Norm St. Landau – A Fascinating Journey Through Family History

Many of our readers have traced their family history or would love to find out more about their ancestry.  We had the pleasure of interviewing Norm St. Landau who has spearheaded a research project into his heritage and discovered a fascinating lineage that has been truly surprising.  His family now owns a story that goes back generations through enormous struggles and incredible successes. He has chronicled this work in a book for family and friends, Navigations that contains the research, photos and documents.

Currently, Norm lives on a small organic farm on Maryland’s Eastern shore with Joy, his wife of 47 years.  He retired in 2012 as a law partner with Drinker Biddle, and taught false advertising and branding law at Cornell Law School from 2000-2012.  Before big firm practice, he was a New Mexico state public defender, legal services attorney, and clerked for the Territorial Court of the Virgin Islands.

In the early 2000s, anticipating retirement from law practice in the early 2010s, Norm started researching the family history after biographers of notable ancestors contacted him to see if he had source material for them. His goal was to learn the smallest details of how an early version of himself started out in New Brunswick, N.J. in 1956 and ended up in Maryland in the late 1900s. Raised in the local Presbyterian Church, he had no understanding of the centuries old Jewish bloodlines in his family.

Anka Bernstein was traced exiting from Vienna to Warsaw when we found a letter to her from Pablo Cassals, which she received at a family address in Warsaw.

Norm discovered a completely hidden family history filled with brilliant and creative ancestors whose detailed lives and thoughts were readily available to see as their own writings were readily available and many were written about.  As a child, Norm  had a strong relationship with his grandmother, Anka. But he knew nothing of her rich life as a musician and immigrant, as a strong force for women’s rights in early 1900s Vienna, or her harrowing exit from Nazi fascism with her family. As he learned all of this through study and reading her artful, eloquent letters over 30 years after her death, her personality and life expanded exponentially into Norm’s own life narrative and that of his parents.

The quest of pondering what family traits and principles made their way into Norm’s persona – and others in his generation – either genetically…or…however. It soon became clear that strong family values in elite education pursuits and public service descended from the 1700’s through the present. That pondering continues.

Your family history is wonderfully detailed in the book, Navigations and includes a great deal of documentation, letters, and photographs. How long did it take to collect and publish your materials?

Years – maybe 15? But, in fairness, this was intended to be a long, careful study and no book was envisioned until the breadth of the material became apparent. New family relationships developed through calls…correspondence…visits – and that takes time. And it takes time to ask people to dig through their closets to find old letters and for talented friends for translation favors. 

It also became clear that the only way to understand the new found family was to understand the social, political and religious contexts immersing their lives. For my family, that’s a deep study of Lithuania from 1700 to 1800s, Poland from 1800 – 1950, and Ireland and Austria from the late 1800s to early 1900s. And finally the 20th Century United States.  

And a deep study of European Jewish faith was required. My great grandparents revered The Gaon of Vilna, great grandmother Balbina’s great grandfather. He was, after all, referred to widely as a great intellectual and was even said to have performed a miracle by saving the Great Synagogue of Vilnius from destruction by Russian artillery. Balbina impressed on her 13 children the highest of educational standards of fluency in four languages and public service – including my Grandmother Anka – who plainly passed along all to my multilingual father. Balbina’s gravestone in Warsaw pays tribute to the Gaon of Vilna.

So all of this – and quite more – was an abrupt change in view for a then 50 year old lawyer whose narrative previously was formed from a small American town and whose religious knowledge was from the local presbyterian church and a liberal arts degree in philosophy and religious studies. 

A farm storage building on the Wola Okrejska estate. Nazi forces used the building during World War II when they took over the estate as their area headquarters. (Photo by Norm St. Landau)

This was captivating because, for this family, this history is, in fact, existential. We don’t exist, my siblings don’t exist, and none of our children exist but for the successful musical career of Bernstein daughter Anka and the successful political career of Bernstein grandson Sir Lewis Namier – who both started life on the Bernstein estate, Wola Okrejeska. Namier’s influence in the British government landed a transit visa for Anka and her family to let them exit Poland as WWII broke out. Casals is a reason Britain admitted them, as he emptied his London bank account to support them once admitted to England. Norman St. Landau Sr. doesn’t escape Austria without the Bernstein driven language fluencies and educational standards which he then leverages into an International legal career defining and supporting his American small town family.

As new items were found they were circulated to the family and comments, reactions, opinions followed – which is to say that family history became a nice way to know one another better through shared interest. And that was the project – as opposed to executing a book project. During pandemic Zoom get togethers, we did family history discussions.

So, in total, Navigations unfolded as a wonderful experience over perhaps ten years through which family friendships and narratives evolved.

While you spearheaded the project, we’d love to know about some of the people who assisted you.

The project is emphatically collaborative with many family and friends involved in vital ways. Our daughter Emilie was an unforgiving editor; my German bilingual niece Cleo helped translate German documents; my bilingual sister Lorraine helped translate French documents; my immigration lawyer brother Jon helped decipher legal issues and mined Rudolph Serkin correspondence with our grandmother, our niece Nikka used business relationships with the Juilliard School to obtain high resolution historical photographs of grandmother Anka with Pablo Casals…Bilingual German and French friends also contributed. There are too many contributors to fairly catalogue.

To research and translate materials from Poland and Ukraine, I connected with Nataliia Novosadova – a wonderful Ukrainian woman with degrees in law and history. Nataliia has become a good friend of the family who we visited in Warsaw last year. She is fluent in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and English. She interviewed the key personnel at archives and museums in Poland for us in which family documents are stored.  Nataliia and her husband, Slava, even tracked down old beer bottles for us from one of a brewing business run by grandmother Anka’s brother, Adolf.  In recent years, Nataliia added design to her resume and she executed a beautiful book design for Navigations, which was published in Warsaw.

An especially wonderful source and guide has been Oxford University Cultural Historian, Georges Rousseau. George wrote an article “Sir Lewis Namier and His Extraordinary Aunt” (referring to my grandmother, Anka). George’s autobiography, Light Sleep, devotes 80 pages or so to his experiences as a concert piano student of Anka’s in Manhattan during the 1960s.

In Austria, we were able to rely on the Nationalfonds, the National Funds of the Republic of Austria, dedicated to helping victims of National Socialism. Nationalfonds conducted detailed research into my grandparents’ lives in Austria from 1890 to 1938. Nationalfonds located numerous reviews of my grandmother Anka’s concert performances, records of her residences, and the Nazi documents relating to the harrowing exit by my grandparents and father from Vienna just as WWII was starting.

The Great Synagogue of Warsaw* was built by the liberal Maskilim movement in an effort to unify Polish Nationalists with the Jewish community in opposition to Russian authority. It was located across from the Bernstein Residence and business complex.

What are some of the sources you utilized to establish your family history? 

Navigations grew organically from family tree research done meticulously by Joy, my wife.  Documents she found – ship manifests, obituaries, distant Iron Curtain locations – all suggested intriguing stories and connected us with other family willing to tell them. To understand the individual stories one must understand the political and cultural history of the times in which each family member lived. We had to learn a depth of Russian and European history, and in particular, the history of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. On my mother’s side, we had to learn about the small band of a few hundred Lithuanian Jewish families, including my mother’s Dennis family, who emigrated to Ireland – all to become a focus of James Joyce in Ulysses. That alone took a lot of time to read and ponder!

There are numerous books and biographies written about the original family patriarch, the Gaon of Vilna, and numerous books and biographies about Sir Lewis Namier, who grew up with my grandmother, Anka Bernstein, and the modernist architect, Helena Syrkus, who helped rebuild Warsaw after WWII.

And Anka’s letters and memoirs (written in three different languages) are all in different university archives (Juilliard and the University of Pennsylvania) and required translation. Her sister Stella’s memoirs (in Polish) are in the (“Janusz”) Korzak Foundation archive in Warsaw.  Caches of hundreds of pages of correspondence between family surfaced in family closets and attics and required translation.  My cousin Jane Heyman, the Canadian theatre director, was wonderfully helpful in locating hundreds of pages of letters between Anka and her grandmother and mother, Anka’s sister and niece.

Still more research evolved as personal interviews. As I traveled in my law practice, I would visit with family and friends to capture their stories. And through these shared experiences they, as well, became friends. Among those were my grandmother’s niece, Eva, who I visited with Jane Heyman in a nursing home in Toronto and who recorded 7 hours of video interviews with the SHOAH Foundation. And at a memorial service for my father, a Rutgers biology professor, Karl Mammorosch, approached me to say that he lived with my grandfather, Heinrich Landau, as a child, in Kolomea, Ukraine. We had lunch interviews and exchanged letters for several years.

While you uncovered an amazing amount of information that was previously unknown, tell us about a few facts that took you by surprise.  

All was a surprise: as of 2000, what we knew was that my grandmother and father had Austrian accents, spoke many languages, and my grandmother was a piano teacher in New York and had famous musician friends. When asked, my parents revealed no more – perhaps, understandably, distanced by PTSD clouds from the Anschluss that saw my father expelled from his Viennese school and suddenly living in Lansing, Michigan while awaiting word on whether his parents had escaped Europe.

That said, there were surprises. Just few: 

• • Grandmother Anka arrived in Vienna from Lviv as a piano prodigy and student of the elite piano pedagogue, Richard Robert in 1895.  She went to her first concert with Robert and his good friend, Johannes Brahms.

• • Great grandparents Jakub and Balbina and prominent in the mid 1800s maskilim movement that sought to unite Poland against Russia – with Jakob being imprisoned.  

• • Grandmother Anka and her husband, Heinrich were rescued from Warsaw just before WWII began when her nephew Namier had a transit visa issued by the British government and Pablos Casals emptied his London bank account to pay their way.

And among other surprises are two political assassinations, and the kidnapping of Namier’s parents and sister from their estate by Ukrainian nationalists just after WWI ended.

So…yes…there were many surprises.

From the earliest family stories into this generation, it became clear that family members lived with intent and principles. My great grandfather, Jakob, coined a credo to “identify with the nation in whose midst you live.  Grandmother Anka, in her purse, carried a two inch by two inch handwritten note that reads (in German) “An artist’s job is at all times to persevere in what he believes to be the morally good and the best, and to practice and perform these consistently.” My grandmother was affirmatively proud of her efforts to help women find places for themselves in the male dominated classical music world of Vienna in the early 20th Century.

My brother, Jon, sister, Lorraine, and me visiting a memorial to the Gaon of Vilna in Vilnius.

Because you were able to trace your family history to specific places, have you been encouraged to make visits to these locations? 

We traveled to Lithuania last year to visit memorials to the Gaon of Vilna as well as to Nevarenai, where my grandmother Rachel Dennis was from. Joy, my brother, Jon, his wife, Signe, and our sister Lorraine, came as well. So it was a wonderful family trip.  From there, we went to Warsaw and were guided through the city by our cousin, Jaroslaw Kurski. Jaroslaw is an editor of the major Warsaw newspaper and wrote a wonderful Polish language history of the family called Dziady i dybuki, a best seller in Poland.  

Jaroslaw also toured with us to the family estate of our shared great grandparents, Wola Okrjeskra, which the government now operates as a museum. The estate was 6000 acres before WWII. Today, what’s left of the estate is a museum as a tribute to the Nobel winning author, Henryk Seinkiewicz, who was born there before it was acquired by the Bernsteins.

What piece of advice do you have for individuals who are interested in tracing their family’s backgrounds and history.  

Learn the political and cultural history of the times in which your ancestors lived. Connect with as many family branches as can be found and search for old boxes of letters. People wrote considered and careful prose to each other in years past – and you can get wonderful glimpses of personality from reading them. 

How has your research affected other members of your family?

A number are pursuing Austrian Citizenship, which Austrian law allows as a form of reparations for victims of the Anschluss and their descendants. My son, grandson, and I all now have Austrian passports and other family members have requested them based on the research compiled in Navigations. I think that is significant because in order to explain why you are an Austrian dual citizen you have to explain the family history.

A number of family members use parts of the family history in their own presentations at work and in school.  

What goals do you have for your research in the future?

I am creating AI “bots” for a number of the key family members, to enable conversations with them and between them. My goal would be to see whether dialog can be created to expand Navigations into works of historical fiction – or even scripts.

For ancestors for whom I have extensive first-hand source material, I think realistic BOTS may be created. Grandmother Anka, for example, wrote hundreds of pages of letters and memoirs in Polish, German, French and English. And much was written about her. A similar record exists for Lewis Namier, Stella Eliasberg, and Helena Syrkus.  

A complete copy of Navigations.  

Video testimony of Holocaust victims, including EvaAnna Schutz nee Bernstein.

Research into Austrian may be requested.

Top Photo: An AI image with imbedded real images of items used to create the family history.
*Photo of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw is in the Public Domain.