See Saw

SW Straus Family and NY architecture

SW Straus' daughter, Harriet Straus Rachevsky. 1929. Harriet is Zina's mother.I got this photo on eBay several years ago. It came with this text:

This text shows that Harriet's husband, Vladimir, was the brother in law of  Grand Duke Boris. Not royalty himself. I also have several  passenger lists from transatlantic voyages in which he appears  as Vladimir Rachevsky, engineer. Not Duke or anything royal. This text brings up an interesting question: Why was the marriage secret? My hunch is that the dying SW would have been livid that Harriet planned to marry someone not Jewish. Her two sisters, Louise and Madeline, had married Jews, as had everyone else in the family. My own grandfather (a Spiegel, not a Straus, but still...) had explicitly forbidden my mother from marrying a Kike, which to him meant a Jew of Eastern European descent, not the good kind from Germany, or even a Sephardic Jew. My mom did, in fact, marry a Kike - my father - and my grandparents grew to adore him. But to marry a Christian in those days was not something you'd tell your dying father.

update: a relative on the Rachevsky side of the family found me through this blog. Ain't google amazing?!! According to him, it seems that the Rachevsky's were, in fact Jewish. Converted to Catholicism, for a variety of reasons, including safety, but Jews nevertheless.

Now that I look at the pictures of Zina, Mrs Grand Duke, she does look Jewish. I mean, she looks like several Jews I know in Russia. . I'm keeping the rest of this post in, because I don't know if Vladimir told Harriet he was Jewish, and even if he did, he was a Russian Jew, not the "good" kind, a German Jew.

From Growing Up Rich by Anne Bernays -  a wonderful novel about a German Jewish family in New York in the 1940's. The heroine is Sally Stern, a fourteen year old girl. Sally's mother is speaking to Sally about her (Sally's) step Grandmother. She is refering to a conversation Sally and Oma Lucy have had about Jews passing for Gentile.

"Oma Lucy has very firm opinions about 'passing.' She thinks it's a sin. It's her hobbyhorse, dear. Of course, she's the ultimate snob herself. Did you know that when she refers to any Jew who isn't the acceptable kind - not German or Spanish - she always uses the word 'little' in front of their name. Little Mrs. Steinberg, little Mrs. Epstein. It's a dead giveaway. I don't think she's aware she does it. Oh, she'd be horrified to hear what I'm telling you. And don't you go repeating it to her either."

 
Grand Duke Boris and his wife Zinaida (Rachevsky) This is not our Zina. It is her father's sister. I think she is gorgeous.

Meanwhile, Harriet's father, my great uncle Simon William Straus, had been busy changing the skylines of three major US cities. He built the Ambassador Hotels in New York, Atlantic City, and Los Angeles.

Ambassador Hotel, New York City. The building has been torn down.

Advertisement from The Hotel Ambassador, New York City.

Ambassador hotel Atlantic City, NJ
Here's a juicy little tidbit from an Atlantic City history website
In May of 1929, mob kingpins from around the country, including Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz and Al Capone, gathered for a three-day national convention in Atlantic City's Ambassador Hotel....The gangsters gathered at Atlantic City's Ambassador sought to find ways to end their bloody wars, coordinate their national racketeering activities and reign in Capone, whose ferocity unnerved even them.

The Straus Building, Chicago.

SW also held the underwriting mortgage  of $6,000,000 on the construction, building and land of the Pershing Square Building, which was right next to Grand Central Station, on 42nd Street and Park Ave.  It was owned by The Pershing Square Corporation, of which Seward Ehrich was the treasurer. Seward Erich had just married Louise Straus - Harriet's sister and Zina's aunt. The marriage tookplace at the Italian Gardens of The Ambassador Hotel. The building was designed by John Sloan, architect at York & Sawyer.

Pershing Square Building Plans Completed, NY Times 1921

Pershing Square, NYC, 1922 postcard

Pershing Square now. It is a trendy restaurant.

Building was nothing new to the Straus family. SW's uncle, Jacob Straus, Jewish pioneer and businessman in Ligonier, Indiana, built this beauty.

Citizens bank, Ligonier Indiana founded by Jacob Straus

And that's it for today's Straus family history. If you are interested in reading more about the Straus/Spiegel clan, and about reclaiming Jewish roots, I highly recommend An Orphan In History by my brother, Paul Cowan. (It's on my Powell's booklist). For a great read about German Jews in New York City in the 1940's, I recommend Growing Up Rich, by Anne Bernays.

more about Zina Rachevsky

Did you know Zina. I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line in the comment section.

ZINA RACHEVSKY - JEWISH PRINCESS - AND THE TIBET CONNECTION

 With Tibet in the news recently, I thought I’d expand on a piece I have on my website about  my cousin Zina Rachevsky and my travels in Nepal.

Zina Rachevsky
  In the 1980's I lived in Woodstock, NY, practically in the shadow of the Tibetan Buddhist Monestary Karma Triyana Darmachakra (KTD). Although I was not a practitioner, I lived with one, which I thought gave me some in-law status.

White Tara, acrylic on canvas by Liza Cowan

In 1983 or 1984, my partner and I decided to go to India and Nepal. She wanted to see the Lamas and Tibetan Buddhist shrines and I was in search of information about my cousin Zina Rachevsky, who, it is told, had been the first foreigner to study with Tibetan Lamas, (or second after Alexandra David Neel.) 

Zina and her family had always been somewhat of mythical figures in my family. For one thing, the Straus family was fabulously wealthy. In 1921, Simon William Straus -  (Zina's grandfather, my grandmother's brother)  founder of SW Straus & Co., held loans on new buildings across the us worth $150,000,000. (NY Times, Dec 3, 1922) In 1924 they completed construction on  the Chicago building that is now known as Metropolitan Tower, the first Chicago structure taller than thirty stories. It was then known as "The Straus Building." SW Straus owned the Ambassador Hotels in Los Angeles, New York City and Atlantic City. He died in 1930. The company went into recievership, it went under, in 1932 after defaulting on bonds totaling over $200 million.

Zina was born in 1930, the same year her grandfather died. Zina was known to us a wild child, but in the 1950's, when I was a child listening to the stories, that could be another way of speaking of an independent, curious woman. She spent much of her early adulthood working as actress and gaining a reputation as an international socialite, knew the Beat Poets, and eventually made her way to India and finally to Dharma.

 
Zina Rachevsky, actress 1953

Zena's father, we knew, claimed Russian nobility. While the Russian nobility fable is a large part of Zina’s current mythology, in my family we were more interested in our side, the Jewish side. Zina's mother and my mother were first cousins. Zina's grandfather and my my grandmother were siblings. They were all German Jews, who had been in the United States since the middle of the 19th Century, and had made their fortune first as peddlers, then as bankers with huge real estate holdings throughout the country. They settled first in Ligonier,  Indiana, creating one of the first and largest Jewish communities in the midwest.  The family then moved on to Chicago and then to New York.

Zina, in the stories written about her, is usually referred to as a Russian Princess. It is  not likely that Zina actually thought of herself as a Russian Princess. Certainly the rest of the family knew that her common-born father's common-born sister had married a dethroned Russian Duke, which doesn't equal royalty by any inheritance laws anywhere. Not a drop of royal blood coursed through her veins. However, it was a clever way of branding herself when she was creating a name for herself as an actress and a showgirl. The meme seemed to have stuck with  her friends and acquaintences and became part of her public persona. Certainly, it made her memorable, and most likely reduced the amount of anti-Semitism that might have been an obstacle in those days.

Update: It turns out, in fact, that the Russian Rachevsky's were most likely Jews as well. Converted to Catholicism, for various reasons, but Jews. Did Zina know this? I don't know. But it seems that she was, by blood, 100% Jewish.

I didn’t think much about Zina until I became interested in Tibetan Buddhism. She had visited us in New York only once, but I had no memory of her. But when I found that Zina had been involved with Lamas in India and Nepal soon after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, I knew it was something worth investigating.