Schwartzspot. A blog for gutsy women.

Life can continually surprise us. People can surprise us, as I’m continually reminded.

I’ve been recently surprised by my Grandpa Izzy, who died when I was young, and who from my fragmented memories and accounts of others, seemed  a sweet, if fairly unremarkable man.

Recently I found out how achingly wrong I was.

Two months ago, out of the blue, my sister and I received a call from the historian and HBO producer, Michael Hirsch, who had just finished a documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It turns out that our maternal grandfather had been a key figure in the tragedy.

It had long been family lore that Grandpa Izzy’s first wife had died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. No details were known, and we didn’t even put much credence in the story anyway.  Grandpa Izzy had a twinkle in his eye and a bit of the blarney in him, Yiddish -style. My mother loved to tell how Grandpa Izzy kidded around and embroidered stories.

But the real story was even more wrenching.

It turned out that the woman who died in the fire wasn’t Grandpa Izzy’s first wife, but his fiance, Sarah Brodsky, whom Grandpa Izzy planned to marry five weeks later. Sarah was 21, and died along with her 15 year old cousin, Ida, who also worked at the factory.  The cause on both women’s death certificates is listed as “asphyxia,” but newspaper accounts of the day also describe how Sarah’s body was burnt beyond recognition, and that her fiance — Grandpa Izzy — was only able to identify it because of the engagement ring he had given her.

Both the New York Times and the Jewish paper, The Forward, were so taken with the dignified and heartbroken fiance of Sarah Brodsky that each paper wrote about my grandfather as part of their coverage of the tragedy.

But my grandfather’s sorrows weren’t at an end. He had already lost of his mother, who died when he was a boy. Now, two years after his fiancee’s tragic death, he married a woman named Jennie Blanck. So his first wife did not die in the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire, but Jennie too had a connection. Jennie Blanck was the niece of one of the owner’s of the factory, Max Blanck.

My grandfather was a carpenter, while Max Blanck was among the wealthiest men in New York. How the heck, my sister and I wondered, did that marriage come about? Did my grandfather and Jennie know each other before the fire?  Or somehow, they became acquainted afterwards and discovered an emotional bond?

Alas, the marriage was short lived.  About two years later, Jennie also died, this time a victim of the endemic tuberculosis that was rampant among immigrants.  She left a toddler — my Uncle Bob — and my grandfather, grief stricken yet again.

So what’s the point of this story, which highlights so much death and sorrow happening to my grandfather by the time he was 30?

My Grandpa Izzy was also remembered as a remarkably sweet tempered, gentle, and happy man.  In my hazy memory of him, I recall someone who looked and sounded like Fred Astaire, with that sunniness and perennial optimism about him.  Others describe him as elfin.

Two years after Jennie’s death, he met and married my grandmother Rose. It was Rose who outlived my grandfather. And by all accounts, their long marriage was happy.  In the photos of my grandparents, they are always smiling, always look chipper even.

My grandfather was someone, everyone would agree, who had known a lot of sorrow and hardship, and yet found peace with the world.