Oh, that's you... where are we going? I don't know... Look, they took all the Jews away... our people are saying that the Germans want to liquidate the getto. Better be careful. Maybe we are taking a walk?
It looks like you visited me here with Gurnicht... Could you find a better time? All right, it looks like I have a long journey... What do you want to know? It just so happened that Gurnicht was able to build this circle of ancestors and make me the father of the Hermansderfer Root. Well... what was I going to say, oh yes, I remember now.
We are a Family-Of-The-Tradition. Many generations before me and after me have followed the family rules and never broke them. Why? Really, nobody knows the answer. I believe the answer is because we are the Hermansderfers. As all Jewish families follow the traditions and rules written in the Book, the Hermansderfer's do everything that good Jews are supposed to do. The difference is that we have a lot of additional habits which don't make our life easier. You may find them silly and strange but that's how it is...
For instance, no man should shave his mustache. Silly?- maybe... Why is that? - I don't know... maybe because the Polish saying (which I heard from my father and his father before him ): "Rosol bez miesa - nie zupa, Meszczyzna be wasow - jest dupa". In English it means: "As broth with no meat is not a soup, so a man with no mustache looks like an ass". You would not believe how many generations, before and after, have never shaved their mustache.
So... where do we come from?
According to legend, Filippe di Caprulos, our ancestor left Spain with his family during the war between the North and the South of Spain; refusing to be baptized, he escaped to Portugal. Life in Portugal was not terrible at that time. The authorities tolerated Jews. About one hundred years later, part of the family moved to Holland. In Holland they took the name Hermansderfer and established their own life. The following generations moved to Eastern Poland, which became a part of Austria-Hungarian Empire, then mixed with ancestors of Khazarian refugee and became Ashkenazim. I was born in very assimilated Jewish Austrian family. I was the youngest of eight children. My family was very loyal to our Monarch because of the freedom he granted to Jews. The huge portrait of Franz-Josef I decorated our living room. After my father returned from the Prussian War in 1866, going to military school became a tradition for all the boys in our family. My father was wounded in the war. For his service, he received from the Emperor, the land, estate and a monopoly for tobacco trade in Lonka (Luka, naming today Ozerene) which is near Sambor (that is, Eastern Galicia). We belonged to the so called "szlachta zagrodowa", or "podhorodziecka szlachta" (landed nobility). Maybe because we have three white mice in our heraldic shield, people in the village called us "myszati" (mousy). After I graduated cadet school, I served my Emperor, and after my father died I retired and returned to our Lonka Estate.
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