Tom Brook Archives - bruckfamilyblog.com

POST 148: METAPHORICALLY, THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

Note: In this post, I discuss how I recently came into possession of images of ancestors from a branch of my family that originates mostly from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and learned about a memoir written by the grandfather of the English lawyer who shared these pictures.

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT 2: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 132: FATE OF THE BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN“ FAMILY HOTEL IN RATIBOR (RACIBÓRZ): GEOPOLITICAL FACTORS

POST 143: TOM BROOK, BBC JOURNALIST ON SCENE THE DAY JOHN LENNON DIED

A scant three months ago, on the 29^th of September 2023 to be precise, I received an email from a lawyer living in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands of England, Helen Winter, née Renshaw. (Figure 1) I say “scant” because in the short period since we’ve been in touch, we’ve already exchanged several hundred emails.

Figure 1. Helen Winter, née Renshaw in Attingham Park in Wolverhampton in 2023

In Helen’s initial missive, she explained that she is a descendant of the Bruck family and that her maternal grandfather was Professor Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960). (Figure 2) He taught law at the University of Bonn until enactment of “The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (German: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, shortened to Berufsbeamtengesetz) by the Nazis on the 7^th of April 1933. The primary objective of this law was to establish a “national” and “professional” civil service by dismissing certain groups of tenured civil servants, including individuals of Jewish descent and non-Aryan origins. Additionally, the law forbade Jews, non-Aryans, and political opponents from holding positions as teachers, professors, judges, or within the government. It also extended to other professions such as lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries.

Figure 2. Helen’s grandfather, Professor Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960), with his dachshund “Seppel” in 1913 in Mittenwald, Bavaria

Following Eberhard’s dismissal as university professor and confiscation of his home, he fled to the United States and wound-up teaching at Harvard University. As Helen further explained, her grandfather wrote a memoir for his daughter, Helen’s mother (Figure 3), relating the history of his branch of the Bruck family. As a Christmas gift to her nephews and nieces, Helen has slowly been translating the account. Her grandfather’s chronicle makes mention of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, the family business in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] owned by three generations of my family. (Figure 4) While researching the history and fate of the hotel, Helen stumbled on multiple blog posts where I made mention of the establishment.

Figure 3. Margot Renshaw, née Bruck (1917-1985), Helen’s mother and Eberhard’s daughter

Figure 4. The Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] in 1942, owned by my family for three generations from ca. 1850 until 1926

Helen has promised to share her grandfather’s translated story but has given me a preview of the brief entry her grandfather Eberhard Bruck wrote about his great-grandfather, Jacob Nathan Bruck, my great-great-great-grandfather from Ratibor. Since Jacob arguably died in 1832 or 1836 and Eberhard was born in 1877, he would not have known him personally. Eberhard’s written accounts of Jacob are likely stories he heard about him growing up and may have been clouded by the lens through which childhood memories are often remembered. In an upcoming post, I intend to discuss the meager details I’ve been able to uncover about my earliest known ancestor from Ratibor but suffice it for now to say the particulars caused me to more thoroughly investigate when the Bruck’s Hotel might have been built. These findings will be the basis for yet another post because they give insights on avenues others may want to follow in examining their own family histories.

On various occasions I’ve told readers that my ancestral tree has fewer than 1,500 names, which pales in comparison to multiple trees I’ve come across with more than 100,000 names. I use my tree mostly to orient myself to the people I write about on my blog. That said, I have people in my tree, living and deceased, whose names I’ve come across without knowing anything about them. This was the case with my fourth cousin Thomas “Tom” Friedrich Brook until he contacted me asking if we were related; I wrote about Tom in Post 143. (Figure 5) This was also true of Helen who previously existed only as a wraith. Coincidentally, Tom and Helen Winter are second cousins who’ve never met (i.e., Helen and Tom’s grandfathers were brothers), and like Tom, Helen is my fourth cousin.

Figure 5. My fourth cousin, Tom Brook (b. 1953) who coincidentally is Helen Winter’s second cousin

In conjunction with translating her grandfather’s memoirs, Helen recently obtained family documents and pictures her older sister was curating. (Figure 6) Scrutinizing these items in combination has caused Helen to become obsessed with ancestral research. I can relate!

Figure 6. Helen with her older sister Anna (right) as children (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

It is not my intention to further dwell on this branch of my family. However, as I just mentioned, I have numerous individuals in my tree I know nothing about and have no idea what they looked like. As names only, they are lifeless. Helen has been like the gift that keeps on giving because she has sent me pictures of many of my ancestors, including some of the earliest known ones from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Acquiring these visuals for my ancestral tree is like filling in my Bingo card!

Among the most beguiling images Helen sent are ones of Jacob Bruck’s son and daughter-in-law, Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883) (Figures 7a & b-10) and Rosalie Bruck, née Marle (1817-1890) (Figures 11-12) and his famous grandson, Dr. Julius Bruck (1840-1902). (Figure 13) Julius is known for having designed in 1867 a water-cooled diaphanoscopic instrument for transillumination of the bladder via the rectum.

Figure 7a. Miniature painting from the 1830s of Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 7b. English-language caption on the back of the miniature painting of Jonas Bruck indicating that Jonas’s wife didn’t care for the painting because she thought her womanizing husband had it done for another woman (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 8. A second painting of Dr. Jonas Bruck (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 9. Yet a third painting of Dr. Jonas Bruck (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 10. A photograph of Dr. Jonas Bruck later in life (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 11. A photograph of Dr. Jonas Bruck’s wife, Rosalie Bruck, née Marle (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 12. A second photograph of Rosalie Bruck, née Marle (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 13. A photo of the famous and fashionable Dr. Julius Bruck (1840-1902) in August 1880 (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Jonas and Julius Bruck and their respective wives are interred in a mausoleum-like structure at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland (Figure 14), and are among my only Bruck ancestors whose burial location is known. Because I am friends with the Branch Manager of the Old Jewish Cemetery, Dr. Renata Wilkoszewska-Krakowska (Figure 15), I shared the pictures Helen sent with her and she was thrilled to receive them since some of the people are interred in “her” cemetery.

Figure 14. The mausoleum-like structure at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland where Drs. Jonas and Julius Bruck and their respective wives are interred (photo courtesy of Dr. Renata Wilkoszewska-Krakowska)

Figure 15. Dr. Renata Wilkoszewksa-Krakowska receiving her Ph.D. diploma at the recently renovated Baroque Leopoldina Hall at the University of Wrocław, built between 1728-1732

To close this post, I will share two other images (Figures 16-17) Helen has sent over the last several weeks, like the twelve daily gifts of Christmas! Suffice it to say, my Bingo card is becoming quite full!

Figure 16. Tom Brook’s father, Casper Bruck (1920-1983) in his military uniform (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

Figure 17. Tom Brook’s father and uncle, Casper Bruck and Peter Bruck (1922-1977) as children (photo courtesy of Helen Winter)

POST 143: TOM BROOK, BBC JOURNALIST ON SCENE THE DAY JOHN LENNON DIED

Note: In this post, I discuss a fourth cousin, familiarly known to his BBC News followers as Tom Brook, who was one of the first British journalists to report live outside John Lennon’s home on New York’s Upper West Side following his murder on December 8, 1980. Serendipitously, I was recently contacted by Tom’s second cousin, a lady from Wolverhampton, England, who is currently translating her grandfather’s memoir which happens to contain references to my earliest known Bruck relatives from Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. In upcoming posts I will begin to discuss documents I’ve recently uncovered related to some of these early family ancestors.

An application on Geni World Family Tree allows you to enter the name of two people and have it tell you how these people are linked, often a convoluted and rather uninteresting connection. Since we’re all ultimately related, I’ve never personally availed myself of this Geni function though others whom I converse with through my blog have on occasion sent me graphics illustrating our “kinship.” I’m aware of but again have never used a different application available elsewhere that allows someone to determine how they are related to famous people. Since I’m decidedly not a “stargazer,” this is of no interest to me.

At various times, I’ve mentioned that I have a family tree on ancestry.com’s platform with between 1200 and 1300 names. While this may seem like a large number, I’ve seen trees with more than 100,000 names. As I’ve periodically told readers, I use my tree mostly to orient myself to the people about whom I write. However, regular readers know that over time I’ve started writing about much more than my own family in the interest of retaining and expanding my readership.

At the risk of offending distant relatives, I tend to lose interest in next of kin beyond fourth cousins. That said, whenever someone contacts me asking whether we might be related or telling me they think we are related, as an intellectual exercise, I will take pencil and paper to try and work out our ancestral relationship. Occasionally, this leads to hearing from people with a captivating pedigree or making engaging connections. This post is about just such a person, plus a more recent contact from a different individual who I discovered is the second cousin of the person who originally reached out to me. Long-term followers of my blog know that uncovering connections between seemingly unrelated people and events is something I find particularly engrossing about doing ancestral research.

Around Thanksgiving of 2022, I received an email from a genial journalist named Thomas Friedrich Brook (b. 1953) (Figure 1), more familiarly known as Tom, who’s lived in New York for 40 years. After stumbling on my blog, Tom wondered whether we might be related. Given our identical surnames, this makes sense. He briefly explained his lineage, telling me his father was born Caspar Friedrich Bruck (1920-1983) in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and that his grandfather was Werner Friedrich Bruck (1880-1945) (Figure 2), a university professor in Münster, Germany until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Werner’s brother, Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960) (Figure 3) was a prominent lawyer, whom Tom told me he’d met a few times growing up.

Figure 2. Tom Brook’s grandfather, Werner Friedrich Bruck (1880-1945)

Figure 3. Tom Brook’s great-uncle, Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960)

Tom’s family settled in London in 1948, and like my family when they came to America, changed their surname to “Brook.” Following his grandfather’s divorce, Werner ended up teaching at the New School in New York until his death in 1945.

Since all of Tom’s family are in my tree, including Tom whose name I had stumbled across during my research, I was quickly able to establish that he and I are fourth cousins.

Tom Brook’s mention that he is a journalist caused me to Google his name, and I learned he is a New York-based journalist working primarily for BBC News and is seen primarily on BBC World News and BBC News Channel. He is the main presenter of its flagship cinema program “Talking Movies,” and has presented every episode since it was first broadcast in February 1999.

In a subsequent email Tom mentioned that he has a large photo album with pictures of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, plus a drawing of a visit from Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s last Kaiser. The existence of this drawing reaffirms my family’s connection to Kaiser Wilhelm. It’s my great hope that despite Tom’s dreadfully busy schedule, we might eventually connect so I can view his family heirlooms.

Fast forward to late September of this year when I was contacted by an English lady named Helen Winter née Renshaw (b. 1948) (Figure 4) from Wolverhampton, West Midlands, in the central part of England. Like most of my contacts these days, Helen stumbled on my blog while researching the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the hotel my family owned there for three generations. She told me her grandfather Eberhard Friedrich Bruck had mentioned the family hotel in a memoir he wrote for his daughter, Margot Renshaw née Bruck (1917-1985), that’s to say, Helen’s mother. This is when I realized that Eberhard happens to have been Werner Friedrich Bruck’s older brother, making Helen Winter and Tom Brook second cousins.

Figure 4. Helen Winter née Renshaw (b. 1948), Tom Brook’s second cousin and Eberhard Friedrich Bruck’s granddaughter, in Attingham Park in Shropshire, England

Becuase Tom and I have lost touch since our initial contact in 2022, I asked Helen whether she knew of her second cousin and, if so, how to contact him. She explained that while she was aware of him, they’d never met though her older sister had met Tom when she was younger. Intriguingly, she mentioned something I overlooked when initially reading Tom’s Wikipedia entry, namely, that he had been the first British journalist to report live from outside John Lennon’s home in the famed Dakota Apartment building (The Dakota – Wikipedia) on New York’s Upper West Side, following the murder of the former Beatle.

I must briefly digress. Long-term watchers of the CBS News Hour may recall Steve Hartman’s regular award-winning program “Everybody Has a Story.” For those unfamiliar with this series, Hartman would throw a dart at a map and then randomly choose an interview subject from the local phone book. Steve would uncover something alluring or unusual that had happened to that person, and fashion a human-interest story based on their conversation. Running for seven years beginning in 1998, Hartman produced more than 120 pieces in this series. While Tom Brook will better be remembered for his career as a BBC journalist and his long-running entertainment show, I couldn’t help but think that if Steve Hartman had randomly selected his name from a local phone book, Tom’s reportage of John Lennon’s murder outside his apartment building in New York City would have stood out as an unusual occurrence in his life.

On the 40^th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, which took place on the 8^th of December 1980, Tom penned an article in which he basically conceded the point I’m making. Quoting: “Lennon continues to define my career. I have been a broadcast journalist for more than 40 years. In that time, I have filed more than 3,000 stores for BBC outlets and have interviewed most of the big names in the movie industry.

But all people want to know when they meet me is what it was like to cover John Lennon’s death.”

As we speak, Helen Winter is in the process of translating her grandfather Eberhard’s memoir. While he was a lawyer in Bonn, Germany, and like his brother Werner lost his position in 1933 when Hitler ascended to power, his memoir also discusses his early Bruck ancestors from Ratibor. Helen has teased me with some of the facsinating things Eberhard wrote about them that may reveal more about my family’s earliest connection to this town. Stay tuned.

REFERENCE

Brook, Tom (8 December 2020). “John Lennon: I Was There the Day He Died.” BBC News. London. Archived from the original on 8 December 2020.