Out of Latvia

A new book details life for a Jewish family in Taranaki at the turn of last century. Helen Harvey reports.

Some things are destined to forever remain a mystery - like why respected Stratford draper Adolph Manoy chose to settle in Taranaki.

And what happened to his relatives back home in Latvia in 1916 during World War I, when their postcards suddenly stopped arriving.

Adolph's granddaughter Ann Gluckman, 82, has letters her mother, Augusta, wrote while she was at medical school in Otago to her parents back home in Stratford.

She also has an oral history made by Augusta before she died.

Mrs Gluckman has combined this history with 90 postcards from Latvia and put it into a book.

Postcards from Tukums not only tells the story of her family, but also of another world in Latvia at the beginning of last century.

Adolph, born in 1860, left his wife and children behind in Latvia in 1904 and came to New Zealand. He stayed with relatives in Motueka before travelling around the lower North Island looking for somewhere to set up a business.

He finally settled in Stratford in 1909 and his wife and three children came out and joined him. A son had died while he was away. Looking back, no one can really understand why he chose Stratford.

Jewish people traditionally like to live close to other Jewish people for religious reasons, Mrs Gluckman says. But for some reason, her grandfather didn't go to one of the few places in the country where there was a synagogue.

"You didn't find Jewish people in Taranaki in the old days . . . and he had three marriageable daughters."

At that time, people wanted their daughters to marry inside their religion, she says. Only her mother, the youngest daughter, had children - and she met her husband in Australia.

The second daughter, Rebecca, nicknamed Percy, was older when she met a Jewish man, Harry Berman, from Auckland who had moved to Stratford for work.

The eldest, Sarah, never married.

"They tried to arrange a marriage for her with a man she hadn't seen and she took one look at the elderly widower and ran. She wasn't having any of it."

Life in Stratford was difficult for the family at the beginning, she says. Her grandmother, Yetta, was a refined and gentle lady who was used to having help in the home. In Stratford, she had to dig the long drop. And then there was the lack of kosher meat in Taranaki. The family ordered it from Wellington. Augusta, as the youngest, had to go and pick the meat up. It wasn't her favourite job - she described the meat as "walking off the train".

Augusta was the only member of the family to go to school in New Zealand. She couldn't speak English and, at age 12, was put into standard four. The next year she was moved to standard six. She later won a scholarship to medical school in Dunedin.

Her sister Sarah stayed home to help their mother and Rebecca worked in the family's Stratford drapery shop.

As well as the business in Stratford, Adolph had stores in Whangamomona and Tangarakau, both of which were sold around 1925. Rebecca worked in the Stratford shop from the moment she arrived in 1909 until she retired in 1965 and moved to Auckland.

It was an honest firm to deal with, Mrs Gluckman says, "the firm where you could get everything from your bra to your wedding dress, the real country drapers that don't exist now, I think".

The shop started in a wooden building and the concrete building that is still there was built in 1925.

Adolph died in 1933 and the Stratford Evening Press wrote, "By all with whom he came into contact Mr Manoy was admired and highly respected as a man of integrity and high motives . . ."

And it was this respect that helped the family during World War I. Although the family had been under Russian rule in Latvia, they spoke German at home, unlike most Jewish families, who spoke Yiddish, Mrs Gluckman says.

They had lived close to the old Prussian capital of Konigsberg, which is now in Russia and renamed Kaliningrad.

"Konigsberg was an important cultural centre."

Back in the day, New Zealanders were afraid of an attack by the Russian fleet and there was an anti-Russian feeling in the country. So the family decided that if people thought they were German, they wouldn't deny it. This backfired a bit when war broke out in 1914.

In the book, Augusta is quoted as saying ". . . There was a grave hatred [of anything German] raging. Yet they formed a little defence force in Stratford. 'If anything happens to the Manoys . . . we will jolly well see that no one touches our Manoys' because they knew we were good citizens."

And though things got quite bad, the family business didn't suffer, because Adolph was so respected.

Augusta and Rebecca went to the police and told them the family's story. ". . . and he put his arms around us, the sergeant of police, and he said, We'll look after you, don't be afraid."

A home guard was formed and the Manoy property protected. The situation was resolved when a Manoy cousin from Motueka was killed on the Somme, Mrs Gluckman says.

"When his name went up on the casualty list at the Stratford Post Office, Mum said it was the first time she was able to walk to school with her head held high."

When her mother went to medical school in Otago, she was one of two Stratford District High School girls to go at the same time. In 1922, Augusta became the first Jewish woman to graduate in medicine in New Zealand. She then went to Europe to do postgraduate study before meeting her future husband, Sam Klippel, in Australia, Mrs Gluckman says.

"She was a pioneer, but there is a substory in the book. She belonged to the generation when men had very definite ideas about what they expected a wife to be."

In her letters home, Augusta debated whether she should get married and give up the career she had worked so hard for.

"The older she got, the more she regretted that she hadn't continued to practice."

But while Augusta gave it up for marriage, her daughter was able to get married, have four children and still have a career.

"We got on wonderfully well, but there was an element of longing. She wished she'd been able to do it.

Mrs Gluckman was the first woman in New Zealand to be appointed principal of a state co- ed school, Nga Tapuwae College, Mangere, in 1975.

All Adolph's descendants have done well. Mrs Gluckman's son is Sir Peter Gluckman, the science adviser to the prime minister. It was Sir Peter who found Augusta's letters.

The house in Remuera, which has been in the family for three generations, was being remodelled and workmen found an old cardboard box in the rafters. Once used to pack men's suits, it was full of letters.

"They gave it to Peter and said, Do you want us to chuck these letters? And Peter recognised his grandmother's writing. I spent about three years typing out all of her letters. And then three years ago, I moved into a retirement village and my other son said he had just found this box among his grandmother's old things."

The second box contained 90 postcards sent from Latvia between 1908 and 1916. They were written in German, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish. Mrs Gluckman had to get the cards translated.

"Latvia at the time was under the Russian tsars and the life of Jewish people in Imperialist Russia was very fraught."

The cards were sent from a little town called Tukums and addressed to Adolph Manoy, Stratford, New Zealand.

"Sometimes they were addressed New Zealand, Australia. They had no idea where New Zealand was. These cards said: Missing you. How are you getting on? We went to a dance."

After the cards were translated, Mrs Gluckman realised the pictures on the front of the cards told a story of the environment and the times.

"I did a lot of work tracing the artists or the places where photos were taken and who the people were in the photos. And it builds upon a very contrasting picture of the background and culture of the people who came to New Zealand and life in Europe before the Russian Revolution."

The last postcard has no date and no postage stamp, just a stamp by the Russian censor. It gives birthday greetings and then says, "I almost doubt whether my card will reach you. Do not be concerned for us. All is well, so far."

It was towards the end of 1916 during World War I.

Mrs Gluckman doesn't know what happened to the family. Some, she believes, went to Israel. Her mother and grandparents never talked about the past.

"I do not know what happened to most of the people who wrote the cards, but it is safe to assume that they all died during the First World War or in the 1917 Revolution. I am certain Perez Kaufer, the main correspondent, died as a conscript in a uniform factory in 1916. Had the devoted Perez survived, he most certainly would have kept in touch."

The book tells the story of the beginnings of Zionism when it was not political, she says, "when it was purely the Jews, who had a terrible time under the Russian Imperialists, wanting to go back to Israel and buy land, which they did".

About 18 of the cards are Jewish National Fund cards, which have pictures of the Holy Land and biblical scenes, she says.

"They were sold for a few kopeks to raise money to buy land in the swamps from the Arabs."

There are lots of layers to the book. The stamps on the postcards tell an interesting story in themselves.

"In 1913, Russia celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Tsarist rule and they had huge celebrations and that was the beginning of the end for Russia. They spent all the money on the anniversary and the peasants and everyone else started to revolt."

For the centenary, there were a series of stamps published with the various tsars' heads on them and they are much bigger than the other stamps.

"In a way, it's a book written by a schoolteacher, because it's got footnotes and appendices," Mrs Gluckman says. "But it's such an unknown part of the world I'm writing about, Latvia, that I thought it necessary to explain."

Postcards from Tukum is available from Benny's Books in New Plymouth and other good bookshops for $44.99 (ISBN: 9781877378454).

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