Genealogy and Gastronomy

Forgive me, friends, for I have slacked; it has been 3 months since my last blog post.

Having left off as we arrived home for our unscheduled three week 'vacation' from our travels – which was filled with wonderful reconnections with friends and

family for me and plenty of much-needed 11 year-old buddy-bonding for Colin
– we set back out at the end of May with our batteries fully recharged to finish our European travels. After Asia, India and Africa, our two months in Greece, Italy and Switzerland had been a cushy and gastronomic delight, and we were looking forward to completing our tour of Switzerland and spending a nice long summer month in the south of France. We arrived in Paris, where we had leased a car, and drove for two days to my brother's house in Zug, Switzerland, after spending a lovely night with our French couchsurfers from the summer before.
This time they were the hosts and we were the surfers, enjoying a homemade salmon dinner and walks around the neighborhood and through the palace grounds a few minutes walk from their apartment at the edge of Paris. Having slept off the worst of our jetlag, we set out through the rolling countryside of Champagne, Bourgogne, and Franche-Comte, landing for a night in Montbelliard, where my great-grandfather may (or may not) have been born (more on this later...), before crossing back into Switzerland and arriving in Zug two hours before my nephew's 3rd birthday party.
The kids spent the afternoon bouncing off all manner of padded and spring loaded padding at the gym hosting the party before consuming cake and super-sweet juice and various other sugar treats. Suffice to say, these things always end badly, but in the meantime great fun was had by all! ;-)

In the morning, Colin and I headed south in search of sun, which was nowhere in evidence in northeast Switzerland – nor in fact in northwest, southwest or central Switzerland this particular end of May. We did find a small pocket of the bright stuff, though, in the far southeast, along the Italian border (I was loving the independence of movement our car brought!).
We arrived in Lugano and scouted for a campground, finding a friendly family-owned site right along the river separating Switzerland from Italy, complete with pizzeria, giant chess board and pool.
We stayed a week, exploring the local castles and mountaintops, and found a a falconry, which had been a goal since being disappointed by a canceled demonstration in Italy before our visit home.

Highlights included a trio of castles that formed the backbone of modern-day Bellinzona and a trip to the top of Mount Tamaro, where bobsled courses and a cave-like church with majestic views ruled the roost.
After immersing ourselves once again in the rythym of travel, we set out over the gorgeous Simplon Pass for a small village outside of Vevey near Montreax (of the famous jazz festival), where an until recently long-lost cousin lived. My mother had located her some years ago, and with the help of friends and neighbors we hosted her teenage son in Seattle for a semester of high school a few years earlier.
We spent the night with her before picking up my mother at the Geneva Airport to continue her quest – more family research in Switzerland, France and Germany, which would occupy us for the next two weeks. We returned to cousin Marion's for a lovely dinner on her deck overlooking Lake Geneva and another night's sleep before setting off.....

Next stop: La Chaux de Fonds, home of also recently-found cousin Marc, owner of La Semeuse – a fabulous Swiss coffee and chocolate company: my personal version of 7th heaven.

Our visit included an incredible introduction to “puppet therapy” and Marc's wife's puppetry workshop, where she works with children suffering trauma through creation and role-playing with puppets that represent the children's hopes, fears and challenges. Then on to La Semeuse headquarters and factory, where we got a full tour of the facilities and left loaded up with enough coffee, teas and chocolates to last us a year! From there the next several days would take us into less familiar territory – looking for records of family not yet found or long deceased, to finish putting together the family history.

We headed north and across the border to Strasbourg, into the countryside in Alsace, France, and to Kronau, Germany, searching for the missing pieces of a puzzle that my mother had been slowly assembling over the past decade.

What we know so far (to the best of my abilities to follow it all):

My mother's name is Moch, pronounced “mock.” All Mochs with the same pronunciation and spelling come originally from Alsace – no exceptions. Moch means “tailor,” her family's long-ago profession. Later Mochs were horse-sellers in Switzerland and (when the law permitted) watchmakers in both Switzerland and France. My great grandfather – the second generation of Mochs to emigrate to America – was a watchmaker and set up shop in 1904 in Montesano, Washington.

The Mochs were Jewish, and took a variety of different paths in their efforts to avoid persecution in Europe. In 1808, a contingent of Mochs went to Russia, recruited by Catherine the Great as farmers with the promise of free land and a market for the fruits of their labors. That worked for about a hundred years, until Stalin came to power and executed nearly all of them. Some Mochs stayed put in Alsace, where Hitler later placed the only concentration camp built on French soil. Still more converted and moved to Germany – several dozen Moch families have lived as Christians in and around the border town of Kronau for at least five generations (this we discovered in the town records when we visited). Yet another contingent went from Alsace to Switzerland, and some continued from there to America.

Two generations of our family arrived separately in the new world from Switzerland and headed west, settling in the Pacific Northwest – the first in the 1850s and the second in the early 1900s. The latter was my great grandfather. When he arrived, I can only imagine that he was scared for his life and/or liberty, worried that government-sanctioned anti-semitism would follow him to the Americas. He married a fiercely anti-semetic woman, presumably without her knowledge of his past, and hid. In 1949, following Hitler's era but on the cusp of the McCarthy era, family members in Switzerland wrote to him requesting help settling in the U.S. He refused. In the 1970s, a European relative traveling in the U.S. knocked on his door. His wife answered and immediately slammed it shut (so maybe she did know). My grandfather only learned of his own father's history as he was packing to leave for the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where he would compete as coxswain for the American crew team from the University of Washington. My grandfather planned to bike around Europe with some buddies following the games and would drop in on a few family members en route, so his father decided it would be best if he knew they were Jewish, “but dont tell your mother.” Despite this revelation, my mother was raised pure wasp, and didnt find out the “family secret” from her father's father until she was a teenager. Hitler would have been so pissed if he had known who was competing in his Olympics, for sure. My grandfather's crew team brought home the Gold.

My mother ran into an interesting side note as she sorted all this out. The first generation of Mochs to arrive in America came in the form of two cousins. One headed west, and was joined a generation later by my great grandfather. As a result of a chance encounter with a surprised-looking man named Moch at a social workers' conference in Chicago a decade ago, my mother learned that the other Moch cousin settled near New Orleans and shacked up with a woman he wasn't allowed to marry – not because he was Jewish, but because he was white and she was black. She was a free black woman (a bit of early American history most Americans don't know anything about) and they had a long life and a child together. As a result, there is an extensive family of African American Mochs in the southeast U.S. who are part of our extended family. My mother has been attending their semi-annual reunions for eight years now. She has also found a branch of the Mochs in the Dakotas, where two of the Moch cousins landed after escaping Stalin's pogroms.

Anyway, to make a two week story very short, we traveled through the ancestral homelands, digging in city hall archives and chatting up records clerks, finishing up in Bern back in Switzerland where we had a wonderful lunch with the parents of friends from home (John and Rosemay, our neighbor Fiona's parents), and ultimately came away with one or two possibly significant new leads to more of the family history.

In the next few days, we fit in a visit to Gruyere, attended my cousin Anthony's military school graduation, and danced late into the night at a fabulous lakeside party at the Geneva Dive Club in Montreax, before returning my mother to the airport. She was on her way to England, to meet the cousin who my great grandmother slammed the door on, who lives in Sherwood Forest – boy was Colin mad not to be going along! Instead, Colin and I headed south, once again looking for sun. We overnighted in Besancon, back in France, and found the sun a day later, in Provence. Oh darn, we thought, guess we'll have to stay a while.....

Up Next: A Week in Provence

P.S. Despite the title, I realize I entirely neglected to include the “gastronomy” part – believe me, I'll make up for it in the next entry, as the delights continued and only got better as we ventured further and deeper into France......