Building a Legacy: A Man Named Chatza

A Kravitz family portrait, circa 1920

In my year of tending to my unfinished business, I felt compelled to fact-check the most famous story in my family's history: how Eliot Ness, the G-man who helped put Al Capone behind bars, set my Grandpa Benny straight on the night of one of the worst gangland slayings in Cleveland's history. Fact-checking that story helped me to heal the 30-year rift that existed between my father and uncle. At the same, it helped me get a vivid picture of one of the most influential and colorful figures in my family's history -- the second man from the left in the top row of this photograph, my great-grandfather Chatza.

From the accounts of my father, uncle and others who had known him, Chatza was a hard-headed, bull of a man who was born and raised in an impoverished shtetl near Covna-Cobarna, Lithuania. He rode (against his will) with Jew-hating Cossacks, worked in South African diamond and gold mines, fought on the side of the British during the Boer War, then came to America in 1908 with diamonds hidden in his teeth.

Chatza hated the hubbub of Brooklyn so he took his family (and those diamonds) to Connelsville, Pennsylvania, where he sold groceries and other staples and traded mules with coal miners. Then in 1919, after a newborn daughter died, he moved to Cleveland because he thought his pregnant wife would get better medical care there.

Chatza came from a long line of peasants who placed little value on education. (A son's place was in the fields or the store.) That's why he ordered my Grandpa Benny to drop out of school after the ninth grade and begin working for him.

Chatza was full of sayings:

"If you don't talk, no one will ever know you are dumb."

"Don't tell people your troubles, they have their own."

"Better you should have to give than have to take."

"A wheel is round, so treat everyone well and it will come back to you."

Chatza trumpeted the importance of hard work, a good reputation and loyalty. He was an unsparing disciplinarian, and saw tears as a sign of weakness. It was Chatza's expectation that the younger generation would treat him and my great-grandmother with unquestioning respect.

At weddings and bar mitzvahs Chatza was as passionate as Zorba the Greek. Strike up the band and he could squat and kick out his legs with the best of them. But, in 1944, when the doctors said that one of his legs had become gangrenous and couldn't be saved, my great-grandfather Chatza told them, "Just take it off! Why do you keep monkeying around."

The Russian novelist Turgenev once said that "Every man should write the story of his life." A corollary might be: "Every man (and woman, of course) should write the story of his or her family." Preserving our family's story is one of the most important pieces of business we have as human beings -- it's the way we pass on the values and personalities that define our character and put flesh on our DNA. That's why it's so important to hear and record the stories of our parents and grandparents before they die -- and to pass on our own stories to our children.

It wasn't until I was 54 years old and interviewing my father about Eliot Ness that I finally got to hear about the man who had had such a major impact on my own life. Chatza died before I was born but it was clear that my father had raised me, for better or worse, according to Chatza's sayings and principles, which reflected the values of the Lithuanian shtetl of his youth.

Do you have a famous family story? Click here for tips on how to fact-check it and learn even more about yourself. And watch for my next scrapbook item -- about a one-armed man named Teddy and the way family stories can inspire the best in us.

Lee Kravitz is the author of UNFINISHED BUSINESS: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things (Bloomsbury)