Above: Surasky Bros. Store, Laurens Street, Aiken, SC, circa 1914. Interior: left to right, Ernestine Murrah, clerk; Solomon Surasky; H. C. Surasky; John Henry Holmes, employee; Sam Surasky; Mandle Surasky. Courtesy of Stephen K. Surasky. I am 67 years old and was born and raised in Aiken, as were both my parents, Harry Surasky and Evelyn […]
Above: Left to right: Raymond Kaplan, his mother, Ida Kamenoff Kaplan, and her good friend Sophie Rudnick return from the races, Aiken, circa 1937. Courtesy of Jeffrey Kaplan. My family’s story begins in the 1880s in that part of the Russian empire known as White Russia: Byelorussia as it was called. Today it is called […]
The five sons of David and Rachel Poliakoff of Abbeville, South Carolina, served their country in the World War II era like countless other Americans. All were proud University of South Carolina graduates, and from 1924 through 1940 at least one of the brothers lived in Burney College, Room 48, on the Carolina campus. Their […]
I am grateful for the opportunity at the upcoming May event on World War II to speak for my father, the late Alan Jay Reyner. In some ways it is an awkward situation for me as I’m not sure I am worthy to speak about a matter so personal to him that only he and others […]
Above: Sam Siegel, (front row, seventh from left) with his platoon at Camp Blanding, FL, August 1944 Our father, Sam Siegel, was born to Russian immigrants on February 27, 1915, in Anderson, South Carolina, the fifth of eight children. At that time Anderson was a mill town with a small Jewish population and an active […]
In the first week of May 1943, Earl Mazo of Charleston, South Carolina, crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the second time in his life. The first time was 20 years earlier when he left Warsaw, Poland, with his family, heading for America. He was three years old on that first crossing and apparently the life […]
In 1934, two months after I was born as the Bass family’s seventh child, my oldest sibling Bernie (Samuel Bernard Bass) enrolled as a freshman at the University of South Carolina. Six years later, he had a law degree and that summer opened a law office in our hometown of North in the western part […]