Note: In this short post, I take a whimsical look at the cars my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, Theodore Brook in America, owned in Germany and later in New York. The opportunity for whimsy rarely presents itself when telling stories about my father’s Jewish family, so I’m relieved to take a brief pause from these to relate a lighthearted tale.
One of my English teachers once cited a writer, whose name is lost to me, talking about coming up with short story ideas who’d quipped these can be found on every street corner. As I near the three-year anniversary of writing stories on my father’s Jewish family, this is a sentiment with which I most heartily concur. The inspiration for this current post came from a gentleman, Raymond “Ray” Fellows, who contacted me through my blog after discovering several posts I’ve written on my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982), known in America as Theodore “Teddy” Brook. (Figures 1-2)
It turns out Ray’s mother rented a room with kitchen privileges to my uncle in Yonkers, New York before he got married in 1958, a period in my uncle’s life I’m unfamiliar with. Ray, born in 1941, met my uncle when he was a teenager and my uncle was working as a toll collector on the New York State Thruway; at the time, he commuted to work in an AMC Rambler, manufactured by the American Motors Corporation between 1958 and 1969. Ray clearly remembers this car. He also has fond memories of my charismatic uncle because he treated him as a member of his family, vividly remembers my uncle effusively complimenting him on how nicely he’d decorated his “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree, and even amusingly recalls my uncle making him one of his “delicacies,” cow brains, something Ray has never again eaten! Years later, Ray visited my aunt and uncle in Yonkers, at which time my uncle drove a sporty Plymouth Barracuda, manufactured by Plymouth from 1964 to 1974.
In any case, in my photo archive, I discovered photos of my uncle standing by his AMC Rambler as well as his Barracuda. I also found images of him standing as an obviously much younger man by two cars he owned when he was a dentist in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] before the war. One of these cars even has a brief anecdote attached to it from a story my two, now-deceased, German first cousins once shared.
Clearly, having his picture taken alongside his latest set of wheels was a tradition my uncle shared with many other car owners. Following his tour of duty in WWI, my uncle obtained his dental license from the University of Breslau in 1921; then, between November 1924 and April 1936, he had his own practice in Liegnitz until he was forced to shutter it by the Nazis. Likely, my uncle’s first car purchase was a DKW (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen), judging from the picture, the DKW “Typ P” convertible model (Figures 3a-b), also referred to as a “DKW P15” (Figure 4), which rolled off the production lines beginning in May 1928. This was the first motor car made by DKW. It was a light-weight design with a unit body made of wood and imitation leather, that was powered by a two-stroke inline twin engine. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto Union in 1932 and is hence an ancestor of the modern-day Audi company. (Figure 5)
Subsequently, my uncle appears to have owned another DKW, the slightly larger DKW Cabrio. (Figures 6-7) While this is mere conjecture on my part, my uncle’s acquisition of a larger car may have been prompted by his “inadvertent” family. In earlier posts, I told readers my uncle carried on a long-term affair with a married woman, Irmgard Lutze (Figure 8), by whom he had two children, my first cousins Wera Thilo née Lutze (1927-2017) and Wolfgang Lutze (1928-2014) (Figure 9); Irmgard never divorced her husband, with whom she raised the children, which afforded my half-Jewish cousins considerable protection when the Nazis later ascended to power; for this reason, my cousins retained the Lutze surname, though my uncle had ardently hoped they would adopt the Bruck surname.
My two first cousins, Wera and Wolfgang, whom I initially met in the mid-1990’s, clearly remember riding in the DKW Cabrio with my uncle and his paramour on Sunday drives through the Silesian countryside, although it would be years later before my uncle announced himself as their “real” father. What made these drives so memorable to my cousins as children was being seated in the rumble seat in the rear of the DKW in the freezing cold. (Figure 10)
Next, one must fast-forward to see my uncle standing by his first American car, the AMC Rambler (Figure 11), which Ray Fellows so clearly remembers. And, judging from my photo archive, my uncle Fedor’s last American car was his Plymouth Barracuda. (Figure 12) However, there is one other car alongside which my uncle can be seen, a Plymouth Savoy, produced between 1951 and 1964. It’s an advertisement for a 1964 Savoy, and, as readers can see for themselves, my uncle is standing in a toll-collection booth, dressed in his work uniform, reaching towards the driver to collect the toll; this photograph was likely staged on the Tappan Zee Bridge where my uncle in fact worked as a toll-collector. (Figure 13) How my uncle came to be featured in a magazine advertisement for Plymouth is unknown, but perhaps when buying his Barracuda, the dealer decided my uncle fit an older demographic towards which the Savoy was targeted, even though he ultimately wound up buying the sportier car?
