My Family Story of Generational Wealth

An immigrant's triumph, a few fortunate marriages, one family schism healed through wisdom, another family schism made permanent through betrayal.

My last post about the American Caste System addressed the generational persistence of an elite caste of wealth and privilege. Parents in the elite caste do their best to pass down to their children a continuity of caste status.

But beyond the second generation, continuity of wealth and privilege becomes far more difficult. The adage of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” makes sense when you consider the difficulties inherent in preserving wealth across multiple generations.

Fortunes are diluted among multiple children of successive generations. And while the generation that made the initial fortune may pass down money and social capital to their children, the children may decide to flourish in ways that don’t prioritize financial and social success. Some children won’t flourish at all. Some children will squander what they’ve been given. And some children will take the path of my mother who used most of her inheritance to pursue philanthropic projects.  

I’ve described myself as a product of “generational wealth,” a term I define as at least three generations of familial wealth, including one’s own.

Examining my own family history as a historian might do, I see a pattern of maintaining generational wealth that has much to do with fortuitous marriages, i.e., examples of assortative mating––people from the same social set marrying one another and in some cases taking a few steps up the socio-economic ladder.

But for me to be able to tell the story of a five-generation Jewish American family, someone had to leave Europe before American immigration laws became highly restrictive in the 1920s and 1930s. And of course before the Holocaust.

In my father’s family, that someone was my great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg.

Portrait of Samuel Rottenberg

I have in my possession twenty precious pages of Samuel Rottenberg’s account of his life from his birth in 1872 to about 1898. Samuel grew up in the small town of Zemete in what is now the Czech Republic. He emigrated to America in 1888.

Samuel’s father had been complaining about the sinking fortunes of his sawmill business. In an offhand remark of bravado, sixteen year old Samuel volunteered to go to America to bring back a lot of money to save the family business.

His father said, “wonderful idea,” meaning it as a joke. But the young and very serious Samuel took it as an oral contract to which he was now unhappily but irrevocably bound.

“I didn’t feel so happy and in little hiding places I cried bitterly. I could not reconcile myself to leaving home, but I was too stubborn to back out.”

Generations of my family, including myself, owe our existence to Samuel’s adolescent pride.

Samuel’s desire to emigrate was influenced by his own grandfather who had gone by himself to America from 1862 to 1865 and had fallen in love with it. But when Samuel’s grandfather suggested to his wife that she come with the children to join him, she ordered him to come back home. He returned with a memento of his love affair with America, a pair of suspenders that he wore daily, down to its threads.

Samuel arrived in America with no possessions and a great deal of misery at being thousands of miles away from his father whom he worshipped. Samuel’s mother had died when he was four, and Samuel believed his attachment to his father had been doubled by his mother’s absence.

In America, Samuel started out as a peddler earning $5 a month and sleeping in a cot in a storeroom. He proved to be a talented businessman and rose quickly. After about ten years of promotions and increasingly lucrative business partnerships, he had accumulated a few thousand dollars, making him well-off, if not rich.

His mini-memoir stops there. He married, had eight children, settled in Brooklyn, and continued to prosper in various small scale businesses.

He was able to send his son, my grandfather Alfred, to UPenn in the 1920s, which was a turning point for my family. Alfred’s roommate was Mel Block, the son of the wealthy patriarch of Block Drug, a thriving health and beauty aid company. Through Mel, Alfred met and married Mel’s sister Betty Block.

Marrying into the Block family did many things for Alfred. He was taken into the Block business after getting his law degree at Harvard. And through the Block family, he was accepted into a society of wealthy Jewish families who lived or summered on the Jersey shore around Deal, New Jersey, a few miles north of Asbury Park, the future haunt of Bruce Springsteen.

In the meantime, Alfred’s father Samuel was establishing himself as a leader, not in commerce, but in the Jewish community in Brooklyn. Samuel was a founder and the first president of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, which opened in 1920. At the time, it was considered the most comprehensive Jewish communal institution in the United States.

[The Center] was “a singular institution which housed all educational, social, and recreational aspects of Jewish life, from childhood through adulthood.” ¹

In 1940, soon after my father William was born to Alfred and Betty, Alfred decided to change his name from Rottenberg to Roberts. Changing names was part of an effort to assimilate. The American nativism and anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1930s had continued into 1940–––see Philip Roth’s chillingly realistic counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, in which Roth imagines Charles Lindbergh defeating FDR in 1940 to become an isolationist president, sympathetic to the Nazis.  

I believe Alfred changed his name not only to assimilate but also under the influence of the already assimilated Block family with whom he’d grown so close.  The Blocks had changed their name from Biaboblotcky. To have a long, Jewish-sounding name was considered undesirable, although Biaboblotcky was in a different category than Rottenberg.  

Samuel had asked Alfred not to change his last name. After Alfred went through with it, Samuel wrote a letter to Alfred expressing his deep disappointment, even pain. Every time I read that letter, I wish I could tell Samuel how much his legacy has influenced his next four generations, even though our last name is Roberts, not Rottenberg.  

From Samuel’s letter, dated August 1940. He was 68 when he wrote it.

“A name, to me, is like a flag that a nation adopts at the beginning of its career.”

“I had hoped that my children would be proud to bear that name. I had cherished the hope that with the education and opportunities I tried to give my children, they would continue to build where I stopped and carry the banner to new heights and achievements. That was my dream, but like all dreams I woke up to reality.”

“You tell me, ‘Here is your banner; I do not like it; I will unfold my own flag.’ I hope that yours will be an improvement on the one that I tried to hand down to you.”  

Toward the end of the letter, however, Samuel keeps the door open, the family intact. He writes that as long as Alfred continues to be tied by love and devotion to his parents and his many siblings,

“I shall adjust myself to this present phase, distasteful as it is to me.”

After first reading Samuel’s letter, I considered the idea of changing my name back to Rottenberg.

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In 1953, Alfred’s wife Betty, my grandmother, died at age 39 (asthma, heart attack). Earlier that same year, Betty’s father, the Block drug patriarch, had died, leaving a third of the business to each of his children, which meant that my father, then 17, and his two younger brothers would now inherit a one-ninth interest in the company.

Soon after Betty’s death, her two brothers led by “Evil Uncle Leonard” as he is known to us, promptly kicked Alfred out of the business even though, or perhaps because, his wife, their sister, had just died.

In the brief time between Betty’s death and being fired from Block Drug, Alfred wrote a letter to his sons, to be opened upon his death (1979). That letter attested to Alfred’s closeness with the Blocks. I bolded the sentence that pre-figures the Block brothers’ betrayal of Alfred.  

“Your dear grandfather and grandmother Block were not my “in-laws” ---they were another affectionate set of parents. They could not have treated me better, although I am afraid they did [so more] than their own sons, your uncles Mel and Leonard. I was brought in to the family business, given the opportunity to prove myself, and fortunately I was able to help make it an even greater success than when I entered it. So, instead of being the husband of a rich wife, I was able to make a career of my own and retain my self-respect.” ²

The two Block brothers soon bought out the one third interest of my father and his two younger brothers for many millions of dollars. In hindsight it was a great bargain for the two Block brothers. But it was also a large sum at the time for my father and his brothers to share.

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As part of the Block social set that summered on the Jersey shore and wintered in Florida, my father William met and got to know my mother, then Jill Appleman. She was an heiress herself.

Her father Nate Appleman had made a fortune as an oil wildcatter out of Oklahoma and Kansas, Nate had seen many of his relatives go through personal booms and busts following the inevitable cycles of the oil business.  During an upswing for oil, Nate sold out, put his money into the stock market, and moved East to be an investor.

My grandfather Nate Appleman, age 52 and my mother Jill, age 19

My parents’ marriage was another example of assortative mating. Like his father Alfred, my father married a woman from a wealthier family. That said, by all accounts, from the time my mother was a child, she had decided to marry my father. She was in complete control of their courtship, a control she exerted and extended throughout their 63 year marriage.

My mother and father were the beneficiaries of two fortunes, one created by my grandfather Nate in oil and the stock market and one created by my great-grandfather Block in denture cushions, among other products.

The fortunes were different, however, in size and nature. After the buyout of his one-ninth share in Block Drug in the 1950s, my father’s diluted inheritance stopped growing at the dynamic pace of a successful business, while my mother’s father Nate continued to increase his fortune throughout his lifetime until he died in 1992.

My siblings and I were beneficiaries of both fortunes, although more so from my mother’s side. I was able to increase what I inherited to a significant degree, and so my children are the fourth generation privileged to come into adulthood with wealth.

I was also the beneficiary of assortative mating by marrying Debbie with whom I shared a similar background and many similar values. That said, Debbie’s parents were self-made so Debbie and I, fortunately, have different values about money. She’s far more careful about spending than I am.

When Debbie was shopping for engagement dresses in 1985, she fell in love with one particular dress. As soon as I saw how much she loved it, I wanted to buy it for her on the spot. But the dress cost $800, multiples of what Debbie had ever spent on an item of clothing.

At the thought of a sudden purchase of that magnitude, Debbie became gripped by anxiety. The store had to give her a paper bag to control her hyperventilation. She eventually allowed me to buy the dress but we waited a few days, until she had gotten used to the idea. ³

I am grateful that our children received a nuanced sense of money values. Had I married someone who didn’t care about the cost of things, our children’s values about money would have suffered.

Sometimes assortative mating can be too much “like for like.” Some diversity of background, even if it seems slight from afar, can be a virtue.

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My great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg was a man of great integrity who believed that reputation, character and family were everything. While he didn’t create a fortune, his legacy of values has had a profound effect on me and the rest of our family.

One of the things that impressed me most about Samuel was the wisdom with which he reacted to Alfred’s name change. He advised against it and when it happened, he expressed his grave disappointment. But the preservation of his family came first so he never let the name change cause a schism between him and Alfred.

That’s a stark contrast with the schism the Blocks caused with the Roberts.

So while my father grew up as a Roberts and was close to the Block family until their betrayal, my father also grew up as a Rottenberg with a close relationship with his Grandpa Sam. ⁴

And his Grandpa Sam is who my father has always named as his role model and his hero. ⁵

Question for the Comments: My observation is that many if not most family schisms are caused by issues of money. What’s been your experience and observations in this regard?

1. From WritLarge NYC. According to the article, Albert Einstein, Mark Rothko, and Mayor Abe Beame were members of the Brooklyn Jewish Center.

2. My grandfather Alfred’s love for the Block family reminds me of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina describing Levin’s love for Kitty as practically indistinguishable from his love for her family:

“Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, [Kitty’s] family, that Levin was in love. It was in [that] house that he saw for the first time the inner life of an old, noble, cultivated…family.”

3. Debbie reminded me that she still owns that dress.

4. After the schism between the Blocks and the Roberts, my father lost his best friend, his first cousin Jimmy Block.

5. My brother Samuel is aptly named after Samuel Rottenberg.