In 1929, business was quite good for the Dietz Paint Company. For their twentieth wedding anniversary, Pa took Ma on a grand ‘honeymoon’ tour of all the places he had lived in Europe.
Us ‘children’ (Clara was now twenty years old, after all) were left on our own, in the new house in Newton on Bishopsgate Road that Pa had just had built (around the corner from the mansion of his first client, Mary Baker Eddy) while we were in a temporary apartment on Babcock Street. Harold Rudginsky, who was going then with my sister Toby, Aunt Kate and I drove Ma and Pa down to New York, and saw them off on their luxury Cunard liner.
They landed in England, and continued to all the places George had lived in Europe- Holland (Utrecht), Germany (Dusseldorf and Berlin) and Latvia.
In Berlin, while walking in the park, they saw a man excitedly speaking to a crowd. “Who is that?” Pa asked a man.
“That’s the man who will be our next Chancellor, Adolph Hitler,” he was told. Ma couldn’t stand Berlin.
In Russia, the Bolshevik officials wouldn’t give them back their passports for several days.
Finally, they reached his old home town, Rezekne, where Pa’s mother, Libbe Ada, was still living,
as well as his younger brother Naftoli, and Naftoli’s children.
Naftoli teaching a student in Rezekne, 1929
Naftoli, the only one of Chaim and Libbe Ada’s children to stay home, was very religious, like his father. He had become the Rebbe of the Rezekne Jewish community, as well as working for the government as a flax inspector.
Naftoli was much loved by the community as a leader and teacher; however, he was very poor. George and Rosa gave Naftoli all their extra clothes and belongings, and all the money they could spare.
George, who had been quite anti-religious since running away from the shetl, was transformed by meeting his brother, and became quite religious- a baal teshuvah, as they are called nowadays. He convinced Naftoli to let him take a Sefer Torah back to Boston with him, and he gave his brother enough money to purchase a replacement.
When Pa came home to Newton, he set up the torah in an ark in his house, and davened before it every morning. In 1930 he helped to found Temple Emanuel in Newton.
Michael and Sarah Rubin had a daughter Rachel who married Naftoli Taitz(Dietz)(Rachel's brother was the grandfather of Eleanor Cohen in the USA). Naftoli and Rachel stayed in Rezekne and had five children. Rachel, Naftoli's wife, died before World War II.
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