A Glimmer of Light at the End of the Tunnel

A MYSTERY SOLVED!!!


New Discovery:

I know in my last blog, I was going to tell you about all the Sperber kids. Something's come up and I will delay that and get back to them shortly.   I had mentioned in my first post that families hold many secrets and human stories, tragedies, and hope.   This holds true as you will see.  If you remember, I had previously mentioned my maternal Grandfather, Leon Sperber, who I never knew as he died in 1938 six years before my birth.  He had brought all his little sisters to America from Vienna after he was established in business.  I had mentioned one of them, my grand-aunt, Mathilde Sperber, who had, to my understanding, run off and was never heard from again.  No one, apparently, had any knowledge of her...but my grandfather did, and it went with him to his grave.

MATHILDE!

As recently as yesterday, Aug.30th, I received an e-mail from a woman in Nicosia, Cyprus, through  Ancestry.com, to which I subscribe, Elena Papanastasiou.  She had discovered, as I subsequently did, through our DNA analysis, that we were, in fact, second cousins.  My excitement at this development was unbridled!

Mathilde, at the age of 17, arrived at Ellis island from Hamburg on the ship Amerika on July 12, 1913.  The ship's manifest says she went to live with a cousin, Heni Rattner in NYC who I am looking into.  In all my years as a child and adult, up until my mother's death and all those in her generation, I never once heard the name of my mother's Aunt Mathilde and what had happened to her.  Hearing from Elena cleared up this mystery and it was quite a story.

"TILLIE":

I was able to find out that Mathilde, after arriving in America, became known as Tillie Sperber, and, having fallen in love with a man by the name of Christ Hadjicharalambous, a Greek Cypriot, married him on June 8, 1927.  He owned a restaurant in New York City but, after the Great Depression of 1929, with the economy tanking, the restaurant closed.  I have no idea how they met or any information on their courtship.  Being in America, Christ changed his last name to Harrison (which incidentally is my son's middle name) and so, Tillie became Tillie Harrison.  Below is their wedding picture, a tall good-looking Greek Cypriot and my Austrian immigrant grand-aunt, Tillie, with appreciation to Elena for providing this to me.

CYPRUS!
In 1931, after 4 years of marriage, the couple decided to leave the US and settle in Cyprus, a beautiful island nation in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean.  Mathilde or Tilley lost all contact with all of her other family members.  They settled in her new home town of Famagusta.  Her family remembers her talking about her older brother and her sister, Sophia (who died in the Holocaust).  However, she never talked about her past and her family never understood why.  She was a refugee three times, once from Vienna, once when she left America for good, and the third time when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and bombed Famagusta, destroying her American passport and letters she had saved from my grandfather, Leon.  The Greek Cypriots, living in the Turkish zone, had to flee to the Greek Cypriot area further south.


When Elena went to university in the US, she found the Ellis Island website and, for the first time, discovered that Tilley was Jewish.  She might have hidden this fact to protect her family from any possible harm, and, so, she took this secret to the grave.  As her sister, Esther Scibelli, my other grand-aunt, she might have hidden this fact because of marrying out of her faith.
Her daughter, Andreoniki (or Niki), my mother's first cousin, is ill but still alive in Cyprus.
Sometime, in the 1940's, Mathilde was baptized as an Orthodox Christian and her new name was Cleo.  Cleo's daughter, Niki, had 4 children: Georgia (Elena's mother),  Cleo, Panagiotis who passed away, and Christiana who now lives in Germany.  Elena has three pre-teen children and her brother in Scotland also has three children.
Below is a photo from 1974 of Aunt Mathilde (or Cleo) holding Elena, her infant great-grand daughter.  She exudes warmth and joy in this picture, all the more reason for being sorry our family never knew her.

And so, thanks to Elena, I have discovered a whole side of my family I never knew about.  The only missing sister now is Rosa, and I suspect I'll never find out.
I hope some day to get to Cyprus and meet this lovely family as well as to see a part of the world that is new to me.
The moral of this story is that America was, and continues to be, a wonderful "melting pot" of cultures, nationalities, religions, and people with hopes and dreams and we must keep this alive in these trying times.
Providing I solve no further mysteries, I will get back to the rest of the family and "My Lifelong Childhood", in the next posts.
Thank you for staying with me in this journey!
Sandy