The LANDAU Monologues in Six Parts (1 of 6)

Part 1 of 6 — Amalie LANDAU

At the beginning of the modern history of genealogy when my brother Don was starting to gather information and prepare family trees with all known information, we thought that our mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was a FRIEDENTHAL; Ernestine FRIEDENTHAL.  Supposedly, this FRIEDENTHAL great great grandmother was from the family of R. Ezekiel LANDAU (1713-1793) of Prague, author of “Noda b’Jehuda”, the name of which is his frequent moniker.  In the 1980s and early 1990s, I did a bit of research trying to find a line descended from Rabbi LANDAU that included FRIEDENTHALs, but without success.  That would have been more or less the state of “knowledge” from the late 1960s or early 1970s until May 1996.

“Less” because at some point, possibly from reading the “Chronique Familiale” by my uncle Andreas FREUND  I was able to correct our knowledge about that great great grandmother with the information that she was Ernestine PERL get. FRIEDENSTEIN, not FRIEDENTHAL.  I think that same source identified our mother’s mother’s father’s father’s was Jakob BACH, a teacher of Jewish subjects in Upper Silesia (Oberschlesien).

In May 1996, my mother, my brother Don and I made a trip to Prague, Theresienstadt, Breslau, Brieg and Berlin.  In Prague, in addition to meeting up with my fairly new friend Mark LUDWIG, violist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and founder and director of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation, we also met our grandmother’s first cousin Ja’acov BACH (1911-2006) of Tel Aviv (born Karl Adolf BACH in Tarnowitz).  He was on a trip to Switzerland, but he made a side visit to Prague to meet us.  Over dinner, we learned that Jakob BACH’s wife, Ja’acov’s grandmother, our great great grandmother, was Amalie LANDAU, and she was supposedly descended from R. Ezekiel LANDAU.
 
While we were in Prague, we eventually got ourselves to the Old Jewish Cemetery at Zizkov (on Fibichova Street).  It was at the base of the huge television tower that we had been seeing from every vantage point in the city.  The cemetery was closed and surrounded by a metal fence.  One metal post was missing and following our mother, Don and I also went through narrow opening.  We found the gravestone of R. Ezekiel LANDAU, and then made our way back out through that opening.
 
With great great grandmother Amalie, we now had a LANDAU ancestor who was said, in family lore, somehow to be descended from the Noda b’Jehuda, R. Ezekiel LANDAU of Prague.  Initial research on family trees of R. LANDAU again did not reveal a family line that including our Amalie LANDAU.

We had just been on a slight detour at the beginning.  Instead of looking for LANDAU ancestors in our mother’s mother’s mother’s mother‘s family, they were instead to be found in our mother’s mother’s father’s mother‘s family.