The memoirs we’ve read this year tell variations on a story: Jewish families immigrating to this region from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
First-person memoirs upend stereotypes by showing the gradations of human experience. In these memoirs, you get to see how two people can follow different paths through life even as they appear to walk along the same road.
“My Life History” is a different road altogether.
Jacob deSourdis Freund was born in Barranquilla, Columbia in 1873. His mother was from Curacao, in the West Indies. His father came from a Sephardic family living in Bavaria, by way of Bordeaux. The family had assumed the name deSourdis in the 16th century, in gratitude to a Cardinal deSourdis. He helped them escape from Spain during the Inquisition by disguising them as priests and secreting them across the border into France.
In his 10-page account from April 1954, deS Freund describes his childhood in a large middle-class household in Detroit, where English, German and Spanish were given equal authority. He earned an engineering degree from Cornell University in 1897 and struggled to find work through the Panic of that year.
After years of professional advances and retreats in various major cities, he was hired by the Union Switch & Signal Company in Swissvale, Pa. in 1903.
Working on a trolley line on Browns Hill, he oversaw the installation and testing of a new alternative current signaling system for electric roads. The system worked and was later implemented on the New York Subway.
deS Freund soon joined a new family business called the American Cement Tile Company. He opened a new plant in Wampum, Pa. and moved his family to Beaver, Pa. to oversee the operation. Within a few years, he had secured a major government contract to produce roofing materials for the shop buildings then under construction at the Pacific Ocean end of the Panama Canal.
