Stories of Our Fathers: A Multi-Generational Narrative of the Gazan Family Through Sorrow and Triumph

Stories of Our Fathers: A Multi-Generational Narrative of the Gazan Family Through Sorrow and Triumph
Harold Gazan. Springtree House Publishers: Lansing, MI, 2006. Pp. 290. $49.95, hardcover. ISBN: 0-9770646-0-3. TEL: 517-323-2327

Genealogical accounts predictably have a narrow audience. After all, they customarily record the lives of the members of a single clan, and the reading is, therefore, of interest primarily to the members of that clan. It is surprising and rewarding, then, to come across a genealogical record that serves a broader purpose, as this one does.

In the preface to his book, the author states: “I write about our ancestors not because they were leaders of armies or captains of industry, but simply because they were our predecessors and therefore are a part of who we are.” Because Gazan has taken such care to reveal the historical contexts in which various members of his family have lived, the reader understands anew that all of our lives—Gazans and non-Gazans alike—are intertwined.

This narrative begins with the birth in 1720 of Marcus Levie-zoon, a Polish Jew. When he was about 20 years old, he left Poland to begin a new life in the Netherlands. Not content just to record that his first known progenitor migrated from one country to another, Gazan carefully and methodically chronicles the rise of anti-Semitism (beginning in the Middle Ages) in Europe, so the reader understands the sociological, economic, political, and religious forces that caused many Jews to seek out the safe haven that life in the Netherlands offered.

It is also in this section we learn that it was “The imposition of the Napoleonic Code that resulted in the widespread practice of attaching a surname to a person’s given name.” Many of these new surnames derived from a person’s appearance, occupation, or place of residence. Gazan comes from the Hebrew word Chazan, meaning cantor.

The most gripping parts of the book are those that most clearly give the book a significance beyond the Gazan family. These parts detail the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of European Jews.
Gazan recounts that in 1809, when an ancestor named Aron Izak Gazan moved to Middel-harnis in the Netherlands, an estimated 50 Jews lived there and in the neighboring community of Sommelsdijk. By 1904 the Jewish population had grown to about 100. By the end of World War II, Middelharnis had just four Jews, the ones who had been successfully hidden. And, he reports, “There were no Gazans among the survivors.”

More than 50 members of Harold Gazan’s family perished in the Holocaust. During the 27 years he worked on this book, the author and his wife, Nancy, made many trips to Europe to collect historical records. Some of those records are chilling, indeed.

For example, he learned that Cato Gazan, Hartough Gazan, Anna Gazan, Margaretha Gazan, and Sebilla Gazan all died at Auschwitz on November 13, 1943. The book chronicles other instances in which several members of a single Gazan family were killed together in various Nazi extermination camps.

Which would have been more horrific, we wonder: to have been murdered alone or to have had to watch as other members of one’s family suffered the same fate?

Finally, this book may serve as a valuable resource for others who are interested in the various epochs that are the focus of this handsomely produced work. Gazan’s book is meticulously documented and liberally illustrated with copies of documents and pictures of significant locales and buildings.

The bibliography of the book contains more than 70 entries. Many of those entries could save other genealogists a good deal of time by revealing to them various sources which it took Gazan a quarter of a century and a good deal of travel to uncover.