Visiting the Red Star Line Museum  in Antwerp, Belgium, inspired me to find out more about my ancestors. In the past, I’ve always come up empty — Ellis Island, Yad Vashem, every database all those millions of names, and I’d never found  so much as one forebear.

Irving Berlin’s descendants at the Red Star Line Museum, Antwerp. PHOTO BY JILL SCHENSUL

Just before going to the museum for the second time, I put my Grandma Julie’s name into google, along with “Irving Berlin.” I knew that my grandmother had been an accomplished pianist and had played with either Berlin or the Gershwins. Since the descendants of Berlin, who had come to America on the Red Star Line, would be speaking at  the museum that day, I thought I’d try to find something — anything — that might  refer to Juliette Schensul and one of the famous musicians. Maybe an old newspaper item, or an anecdote in an obit.

I didn’t, but I did find Grandma Julie in ancestry.com. I can’t tell you how excited I was, after so many years of looking, to find her – find our name — listed somewhere.  I realize some of you are old hands at your genealogy, that you may have put together  family trees extensive enough to qualify as forests.  Me? My parents were always vague, most of my grandparents died when I was little, and I had few clues. But I’d wager ancestry-tracking neophyte or veteran, the thrill of unearthing those  tangible connections to the past is pretty much the same. Continue reading →

It looked like a warehouse. I’d come 3,700 miles on planes, trains and yes, automobiles, to get here, to Antwerp, for a preview of the new Red Star Line Museum and it looked like a warehouse.  Warehouses, actually. Three red  brick buildings, square and unassuming, sitting on a corner across from a rather rusty-looking, industrial port area.

No windows, no marble steps leading to a grand entrance, no statues or friezes foreshadowing some precious archive or priceless collection within. The building sported not a thing to make it look imposing or museum-like.

Just Red Star Line, in big white letters of an old-fashioned, poster-like font. There was a new glass tower, ship-like in shape, among the three old buildings, but that was for the view.

Going through the glass, street-level doors, the immediate impression did not disabuse me of the first impression. A gift shop in one corner, a (really interesting) photo exhibit dwarfed by the towering walls on which they were hung.  Even the crowd here for the press conference seemed small, impermanent, beside the point.

The main thing, the important thing, the ubiquitous thing, was quite simply the walls. And, naturally,  the space they contained.

They are, really, the foundation of the new museum’s collection. The walls, the space, the building, the site by the port, these are the powerful artifacts from the Red Star Line’s past. All here and as they were when the shipping line was established by a group of Philadelphia businessmen in 1873. People came from all across Europe – a majority from Eastern Europe  –to the  Red Star Line complex.  They traveled by train, by foot, by subterfuge, by night, without papers or passports or visas. Some were detained for months by red tape, by brutal weather, by illness.

The first and second class passengers boarded their ship with only minimal scrutiny. It was the steerage class, the ones who arrived with few possessions and sand would be sailing under the worst conditions — after spending all their savings on a ticket ($500 to $1,000 in today’s economy) — who came through these buildings. And sometimes. this was as far as the would-be emigrants got; some were  turned away while they were being processed for boarding, when they were deemed  sick or otherwise undesirable.

For the rest though, the more than 2 million given the green light, a new journey had begun. Antwerp was the last they would see of their Old World life; when their feet next touched terra firma (for many, at Ellis Island)  they would be taking their first steps into a better life in a New World, a world they believed offered freedom for all, and the opportunity to make their dreams come true.

Between 1873 and 1934, this building was the grand central station for more  than 2 million people in transition. It was a place of hope, of sadness, of despair and fear and anticipation and confusion.A place of comings and goings, endings and beginnings.   Truly, the “if walls could talk” wish was made for a place like this.

Around 2004, some Antwerp city officials, who saw the potential in these old buildings, started the process that, in essence, actually made those walls talk.   The Red Star Line Museum is as its first impression suggests: a warehouse. What is stored within is human history, the human condition, in a million different stories.

Through official records, through amazing photographs, through letters and diaries and recent  interviews with relatives and some of  those Red Star passengers still alive, the stories have be rescued from obscurity. The ghosts have been given substance, the faded names turned into people who lived and breathed and dreamed.

As I write this I’m getting goose bumps, again, as I remember the stories I learned, the grainy black and white faces I peered into, with their huge and hopeful and intelligent and terrified eyes. Stories and people front a not-that-long-ago past, really. Yet all of it nearly lost.

The Red Star Line, Ellis Island, the millions and millions of people uprooted during that time in Europe, changed the course of history. Gave America a foundation for the life we know today. The museum makes a point of tying in the phenomenon of  human migration with examples the first homo sapiens 70,000 years ago to the current waves of refugees from Afghanistan, Congo, Iran and other war-torn countries.

Every migration has its own particular political and cultural components. But at its core, they all have one common thread: the hope for a better life.  The example of the Red Star Line’s migrating passengers tells a universal story: a story of human beings willing to endure hardships  and overcome unimaginable  obstacles, to find a  better life for themselves, their family, their future.  Somehow, from the depths of despair created by fear and  hate and prejudice, the human spirit manages to rise, and rise again.

I’m in Antwerp (that’s in Belgium, people do sometimes want to ask that). I came  specifically to  preview  the new Red Star Line Museum.  which opens today (Sept. 28). But discovered lots of small and big treasures in this history-rich town.

I’d heard Antwerp was centrally located, but that was mostly in relation to the Netherlands. So today when I got in the cab for a ride to the airport in Brussels and the driver said it would take 35 or so minutes, I was surprised.

“Gee, I thought it would take an hour or two,” I only half-joked. I mean, where I live, the traffic alone can make any quick hop a two-hour adventure.

“Two hours?” he laughed. “I can get  you to Paris in two hours.” If  I had known that, I would have called a cab last night to take me to a movie on  the Champs Elysees.

“I can get you to Amsterdam,” the driver was saying, “or Berlin, or — [names of places I didn't know].”

People who live in Antwerp love it here. Once a place people left from (the  Red Star Line and the port were where millions of those emigrants who passed through Ellis Island began their journey to a new life in the New World.

Now, imagine if all these amazing European cities are two hours away.  Like …. like as far as the Catskills, or Cape May, or Philadelphia, but at the destination, in two little hours, people are speaking a whole other language. Your can take a canal boat to your restaurant. Maybe the King and Queen will be in town for something. Or the ice rink will be up and ready at the Grand Palais. ….

Sure, gas here is more expensive than in the states. but in under two hours, how much can you burn? To be immersed in different cultures so conveniently  — that’s money well spent.

I’m heading off to Antwerp today, for the opening of the Red Star Line Museum, which I’ve already written about and which I’ll be writing more about very soon.

But right now, I just wanted to get down the moment. The way it feels to get back to the melee that is travel, that is air travel in particular. that is being at the airport, and pulling out documents, and finding what you need, and making sure you get it back and don’t leave it somewhere, and then eventually making your way from the check in counter for the airline to join the masses coming from everywhere ad going to everywhere all funneling into one or two or three small points of checkability, security screening, first the gazing at the passport by men in navy uniforms wearing thin plastic gloves and undoubtedly trained to see things and find tells that you have no idea about. Standing there and waiting, as unbelievable jams of humanity wait and wait and shuffle and wait to get past the eyes of these men so they can unload all their possessions into big flat plastic bins and have them scanned for more who knows what in machines that may or may not actually help keep us safe.

But I stopped had to stop, at least  for a while —  a long while — at the passport scrutinizing lines at JFK and could do nothing but stand and since I am traveling and it is best when traveling to assume sponge mode, seize the moment mode, and be aware of everything right right right  now, that is what happened. And I noticed I didn’t understand a word anyone around me was saying. it was just syllables, just lilting sounds imbued, maybe because of some vestigial genetics thing, somewhere deep in my genes, with a note of exoticism. of faraway. of places too unlike my own place to every be fully grasped, understood, appreciated.

Everywhere I put my ears were sounds that  were completely impenetrable, untranslatable to my mind, my reality, my idea of the way things should sound. I could only give up. I stopped trying to make sense of it. I started just listening.

I waited. And let the unfamiliar, the beautiful unfamiliar, blow through the dam of the everyday.

I smiled. Hard.

On  Oct. 1,  2012,  Club ABC Tours disappeared. So did $1,033,245. So did the long-anticipated travel dreams of countless ABC customers.

Today NJ’s Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman and the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs filed suit against   the two brothers who ran the Bloomfield-based companies — Club ABC Tours for its  members,  and Club ABC Destinations for entities such as educational institutions, business groups, churches, etc.  The state alleges that Robert S. and Thomas H. Paris were selling packages and taking in money though they were well aware their business was insolvent.  

The State alleges that, for years, the Paris brothers allegedly kept the businesses functioning by accepting payment for future travel packages and using them to pay off already outstanding debts. Eventually the system began to fall apart.  The whole time, however, the brothers made sure they  paid themselves nice salaries.  Oct. 1, at 5 p.m., they locked their doors, and made their escape — stranding hundreds of customers, some quite literally. Continue reading →

Gee, I thought passengers were just holding up progress in the aisle because they were stuffing their stuff in the overhead bins.

Turns out they were wangling deals for better seats.

I had no idea passengers had started bribing other passengers for a little more legroom or a way out of the middle-seat hell. Apparently, as I read in a recent story by Dave Seminara, this sort of free-market scenario has taken wing in the dog-eat-dog (but not peanuts, or, come to think of it, much of anything) world of passenger flights.

I may have been stunned momentarily, but then realized it was another perfectly logical step in the evolution of air travel.   The airlines have already demonstrated that passengers are willing to pay extra for a little extra comfort — big money in the case of business or first class versus coach; or a less steep fee for new beasts such as “economy plus,” etc.

Passenger-to-passenger bribes aren’t illegal. And this sort of action does make sense — at this point, anyway. Passengers are just getting their piece of the upgrade action long monopolized by the airlines. Continue reading →

I’ve attended blessings of animals, blessings of fleets, blessings of new buildings.

I was always going to other people’s blessings. Today, though, I came upon the perfect blessing event: Blessing of the automobiles and travelers!

I was looking for monasteries in upstate New York that were open for travelers — retreats, spiritual recharging, etc. My editor pointed out St. Anne’s Shrine.on Isle La Motte, in  Vermont, actually. In the course of checking out its Web site  I discovered, on its Events page, this blessing of the cars and travelers. Unfortunately it’s today and tomorrow, and I can’t get up there that fast. Well, I could, but  I’d definitely need the blessing before I started out,  to keep me safe from the risk of tickets and accidents I’d be taking driving at 120 mph).

Turns out this car-blessing thing isn’t an isolated incident (what is these days?) Continue reading →

I figured sequestration would only mean disaster for air passengers. Like, OK, let’s put even more stress on the shaky, badly understaffed air traffic control system by REDUCING THEIR HOURS could even be considered simply boggles my mind.

Apparently, I overthink these things. I can be pessimistic when it comes to air travel, I admit it.

Not only have there been no mid-air collisions so far, but apparently the widespread airport delays have been advantageous to at least some passengers — the garrulous single traveler.

MeetAtTheAirport.com, launched in May 2011 as the first dating web site for air travelers, has seen an 800 percent increase in visits to the site since the reality of sequestration began hitting airports earlier this week. Continue reading →

My cabin at the Pine Cone Resort. Since it is on wheels, you could think of it as a wooden cabin RV.

A band I knew had a song that spoke to my personal cultural experience: “Jews Don’t Camp.”

But  they do “cabin.” I snagged  a cabin at a Jersey Shore campground last night, and now have been able to enjoy the whole camping experience, minus the hard dirt floor, the bathroom down the road apiece and the snake in the tent.

OK, well, I could have come in with my recreational vehicle. Which would have been about the same comfortable. But I don’t have an RV (just yet). Also, as I found out today from the owner of the Pine Cone Resort in Freehold, Roxane D’Ambrosa, my cabin is actually on wheels! Continue reading →

I’m headed down the Shore today,  listening to “The  Accursed” by Joyce Carol Oates (just released) on CD. It’s set in  Princeton early 1900s, with hysteria and eerieness very akin to Salem ramping up for the witch trials. So I’m totally  engrossed, at a part where  this dark and sinister stranger arrives and flowers start wilting,
and dying.  Mushily, weepily and, most of all, stinkingly.
And all of a sudden I  smell dead flowers in my car. Not kidding.
Heading toward Princeton, and smelling the podited smells — creepy!

Also disorienting because, tho I’m heading south thinking of beaches,  it’s snowing!
BTW, I’m a big fan of books on tape. They keep me awake and edified. When I can find one that dovetails with my destination, even better. 
So along with “The Accused,” I’ve brought along “Six Years, ” the latest mystery from NJ’s prolific literary star Harlan Coben. Also “Ghost Man,” by Roger Hobbs,with a wondefully breathless account of a heist involving an armored car coming from an Atlantic City casino.