The Finkel Family Memoirs
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"The battle at Anzio was going so poorly that I was given a charge of explosives and assigned the job of blowing up the last bridge on the beachhead before evacuating. When I inquired as to why I was the lucky one to be assigned this detail, I was told that I have the reputation of being a fast runner so I was best qualified." "I was one of two soldiers assigned to guard the medics because the Germans were infiltrating and capturing them. When we got to the medics quarters, which was a bombed-out barn, there was no place for us to bed down. When I was not assigned to walk guard duty I tried to sleep in the haystack. I found it too itchy and uncomfortable and I went back into the barn. About five minutes later a shell landed in the haystack, killing all the soldiers who were in that area. Again, the luck was with me." -- Murray I. Finkel
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About the Book
"Both Max and Bessie arrived in the United States in 1905, after having fled the tyrannies, anti-Semitism, persecutions, poverty, and hunger of Eastern Europe. Grandpa was twenty years old at the time. He took up the trade of carpentry, as his father before him. Grandma was fifteen years old and had seen the horrors of a pogrom which had killed her mother. She was unhappy with her stepmother and lonely for her older sister, who was already in the United States. Grandpa and Grandma settled in the Lower East Side of New York, met each other, and married in 1910. They had simply moved from one shtetel to another. Yiddish was the primary language spoken at home by the entire family. By the time Murray was born in 1922, Belle was twelve, Esther was nine, and I was five years old. We had been exposed to English, which became our second language." Four generations after Max and Bessie's arrival in America, we Finkels have multiplied and thrived in our new home. From the Old World to Ellis Island, from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, from Long Island and South Fallsburg, these memoirs tell our story.
About the Author
Murray I. Finkel was born in New York in 1922, the fourth child of Max and Bessie Finkel, Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms in Europe. Here he compiles his memories of growing up in Brooklyn, fighting in World War II, and raising a family. Now a grandfather of seven and a first-time great-grandfather, Murray lives in Florida with his wife Dotty. Murray's brother Allan and sister Esther, as well as Dotty, also contributed to the book.