Bath House
Neighborhood: Dark Mustafa Pasha the Archer
District: 6
City: Istanbul
Permanent distinguishing mark: None
Moustache and Beard: Red Beard
Eyes: Hazel
Height: Medium.6
Sometime after this certificate was issued, however, the family moved from Istanbul to Palestine, taking up residence in Hebron, where Abraham was born. Thus the confusion. At the time, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and this fact, presumably, led the artist to believe that Turkey was his father’s birthplace.
Abraham LeWitt left Palestine after becoming one of the few Jews accepted to study in Russia at the Samuel Poliakov School of Mining Engineers, in Gorlovka, from which he graduated with highest honors in 1890.7 Later that year, he and his mother, Hinda, sailed from Hamburg to Liverpool on the passenger ship Warrington. In Liverpool they boarded the Pennsylvania and sailed for New York City, where they lived with Abraham’s sister, Bella, in an apartment on East Thirty-Ninth Street.
Abraham worked with his brother, Michel, in the latter’s Brooklyn jewelry store, which eventually moved to New Britain. Abraham was briefly employed after that as a mining engineer near Scranton, Pennsylvania, but then, wanting to be near members of his family, took a job at Russell & Erwin Manufacturing Co. of New Britain. There, his work on cylinder locks led to patents held by the firm. But he had plans to become a physician and enrolled in the first class at the new Cornell University Medical College in Harlem. Two years later, in 1902, the State of New York issued medical license number 4230 to Dr. Abraham Le-Witt. Once again to be near relatives, he moved back to Connecticut. In a relatively brief time, he became one of Hartford’s most prominent physicians, specializing in maladies of the eyes, nose, and throat, and also practicing surgery. He invented several medical devices, including clamps used in eye surgery and a girdle harness that helped intestines heal after abdominal surgery, which led him to become one of the city’s wealthier residents. He invested in real estate, particularly apartment buildings, a financial plan that worked well for a time. He intended to stay single until his mother died.
■ Sophie (a nickname for Sofia) Appell was born in 1890 in Rostov-on-Don, in western Russia. She was one of the seven children of Solomon and Elizabeth Appell. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which many Russians incorrectly blamed the Jews, pogroms proliferated in cities and villages across Russia. In 1892, Solomon parted from his wife and children to see if he could find a place in the new world for them.
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish German banker, had devoted some of his enormous fortune to helping Eastern European Jews emigrate. Initially most of the Jews moved to Argentina, Canada, and Palestine, but many were also immigrating to the United States by the 1880s. Other charitable and humanitarian efforts were begun, and Jews from Russia began to settle on American farmland that was largely available because it was too difficult for others to till.
This is how Solomon Appell ended up in Colchester, Connecticut, along with many other Jewish farmers. By the end of the nineteenth century, his farm had become a working concern, and shortly thereafter he sent for the rest of his family. The timing was fortuitous. Soon afterward, nearly 150 citizens of Rostov-on-Don were slaughtered in a pogrom.
Sophie was sixteen years old when she left Russia for America in 1906, traveling from Hamburg with her brothers Sam, Moses, and Aaron aboard the Graf Waldersee (their mother would come later). In Colchester she worked on the farm, but she also studied nursing.
A little more than a decade after that she was back in Europe—France, specifically—serving as a nurse during World War I. Her three brothers, Sam, Harry, and Louis served as soldiers toward the end of the war. A story in the Hartford Daily Courant indicates that the Appells made one of the largest American family contributions to the war effort. The account details the service of the brothers—a quartermaster sergeant, a machine gunner, and an army hospital worker—and then offers the following description of their sister:
Sophie Appell has done valiant service. She was graduated from Mount Sinai Hospital at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After being called to service, she was temporarily on duty at Cape May, N.J., General Hospital #11 and was sent from there to France. Her letters tell of the wonderful morale of the American soldiers. She expressed pride in New Britain boys with whom she came in contact. A recent letter tells of having met David Rosenberg, Fred Ward, John Storey, Edward Hayes, Joseph Farr, and John Kerin, all well-known young men of the city.
That Miss Appell was popular with her associates at Camp May is evidenced by the fact that in recognition of her service overseas, they named one of their rooms in the quarters at General Hospital #11 in her honor.8
Later in the piece, Louis Appell is quoted on the progress of the war, and the family spirit: “Never fear. We have [them] on the run, and we will be among the first to enter Berlin. Don’t worry. An Appell can always take care of himself or herself.”
When Sophie returned she had received a Red Cross commendation: “Sophie Appell—foreign service certificate … September 1918 to August 1919. The American National Red Cross tenders this expression of sincere appreciation for the faithful and efficient services rendered by you to this organization in its work overseas connected with the great European War when you served in the Nurses’ Bureau. Certificate of identity, no. 22842, Nurse, Base unit 60 at Hoboken…. One scar over left cheek, one mole under left eye.”9
The unofficial record consists of postcards from the war zone. One of them indicates that in France Sophie met a suitor. But the romance wasn’t going to go anywhere as he was not Jewish but a Christian from Texas, and her family objected.10
A year after her return, when she working as a nurse in Hartford, she met the confirmed bachelor, Abraham LeWitt, who had treated Sophie’s father in his medical practice.11 Nineteen years her senior, the forty-five-year-old the doctor was an adventurer who had traveled to Berlin and Vienna to investigate up-to-date surgical techniques and other new methods of treatment. He had been one of the first residents of Hartford to own a high-end automobile—a Knox,12 made in Springfield, Massachusetts—and among the first to be a victim of auto theft (someone stole the steering mechanism) and to be thrown from a car at a railroad crossing after a collision with a freighter (he suffered only minor injuries).
After his mother died in 1920, LeWitt proposed to Sophie Appell. The two were married on January 16, 1922, at the home of Rabbi Abraham Nowack, and honeymooned in Florida.
In addition to his career as a doctor, Abraham took up writing, apparently as an avocation. In a 1933 essay he foresaw a time when the automobile and incompetent or inebriated drivers would be at the heart of a great number of deaths.13 What is exceptional about the essay is the amount of research he had done to bolster his argument.
He also wrote a short story telling, in a foreshadowing of his son’s eventual passion for social justice, of a doctor faced with an ethical dilemma common in that time: how to protect a deeply distressed woman about to give birth who was unmarried at the time she conceived. The story that ends with the mother being sent off to an institution, an outcome the doctor deeply regrets.
The tale may have been based on a real Hartford incident, and it might indicate that that one night, after a hard day, Abraham at last found a way to address an issue that had troubled him—and, it may reasonably be inferred, left him with a guilty conscience. In any case, there is no doubt that Abraham’s final years were stressful.
He
