The value in studying family, national, and other social histories is in studying them for the applied social principles involved, for what works and has not worked. The primary value of studying heredity is in the principles learned more than biological heredity. I offer these scriptural quotes to cite where family thinking, in different degrees and manifestations, came from. Theodore Zuckerman, professor of history at Columbia University, credits the Nasi (president of the Babylonian     Sanhedrin) for sending his son Makhir ben Yehuda to Europe at the behest of Karl der Grosse (Charles the Great, Charlemagne in Latin), Holy “Roman’ Emperor at the time of the 9th Century of the e Common Era, to set up a small ostensibly sovereign in the southeastern sea coast of France, around today´s Narbonne, to promote commerce with the East, relying upon reputed Jewish entrepreneurial skills. Yehuda and his son, it was claimed, were descendants of the House of David and inheritors of its traditions. (In slightly altered form, this story became the basis for the fictional Da Vinci Code. If King Solomon had 700 wives, concubines, and paramours, it does not seem unreasonable to credit Yehuda and Makir with Davidic descent. Through Charlemagne and Pippin and others Davidic descent would commonly spread to the many ruling royal houses of Europe, many, if not all, connected through allying intermarriages.  I am connected through the Roosevelts and the present House of Windsor, etc.
   
Bereshit:
 In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of God  hovered over the face of the waters….’
“And God said ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place. and let the dry land appear.’ Genesis 1 and 2.

Explanatory notes: Rabbi Mark S. Golub argued that the Hebrew Bible is poetry. The Hellenes (Greeks) depicted literature as delineated between mythos (fictional writings) and logos (category of factual argumentative writings, and later used the term to indicate the factual principal ordering existence).

“Their affliction, [that of the Jewish people,] as well as their religion, has prepared the Jews for democracy.’ Experiencing, supporting, leading it, I would add, Dietz) Justice Louis D. Brandeis, The Jewish Problem. June 1915.

All people should learn the lessons from that affliction! And apply those lessons.

Ancient Judeah-Israel strove to have a constitutional state, balancing the balance between majority and minority rights, and the needs of leadership, setting an example for the future United States of America.

Something transcendent can be found in several ethnic/religious traditions. We can draw beneficially from many if not all of them.

“In the Beginning was the Logos [often translated shallowly into English as “the word’] and the Logos was spoken into existence.’  The “New Testament’
“The Cosmos was sung into existence.’ The Bhagavad Gita. (sacred Hindu scripture, composed sometime between the 2nd Century Before the Common Era and the 2nd Century of the Common Era). According to The Bhagavad Gita (sacred Hindu scripture)  Spoken or sung, words are informative. A cosmic vibe. Creation was, and is, a positive force.   

Early America and New England and New Amsterdam (New Netherlands) of the 1160s. Charlemagne and Septamania (a Jewish province in the SE of France, established by Charles the Great in the interests of promoting the prosperity that could come from Jewish entrepreneurship and increased trade with “the East’ , if. e., Western Asia) ). Imputed descent from the House of David. Where the DaVinci Code comes from. (David´s Moabite ancestors) Interrelationship of all of humanity, according to Jewish tradition and heraldic/genealogical scholarship. The overlap of Jewish-Israelish and Trinitarian Christian myth and (Spanish Jewish)moral/ethical traditions and divergences.
* Goebbels attribution of the Roosevelts to Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) origins, prior to our well-documented origins in the Netherlands (Holland). FDR´s equivocal response, (1940) when Nazi Propaganda Minister Jozef Goebbels alleged the Roosevelts family origins could be traced back beyond Holland to Sephardic families in Jewish Spain.
* Clinton Roosevelt and his socialist outline for a corporate-dominated state and funding for the 1848 attempted revolution across Europe.
* Freiherrin (“Viscountess/Baroness’) Cornelia Canorcan von Zedlitz-Neukirch, nee Roosevelt. Husband Clemens von Zedlitz-Neukirch.  His wealth and soldierly “Presidential Event’ were attended by US President Theodore Roosevelt. Clemens´s death was misreported on the front page of the New York Times. The scandalous actual cause of his subsequent and its impact on Cornelia.
* Cornelia´s unhappy life in Europe. War and confiscation of Cornelia´s American properties under the Alien Act.
* Restoration of Cornelia´s American properties via a private bill/act in Congress.
* Marriage of Cornelia´s daughter Hilda to “that Jew’, the “locomotive engineer’, the lawyer, whose suicide father converted to get his job.
* The advent of Hitler and the decision to leave Germany and estates behind. Hitler´s offer for Aryanization.
* A daring escape.
* Settling in Lugano, Switzerland, in the Italian-speaking part of the country, where geothermal springs allow for palm trees.
* Attempt by Admiral Canaris to recruit grandfather for the Abwehr (German military counter-intelligence) resistance and clandestine opposition to Hitler. Canaris personally journeys to Switzerland to make his appeal in person. (Canaris convinced General Franco not to join the Axis in 1940 an was hanged on Hitler´s orders on meat hooks in 1944 for treason. Canaris must have thought grandfather would have made a particularly good agent to have made the trip.
* Summer 1936. Frederick Helmut Ziechmann and his (only) son William made the trip to Berlin, Germany for the Summer Olympics. The country seems at peace and prosperous, filling the Ziechmanns with renewed ethnic pride. Jesse Owens, a Negro athlete from Clevland, Ohio wins an Olympic gold medal for a sprinting event. The audience cheers and applauds, but Hitler, holding Nordic Aryans superior in all ways, feels embarrassed and leaves the reviewing stand to avoid seeing Owens get his medal and attendant honors. Helmut visits the world-famed Berlin Zoo and is photographed with Simba, a lion cub.
* 1937. William K. Ziechmann returns to Berlin as a Shaker Heights High Guenther  Meissner, teenage Hitler Youth Leader. Meissner invited my father to the stage at a gathering and asked my father what he thought of the New Reich. Father with his combination of candor and indiscretion answers he prefers the old Kaiserreich, provoking the audience to nearly storm the stage and beat him up; Meissner orders his followers to desist. Three incidents around this time indicate how shallow Nazi racial indoctrination could be at this time. An older Jewish man on the street feeling kindness towards the young Hitler Youth leader, was reprimanded for smoking a cigarette on the street, telling him it was inappropriate for someone in his uniform. My father accompanied Hans-Guenther Meissner to the house of a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish woman for an invited dinner engagement.  The thought of such an engagement belies the idea that Jews were generally consumed with hereditary nobility. His father would regret the day he facilitated such a visit.
* 1937. As part of his tour of Germany and visited Heidelberg and its university. He was allowed to join Saxo-Borussia, the elite, aristocratic sword-dueling fraternity (whose membership ironically once included the German “Communist’ Karl Marx) celebrated generically in the Franz Lehar musical The Student Prince. The visit filled Father with visions that he could be part of a permanent social elite by claiming membership in the German titled class.
* 1938.  Reciprocating the American student's visits to Germany, Berlin high school students visiting a dance of Shaker Heights High School students asking a rabbi, respectfully if they could dance with his pretty daughter; Nazi race-based indoctrination could not have fully been assimilated yet.

* My maternal Grandparents attended George VI´s Coronation in Westminster Abbey by hereditary right. Our deep hereditary British roots Talbots, Livingstons, Spencers, Howards, the Churchills, Windsors, etc.). Grandmere foolishly/naively/idealistically donated her diamond tiara to the archbishop in the interests of Anglo-German peace, forgetting the nature of Hitler. The desirability of an Anglo-German peace was certainly desirable, in the wake of the wasteful horrors of WWI, but military deterrence was needed to block Hitler´s violent expansive plans, much more than such generous gestures.

An urgent telegram to the family vacationing at a resort town in Belgium in 1938 to leave Europe and come to the USA because of an expected war in iKochembahrs get admitted to the USA, despite the immigration quota for German citizens having been maxed out.  FDR played a key role in blocking “peaceful’ Nazi aggression eastward, privately guaranteeing Polish security in the event of a Nazi invasion, though unsecured by the Senate as required by treaties. Poland, thus, reoriented from being a Nazi collaborator in the wake of the Munich agreement (dismembering Czechoslovakia) into being a resistor to the Nazis. Such an action greatly increased the probability of a war in Europe. FDR had previously (1936) attempted to build the world´s largest battleship for Stalin, plans blocked by delaying tactics of the U.S. Navy Department. (See within British historian Richard Overy´s account, Prelude to War.) The lack of a large, deployable military-naval force as in the days of the “Cold War’ (particularly the lack of any but a small army, and a big independent strategic air force, but the Navy had been built for global missions under Theodore Roosevelt) greatly hindered FDR in effecting deterrent power within the Europe continent and across East Asia and the Pacific/Oceana, in the case of an imperialistic Japan. Poland might have become Hitler´s third Slavic satellite state, after the Herodian-like palace-state of Czechia (adjoining the Bohemian-Moravia Protectorate under the direct control of the Schutz-Staffel (SS), and Slovakia (under the anti-Jewish dictator Father Tiso). (The Slavic resistance block hardened Hitler's already anti-Slavic dispositions with tragic consequences for Operation Barbarossa, the attempted conquest of the Western Soviet Union, and the atrocious practices enacted against the Slavs, Jews, and other ethnicities.

With the V.K. evacuation from Europe, my Uncle Wolf had to cancel plans to attend Oxford University in 1939. (He had been attending the official Oxford University preparatory school in Switzerland.  Gerhardt had been studying law at the University of Bologna, in Italy; whatever plans he might have had to continue those studies must now be canceled, though how practically useful a background in Italian law would have been for him may seem dubious, other than the abstract value of the study of law anywhere. (An ironic sequel, this peculiar background proved of some slight use, when Uncle Gerhardt served as a lowly Tech-5 aide in General Mark Clark´s G-5 staff (Civil Affairs), de-Fascistifying Italians, as the Fifth Army slogged its way slowly up the Italian peninsula, 1943-1945, during World War II. Study of law may also have facilitated Uncle Gerhardt´s accommodating the French Rothschilds needs when Alain and Guy were in a temporary Manhattan exile in 1940, when their Parisian bank was under Nazi occupation. Gerhardt provided facilities through Chemical Bank, the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelts.  The French Rothschilds became house guests of the von Koschembahrs at their Manhattan apartments and their summer home in Port Elizabeth, Maine. Some mutual affinities surfaced during these encounters, though Franklin Roosevelt had not yet married (and subsequently divorced Felicia Warburg, from a related elite banking family.) (The affinities of great banking families are chronicled by Joseph Wechsberg in his celebrated book The Merchant Bankers. Wechsberg came from one of the minor families and casts a positive spin on the psychological/social aspects of the trade.)

While the rest of the von Koschembahr family journeyed to the Northeastern USA and settled in, Mother journeyed to Brazil to stay with her cousin Karin, working for the Lufthansa German airlines in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, for what turned out to be a two-year stay. Traveling there from Genoa, Italy aboard the Italian steamship liner Italia, a Catholic priest invited her to his cabin in an attempt to seduce her sexually, and she heard the gunfire of the ongoing Spanish Civil War, as the ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar.  While in Rio, she encountered a tarantula in her bedroom and instinctually averted an attempt to be kidnapped by a “white slaver’ ring, attempting to trap her into sexual slavery, when she applied for a nanny job.  In 1940, with the Second World War already ragging, she ironically obtained a visa from the Germany Embassy in Rio to travel to America,  was tempted to go ashore in British Jamaica, as her ship docked there, naively assuming that our British connections and good feelings towards them would safeguard from being interned there as an “enemy alien’, a fate averted by fellow passengers aboard the ship on which she was traveling. Finally, she arrived in New York, joining the rest of her immediate family.
 
But her mother had renewed plans for exiling her within the family.  Hilda contacted Sarah Delano Roosevelt, President FDR´s mother, to attempt to arrange for Mother to become Sarah´s adopted daughter, which would have made Mother FDR´s adopted sister! What a strange fate that would have been, an honor, that one Mother did not want.  There was to have been a Central Park meeting interview. Sarah went to the park at the scheduled time, but Mother balked; she did not want, no matter how privileged the adoption might have been, to be separated once again, from her immediate family, her brothers and sisters and parents! Mother, throughout her kind, dreaded the thought of being separated from loved ones.

Hilda hired a paid publicist to chronicle the v. K.s coming to America. She wanted to continue to live a lavish lifestyle. This included acquiring an apartment in Manhattan, a townhouse in the NYC suburb of Pelham, NY (probably an inherited property), and a summer resort home in Port Elizabeth, Maine, the hometown of Hollywood producer/director John Ford.  Household staff included a cook and a chauffeur brought along with the family from Germany and Switzerland.  Household expenses must have been considerable, but income from the family´s inherited estates was no longer available. Grandfather wanted to return to the practice of law, which could have been arranged to occur in the USA. But Grandmother Hilda would have none of it, following a British tradition among the old titled aristocracy of not practicing conspicuous ambition or financial striving, a tradition innovated by the old feudal aristocracy to separate themselves from the new, mercantile elites, a dysfunctional practice carried to an extreme in this case. Not only did this practice preclude new earned income. It reduced my grandfather´s purpose in living, set a dysfunctional example for my uncles, and precluded their apprenticing in a useful profession for the start of their own careers. The study and practice of law would have been the most appropriate career for my uncles to have pursued, appropriate for the family background, temperament, and philosophy of service.  No one of my uncles ever became a lawyer, a few eventually became investment bankers, following weakly, in the tradition of Roosevelt & Son(s), which never really became an adequate substitute. Grandfather did at least serve for a while on the Committee of Alien Refuges, in New York, serving alongside many others with Albert Einstein.  Sir William Wiseman, 10th Baronet made an unpublished visit to Port Elizabeth, fellow alumn of Jesus College, of Cambridge University, and partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb, came to visit my maternal grandfather at the family´s summer home at Port Elizabeth, Maine. He made an attempt to recruit grandfather for BSC. BSC´s activities would have been regarded at the time as highly illegal, though known to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and other high-ranking Federal government officials. This was the second time in my maternal grandfather´s life that a high-ranking officer had attempted to recruit him for covert activities, the first having been Admiral Canaris´s attempt while the v. K.s were living in Switzerland; this second while they were living in the USA, while its still being an ostensibly “neutral’ country. Grandfather had a high intellectual capacity, social and analytical talents baseline political affinities and aversions, and discretion. He could have made a highly motivated covert agent.  His wife, risk-averse and  conformist as she was, if she had been consulted, probably argued against such actions, especially if the proposal was not presented as being an opportunity for high-prestige rewards. So, again, Grandfather became deprived of an opportunity to employ his creative and purposeful capacities. His third opportunity to strike a blow for the anti-Axis powers, he did not turn down. The opportunity to provide useful information and analysis to the Strategic Bombing Survey of the United States Army´s Strategic Air Command, he did not turn down, an opportunity that did not require his playing an unpublicized, but not covert role. That role would provide him with pride for being selected and able to play an important role, but also sorrow with having to help destroy something he had helped achieve, and also having to do something harmful in some ways to the land of his birth, but also helpful in some ways towards its liberation.

1941/1942: An eventful set of years in the life of the family, the country, humanity, and the world. The townspeople in Port Elizabeth, Maine think the von Koschembahr family, living near the U.S. Coast Guard station on the coast, are secretly tunneling to get to the station, the mayor tells the family, much to his embarrassment.  Hellman, an ex-British Indian Army officer and family confident recommends the family move to someplace more cosmopolitan, Cleveland, Ohio, where there are many multigenerational “ethnic’ European families, many of them German in origin. (A strange bit of advice: What New York City isn´t cosmopolitan enough?) Mother gets invited by a West Point cadet to his graduation prom, but having no idea of the honor, declines.

So, the family treks 500 miles westward, buying an eight-bedroom mansion on Stradford Road and Fairmount Boulevard, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. A new phase in the family´s history has begun.  On December 7, 1941 aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force, attack the U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  Understaffing of the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. caused the formal Japanese declaration of war upon the United States, causing the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack to be viewed as a “sneak attack’, outraging most Americans, including many former “isolationists’. Including, many members of my father´s American literary fraternity, the Alpha Delta Phi, on the Western Reserve University campus, volunteered to join the U. S. Navy under the V-12 program, designed the alleviate the enormous officer deficit in numbers of that service at the time. Recruits become instant Ensigns, upon their enrollment. My father and others are sworn in by U.S. Senator Bricker, at his Cleveland, Office. Subsequently, Father takes his physical, and the medical staff notes his withered right foot, and gives him the option of beginning active service in the Navy, or not. Pear Harbor passions had cooled, and Father declined to begin active service, still harboring American First sentiments I suspect. So, Father does not go off to war, which could have involved an administrative post for him.  I think it was among the biggest mistakes in his life. He continues his studies at Western Reserve, getting his Bachelor of Arts at an accelerated wartime pace.

1942: Shopping at Halle´s Department Store, in downtown Cleveland, he notices the surname of my mother “von Koschembahr’ on her sales tag.  He immediately is attracted to her, because of her association with the “vons’ of Germany and begins courting her. At one point, he tells her he will kill himself if she doesn´t marry him. The strategy works, Mother and her sisters have not been nurtured and socially supported by their mother. Those who marry will not marry husbands of their social class and background.  Several found husbands after enlisting as volunteers in the U.S. Army´s WASP program.  Mother justifies marrying the social climber who becomes her husband on the grounds that it “is the democratic thing to do.’ Her mother, Hilda, in turn, had volunteered to join an Army civilian support group, she regarded such volunteering as the appropriate thing to do for one of her social class. She also petitions Eleanor Roosevelt, her cousin to invite her to come to the White House for lunch for a purely social purpose, not for any philanthropical purpose, which would have appealed to Eleanor.  Hilda became an enthusiastic supporter of the American Committee for Support of the United Nations in the early 1950s, probably influenced by her cousin Eleanor, after my maternal grandparents had moved back to Greater NY, acquiring a modest home in Rye, NY, a suburb of Manhattan, where the v.K.s also supported Weymouth House, a secular metaphysical/spiritual group located in the suburb.   (Mother will not become a United States citizen until 1954, when she takes out citizenship at her own initiative, much to the distress of her husband. Those of her siblings who had joined the Army as volunteers or draftees had
apparently gained such citizenship during the war.)

1945: In May, the war in Europe comes to an end, with Germany´s surrender in May. I, Dietz Ziechmann, am born at MacDonald House, of University Hospitals, in the University Circle area of Cleveland. Two days later, on September 3, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, one of my maternal grandmother´s many cousins, signed the armistice agreement for the Allies aboard the battleship. USS Missouri.
The ’Cold War’ gradually begins.

1946:  Former British Prime Minister Winston Spencer-Churchill makes his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri warning Western countries and the world of Soviet territorial ambitions.

1947. Lord Louis Mountbatten, another of Grandmother´s cousins, (last) British Viceroy of/over India, signs the agreement for Indian independence.

1948. Allen Dulles. Another of my grandmother´s cousins becomes the Founding Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

1951: The Wainright House Center for the Development of Human Potential is established in Rye, NY. It is an outgrowth of the Laymen´s Movement, established in 1941. By the early 1950s, its members have included Dwight D. Eisenhower, J.C. Penney, and John D. Rockefeller (one of our kinsmen by marriage). “The Laymen´s Movement set a tone of serious and open-mindedness at the center by bringing in heady events like United Nations conferences on conflict resolution.’ (NYT, 03/29/15). No wonder grandmother was involved, the house offered proximity, social prestige, style, and explicit purpose.  

1952: Following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as US President, Allen´s brother John, becomes U.S. Secretary of State.

1954: Hilda dies of a (heat) stroke outside of her Rye, NY, home.

1954: We go to Manhattan and Rye, for the reading of Hilda´s will. We visit the antiques offices of Roosevelt & Son, in the 120 Broadway Building, seeing the old-fashioned wooden, grade school desks with high chairs, and ink well cutouts. We also visit the Rye home, a shadow of former glories.   
 
The first half of the 1950s was a time of big-screen social film epics, often with Biblical themes. When television made its mark during this era, it included Sunday morning Biblical dramas. Amongst them, were little vignettes of Yeshua bar Miriam (alias Jesus, son of Mary), traveling about performing miracles, his life climaxing in a direct assault on the Roman-supported Jerusalem Temple authority, by knocking over tables belonging to money-changers, there for the convenience of Temple visitors, required to pay a small attendance fee, and mocking the status and durability of the temple structure. These feckless incidents, without achieving any purposeful results, other than to generate personal publicity, did not seem to me to be the mark of an effective born leader, much less the efforts of a semi-/fully-divine figure. Neither did the virtue mute appearance before the Roman procurator. Even the efforts of the evasive Masada community seemed more effective. (Fortunately, we were not enrolled and forced to bear allegiance to this would-be messiah/god.)  I could have envisioned even myself, directing better more fruitful tactics. The oddity is that both ordinary and leader Jews would be blamed for his death in centuries hence.

In 1964, I graduated from Shaker Heights High School. No clear vocational and educational path existed before me.  No college funding had been established by my father, despite promises to the contrary. (Most of my high school acquaintances seemed to have been set up with acceptances and funding for college, many to elite schools.) College was seen as a prerequisite to acceptable employment in our household, so what was I expected to do? I had an inheritance from my paternal grandfather, and the country seemed imperiled by the danger and horrors of advancing, ruthless Leninist Communism, so I did make an effort, at least, in the political sphere, to do my social duty, by going out to the Republican National Convention to support Senator Barry Goldwater´s Presidential bid. Goldwater seemed a decent, honorable man, who would fight courageously to maintain decency and morality in office.  Ironically, I liked some of the people on the other side dedicated to improving people´s lives and society. On our side, there were too many people with a narrow, shallow self-interest only.

For my first outside job, I had to deal with stereotypical capacities for and about compensated work. My philosophical insights and knowledge of psychological history would count for nothing starter job would prefigure (prejudice) subsequent jobs for years to come; or so, I thought. In most, instances correctly.

In September 1964, we approached John Carroll University, a Jesuit institution about a tenants-in-common on at the time, American involvement controversially ramping up at the time. The Ford Foundation produced a study advocating a (gradual) merger of the USA and USSR over time. How many basic, essential liberties were Americans expected to give up in the course of a merger? US Secretary of State Dean Rusk had stated in response to Lawrence Spivak, why the USA had not declared war on the People´s Republic of Vietnam (i.e., North, Communist) Vietnam. Rusk, a JFK hold-over in the LBJ Cabinet. Answered that if the USA declared such a war, the public would demand that the USA fight it to a successful victory. What critics have labeled a “no-win war’. That seemed generally unacceptable to me, especially as I was of draft age and potential status. I focused intensely to the detriment of my academic studies. Not so, my older sister, who also began a real estate sales career.

In 1966, I acquired and real intensely a paperback edition of a book published by Commentary Magazine entitled  The Condition of Jewish Belief, a wide-ranging survey of Jewish beliefs from “Orthodox’ to dedicated secular/humanist. A book with a satisfying positive overview, tackling important questions. Previously I had only been able to find simplistic Biblical accounts designed with teenagers and younger audiences in mind. Or long, impervious diatribes about anti-Semitism, which seemed to accept no criticisms. My father was pleased that many reference points were to Jewish texts in German, indicating a common, symbiotic self-interest between Jews and Germans, a symbiotic situation too often not recognized nor publicized. Within a few weeks, I borrowed my mother´s Mustang car and was applying by myself to Suburban Temple (known today often by its Hebrew name Kol Ami “All People’), a Reform synagogue, at that time, a non-Zionist congregation. Mother accompanied me on a second visit with the rabbi. Mother related her whole r family´s flight from Germany and her descent from grandmother Cornelia Roosevelt and cousin FDR. And her enduring radical incompatibility with her husband and his streaks of xenophobia and neophobia. The congregation we found was warm, sympathetic, empathic, and welcoming. The resident rabbi, like my mother was from Germany. They quickly discovered common ground and ideals.  He then post-interview discussed our application with some of the leading members of his congregation. A major donor, grateful for FDR´s help for Jews in World War II and before,  proposed helping Mother and children out getting us college educations and appropriate career jobs, and helping her with a badly-needed divorce, as she had indicated in her interview. Without the divorce, a holistic solution would not be possible. Thus,  a solution along the lines that Mother had long been hoping for was in the offing.  

But Mother became frightened. As in a few other decision points in her recent life. When her father-in-law, my paternal grandfather lying in a hospital bed, after his debilitating auto accident, in which he was an innocent passenger, noted the chronic irresponsibility of his son and predicted ruin if that son was left to inherit the bulk of his estate, and told her that he wanted to leave the bulk of his estate in her hands, not his sons. Family responsibility over blood relationship. Mother demurred at that point. Alleging that such a decision would emasculate his son. Even though her father-in-law tried to insist that she accept the proposal. Mother was firmly committed to not accepting the proposal. To the detriment of the well-being of my immediate family. My paternal grandfather had built up the family business by his physical l would labor, frugality, and persistence from around 1912 onward, with pauses for engineering school, service in the office of Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. (no family relationship at the time), work for General Electric, etc.) at a NY plant, professional minor league play with the Canton Bulldogs, etc.).

Mother ill-advisedly discussed the Suburban Temple with my Great-uncle Karl, the administrator-treasurer of the family business, in the open presence of family attorney, Wilson G. Stapelton, at that time also the Dean of the Cleveland Marshall Law School, also Mayor of Shaker Heights, and also corporate attorney for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio (SOHIO), who also had a lease on the popular gas station on the family compound which he had helped to negotiate with the consent of both parties.  Stapleton was also said to have favored and had an (unofficial?) interest in selling the family compound to a real estate developer interested in acquiring the property intact in order to build a high-rise apartment building on the site. Many of the backstreet neighbors were said to have favored the removal of any non-conforming entity on the site, apartment building, greenhouse development, any. I was said it would have cost $10,000 in lobbying of one sort or another to alter the zoning for the apartment complex.  Stapelton had been put through the law school he currently led through some funding by Ziechmann Florists, headed by Uncle Karl, over period of time. He had no interest in appearing to act against the wishes of the Ziechmanns, who certainly had some anti-Jewish prejudices, as it was also said of Mayor Stapleton.

It therefore appeared highly inappropriate to discuss such a matter with Uncle Karl, especially in the presence of Wilson Stapleton. Stapleton argued against the divorce, arguing/alleging that it would result in a partition sale of the compound, existing in the state,  requiring a petition sale, for WKZ to extract his portion of the land value. A partition sale resulted in a collective value of the land. I didn´t think the Ziechmanns would let things go to a partition sale, instead buying out WKZ´s share of the land, to avoid just such an outcome. Especially to avoid a collective loss of faith, as it were. But, of course, my saying so, openly, would not have been a welcome comment, even though appropriate analysis. Stapleton further advised maintaining the status quo, WKZ would eventually inherit the whole property. ignoring, for the moment at least one-third of Karl´s brother Bill, which would eventually go to Bill´s daughter (WKZ´s cousin Lore). Thus, our current misery in the face of a deteriorating situation would be maintained for decades, thwarting any progression in our lives, saddling me with a responsibility for trying to mitigate the situation and protecting my vulnerable, but foolish, mother, compromising my own possible plans for any kind of advancement.

In the interim, I tried to research the background of Corelli Barnett´s 1961 classic. Dialectically- ambiguous book The Desert Generals, which questioned some of the British aristocratic social values, I had been brought up with. However lacking sufficient research resources, I did not feel I could easily author a perfect literary response. (Others tried, as well, and I kept trying to solve some technical and psychological questions, while mostly hoping sub rosa subconsciously that someone else would preempt my efforts.

In the spring of 1968, while trying to help with operations of the floral establishment, I got drafted into the Army, somewhat to my relief, somewhat to my dread. I would not be able to help directly in the land battle, but would be freed from immediate responsibility, and would face the risk of death or disability via Vietnam. A complexity of issues faced me and many others at crucial decision points. Where did issues of morality, common sense, and practicality lie? Philosophical issues, social and political issues, matters of expediency and continuity.

For 22 months, I was in active duty with the United States Army. From the Reception Center and Basic Training at Ft. Know, Ky. To Fort Dix, NJ, for Advanced Individual Training, Infantry with a stricter Pre-Sergeants and Pre-Officer Candidate School (OCS), to the Infantry School for OCS at Fort Benning, Georgia and Alabama, to the Scout Dog School, also at Benning, I spent around a year training stateside training in the United States, studying everything in the Army from minor infantry tactics, organizational psychology, through to tactical nucl0ear bombing under a British brigadier officer for an hour.  In such intensive training, one becomes isolated from news of the general (civilian) community. In the first four months, we were prohibited from having coffee, causing caffeine withdrawal symptoms. As someone who used to closely follow media with reports of current news items, I felt strangely isolated. Most of the training seemed comparatively low-keyed. The Army seemed to be doing about the best that could be expected in a difficult situation, with minimal involvement by the general public.

Around December of 1969, as I recall it, I received a copy of a brief interview with General Paul Harkins, protégé of Patton, recently replaced U.S. commander in Vietnam, stating that he could have succeeded in winning the war in Vietnam in a matter of weeks, had it not been for the matter of artificial political restraints placed upon his command,

 1969-70. I spent nine harrowing months with the 25th Infantry Division of the United States Army in Vietnam, in Daut Tieng and CuChi, in some of the worst, most harrowing days of my life. Occasionally under fire from mortars and rockets. Under minimal physical danger, but under its ambiance struggled to balance duty and practicality from a weak position.

Return to Cleveland in the Spring of 1970. The family compound was still in a state of chaos, it had been around two years ago. I consequently had to continue to struggle to keep my father and his great-uncle Karl from dysfunctional practices, protect my mother from as much of the consequences of her wrong decision from four years back, and earn a living. I joined the support staff of the United States Public Health Services in Cleveland for what would turn out to be a four-year stint. I joined the (Cleveland) City Club, the Cleveland Council on World Affairs (where I attended quarterly confidential State Department briefings)and the English-Speaking Union.

Around 1975, I acquired and studied A Kabbalah for the Modern World, by Migene Gonzales-Whippler, an imperfect text by a UNESCO staff, which renewed my interest in eclectic Judaism and metaphysics generally. Such an interest led me to the Layman´s Retreat Project, Inc. of Cleveland (later renamed Shadybrook at my suggestion to become more inclusive), where I became an unpaid Study Group coordinator, where I taught metaphysics, comparative religion, and philosophy. On a weekly basis for two and one-half years.

Involvement in Shadybrook led to my being invited by Lilii Mark to attend a group called Creative Conversations at the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Cleveland, which brought me into further and future involvement with interfaith activities. Eventually, I joined the Society to engage in (supplemental) interfaith work, becoming one of the coordinators and promoters of the annual Arts of Thanksgiving, a local group hosted by B´nai Jesherun, attended for its annual and various faiths and ethnicities annually.

A bachelor´s (London), a promotional representative for The Musical Arts Association (doing business primarily as The Cleveland Orchestra). “interim’ Project Coordinator for the Veterans Memorials, Inc. (for the supplemental memorials on Memorial Plaza, with an office in Cleveland City Hall), copy editor, later editor for Life and other periodicals, and a loan broker/financier.

In between and simultaneously, I acquired three academic degrees: an associate of applied business (banking option, ABA/AIB affiliated),  a bachelor´s in Finance & Economics (also affiliated), and a bachelor´s in History & Political Science. My studies led me to attend a graduate summer at Harvard Summer School, studying the Economics of Managerial Decisions, and learning about the intricacies of tha University, when I wandered about the campus and lunch with the faculty and administrators at the Faculty Club, inquiring about the reason for the disappearance on the George Emlen Roosevelt Center on Mathematics.

My interest in banking had been peaked by discussions with a radical critic at the Lincoln Inn and our table at the City Club. I also self-studied reading Greek to retain memory of the Greek letters used in formal economics equations and other interests.

My interest in interfaith matters and practices led me to have a one-time correspondence with Charles (then Prince of Wales and currently King Charles III of England), a (distant cousin, through the Roosevelts, Talbots, Spencers, etc.). Reciprocating with the Mayor of Cleveland´s generosity, I volunteered to help with a motorcade of the Democratic National Committee and then Vice President Albert Gore held in Cleveland (being elevated from a volunteer driver to a coordinator on the spot, though still a registered Republican), being rewarded with an official White House photo of Gore and I in front of Air Force Two and a friendly gratitude letter, seemingly suggesting an invitation to join the White House staff, offset in my reasoning with unjustified fears on my part with being tar brushed with the still-developing, though unwarranted Whit Water scandal.

I continue to maintain my interest in statecraft and politics, doing whatever I can to promote global social harmony. I maintain an active presence on Facebook(Queen Janina of Jordan and her mother-in-law, Queen Noor, are among my several hundred Facebook friends}.

I hope to convene a Council of Monarchs and Notables, utilizing family connections and background to promote global social harmony.

A Short List of References:

The Roosevelt Family in America: A Genealogy. Three parts. My maternal grandparents are listed on page 38 of Part I, as is Cornelia Carnochan Roosevelt, as are her parents and immediate kin.  The Theodore Roosevelt Journal. Winter, 1990

The Amazing Roosevelt Family, 1613-1942 by Karl Schriftgiesser. NY: Funk, 1942, especially Chapter, XI, and particularly pp. 144-145.

Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett. Cambridge University Press. (Charts the diverse roots of the House of Windsor, et al and its multiethnic/multinational connecting branches, including the Roosevelts, and the House of David).

       The Luria Legacy: The House of David Royal Descent.Neil Rosenstein, Israel Meir Lau, and Ranan Lurie.  Relates much of the broad Loria/Luria legacy going back to the “House of David’. The author seems to have been unable to relate the Western  outgrowth from Septamania.

Royal Highness: Ancestry of the Royal Child [Prince William of England, one of Prince Charles and Diana, Lady Spencer]. By Iain Moncreiffe of that ilk, Herald Pursuivant of England. 1982.

 Wall Street and FDR. By Anthony Sutton.  (Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976) Relates at least some of Roosevelt influence on American banking, etc.

A Jewish Princedom in France 768- 900. By Arthur Zuckerman, (a history professor at Columbia). NY: Columbia University Press, 1965, 1972. Relates the Nasim of the Babylonia Sanhedrin to the European monarchs.

Enlightenment 2022.Posted on YouTube. My video on the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II of England and Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of England/more loosely, the Commonwealth, in conjunction with President Herzog of Israel.

See Who is Dietz Ziechmann