Old family photos from Brazil, ca 1949

My dad just sent me some old family photos from Brazil that are pretty great. Here, let me share this one with you. My dad estimates it might have been taken around 1949, in Rio.

On the left here are my great-grandparents from Germany. Great-grandpa's full name is as epic as his mustache: Louis Karl August Wilhelm Fricke. He was born not too far from where I live now. Great grandma Sidonie Margarete Gertrud Taubert was born in East Prussia, now the Kaliningrad region of Russia but then part of the German Empire under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II. They married in Berlin in 1913 and immediately eloped to Brazil, sailing from Amsterdam.

In the center are my grandmother's sister Iseult, nicknamed Pooh, next to her father, my other paternal great-grandfather Patrick James Tobin, an Irish merchant living and doing business in Brazil. Pooh eventually moved to the United States, sailing on a Norwegian freighter ship as the only passenger, landing at New Orleans and settling across lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville. She died two years ago at age 97.

Finally, on the right stands my grandfather's half-brother, my great-uncle Carlos. I remember visiting him when my parents took me to Brazil as a toddler in 1984: he gave me a gift of a gigantic chocolate easter egg. I guess great uncle Carlos knew it was his one chance to make an impression on his grand-nephew: I still remember that gigantic chocolate easter egg, and in my mind's eye it was as big as my head and infinitely nested with additional chocolate easter eggs like a set of chocolate, ovoid Russian dolls.

Not pictured is my Brazilian great grandmother Elisa Caldas, who I don't know much about.

The occasion for trotting out the photos is that my grandfather Rolf, who lives in Rochester NY, will be making a trip back to Brazil next week after a long absence, on the occasion of an old friend's birthday and another friend's book release. (That book release is interesting too: an account of a circumnavigation of Antarctica.) He just shared this recollection with some German friends and the German-speakers of the family:

Am kommenden Donnerstag werde ich nach Brasilien fliegen, um meine Geburtsstadt Rio noch einmal zu sehen. Dort war ich vor dem Krieg in der Deutschen Realschule, als wir ganz ausnahmsweise einmal waehrend der Klasse aufstehen durften, um ans Fenster zu gehen, als das Luftschiff Graf Zeppelin majestaetisch ueber uns brummend vorbei zog! Die Schule wurde geschlossen, als Brasilien in den Krieg eintrat, sodass ich nur bis zur Obersekunda kam, also nie ein Abitur erreichen konnte. Da ich nicht in Brasilien studieren durfte, bewarb ich mich an einer amerianischen Uni, die meine Zeugnisse aus der deutschen Schule akzeptiert hat und ich somit ein Electrical Engineering Studium abschliessen konnte.