Mendlessohn-Bartholdy Poem by gershon hepner

Bartholdy added to the name
of Mendlessohn made people who
feared antisemites hide with shame
the fact that Felix was a Jew.
I feel quite sure that Grandpa Moses
would hate to have been hyphenated
when his descendants by osmosis
were Aryanized, with gentiles mated,
and surely would have greatly worried,
as Jews from Dessau often do,
when Felix married and was buried
as Christian, as if not a Jew.
The man, of course, had been baptized,
as used to happen then to lots
of Jews who tried to keep disguised
their origin, like leopard spots,
but he was Jewish, though they added
Bartholdy to his Jewish name,
for even when your name is padded
you can't conceal it out of shame.



Carol J. Williams writes in the LA Times(Germany's Ex-Gentry Is In a Bind: The heirs of easterners whose land the Soviets seized still face communist era restrictions when trying to get it back, ' December 9,1998) , that Julius H. Schoeps, one of four living descendants of the Mendlessohn-Bartholdy banking family and a professor of history who maintains the Moses Mendlessohn Center in Potsdam, is fighting to recover property that belonged to his later mother Marie, who fled the Nazis during the war years.

12/9/98