(continued from the overview)

The Fax/Fox and Rivitz Family in Mlynov

Getzel Fax was born in 1862 in the small town of Demydivka, which is 24 km (24 minutes driving today) southwest of Mlynov on the road to Berestechko. His brother Sam (Fox), also an immigrant to Baltimore, was born quite a bit later in 1883. We don't know how Getzel met his wife Chaia (Ida) Rivitz, who was born in 1867 and living near Mlynov. Perhaps he was in Mlynov one market day during business or staying at the inn that the Rivitz family ran outside of Mlynov.

Ida, for her part, was born during a lengthy journey of her parents, Mordechai and Zecil (also "Lisel") Rivitz, from Sevastopol in the Crimea back to Mlynov. In a short memoire, her niece, Clara Fram, recounted the story of how Ida's parents (and Clara's paternal grandparents) first met: Mordechai Rivitz was conscripted into the Tsar's army at the age of seven and released after fifteen years in Sevastopol, near the Turkish capital of Constantinople. There "at age 22, he met a young Jewish orphan girl, the owner of a wine cellar. He married her, and began making plans to bring her to his home town in the Ukraine." It took them 2 1/2 years to get there, during which time Ida Rivitz was born.^[1]

Back in Mlynov, Ida's brother (and Clara's father) David Rivitz was born. Clara recounts that the family lived in the countryside not far from Mlynov and had a variety of means on their property to produce a living, including "an inn where travelers could stop and be refreshed," "a distillery making vodka," "cattle," and farming. It should be noted that Jews were known to dominate the liquor trade during the Russian period, and were blamed at times for the debauchery of Russian peasants on that account.^[2]

David grew up and went to school ("cheder") in Mlynov and there met and fell in love with Pesse Demb (later Bessie Hurwitz), the beautiful, eldest daughter of one of the town's scholars, Israel Jacob Demb, and his wife Rivkah (Gruber) Demb, daughter of the well-to-do Moshe Gruber. According to Clara, it was an unlikely match because Bessie's father, Israel Jacob Demb, would have preferred a scholar for his eldest daughter. But Israel was himself supported by the foundry business of his father-in-law, Moshe Gruber, and the business had started to decline and could not support another non-working scholar. Clara explains, "By the time my father and my mother saw each other in Cheder, though he [i.e., Pesse's father, Israel Jacob Demb] would have desired a scholarly bridegroom for his beautiful and accomplished Pesse, my grandfather did not object to her marrying into the Rivitz family that was well-off in their Possessia."^[3]

In 1891, after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, the Rivitz family had to sell their property outside Mlynov and moved back into town. This loss is what triggered Getzel and Ida Fax to leave for Baltimore. Being such a small town, word must have spread fast about the pending migration. Over the next twenty years, many Mlynov families followed the Faxes to Baltimore and lived with them until they got on their feet.

Getzel and Ida had three children. Their oldest child, Theresa (also Teresa) Fax, born around 1880, arrived in Baltimore in 1891 (probably with her mother) where she married Israel Goodman and they had their first child, Rose, in that city in 1898.^[4] Theresa and Israel Goodman went on to have an additional eight children in Baltimore.

As noted earlier, Getzel and Ida's son Joseph Fax, born in 1894 in Baltimore, was the first child of a Mlynov immigrant to be born in Baltimore. He went on to be a prominent Baltimore attorney and represented a number of lantzmen in real estate and even in interesting zoning disputes with the city of Baltimore. Joseph married Zelda (Selma) Bronstein (1897–1935), from a large prominent Baltimore family in the garment business. Zelda arrived in Baltimore with her mother in 1899 at the age of two.

Getzel and Ida had a third son, Michael or Max, who was born in 1896 and appears in the 1900 census. But then he mysteriously disappears from the records and is not present in the 1910 census. When I tracked down Getzel and Ida's great-grandson, Charles Fax, I asked him about this and learned that Max had been run over by a trolley car while riding a bike just outside their home. The incident was documented in this story in the Baltimore Sun on March 21, 1903 (p 12). Recounting this story, Charles told me that this loss stayed with his grandfather and none of the children were allowed to ride bikes for the longest time. The descendants were thus surprised when I turned up this newspaper story, which mentioned nothing about the bike.

Ida's brother, David Rivitz, traveled back and forth from Mlynov to Baltimore throughout the 1890s and lived with the Faxes before moving permanently to Baltimore in early 1901. During his itinerent period, David's wife who was still back in Mlynov was known as "Pesse the American," "a name given to her because her husband keeps going to America and returning, because he doesn't want to raise his children in the 'traife' America." Clara adds: "'My mother, years later, fond of reminiscing about my father, said frequently: "Whoever didn't see him get off the train in Dubno [on his return], has never seen a handsome man.' He had come home perhaps to go into the grain business, so he thought." Apparently it didn't work out and David left permanently for Baltimore in 1901. According to Clara, David changed his name from Rivitz to Hurwitz there, because he was told by someone in the synagogue when he first arrived that Rivitz was too hard to spell. Growing up, Clara never knew her family name was Rivitz back in Europe. David Hurwitz became a peddler and worked for a company called Nachlas and Freiden in dry goods. (Clara Fram recalls other memories of Mlynov here.)^[5]

In 1904, Getzel Fax's brother, Sam and his wife Zipporah arrived in Baltimore and at Getzel's urging took the family name Fox rather than Fax, which was the spelling Getzel had accidentally adopted upon his arrival in the country. In fact, Getzel's name appears in many different English variations in the records, including Georg Fax, Geo Fax, and Getzel Fox, indicating in part the attempt to settle in and find a new identity. As one of the few Faxes in the Baltimore City directory who was not African-American, Getzel's name appears without an asterisk next to his name, the asterisk a convention at the time signaling a person was "Negro." This lack of an asterisk is an early indication of how Russian Jewish immigrants were being mapped "white" in the hierarchies of Baltimore in the late 19th and early 20th century, even though they were also subject to housing discrimination because they were not Christian. Getzel's great-grandson, Charles, explained to me that the African Americans with the name Fax often:

descended from the slaves who were freed, at his death, by Lord Fairfax, who owned much of Northern Virginia during the colonial period. In gratitude, the emancipated slaves took the surname "Fairfax" or "Fax",... The author Elton Fax is from one of those slave families. My father used to recount how, when he was on business travels, occasionally he would get a call in his hotel room from another hotel guest who introduced himself as "Fax," advised that the front desk had told him that there was another "Fax" registered at the hotel, and asked whether they might be related. "I doubt it," was my father's standard reply.

Soon after his arrival, Sam Fox married a woman named Zipporah, and the couple had two sons (Martin and Ernie) in Baltimore. Unfortunately, Sam was widowed sometime before 1910 due to unknown causes.

1901 Baltimore City Directory showing Getzel Fax and Ida Fax without an asterisk by their names, mapping them as "white" instead of "Negro" in the hierarchies of early 20th century Baltimore

A contemporary map showing the 1600 km trek of the Rivitz Family across Europe from Mlynov to Triest in late 1908 on their way to Baltimore. They arrived in Baltimore in early 1909.

In 1907, David's son Yitzhak Rivitz ("Jechok Riwez" and later "Isaac Hurwitz") arrived in Baltimore via Bremen followed in early 1909 by David's wife, Pesse, his mother Zecil, and three youngest daughters, Minnie, Rose and Clara. They traveled across Europe from Mlynov to Trieste, Italy where they caught took a ship called the "Martha Washington" to New York and then took a train to Baltimore.^[6] The youngest daughter, Clara, the author of the memoire from which I have been quoting, apparently did not recognize her father when they were reunited. He had left Mlynov when she was two years old and was seven when they were reunited in 1909. Clara tells us that there was not much room in the Faxes' home when they first arrived and her sister Minnie lived around the corner at the home of her Aunt Mollie (Demb) Roskes before Minnie was quickly married off through an arranged married to her uncle Getzel's brother, Sam Fox, who had recently become widowed. Sam and Minnie Fox went on to have three additional children together: Sarah Ann (Fox) (Kappelman) Harris (1910–2019), Michael (also Michel) Fox (1911–1973), and Jack Fox (1914–1982).

Sadly, Yitzhak Rivitz would be the first Mlynov immigrant to die in Baltimore in 1918 from the Spanish flu epidemic, but not before he married a woman named Cecilia and had a son named Howard Hurwitz. (Ceilia became Sheila Shapiro after she laer remarried). David and Pesse's oldest daughter, Gulza (Rivitz) Mazer, would not arrive with her family in Baltimore until after WWI in 1921, as part of the third wave of immigration following the War.

Rose went on to marry, Henry Finkelstein, who ran a men's clothing business in Baltimore and they had four children. Clara would later marry Philip Fram from Texas, son of an immigrant rabbi, when he was stationed in Baltimore. They had two children: Betty J. Korpeck (1933–) and David H. Fram (1937–2019).

You can read more about Getzel and Ida by downloading the memoire of their niece Clara Fram Clara Fram or head back to the beginning of Fax family overview.

Notes

[1] Clara Fram, "This is My Story," p. 3. ↩

[2] Clara Fram, "This is My Story," p. 3. ↩

[3] Clara Fram, "This is My Story," p. 3. ↩

[4] This is based on the 1900 Federal census record. ↩

[5] This story comes from Clara Fram, "This is My Story," Part I, p. 2, and Part II, p. 5. See note 7. ↩

[14]We don't know why Bessie Hurwitz and family made the trek across Europe to Trieste instead of Bremen, where others had previously left, for the trip to the US. But we do now that between the time that Bessie's husband David made the trip in 1901 and Bessie made the trip in 1909 that a major shipping company had opened a route to the US from Trieste. In 1904, Trieste saw the founding of Unione Austriaca di Navigazione (Austrian Shipping Association), also known as Austro Americana & Fratelli Cosulich....A May 5, 1904 article from the Baltimore Sun announces the new shipping line. Perhaps this ad or one like it that what David Hurwitz saw and became the basis for his family coming via Trieste. In only a few months, the new shipper doubled its capital stock, thanks to investments by large north German shippers and Austrian banks that wanted to squeeze a competitor out of the domestic market. Other Mlynov immigrants such as Meyer Fishman would follow the same route later that year. ↩

Compiled by Howard I. Schwartz
Updated: July 2024
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