Sklarewicz or Feinberg — What’s in a Name?
Back in the 1960s, having a television was a much bigger deal than it is today, when everyone carries a screen nearly everywhere they go.
When I was little, we had one TV, and there was usually considerable negotiation over what to watch, unless it was The Ed Sullivan Show or something similar that appealed to all generations.
After Sunday dinner, we’d all gather in the Big Room, our very large living room. There was also a formal living room with nice furniture and rugs, reserved strictly for special occasions.
As the youngest, I would park myself as close to the TV as possible, partly because I didn’t yet know I needed glasses. Inevitably, my mother would say:
*”You’re blocking my view. Your father isn’t a glazier.”
I thought she was saying glacier, and wondered to myself: what is a glacier doing in our living room?
What I didn’t know was that she was quoting a long-standing Yiddish phrase:
שטיי מיר נישט פאר די אויגן, דיין טאטע איז נישט קיין גלעזער
Shtey mir nisht far di oygn, dayn tate iz nisht keyn glezer.
Used to tell a child blocking the view to step aside, literally meaning you are not made of glass, this was a common expression across the Jewish immigrant world. In most families, it was simply a figure of speech. In ours, it carried an additional layer of meaning.
The surname Sklarewicz comes directly from the Slavic root sklar or shklyar, meaning glassmaker or glazier. When Barnett Sklarewicz’s great-grandchildren told each other “your father is not a glazier” in a 1960s American living room, they were unknowingly echoing the precise trade that had named their family in Lithuania generations earlier. The Sklarewiczes were, by ancestral definition, the glazier’s descendants.
Did my father know this? Did he tell my mother? Or was it simply another Yiddishism passed down through the family?
Once I discovered the meaning of Sklarewicz, I fell down the genealogy rabbit hole and found probable cousins living not far from my Feinberg family in the Bronx: Sachony and Samuel Feinberg, both recorded as glaziers in Manhattan in 1910, who had carried the trade literally across the Atlantic.
We have confirmed the use of the surname in a listing for my great aunt Mariem Sklarewicz on her ship manifest for the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria as she traveled in steerage from Grodno, Poland to New York to meet her brother, my grandfather, Isadore, in May of 1909. He and his father Barnett and brother Saul had already changed their names to Feinberg.
