Dan Morgenstern's Family History, 2: A Connection with Peter Hand’s Family (+Bonus music)

(For Paying Subscribers, there’s an unissued recording at the bottom of a Peter Hand composition featuring Frank Vicari, soprano sax, Mike Abene, piano, bassist Paul Berner and drummer Dave Ratajczak.)

Last time I shared with you some research on the amazing European ancestors of jazz historian Dan Morgenstern (1929-2024), who grew up in Vienna during the 1930s. Today, I want to talk about a surprising connection between the families of Dan and of Peter Hand, the currently active guitarist and composer-arranger, best known for his big band albums on Savant Records:

There is almost no overlap between the previous essay and this one. You need just these three sentences of background: Although Dan was born in Munich, Germany, he and his parents were based in Vienna, Austria. His father was the respected Jewish author Soma Morgenstern (1890-1976), and his mother was Ingeborg “Inge” von Klenau (b.1904-1990). Inge’s father was the Danish composer, Paul von Klenau, a Lutheran, and her mother was Anne Marie Edeline Simon, who came from a prominent Jewish family, active in politics and publishing. (There is much more information about Dan’s ancestors in the previous essay.)

So Anne Marie had family money, and in 1912 she bought an estate in the German countryside, in Beuerberg, about 35 minutes drive south of Munich and about an hour north of the Austrian border. Dan described it in his interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program (JOHP; a transcript and a few audio excerpts are at this link):

It was an old, beautiful, large house…and it also had an adjoining stable and a barn… It had quite a bit of land attached to it. She built another house there, a smaller house, for the kids. There was another – still another place which was for the tenant farmer. So it was a fairly large operation.

Paul von Klenau and Anne Marie lived at the Beuerberg estate from the time she bought it in 1912 until they divorced in 1927. Then Anne Marie continued to live there full-time and her daughter Inge was often there. Now, guitarist and composer-arranger Peter Hand picks up the thread with some details that have never been published before:

From Peter Hand:

Dan’s mother Inge and my mother were friends in Vienna, even though Inge was about eleven years older. My mother Schura Sigall was born July 1, 1915 in Briconi (today part of Moldavia), where her mother was also born, but she was raised in Odessa (then part of the Russian empire, today in Ukraine). She was the only child of my Jewish grandparents, and when she was about two years old, they had to flee from a pogrom (a violent riot against Jews), finding safety in and around Vienna. My mom grew up there and loved being there, becoming culturally Viennese. She spoke Russian, German, Yiddish and later English fluently. Her mother Rose was a dentist, which must have been unusual for a woman at that time, and I'm not sure what her dad, Boris Sigall, did. In any case, Schura went to art school to study dress designing. She even won a beauty contest in Voslau, about 30 minutes drive south of Vienna:

After graduating from art school, she started working, and was engaged to be married. And since she was friends with Inge, she surely had been to the farm in Bavaria on occasion.

But the Germans were, notoriously, welcomed to Vienna on March 12, 1938, known as the Anschluss, the “joining” or annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich. Everything changed, and quickly. Here's what it says in Wikipedia:

The campaign against the Jews began immediately after the Anschluss. They were driven through the streets of Vienna, their homes and shops were plundered....Jews were driven out of public life within months...The Nuremberg Laws applied in Austria from May 1938, later reinforced with innumerable anti-Semitic decrees....Jews were gradually robbed of their freedoms, blocked from almost all professions, shut out of schools and universities.

This led eventually to “the final solution,” the plan to murder all Jews, which began with mass shootings in the summer of 1941, followed by the extermination camps. In March 1938, Dan’s father left Vienna alone (as explained in the previous essay), and by the Fall of 1938, Dan and his mother Inge fled to Denmark. Dan remembers:

Austria no longer existed as a country. It was annexed to Germany. So if you had an Austrian passport, you got a German one. But my mother was Danish by birth.. the Nazis were taking over all these bureaucratic positions...she managed to talk them into giving her a Danish passport. The Danish consulate was cooperative, I guess. She dumped me at my grandmother’s place [in Bavaria] and went to Denmark and prepared things there. Then my grandmother, who was a Danish national by marriage and was free to travel – this is still ’38…my grandmother took me to Denmark.

Now Peter Hand continues:

I can only imagine what that must have been like. My mother was 23 and living on her own. Her parents, Rose and Boris, sailed to New York City from Antwerp, Belgium without her on October 1, 1938. I wish I had asked my mother to tell me all about her trials during this period. She did tell me that her best friend turned against her, she was forced to give up her job as a dress designer, and that her fiancé from that time later died in Auschwitz. She was even briefly in some kind of detention camp, but was let go because, she said, she reminded the camp director of his daughter. Finally, my mother was able to escape from the horrors of Jewish life in Vienna by staying at the von Klenau family farm with Inge’s mother, Anne Marie Simon, from around December 1938 until she could make her way to the U.S.A. sometime in 1939. In New York City she reconnected with Eric Hand, who she had met briefly in Vienna, and they married and lived at first in Brooklyn. And she loved her her new country and her new life, marriage, children (me and my sister), friends, work, music, food, theater, reading, and all with a passion.

My mother was so grateful that she called Dan’s grandmother Anne Marie “my second mother.” My mom returned to Austria to visit her in August 1971 and again in 1973. Here are photos that she took of the main house at the Morgenstern/von Klenau farm in Beuerberg, Bavaria in December 1938, around the time she arrived there, and again in August 1971:

And here is Dan Morgenstern’s grandmother Anne Marie Simon von Klenau sometime in the 1920s, again in October 1973, and again with Peter Hand’s mother Schura Sigall Hand (on the right) in August 1971:

And Peter Hand concludes this amazing story:

My parents losing their roots, possessions and occupations, escaping to America while some family and friends perished, was a big part of my upbringing and consciousness. It’s given me a real understanding of what people went through, and the evils of racism, prejudice and hatred.

Dan's mother and my mother remained friends in New York City, and through that friendship, I shared a connection with Dan Morgenstern. I first met him in the late 1960s, when he visited at my mother’s home in Queens (my dad had passed away years earlier). I was a teenaged fledgling guitarist at the time, mostly interested in blues. I’d already been reading Downbeat magazine, and was aware he was the editor. I really liked Dan’s reviews and articles.

After first attending Binghamton University, I switched to the Berklee College of Music in 1972 (it was called the Berklee School of Music until 1970). I started as a guitar major, but soon changed my major from instrumental performance to arranging and composition. I told Dan that I was getting into Duke Ellington's music, and that Lucky Thompson was becoming a favorite of mine as a saxophonist and composer. He mailed me two Duke albums, and a Lucky Thompson album. I credit Dan for putting me on the path to seek out many recordings (some with Dan’s excellent liner notes!) and to study Duke’s music and many other arrangers and composers. When I moved back to New York City in 1978, I contacted Dan, and we got together for an afternoon at his apartment. He put me in touch with Lee Konitz which led to my writing a few charts for Lee’s nonet.

Thanks to Dan, that gave me confidence about my writing, and soon I had charts performed by the small groups of George Coleman, Carmen Lundy, Jon Lucien, Claudio Roditi, and others. My interest in big band writing led to my founding the Westchester Jazz Orchestra, and to my own big band albums. Some of the big bands that played my charts were the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Charleston Jazz Orchestra, St. Louis Jazz Orchestra, Central N.Y. Jazz Orchestra, and the Munich Modern Jazz Orchestra. Dan and I stayed in touch, and when my first big band album was released, The Wizard of Jazz, a Harold Arlen tribute, Dan included it in his radio show of the best albums of 2009 on WBGO-FM.

So, Dan's grandmother helped save my mother, allowing her to flee from the Nazis in Vienna. But nobody could have known at the time that we would both dedicate ourselves to jazz. What an amazing coincidence that Dan became one of the leading jazz authorities, and that, years later I went into jazz for my career.

Thank you Peter for this wonderful story!

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. Paying Subscribers, scroll down for your bonus recording.