Custodian

A few days ago, my wife gave me a yellow gold ring to replace the white gold wedding band that I had worn for almost 48 years but lost in January. The ring she gave me belonged to Jacob Bloom, her great grandfather. It’s a strange feeling to be wearing another man’s ring. I don’t suppose he would object to my wearing it, since he has no use for it now, although he might wish that one of his descendants was wearing it instead of the husband of one of them. Still, perhaps he would be glad to know that just about every time I look at it I think of him.

But I have to imagine what he was like, for we know little about him. He was born in Louisville, in 1856 or 1857, the son of Nathan Bloom, who had immigrated from Bavaria in the early 1840s, and Rosina Kling, who was born in Lorraine. We know much more about the father than the son, for Nathan Bloom became the head of one of the greatest wholesale dry goods houses in the South, operating in all the southern states as well as in Ohio and Indiana. A philanthropist who contributed greatly to Louisville causes, he's memorialized there by a street named after him. One of his sons graduated from Yale and became a distinguished physician.

But his son Jacob seems not to have led as notable a career. He was known as Colonel Bloom, but as far as we know, he never served in the military. We assume that he was a Kentucky colonel, an honor awarded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky for outstanding service to the state or the nation. Whatever his service was, it's unknown to my wife. I suspect the title was a reward for a generous campaign contribution, but this is an ungenerous thought and I hope untrue.

He and his bride, Sallie Thurnauer, who was born in 1858 in Cincinnati, lived neither in Louisville nor Cincinnati but in New York, where he devoted himself to his investments. This was a time when the stock market was largely unregulated and more speculative than it is today, and his financial reverses forced his wife, who also came from a rich German Jewish family, to go to work. She eventually became the much-admired principal of The Hebrew Technical School for Girls, one of the charities established by the well-established New York German Jewish community for the benefit of the poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had come after them. Still, the Blooms had come down in the world. Whereas her parents could afford to send her to Vassar, she and her husband could not manage such a college for their own child, my wife's grandmother, who went to what is now New York's Hunter College.

His ring, a simple, wide gold band, looks wonderful even on my small hand. His hand must have been larger than mine, though, because it slips off the ring finger of my left hand. I asked a jeweler to insert something to secure it, but she said the only way to make it fit was to "size" it, i.e. reduce its size. I'm not willing to alter the ring. Somehow I feel it's not mine but the possession of my (and Jacob Bloom's) descendants. So I wear it on the larger ring finger of my right hand, where it is reasonably secure. I’m determined to preserve this ring if only as a keepsake for a man I never met. It’s sobering to reflect that after a few generations my descendants will know as little about me as my wife knows about her great grandfather.

I hope that my great grandchildren will inherit this ring, just as my wife did. They will view the legend inscribed inside, S. T. to J. N. B July 11^th 1881, and wonder who they were. They won’t ever know that another ancestor wore it for a while, and that he served as a custodian for what would pass down to them.