In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

674 The Kentucky Anthology Abraham Flexner from I Remember Not everyone who has lived in Kentucky over the past two hundred years has been the stereotypical white, Christian male, yet, except for the slave narratives of antebellum Kentucky, few minority voices have been heard in our literature. In the midnineteenth century, large numbers of Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants began coming to America and to Kentucky. One of the best-known Jewish families in Louisville were the Flexners, who within a generation were producing sons and daughters who became leaders in their fields. Three sons of Morris and Esther Abraham Flexner, immigrants from Bohemia and Alsace, for example, were all born in Louisville: Simon in 1863, Bernard in 1865, and Abraham in 1866. Simon became a research pathologist and author. Bernard became a prominent lawyer, Zionist , and author. Abraham became a physician, medical school reformer, and author of an autobiography, I Remember (1940), from which the following excerpt is taken. He describes his mother’s and his aunt’s immigration to the United States in 1855 during the antiforeigner riots in Louisville. After a delay in New York, the two young women came to Louisville, where Abraham’s mother met and married her husband, Morris Flexner. h About this time there had been antiforeign and anti-Masonic riots in Louisville , so that instead of going immediately to their uncle the two girls remained in New York with another relative, who was a tailor and who gladly welcomed them. Approximately a month later they went to Louisville, arriving there on October 15. They were very happy in those early days in Louisville , but they soon learned that in the Louisville of that time one must shift for oneself. Their uncle had a large wholesale and retail china establishment. Their aunt was an accomplished seamstress who made all the clothes required by her own family and often also made clothes for others. Very soon my mother undertook the housekeeping, while her sister became a seamstress . Toward spring, however, my mother decided that she too would become an earner in order that she might accumulate something for herself and likewise from time to time send helpful remittances to her family in the “old country.” Her Paris training enabled her to become a seamstress in a somewhat fashionable cloak establishment, spending the whole day at work and being accompanied home by a nephew of the proprietor of the establish674 Abraham Flexner 675 ment. At their uncle’s home they met many of the young Jewish merchants or peddlers, who used to spend the Jewish holidays and week ends in the large city. She felt a certain contempt because the clothes worn by the girls and women in Louisville were, from the standpoint of style and finish, so much inferior to what she had seen and worn in Paris. She did not remain a seamstress long. My father had been in the habit of making purchases of her uncle, and before the winter was over he and my mother became engaged. By this time my father felt himself almost a “rich man,” to use my mother’s words. They were married on September 13, 1856, and were in a position to equip a small house comfortably and tastefully. Much of the furniture which they purchased for their start in life still remains in our family. My mother was always proud of the fact that it never “went out of style.” I was born in 1866, the sixth of nine children—seven boys and two girls. After the panic of 1873 our living conditions had to be materially altered, but, although the successive houses in which we lived became for many years smaller and smaller and our way of living simpler and simpler, there was nothing either in the atmosphere or the appearance of the home to suggest the poverty and hardship in which we grew up. I am still at a loss to understand the courage and confidence with which my parents contemplated the future of their large family. I do not recall a single word of complaint. They did not bemoan their fate; never a word of bitterness or envy escaped either. It made no difference to them that others were more fortunate or successful. They had pitched their own ideals incredibly high, and no pressure of external circumstances, no temporary expedient to which they had to resort, such as putting the older boys to work to help support the family, ever lowered their...

Share