When I tell people about Jewish families in the small towns I’ve visited, they often ask, “How did they get there?” When I’m doing oral history interviews, I usually ask the same thing.
The most common answer is that someone (a grandparent or great-grandparent) had a cousin or sibling who was already in the area. Many families have amusing, likely fictionalized tales of a newly arrived forebear getting off of a train at the wrong stop or landing in a small town by some other sort of accident.
In July, I interviewed Michael Korenblit, of Edmond, Oklahoma. He shared the story of his parents, Meyer and Manya Kornblit (the last name is spelled differently due to clerical discrepancies) and their immigration to the United States. There is much to say about Meyer and Manya, childhood sweethearts and Holocaust survivors who were reunited after World War II. They were married shortly after the war, and their oldest son, Sam, was born while the family was living in Eggenfeld, Germany. In the interview clip below, Michael tells how his family ended up in the small Jewish community of Ponca City, Oklahoma.
The clip is also available through the Ponca City article in our
Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities
. The rest of Meyer and Manya’s story is recounted in
Until We Meet Again
, which Michael coauthored.
How did your family get to where they live today? Where did they come from originally?
