Author Nancy (Isaacs) Klein is the daughter of Moses Isaacs. Moses was one of the 11 children of Abraham Isaacs, a second-generation immigrant to the United States. The Isaacses were all prolific writers, and in 1953 Moses wrote an article for the Orthodox Union magazine Jewish Life, telling the story of how his family went to America.
In Lithuania, the family name was Wartesky. Moses’s grandfather Reb Schachne, with his wife, Reitza, and their five children arrived in Cincinnati in the late summer of 1853. They were greeted by Schachne’s older brother, Lazarus, who had gone to America first and changed the family name to Isaacs.
Over the years, as Schachne became a leading figure in the Jewish community, he and Reitza had two more sons. Their seventh child was Abraham – Moses’s father, and Nancy Klein’s grandfather.
Abraham married Rachel Friedman in 1878. Over the next 27 years, they had 11 children – nine boys and two girls. The first two children, Aaron and Isaac, graduated from high school and joined the family business, which dealt in household goods and clothing. The third child was Rebecca. She never married and became the quintessential “maiden aunt,” a surrogate mother for her siblings and their children.
The remaining seven boys and their sisters all went to university and had glittering academic and professional careers. In her book, The Amazing Eleven, Klein tells their fascinating story. Nathan became a lawyer, Schachne a psychologist, Raphael a doctor, Nesh went to university – an achievement in itself for a woman at the time– and became a lecturer in sociology. Elcanan was as academically brilliant as his siblings and became a prolific writer on law and Hebrew poetry. Moses – Klein’s father – earned a PhD in biochemistry and wrote extensively on evolution. Asher specialized in economics and founded the Jewish newspaper The American Jewish Outlook. Judah, possibly the most academically brilliant of them all, bypassed the University of Cincinnati favored by his siblings and won a scholarship to Harvard. He became a financial expert and author.
The family had been brought up Orthodox, and all 11 remained so throughout their lives. Today, as Nancy Klein records, there is a large and ever-expanding, Isaacs family stemming from Reb Schachne and Reitza; however, five of the 11 Isaacs siblings left no descendants. Aaron and Rebecca never married; Nathan, Schachne and Elcanan did marry but left no family behind them.
Delving into family history
For anyone who enjoys delving into family history and tracing relationships through the generations, The Amazing Eleven provides a genuine treat. The author, Nancy Klein (who, coincidentally, stems from a Klein family on her mother’s side but chanced to marry a totally unrelated Klein) enhances her unique family story with vivid character sketches and well-remembered family incidents. Like all such histories, this saga of the Isaacs family is unique, yet it falls into place as part of the larger story of how the Jewish immigrants of the 19th century made their way and became integrated into American society.
The Amazing Eleven is a jolly good read.■