Karolina's Story
by Leonard L Dreifuss
(with an Introduction and Epilogue by Pete Dreifuss)
An Introduction
One evening my dad, Len Dreifuss, took a seat at the head of our dining room table and with a notepad, pencil and a draftman eraser wrote a prologue to a short story about his mother, Carrie Hess Dreifuss. In retrospect, it was characteristic of my father to write a prologue for such a story even a short one. I once observed him discard his own efforts that didn't meet his own standards, ripping up a detailed drawing of a tree he drafted for our synagogue's newspaper the was heralding the upcoming Tu b'Shevat festival. I was amazed to see him destroy what I saw as a framable portrait-grade rendering.
However on this occasion around 1980, he liked the prologue he had written and followed it over the next few hours with a tribute to his mother he had wanted to write for some time. My dad wanted to leave future generations with an insight into history of Jewish life in Germany aroung the turn of the 20th century that he had learned from his mother, who was every bit a part of it for her first 22 years. Although I can't say for sure, I believe dad must have learned everything he wrote directly from constant questioning he posed to Carrie over the years of his youth. For that must be the origin of the questioning my brother Jeff and I picked up from him and why he was so patient with our questions about his childhood. Jeff and my lives were so different from dad's life in Brookyln in the early 20th Century New York City.
Dad wanted to pass on why a young woman would leave behind her very promising young life, parents, eight siblings. numerous cousins and relatoves, numerous cummunity friends and country. Well before the story was written, Jeff and I knew from dad's stories that our paternal grandmother was not only a wonderful grandmother to us but an extraordinary person to our family throughout the world.
In the summer of 1999, Jeff and I followed up on dad’s exploration of the family history with our own research and visited the ancestral home of our DREIFUSS family principally in Altdorf and Schmieheim, Germany. It was a wonderful trip combined with a trip with Shelley and my daughters to visit her Parisian relatives and an excursion into Switzerland. But there was no time reserved for a visit to the ancestral home of my grandmother Carrie, as she was known in the United States.
In 2018 Shelley and I began talking about making a trip to Fulda, Germany and other nearby ancestral towns of the Hess family to honor Carrie. We presented the idea for a summer 2019 trip there to Jeff and Sue at what must have been Justin’s Bar Mitzvah and soon many of Carrie’s descendants wanted in as well.
We were glad to see the trip as a type of family reunion. The trip was expanded, planned and all set when COVID came along and forced us to indefinitely postpone the whole thing.
Now a few years have passed again and we’re ready to try again. The trip is now somewhat more focused than before and without Jeff and Sue. It also coincides by coincidence with an invitation to Fulda by the Lord Mayor of Fulda to descendants like us for a week to honor the former Jewish population of Fulda.
Dad’s story, begins with his Prologue. After dad's story I'll conclude with an Afterword, which I hope you read. It adds an unwritten chapter, contributed in so many ways by his sister, Bea Dreifuss Schechter from the grave in 2023.