My father’s father, Joachim Manne, or Chaim, as he was called, was a Galician Jew born in 1872 and raised in Cracow, in the Polish lands of the Habsburg Empire.
His family owned a substantial furniture manufacturing business, The Cracow Furniture Company (KrakowskaFabryka Mebli), whose records go back to 1860. For some reason, unknown to me, Chaim Manne migrated to the United States in 1900. Not long after, he married Leonora Hötchner, his first cousin, which was not uncommon then.
In January 1904 my father was born in New York, always Henry so far as I know, never Heinrich. Chaim Manne failed in business in the Promised Land of America – a surprising fact I like to think helps explain my own almost spectacular lack of commercial acumen – and returned to Europe in 1910, not to Cracow but to Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire.
