The Beginning of Our Story
This assignment was more than an exercise in finding out about my family name and names – it was a trip into the past – and a past of which much of the information as to who, what and where is still unknown. This exercise made me nostalgic and made me cry – in a good way, I suppose, because it brought to mind memories of my girlhood which are long buried. I am only a second generation American. My grandparents were born in Europe; my parents were born in the U.S. in Newark, N.J., as was I. My last name on my father’s side is Lovler. There are no surviving relatives who can tell me anything about the origin of the name – or even if it is an Anglicized version of a different name. None of my grandparents or parents is living. My father’s second wife, who was also his sister’s best friend, is herself, 88 years old. She only recalls that my grandfather came to the U.S. from “somewhere in Russia” and that your grandmother was from somewhere in Poland. Common family history has the name being one of a kind and original. Was it? Who knows? If we wanted to make an educated guess at the meaning of the name, you could tie it to “love” in some fashion, but that is simply an educated guess. Of course, carried forward in the American or U.S. tradition, is the mother’s surname. My mother’s last name was Topper and when I talked with my aunt Gloria, I had better luck. Her father – and my grandfather – was born in Warsaw, Poland. He died when I was four years old. Her mother – and my grandmother – came to the U.S. from Austria. She died in 1940, just before World War II. The name Topper means one who attached the wool to the distaff for spinning. We think he came to the U.S. around 1915, to escape being drafted into the Russian army. His future wife came over on a French boat called La Lorraine. An unknown to me Aunt Sarah, who was married to my grandfather’s cousin, introduced the two when they got to New Jersey. Soon after, they married. My ancestors came to the U.S. to escape the pogroms of Russia. But they did not share much about their past with their children – five daughters -- my mother and my aunts. I am named for my grandmother, Rose. My sister, Sheryl is named for my father’s mother, Sadie. In the Jewish tradition it is customary to name someone for a deceased relative by choosing a name that starts with the same letter. In the telephone conversation I had with my Aunt Gloria to do this assignment, she said she had just gone through this exercise with one of my cousins. And what she realized is how little we all know. “We never talked to parents about things like this and never volunteered the information. … We just didn’t stop to think and ask questions like that and they never volunteered the information because the life they had was a poor life in Europe.” What we could piece together was that my family, like so many other people who emigrated to the U.S. from eastern and southern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century were poor and were leaving behind hard lives in their homelands. “They had no food, no clothing, no homes, and when he Russian pogroms started, a lot of the Jews left Russia and came here,” my Aunt Gloria said. Most of the boats to the U.S. left from Hamburg, Germany, and many would-be emigrants had to literally walk across half of Europe to get to the boats. And that’s the beginning of my story. It continues now with my two sons, Tiffen and Michael. Their last name is Tapia, from their father, Mario Tapia, a Nicaraguan. Tapia, a Spanish surname means protective wall, like the kind kind built to protect castles in medieval times. On their father’s side, they can trace their roots to Spain – their great grandparents immigrated to Nicaragua at the end of the 19th century and settled in a town called Masatepe – where the family still lives. Tiffen was named for my mother, Toby. Michael was named for my father, Morton. And that’s the beginning of their story.
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