(The Golden Door)
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LIFTIG/LUFTIG
Liftig/Luftig
L’viv, and near the border with Poland. The names Liftig and Luftig are found mostly in the records of Teranopol (Tarnov) in Eastern Poland, near Krakow. I have seen a reference to a Liftig in Germany as long ago as 1804 – of an Adolf Liftig – a sexton, or assistant to a temple. It is very possible the name was generic and applied to non-relatives. Jakub Ziering says he is convinced There are only about 20 Liftigs in the world, all in the United States, as far as I know. This is because the name was that the name originally originally was “Lustig” – happy – and that, because the old spelling would have substituted an “f” for an originally “Luftig.” I have been told by researchers at YIVO, that if you lived south of the Great Swamp in the Ukraine,
“s,” it would have been spelled, “Luftig,” with a long tail on the “f.”
“Luftig” was pronounced “Liftig”; and that, if you lived north of it, it would have been pronounced as it was intended to The genealogists at YIVO told me that the name Liftig/ Luftig was common around the Pripet Marshes, just north of the be in Middle German: “Luftig.” The researcher added that if you were richer, you lived north of the swamp, and if you Ukraine. It was a Yiddish name – medieval German. The northern section of the Marshes was an area where Jews were more pros-were poorer, you probably lived south, so, forget about family crests with this bunch. My father used to say that if we ever perous, and so it held more closely to the proper Yiddish/ German pronounciation of “Luftig.” The southern area was the poorer had one, it would have been two martini glasses, stems crossed, with cherries hanging down between them.
region, and poor Jews, like poor everyone elses, pronounced “proper” language improperly, hence: “Liftig.”
Noone seems to agree.
Samuel Liftig (presumed)
Herewith, a description of the Pripet Marshes:
b. approx. 1807 (the same time as an “Adolf Liftig” is listed as a “Sextant” – keeper of a synagogue – in Germany) David Liftig
Pripet Marshes, Ukrainian Polissya, Belarusian
b. approx. 1827
The Liftig family spawning ground is described as a “vast waterlogged region of eastern Europe, among the largest of the Samuel David Liftig
European continent. The Pripet Marshes occupy southern and northern . They lie in the thickly forested basin of the (a b. approx. 1857. d. 1935. Watchmaker, New Britain, CT. Age 78.
major tributary of the Dnieper) and are bounded on the north by the and on the south by the Volyn-Podilsk and Dnieper m. Rose Tepper, d. of Bernard Tepper. Both buried in New Haven, CT. by Westrocks.
uplands. The marshes cover an area of approximately 104,000 square miles (270,000 square km). The distinctive natural Dr. Morris David Liftig
traits of the Pripet Marshes are a wide development of saturated sandy lowlands, intersected by a dense network of rivers b. 1887 Vladimir, now Ukraine, near L’viv. Dentist.
with weakly cut riverbeds and wide floodlands, and a prevalence of pine forests amid the wide expanse of lowlying bogs d. 1972 Hartford, CT. Age 85.
and marshes.
m. Sarah Dorothy Zimmerman. 1920
As there are so few Liftigs on the planet, and almost none of us with any money to speak of, you have to wonder about the supposedly inherited Jewish ability to make a fortune out of nothing . Liftigs do have an ability to make what seems to others to Dr. Alvin Bernard Liftig
be a decent living and live life large for a while, but then they lose it all. There is usually a woman involved, or a bad marriage, b. 1922, NYC, Dentist
or some kind of association with organized crime figures and subsequent “bad business decisions,” as one relative has describe d. 2009, Avon, CT. Age 87.
his fall.
m. Francine Barbara Greenstein
What is certain is that there was no family crest associated with the Family Liftig – ever. Not even the junior royal Levites Dr. Robert A, Liftig
would lay claim to us.
b. 1947, Frankfort, Germany (U.S. Army Dependant), teacher, professor, writer
Even so, Luftig is – or was - a sometime name in Poland, and its exact spelling is certainly not worth an argument; the name m. Inez Fugate. 1971
is probably only 200 years old because Jews were only forced to take “Western names” in the mid to late 1700s under Napoleon.
My grandfather, Dr. Morris “Maurice” David Liftig came to this country in 1906, age 17, which was shortly after the
Anya Liftig
pogroms of 1905. The steamship’s name is listed somewhere. He joined existing family in Ansonia and New Haven, CT, some of b. 1977. Performing artist
whom also used the name Luftig to identify themselves: especially one Louis Luftig, from New London, CT, who was arrested m. Noel Hartman
in a gambling raid in Hartford, and later for breaking and entering a residence in that city and stealing an overcoat and some Dorothy Allyson Liftig
women’s hair combs. I think Louis was of the same branch which married into the Faella family of Rhode Island, and whose b. 1981. Norwalk, CT. Insurance company representative.
children intermarried with the Patriarcha once crime/ then political/ now legitimate and respectable family there.
m. David Martin
Some relations were obviously left behind in the Prippet marshes, as the Nazis captured some of them and sent them to Auschwitz .
Luftig means “outdoors,” or “windy.” There is also a word in Yiddish – Luftmenschen – which means a peddler who is so poor This was brought home to me every year when I showed the award winning French film “Nuit et Bruilliere” (“Night and
he lives on air. Once when I was hitchhiking in the Alps, a Swiss guy picked me up in a Mercedez, and, when I told him my name Fog”) to my ninth grade English classes. One section of the film gives close up shots of the crematoria; the next shot is of a hand was Luftig, he started laughing and couldn’t stop. He almost drove off the Alp we were climbing. He said there was a word in flipping the pages of the record book of victims whose names begin with “L.” “Luftig” is written there.
German - “Luftighaus” – which meant “Wind going through the head: crazy.” He then laughed harder and almost drove us into Grandpa Morris hated the Russians as well as the Germans and called them “pigs.” I don’t think he liked Ukrainians either.
the Romanche Valley. Other Swiss have told me that the word “Luftig” means everything from “silly,” to a description of vapors He also didn’t like Christians, or Jews who didn’t identify themselves as Jews. He did like to skate, however, and was considered rising, say, from a barbeque, or an auto da fe. Everyone agrees it has something to do with the outdoors and the wind, though. The quite an athlete when he was younger, cutting smart figure eights on the pond at Hartford’s Elizabeth Park. His parents, Sam and Germans use the word in advertisements that feature Bavarian photo shoots; so far, though, only the Swiss seem to find it funny Rose, are buried near West Rocks Tunnel in New Haven in one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries there. I think my wife’s family
– and they’re not particularly known for their senses of humor.
might have owned the mountain the tunnel goes through.
My grandfather, Dr. Morris Liftig, told me the family was originally from “Odessa on the Black Sea,” but Odessa was a Morris graduated from Hillhouse High School in New Haven, on the same plot of land that Morse College of Yale now occu-relatively recent city (1700s) so I doubt if it was their point of origin. Morris was born in Vladimir in Ukraine, Lutzgobyrnia, near pies (Morris? Morse? Makes you wonder.) and the residence that Anya lived in when she was an Eli. Morris had many jobs when 519
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