephanie, Robyn and Caleb Macken. I've attached a copy of an obituary notice.
I have heard from our Canadian cousins. Monique Bosco is a French professor at the Université de Montréal. Millie Bower, wife of Harry Bower, wrote me to remind me that her first husband Erich Brugel was also a relative, on the Reichmann side of the Zeisl Family Tree. Erich's family perished, like so many others, in the Holocaust, but he escaped to India. We still need to do some research to figure out exactly how Erich was related, and maybe Erich and Millie's children, Michael and Thomas Brugel, will help me reach some of the other missing Reichmann relatives (some in Canada) that I know of only from Harry's mother Ida. Harry's brother Heinz Bauer suffered a stroke earlier in the year but has almost completely recovered. I spoke with him last month and he says he is still giving tours at the National Museum several days a week, a job he took up after retiring as a doctor and professor of medicine several years ago.
Ronnie Jontof-Hutter sent me a long and very interesting letter describing his impressions of the changes going on in his former home of South Africa and of the shock seeing the places where he used to read and play music become the backdrop for mayhem and violence. Ronnie's son Shaul is a freshman at the University of New England in northern New South Wales, where he is studying law. He is also an accomplished tennis player. Ronnie is playing violin in a mainly Russian chamber orchestra, and from his home in Donvale, Victoria is continuing to work on his medical projects concerning TB treatment in South Africa.
I have received many encouraging responses to my inquiry about having a family reunion. It seems that most people want it to occur in the summer. I cannot do it next summer if I also want to make the Schoenberg Festival in Paris that fall, so we'll have to try 1996, which seems a long way off -- and is! My thought is to meet in Vienna in August 1996. It is possible that there will be a performance of Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" at the Salzburg Festival at the end of August too. (The last time I went to Salzburg to hear "Moses und Aron" in 1987, my grandmother died during the first night's performance so it was more than a little traumatic. I would like to see if I can have a more enjoyable experience at Salzburg so the beautiful city isn't ruined for me forever.) The reunion itself should take place in Vienna or at least nearby. Mischa Seligman has suggested reserving a number of rooms for everyone at a hotel in Baden, which is about 30 minutes outside the city. Otherwise, we can all fend for ourselves trying to find a place to stay in Vienna. I haven't ruled out Prague, but it may just be easier to meet in Vienna and people can visit Prague (or Budapest) on their own. Although some have suggested other cities -- Paris or Los Angeles, for example -- I think that Vienna is really the only ciy that is central for almost all of us on the family tree. Please tell me what you think. Obviously, we have some more time to plan it out now.
Thanks again to all of you who have written me with information since my last letters. I apologize if I failed to correct some of the mistakes you were all kind enough to point out. As always, I welcome any news, stories, photographs or further family information. Also, if you have some addresses to add to the tree, please send them to me. Best wishes to everyone.
Your cousin,
Randol Schoenberg
P.S. This week I celebrated a long-awaited victory in the Kim Basinger case. The appellate court agreed with us and threw out the insupportable $8.1 million verdict against Basinger. Hooray!
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