Carl Karben - a life

A stand-up guy

Stories of devotion, loyalty and duty abound in our family’s immigrant generation, and Carl Karben figured in many of them.  Here are just four tales about the man who married my grandfather’s youngest sister. 

(1) Unlike many of his generation, who came to America without their families in order to make a start and earn enough to send them money for their passage, Carl would not come until his family of five could make the trip together. 

My grandfather eventually amassed the sum, probably with the help of two of his siblings, and in 1923, the Karbens arrived.  Morris sent his wife to meet them at the boat because he had lost both his legs to amputation a couple of years earlier. 

Carl’s daughter told me that her father never learned to drive a car, and that he would save his money so that from time to time he could “hire a car and a driver” to take Morris for an outing.  “My father and the driver would carry Morris down the stairs to the car,” she said.

Russian inscription on the back of this photograph, taken around 1916. "For remembrance, to my dear sister, Luba Zilberstein,  from me, Benjamin [seated] and Carl Karbenovich."

(2) Our family had emigrated from Russia to America well before the Nazi menace, while  Carl’s brother, Benjamin, and his family had stayed.  The Nazis killed his brother, his wife and his oldest daughter, but the two younger daughters managed to flee.  The girls found their way to a displaced persons camp where they stayed for some time, grew up, and eventually they fell in love and got to South America.    

“One day my father received a phone call,” his daughter told me.  To make a long story shorter, Carl arranged for a niece and her husband to go to Canada.  There they lived good lives.  To show their unending gratitude, every year until Carl's death in 1985 -- nearly 40 years -- they would send him a coat and a suit.  Sometimes they would send a jacket.

(3) There are two more stories about Carl.  I recently learned from a favorite aunt, who just turned 90, that after marrying my father's brother in the summer of 1938, they settled in Brooklyn, but a couple of years later, they needed to move to the Bronx.  “Carl went back and forth many times, helping us move our household,” she said, “and he did it because of Morris.”

(4) Finally, there are the tales of Carl’s derring-do just after the First World War.  It’s a long story, how Carl smuggled across borders the two young sons of his father-in-law's niece.  The boys were stranded in Russia throughout the duration of the War and longer, long after their mother had recovered from tuberculosis in Switzerland and gone back to New Jersey.  For that hair-raising tale, with 10 photos, see "Carl’s Story" on the web page devoted to the family’s history.